The Editor's Wife (12 page)

I wondered how long it would take Owen to read my extra chapters: no more than three hours if he was as keen as he'd claimed. But then I remembered the tower of manuscripts in his office, clamouring for attention. If there was any sort of queuing system it might be weeks, months, before mine reached the top.

The only thing to do, I decided, was to harness these feelings of optimism and spend the interval working as hard as possible on the remainder of
The Night Wanderer
, since a negative response from Owen would surely chase inspiration away for good.

I immediately handed in my notice at Mecca Bookmakers – I had a month's rent saved, and funds for subsistence, no more than that – but I'd noticed that when I was happy and working well, I hardly needed to spend.

The next four days passed in a storm of creativity. I was writing for twelve, fourteen hours a day, uninterrupted, curtains drawn against the world. When at last I surfaced, to buy milk, or something equally ordinary, I was disorientated to find myself stepping out into a Brixton side street, and not the fictional universe I'd been inhabiting so completely. How much longer this level of productivity could have been sustained I never discovered, because on the fifth day Owen rang.

‘Hello. Christopher? I'm just ringing to tell you I loved it.'

I could hardly hear what he was saying because there was loud reggae music pulsing from the open door of one of the ground-floor rooms. In the end I took the receiver outside and shut the front door on the noise, stretching the telephone cable almost to snapping point.

I'd missed a whole slew of compliments during this process, but I could hardly ask him to repeat them, so I just thanked him for responding so quickly.

‘I didn't want to keep you waiting. I know it's distracting, when you're hanging around waiting for a verdict.'

‘It's OK,' I said. ‘I've been working like a crazy man. I've never written so much so quickly.'

‘Good for you. Keep going. I'm really intrigued to see what you're going to do with Gareth – he's a great character.'

‘Oh . . . well . . .' I had, in fact, just killed him off in an industrial accident. Now I resolved to resurrect him.

‘Christopher.' Owen cleared his throat. ‘I don't know how you feel about this, but we've got Ravi Amos coming for a meal in a couple of weeks, while he's in London. I wondered if you'd like to come along and meet him. He's always interested in new writers. It'll be very informal – just me and my wife Diana, and maybe one other.'

For a moment or two I couldn't answer because a whole crowd of people were now leaving the building, bidding each other noisy farewells, hampered by the tripwire of telephone cable across the hallway, some clambering over it, some ducking under, while I raised and lowered the receiver accordingly.

‘Sorry . . . Owen . . . some people . . .' I stuttered, each time the mouthpiece came within range.

‘Look, don't worry if it's not your thing,' he said, misinterpreting my hesitancy.

‘No, no, it is my thing. I'd love to,' I said, when at last the crowd around me had dispersed. In the space of a week I had been elevated from ex-fish-delivery boy and bookie's clerk to a protégé of Ravi Amos. I had to bite the inside of my cheek to stop myself bursting into laughter at the absurdity of it all.

‘Great. I'll drop you a card with my address. In the meantime – keep writing.'

As I hung up I caught sight of myself in the speckled mirror on the wall beside the empty hat rack. My face was split into a wide, deranged smile, which I couldn't shift. I bounded up the stairs to my room and experienced a curious lurch of disappointment that at this moment of triumph I should be alone, with no one to tell.

It was no use ringing Mum and Dad: they would shower me with parental congratulations without knowing whether Ravi Amos was a man or a horse. Gerald would probably have heard of him, but might pretend that he hadn't, just to annoy me. Then I thought of Zoe, the girl who had rubbished
Ask Your Mother to Pass the Salt
, and decided she would be just the person to share my news. Good fortune must like company, as she was in when I rang, free to meet me for a drink that evening, and later, when the pub had turned us out and we had meandered back to my room in Alma Road, ready at last to be talked into bed.

THE GODDARDS LIVED
in Dulwich village, in a narrow street of Victorian cottages just off the main parade.
Come at eightish, don't bring anything except yourself. Dress: as casual as you like
, read the card which accompanied the return of my chapters from Owen. Even so, I had fretted over what to take, and to a lesser extent what to talk about. No one could have faulted me on my knowledge of Ravi Amos's novels, but I wasn't sure whether Great Writers particularly relished discussions of their work when off duty. Anyway, it wasn't him I wanted to impress, but Owen.

