The Editor's Wife (22 page)

‘I'm so sorry. I can't believe it. Isobel loved it. I love it. It was supposed to be just a formality, showing it to Herman. But for some reason he's taken against it. It can't be the book: it's just Herman asserting himself. He is such an unspeakable wanker sometimes. He says it won't sell, it'll be
The Magenta Staircase
all over again. He's never forgiven me for the money we lost on that.'

‘Oh well, it can't be helped. He's the boss.'

‘It's ever since he had that cancer scare. It seems to have made him more tyrannical and unreasonable. I wonder if it hasn't gone to his brain. I don't know what to say. I've let you down terribly.'

‘No, you never made me any promises. It's OK, Owen, really.'

‘Well, look, don't be disheartened. There are other publishers out there. I'm going to try it on an ex-colleague of mine called Vincent Lesser, who's now at Swift & Deckle. It's quite a small list, but it's got a good reputation. I'm
only sorry I won't get to be your editor.'

‘You don't need to tout it around for me. I could do that myself.' Chemists say nothing is poisonous: toxicity is in the dosage. I felt this was true of gratitude. I had reached the point where safe levels of indebtedness had been exceeded and overdose was imminent.

‘Honestly, it's not a problem. Give me something to do while I'm looking for a new job.'

‘What do you mean? You're not seriously going to leave Kenway & Luff over this?'

‘I am. In fact I have. I resigned yesterday.'

‘You're joking.' The nauseous sensation in my gut told me that this was a calamity, even though for the moment I couldn't think why.

‘No I'm not.'

‘You can't chuck in your job over a disagreement about my crappy little novel. You love your job. What about your authors – Ravi Amos and Co.?'

‘He'll be fine. He's uneditable anyway. No, I really couldn't work for Herman a moment longer. I've got no freedom to commission. I'm just a lackey. I used to think all that decision-making by committee was great, and it was, until Herman started overriding the committee every time he disagreed. This was just the last straw.'

‘But what will you do?'

‘Oh, I'm sure I'll find something,' said Owen cheerfully. ‘In the meantime I'll be – what is it politicians always say? – spending more time with my family.'

WITH OWEN ON
indefinite leave it became increasingly difficult for me and Diana to find opportunities to meet. Diana had no previous history of taking extended absences from home and no stomach for the sort of Byzantine scheming necessary to furnish her with excuses. She couldn't countenance the idea of enlisting a friend to provide a false alibi: it was repugnant as well as risky. (It had been a source of comfort to her that until now she had not actually needed to tell Owen an outright lie. It made her feel that on the spectrum of sin hers was a lighter, brighter shade.)

In any case, Owen was enjoying the unusual experience of being at home with Diana during the day without the children around, and was keen to make the most of it. If she said she was going shopping in the West End, he
would jump at the chance to go too. If she made a specifically solo appointment, at the hairdresser's for example, Owen would insist on taking and fetching her. He planned a series of outings to galleries, lunchtime concerts, stately homes, all the places that were out of bounds to them as a family. This much I gathered from one brief phone call, made and abruptly truncated while Owen was giving the twins a bath.

It seemed that if I wanted to see Diana at all, I would have to see her and Owen together, a prospect too daunting to contemplate. Anyone with a grain of integrity or prudence would have accepted this sudden change of circumstance as evidence that the affair was not sustainable, and allowed the period of enforced separation to bring it to an end. But my selfishness was made of sterner stuff.

If it hadn't been for Owen's conscientious efforts to hawk my manuscript around to his publishing contacts – something he seemed to find far more pressing than the matter of getting a job – I might not have been able to see Diana at all.

I met her one lunchtime at a pub in Norwood – halfway between her place and mine, but well outside her usual territory. It was a man's pub – a real booze bar – and a completely inappropriate choice for someone like Diana. All heads turned as she walked in, her eyes darting nervously this way and that to try and pick me out through the billows of smoke. I fairly bundled her back out onto the street, and we ended up instead sitting on a bench in
the cemetery, a suitably melancholy setting for a meeting dominated by anxious clock-watching, and the looming shadow of goodbye.

On another, excruciating, occasion, she turned up unannounced at my flat, not ten minutes after the arrival of Gerald, who had called round to return the out-of-date copy of
Loot
he had borrowed after that disastrous dinner party. He had made a four-mile hike across London to execute this pointless errand, and appeared in no hurry to leave. Diana's visit had to be passed off as a publishing-related matter – some delay with my manuscript – and we were forced to exchange furtive, anguished signals, and make polite chat with Gerald, while the precious minutes of her free hour dwindled away.

One of the topics of our heavily coded conversation was the Goddards' impending trip to North Wales. They would be spending the fortnight over Christmas with Owen's elderly father in Betws-y-coed. My spirits took a further dive at this news.

‘Lots of good walks,' Gerald said. ‘I went on a geography field trip there once.'

‘Yes, the scenery's beautiful, but,' Diana met my eye, ‘I'd rather be at home for Christmas.'

‘A fortnight's a long time,' I said. ‘To be a guest in someone else's house.'

‘Much too long,' Diana agreed. ‘Owen's father is lovely, but the house is a bit remote. You feel rather cut off.'

‘Llyn Idwal,' Gerald advised. ‘That's worth a look.'

He even accompanied me to the door to see her off,
so that I couldn't kiss her goodbye. She returned my look of frustration with a bleak smile as she got in the car.

‘You weren't wanting to be alone with Diana, were you?' Gerald asked, with a belated glimmer of insight, as we mounted the stairs.

