by John Purcell
I was in Helen and Malcolm’s flat when he called. Which I was thankful for. The calm white cleanliness of it. I could have been anywhere – on the street, in the arms of a lover, at the office. But I was alone. More alone than I had been for many years. And it had been good, this time alone. A quiet time with just me and Helen’s words.
But now I couldn’t stop crying.
I blame the timing of the call. Helen’s writing had done something to me. She had been leading me to memories I would normally avoid. Asking things of me I’d prefer unasked.
I read her books, and I knew what I was up against. This was writing. I read the two battered paperbacks of her previous novels Malcolm had found for me before I read the physical manuscript of the first version of her new work. And yes, Clarissa and Malcolm had been right. The new manuscript wasn’t the work of the Helen Owen they knew. But then Helen’s agent and Maxine had been right, too. It was good. In the way I had grown used to using the word good. It would sell. It might even win some of the accolades ordinary writers win.
Her older writing, however; that was something altogether different. As were the second and third versions of the new novel. Brilliant didn’t cover it. The final version was sublime. But they wouldn’t recoup the money Maxine had given her. Only the first version could do that. The novel Helen and Malcolm didn’t want published.
I should have let Julia know a manuscript with sales potential existed. She would have been relieved to hear it. Yet I didn’t. I had been ignoring her calls and emails. I couldn’t say why exactly, but it was definitely a Helen and Malcolm thing.
After the call from Max I realised I had been haunted by him this past week while living in the flat. Malcolm and Helen reminded me of Max. Helen’s writing reminded me of Max. And the books did, too. Second-hand. Everywhere. And their cups of tea and their talk. The quiet in the house. The sound of people reading. The sound of people writing. The sound of thought. They were all reminders of Max. But I gave him no direct thought until that phone call.
Then he was everywhere.
I couldn’t read or think. I took a shower and dressed. I tied my hair back and put on some makeup. My eyes were still puffy from crying. In jeans, T-shirt and trainers, I left the flat and walked to the tube. It was cooler than I thought and I hugged myself as I went, crossing the street to catch some sun. I needed to spend some money. It was my one antidote to Max thoughts.
I love spending money. Love it. I love having money. So much money I don’t have to worry. I understand why Helen doesn’t want to lose the house. After a lifetime of worrying about money she was enjoying the pleasures of material comfort. Max and Malcolm could live without it, Helen and I couldn’t. Max never understood what money meant to me. He said my love of mammon was my one great flaw. He didn’t appreciate my need for fine things. When I spent £500 on a rug, or £100 on some wine glasses he was shocked to his core. It offended him. When I started to make money from Liam’s books he was as suspicious as Malcolm was of Helen’s good fortune.
Spending money now served to banish Max from my mind. Shopping was something we never did together. The boutiques I entered on New Bond Street were as far from the world of Max, Helen and Malcolm as I could go. I spent thousands in a few hours and took a cab back to my Chelsea studio. I couldn’t bear going back to Helen and Malcolm.
The cleaners had just been and the studio smelt of citrus and bleach. It might have been a hotel room or a rented apartment. I had never lived there for more than a few days at a time. It was my post box and a very expensive storage unit, really. Some of my clothes and a few mementos from my life before I had fucked everything up were in sealed boxes in the wardrobe. After Max threw me out, I never went back. I left everything – furniture, photos, clothes, paintings, books. Not that he wanted them. He had wanted nothing from me. He left the apartment, too. It was mine, after all. Yes, he threw me out of my own flat. Then it was empty, but for my stuff. It remained as it was for a year. Untouched. A Miss Havisham’s without a Miss Havisham. I eventually asked Alan to sell it all for me. That’s when the boxes turned up. Alan had gone through my stuff and chosen items he knew would be dear to me. They weren’t. That’s why they’re still in the boxes.
I’ve owned the studio for years. Before this place there was the flat I shared with Max. Before that, I lived on campus. Before that boarding school. Before that, when I was very young, a number of different houses. I don’t have fond memories of any of those. My parents are great at marriage, bad at families.
I have always much preferred other people’s homes. While at boarding school I would always make sure I’d be invited to holiday with friends, and my mother and father would make no effort to stop me. I went to my parents as seldom as possible. I wouldn’t know where to start making a home of my own.
Even Liam’s ‘office’ is more of a home to me than this place. If I know Liam and Gail are travelling, I move into the office. It’s a one-bedroom apartment in Vauxhall overlooking the Thames. Liam and Gail bought it in the first flush of his success, although they now live on a grand estate in Surrey. I often stay over in the office, after Liam goes home to Gail. The place is layered. The original style is all Gail, the furniture and decorations. But since she handed it over to Liam and his work, the place has been altered. The living room is an office. A big desk dominates the space, with the whiteboard on wheels we use to plot his novels. There is a large printer, too. Liam likes to bind his drafts. So they read like a book, not a manuscript. They look like cheap rip-off paperbacks. The apartment is very much a workspace. And there are books everywhere. Liam is forever researching his novels. He loves detail. He is obsessed with new technologies. With weaponry. With history and politics. If I have a home at the moment, it’s that place.