I cycled over to Dulwich on Gerald's bike, which I'd inherited now that he had a new moped – one of the trappings of his status as a salaried insurance clerk with General Accident. I'd done a dry run the night before to
make sure of my timing, and arrived punctually at Aysgarth Terrace, dressed as casually as I dared in jeans and an ironed shirt, and holding a bulbous bottle of Mateus Rosé. I wasn't much of a wine drinker myself, but you had to take a bottle of wine to dinner, even if you didn't drink the stuff, and even if your host said don't bring anything. That much I knew.

The door was opened by a tall woman of about forty with a severe black bob and dark lipstick. She was wearing a long, skinny woollen dress which showed off a curveless figure terminating in a large pair of men's brogues. Not my type. She took a drag on her cigarette and squinted at me through the smoke.

‘You must be Christopher. Come in,' she said, with a jerk of her head that wasn't especially welcoming.

‘You must be Diana,' I said, holding my bottle out as if it was my ticket to the event.

‘No, I'm Leila Ferris,' the woman said, taking the wine nevertheless, with a slight smirk. She stood back to let me past, into a narrow hallway, made narrower by the presence of a huge wooden rocking horse, now serving as a coat rack. I was oddly relieved to discover that she wasn't Owen's wife. From above came the click of a door, and a blonde-haired woman in a blue summer dress came down the stairs, barefoot, a pair of sandals hanging from one finger.

‘Hello,' she said, pausing on the bottom step to hook her shoes on, leaning on the rocking horse for support. ‘Christopher? I'm Diana.' She offered me a cool hand to shake.
‘Sorry. I've been trying to calm the girls down. Owen read them
Sinbad
earlier and now they're too scared to sleep.'

She was much more presentable, pretty even, in a pale, English way, but again Not My Type. There was a Mary Poppins purity about her that made you feel your hands would never be clean enough.

‘What is that thing doing there?' Leila asked, as Diana held her breath to squeeze between the rump of the rocking horse and the newel post to join us in the hall.

‘Owen's father made it for the girls. He's quite handy with wood. But it's too big to go up the stairs. A minor detail. We're stabling it in the dining room until we think of a plan, but we've had to move it out here for tonight.'

Leila pulled a face. At the mention of his name, Owen had come out of the kitchen carrying an uncorked bottle of wine, which he raised in greeting. Over his shoulder, on the kitchen table, I could see two bouquets, still in their wrappers, and wished I'd thought to bring flowers. ‘Are you going to stand in the hall chatting all evening?' he said amiably.

‘We've been admiring Equus,' said Leila, lighting a fresh cigarette from the stump of the last.

Owen grimaced. ‘Come in and meet Ravi,' he said to me, ‘while I do some drinks.'

The Great Novelist was already ensconced in an armchair reading a copy of
The London Review of Books
. He looked considerably craggier than in the famous publicity photograph that appeared on all his books. The
image must have been thirty years out of date.

Diana introduced me as Owen's latest discovery, and Ravi took my hand between his soft smooth palms and squeezed it in the manner of a vicar greeting parishioners at the church door. ‘So nice to meet you,' he said in a rich, slightly foreign voice, looking up at me from beneath a pair of dramatic black and white eyebrows.

I don't know quite what signal I picked up in those few seconds, but my first thought, instantaneous and unplanned, on at last meeting my idol, was ‘he's gay!' My second thought was one of profound shock, that I could have intuited within moments of meeting him something that I had not managed to pick up from reading a dozen of his novels. I consoled myself with the thought that there are writers who are inside their books and writers who are outside them, and Ravi Amos was clearly of the latter variety.

Owen poured him a glass of the blackest wine I had ever seen: at the sight of my bottle of Mateus Rosé, which Leila was still holding, he had put one hand firmly over his glass.

‘We used to make lamps out of these at Oxford. Do you remember, Di?' Leila said.

‘Candle holders,' Diana corrected her. ‘I wouldn't have been clever enough to wire up a lamp. They were the best sort of bottle because they don't topple over.' The merits of the container discussed, the wine was borne away to the kitchen, never to reappear.

In spite of there being plenty of comfortable chairs,
Leila chose a low footstool, hugging her bony knees. Her large black shoes were splayed out so that she resembled some sort of pop-up toy: a frog, perhaps. I wasn't sure whether it was her appearance or her manner that was the more intimidating, but I disliked her just as impulsively as I had liked Owen. She was drinking a pint of bitter, which fuelled my suspicion that she was a lesbian, but at least gave me the courage to refuse the black wine and ask for a beer instead. Around me a conversation about modern poetry had sprung up, to which I couldn't contribute. They seemed to be discussing someone called Dunn or Gunn, or possibly two poets by those names. I sat, tense with embarrassment, waiting for somebody to demand my opinion of him or them, but presently Diana, who was sitting beside me on the couch, came to my rescue.

‘Have you had far to come?' she asked, in the lowered voice of someone trying to break away from the main conversation without derailing it. It was such a conventional piece of politeness that I almost laughed.

‘Brixton,' I replied defiantly.

‘Oh, we're practically neighbours,' she said. ‘The best side of the city, whatever the North London mafia say. It's so green and leafy.'

I had to admit that there wasn't much greenery in Alma Road, apart from cannabis plants on the window ledges, but I agreed with her in principle.

‘I read your opening chapters,' she said. ‘I hope you don't mind.'

‘No, of course not,' I said. ‘Nice of you to bother.'

‘I like the way you write. It's very . . . energetic.'

‘Thank you. I wish I could find the energy to finish it.'

‘Owen says you've thrown in your degree. That's brave.'

‘I don't know about brave. Feckless, more like.'

She smiled. ‘Well, I've always thought you can have too much feck.' Her eyes shone with suppressed laughter. She excused herself to attend to the meal and the rest of us moved into the dining room, which looked onto a tree-choked garden. One side of the French windows was darkened by a dense creeper, one tendril of which had breached the frame and was snaking up the inside wall. A constellation of different-sized candles cast sympathetic shadows across an old wooden refectory table, much marked and gouged, and set with a miscellaneous collection of china and tarnished cutlery. I remembered the huge fuss my mother used to make over mismatching crockery on the rare occasions we had people to dinner, and thought how easy and confident the Goddards' hospitality was in comparison.

The food was similarly unfussy and generous: a large casserole of lamb and some garlicky potatoes, which tasted incredible to my palate, traumatised by weeks of exposure to tinned soup and ravioli. I imagined what it must be like to be married to a presentable woman like Diana, who could discuss modern poetry
and
cook lamb shanks.

Now they were comparing notes on a production of Pinter's
Old Times
which all except me had seen. Even Ravi Amos, who lived in Geneva and was only in London
for a week, had seen it. From the way he was talking, it appeared that he was personally acquainted with the playwright, the director and all three actors. In fact everyone at the table seemed to be related to or friends with everybody significant in the arts. This impression was no doubt false, generated by the paranoia which often accompanies a sense of social inferiority, but it made me wary of being too free with my views. Owen kept trying to bring me in, valiantly tossing out one lifebelt after another. ‘Do you get to the theatre much?' or ‘Are you a Pinter fan, Christopher?' he would say, when I had made no contribution to the debate for some time. I dimly remembered Gerald appearing as some kind of half-wit in a school production of
The Homecoming
, but could hardly offer that up to the company.

‘I'm not that familiar with his work,' I replied.

‘I never let a thing like that interfere with my opinions,' said Leila. ‘I used to review fiction for a women's magazine and I found I wrote much more persuasively when I hadn't read the books.'

‘You don't think that's going to make you any friends at this table, do you Leila?' Owen said, laughing. ‘This is what we're up against, Ravi.'

‘I never read my reviews,' the Great Novelist replied loftily.

Leila shrugged, with the air of someone for whom the making of friends or enemies is a matter of supreme indifference. I felt a grudging admiration for her refusal to curry favour.