I took my phone out of my handbag and played Max’s message again. Amy, it’s Max. I need to speak to you. A work thing. Call me back. No tears this time. I replayed it again. I still love the sound of his voice. He used to read to me when we were together. We’d lie in bed for hours and he would read to me. It was usually something he was reading. I didn’t care. What mattered was the sound of his voice and that he was mine and that he loved me so much. I listened to the message again. The tears had stopped but I felt empty. After hearing his voice the studio seemed even more desolate to me. And I was desolate, too.
For four years Max had been the only home I needed.
Chapter 15
Bleach, Lemon and Death
Trevor Melville had been Malcolm’s agent for more than forty years. He was now in his nineties and lived in an aged-care home in Richmond. His room was well situated, with a spectacular view of the park and the river, but he was largely bedridden. And yet he continued to look after Malcolm’s affairs.
Malcolm had never been the most lucrative of his clients, but he was Trevor’s favourite. He admired Malcolm and his work, which was something he couldn’t say of all his clients. He and Malcolm couldn’t be said to be friends, which Trevor regretted but understood. Malcolm didn’t have friends. He had Helen. He needed no one else.
Malcolm had begun to be a regular visitor of late, which Trevor appreciated, as visitors were becoming rare. His client list was made up largely of estates now. One by one his authors had died off. Just as his friends had done.
So a couple of hours with Malcolm was something to look forward to. But he did worry about the regularity of the visits. There were two possible reasons for them. Malcolm knew something about Trevor’s health that he himself did not know, or Malcolm and Helen were having problems. Neither possibility was particularly attractive.
In a life spent among artists, or ‘creatives’ as Trevor had heard they were called now, the longevity of Helen and Malcolm’s alliance had been unusual. It raised many questions among his other clients and friends, none of whom had succeeded in coupling for more than a decade at a stretch. His own life was a record of depressingly regular cycles of lust, love, boredom, irritation and loss. He had enjoyed one great love.
A relationship that fitted none of his normal patterns and lasted more than twenty years till the object of his affections had died. But this love had been more pain than pleasure. And was never made public.
Malcolm and Helen’s partnership was something Trevor envied. In the seventies, when both writers had been at their most productive, Trevor had been a regular visitor to the flat in Brixton. He was attracted to the atmosphere of their home. Beyond the obvious accoutrements of writers – the newspapers, books and ash – there was conviction. Doubt did not visit the flat often, except in relation to their son, Daniel. In everything else, both Helen and Malcolm knew what they were about. They had direction and confidence. There was nothing they would not discuss. Their lively debates were instructive to each other and to those, like Trevor, who witnessed them, and sometimes partook in them. He never saw, nor did he imagine there to be, when he was absent, ugly, hateful disputes. The couple were companions in mind and body.
This was why he’d prefer that Malcolm was visiting him now because he thought him close to death. He’d prefer death to disillusionment.
‘I’ve been writing,’ said Malcolm, soon after arriving at Trevor’s bedside.
The sun was shining through Trevor’s large window, warming Malcolm’s back. Behind him, Trevor could see the stately progression of a former foreign secretary across the luxurious green of the lawn on his way to the river, where it was his custom to sit in the afternoon, when the weather was fine. The former foreign secretary was accompanied and assisted and almost eclipsed by a burly male nurse, Usman, who, being of heroic proportions, was very popular with residents and management. He would lift Trevor and others as though they were small children. His great strength took the anxiety out of any necessary physical activity, something to be appreciated when even the most ordinary of human tasks could appear as difficult and as perilous as walking a tightrope across a canyon.
Their progress across the lawn was glacial and Usman had time to notice Trevor watching. He waved and smiled pleasantly. Trevor returned the gestures and Malcolm turned round in his seat.
‘Is that?’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought he was dead.’
‘He’s younger than I am.’
‘Tories are never young.’
Trevor laughed. ‘But you’re right. It’s easier to assume all my near contemporaries are dead. Each obituary of a contemporary I read now is, to me, having thought them dead already, a record of a miraculous rebirth and a second death.’ He paused briefly and then added, as though it had just occurred to him, ‘No one bothers to talk about the second time Lazarus died.’
Trevor lifted a tumbler of water from his tray table and drank. His movements were unhurried and precise. He placed it down empty. Malcolm leant forward and refilled it.
‘Perhaps Lazarus didn’t die the second time,’ Trevor continued. ‘Perhaps he lives still. But it’s unlikely to have gone unrecorded. A second death is much more likely.’
‘Lazarus is overkill,’ said Malcolm, emphatically. ‘Conquering death once in a story is enough. John had to go and add another, in case we didn’t get the point.’
Malcolm stood up and shifted his chair slightly so he could more easily turn to look out at the view.
‘I’ve always thought it strange,’ said Trevor, ‘that the synoptic gospels fail to mention the miracle of Lazarus. I would have thought the occasion worth noting down by all of those present. It isn’t every day that a man raises another man from the dead. Matthew, Mark and Luke must have stepped out for a cigarette break and missed it.’
Now it was Malcolm’s turn to laugh.
‘What have you been writing?’
‘Nothing. I don’t know. Pages that have words on them. They come easily. But not like they did before.’
Trevor waited for Malcolm to continue.
‘This damned Booker thing. It’s unsettling. Why that book? Really, Trevor, of all my books to choose! What if it were to win?’
‘It won’t win. Trust me. Don’t worry.’
‘But imagine if it did. It would make a lot of sense in one way. It would confirm the thesis of the book. But such recognition would also underline my failure to do what I set out to do.’
‘I hate that book.’
‘And you’re right to. So why is it getting this attention?’
‘They’re children playing with Daddy’s loaded gun.’
‘Do they know it’s a gun?’ asked Malcolm, eyebrows raised.
‘No. But they know it’s not meant to be touched. It’s forbidden, thus attractive.’
‘Perhaps we’re out of touch,’ mused Malcolm, scratching his ear. ‘That’s what I’ve been thinking. What’s shocking to us might not be shocking to the young. Do you mind if I open the window slightly?’
Trevor nodded. He knew the place had an odour. Bleach, lemon and death. He could no longer smell it, but it had been overpowering when he first arrived.
‘The work of the Marquis de Sade still has the power to shock,’ said Malcolm from the window, ‘but most books that were shocking in their day are now merely interesting historical curiosities.’ He paused. ‘I can’t think of an example now.’
‘Darkness is nothing to the blind. Your book is powerful. The Booker judges recognise this aspect, but not the nature of the power. That’s all. It’s everything you want it to be. Ugly, hateful and dull.’
Malcolm laughed again.
‘And I read that Helen has offended every woman on earth with her speech,’ said Trevor, consciously steering the conversation away from A Hundred Ways, a book he wished he had never read. His only defence against it was disdain. But it wasn’t very effective. He thought of the book now as some sort of disease, like syphilis – a disease you catch while doing something pleasurable.
‘I don’t want to talk about Helen,’ said Malcolm.
‘That’s unlike you.’
‘Really? I wouldn’t know.’
‘Tell me about the new book, then.’
‘I can’t. It’s darker still. Darker than anything I’ve written. Darker than I thought possible. I can’t shake it, either. It sits upon me like a blanket wherever I am, blocking all light. There’s no hope. No redemption. Nothing.’
‘Can’t wait to read it,’ said Trevor in a monotone.
Malcolm smiled grimly. ‘Try writing it.’
Chapter 16
They Shouldn’t Be Much Longer
Amy had been asleep when the doorbell rang. She took a moment to realise it was the middle of the afternoon and she was in Helen and Malcolm’s front room. On her lap was Malcolm’s novel A Hundred Ways. Amy had removed the cover to protect it, but now it was creased. It was pristine before her unscheduled nap. One of twenty copies in a box in Malcolm’s office. She tossed it and the book aside. The doorbell rang again. She stood and went to the window to see if she could see who was at the front door. She recognised the man standing there.
By the time Amy opened the front door, the visitor was returning to the front gate.
‘Daniel?’ she asked.
He turned, looked her up and down – she was standing there in a pair of tight low-cut blue jeans and white singlet, her feet, but for dark nail polish, bare – and asked, ‘Who are you?’
‘I’m Amy. Helen and Malcolm have gone to Waitrose. They won’t be long. Come in.’
‘Were you sleeping?’ Daniel said as he walked up to the front door.
‘I may have nodded off,’ said Amy, smiling. She spun around and walked back into the house rubbing her eyes.
Daniel stopped to watch her walk down the hall. He scratched his near-hairless head, looked back over his shoulder at the street, shrugged and walked in.
‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ asked Amy as he reached the kitchen.
‘I’d rather something stronger.’
Daniel took off his jacket and hung it over the back of a kitchen chair.
Looking at him as he fussed with his jacket, Amy realised none of the pictures aro
und the house were recent. The man before her was middle-aged. His belly strained against his shirt and hung over his belt slightly. He had far less hair than in the photos.
‘Espresso, beer, wine, G&T, whisky?’
‘Beer. Thanks.’
Daniel couldn’t take his eyes off her. His gaze fell on her behind as she opened the fridge and extracted a Beck’s. She then took out a bottle of wine and spun quickly around. He turned his head, perched casually on the edge of the kitchen table and asked, ‘So, Amy, who are you?’
Opening the cupboard that contained the wine glasses, she answered, ‘I’m editing your mum’s new book.’
‘You’re Helen’s editor?’
‘Yes. Does that surprise you?’
‘You don’t look like an editor.’
‘I wonder if I should feel insulted,’ she said, not smiling. She poured wine into her glass, took more than a sip then poured more in.
‘Not if you don’t feel it. You know what I mean, anyway. Have you met Clarissa?’
‘No, but I read her book at uni.’
‘That’s what I mean. She’s venerable.’
Amy handed him the Beck’s and said, ‘Let’s go into the front room to wait. It catches the last sun of the afternoon.’
*
Daniel was seated on the couch where Amy had been napping. On his lap was the copy of A Hundred Ways and on the coffee table was an empty beer bottle. Amy was opposite him, reclining on the other couch. She was holding a near-empty glass of white wine. The sun was setting behind the row of houses across the street and Amy was coated in a warm yellow.