‘No, of course not,' I said. There was nothing to be gained by taking him into my confidence now, even if he had been the sympathetic sort, which he was not. It wasn't just Diana I was protecting: he would share his disapproval with Mum and Dad, in order to climb out of the Peggyshaped hole he had dug and gain the moral ascendancy once more, and they would not be slow to voice their disgust. And, like Diana, I had the superstitious fear that once knowledge was out there, it would somehow spread of its own accord.

‘For a moment there I thought . . .'

‘No, no. It was just the matter of my novel. Kenway & Luff have turned it down. It looks as though Owen won't be my editor now, so I don't suppose I'll be seeing much more of him and Diana.'

That, it turned out, was my last chance to see Diana before she went to Wales. I had bought her an aquamarine pendant for Christmas but had no way of getting it to her safely, so it sat in my drawer in its velvet box, undelivered. Her gift to me, a black cashmere sweater, arrived in the post after they had left, with a card which read
Tried to ring but no reply. Hope you will miss me as much as I am missing you. Will call from Wales
if I'm ever by myself near a phone. Must run to catch post. Love Diana x

She had not exaggerated her haste. The ink was smudged against the inside flap of the card, and in her confusion she had written her own name on the envelope.

Diana didn't phone, so I assumed she had had no opportunity to be alone. Even so, I found myself reluctant to leave the flat in case I missed a call, and then resenting this self-imposed house arrest.

I spent Christmas Day with Mum and Dad – a commitment that had been squeezed out of me back in October, it apparently requiring months for my atheist parents to prepare for this festival.

Gerald was also there, in full vegetarian colours, enjoying a chestnut-stuffed pepper while the rest of us feasted on one side of a strange, legless turkey. Every Christmas, without fail, Mum would say, ‘I think I'll do a goose next year. I'm sick of turkey.' And Dad would reply, ‘How can you be sick of something you only have once a year?'

They had bought me a set of adjustable spanners, and a nylon zip-up jerkin, similar to the one Dad wore for gardening. The fact that I had no car or garden seemed not to have occurred to them. That they understood so little of my tastes and habits was a nagging source of irritation, all the more so since I knew at heart that it was my fault for visiting so infrequently and being so evasive and uncommunicative when we did meet.

For the first time I noticed that the house had a distinctive pungent smell. I traced its essence to the inside of a wardrobe containing ancient overcoats and an old ocelot fur, unaired for decades. Mum and Dad smelled of it, too. The worrying thing was that after about ten minutes indoors I no longer noticed it.

‘What news of the masterpiece?' Dad asked, when lunch was over and we sat cracking almonds across a linen tablecloth devastated by nutshells, satsuma peel, candle wax and dismembered crackers. He was on his knees, hunting in the sideboard for a bottle of port.

‘It's finished,' I said. ‘I'm looking for a publisher.'

‘What happened to that editor chappie who was so keen on it?' Mum asked, ripping into a box of After Eights (Gerald's contribution to the festivities). ‘What was the firm called? Kendal & Co?'

‘Kenway & Luff. They rejected it.'

Mum nodded as though this came as no surprise. ‘These media types. All the same – full of promises that never come to anything,' she sniffed.

‘Here we are,' Dad said, reversing out of the sideboard, clasping a sticky bottle of Cockburn's, coated in fluff. The distinctive woodwind creak of the cork stopper released memories of past Christmases; like cranberry jelly and the taste of tarnish on the best cutlery, it was unique to this day.

‘Owen never actually made me any promises,' I said, feeling bound to defend him from the crime of being a media type, and myself from the lesser charge of being a dupe.

Dad produced three lead crystal glasses – the only survivors of a wedding-present set that had suffered some attrition over the years – and began to pour. Gerald wasn't drinking as he was riding his moped home. He took his duty of abstention very seriously, even refusing Christmas pudding in case it contained traces of brandy.

‘Are you still calling on the man's wife?' Mum asked. ‘Oh, that's a mean measure, Derek,' she exclaimed, seizing the bottle and helping herself.

‘No,' I said, truthfully. ‘I don't go round there any more.'

‘Oh good,' said Mum. ‘I think you're wise.' I could tell she attributed my apparent change of heart to her cautionary words. ‘Even with the best of intentions a line can get crossed . . .' She addressed this remark, which sounded a trifle wistful to my ears, to the busy sky beyond the French windows, and it occurred to me for the first time that she might be speaking from experience.

After lunch Gerald went out for a run, while Mum and Dad retired to the lounge to watch the Queen. I sat on the back doorstep and had a smoke, and wondered what Diana was doing. I had a flash of lovers' intuition that she was thinking of me at that precise moment, our thoughts in collision perhaps, somewhere over Solihull.

When I came back indoors I found Mum and Dad had fallen asleep on the couch, open-mouthed, and the Queen had given way to
The Guns of Navarone.
Feeling heavy-bellied and lethargic myself, I went up to my old room for a lie-down. Since I'd left home it had been stripped
and redecorated as a guest room, an amenity much coveted by Mum, but unlikely to be used since their friends were mostly local, or not the sort to make overnight stops. The room was nevertheless kept as a shrine to these phantom visitors, with a new white towel on the bed, and a tiny, wrapped bar of soap on the washbasin. There was no trace of my former occupancy. Mum and Dad had removed my James Bond posters, and hidden my Dark Side of the Moon mural, and the scuff marks caused by a squash ball being whacked against the wall, with a layer of woodchip paper, painted marshmallow pink for the daughter they never had.

I tossed the towel aside and stretched out on the ruffled bedspread. Even fleeting contact with the pillow made me sneeze: it gave off a soapy smell of lavender, which I traced to a quilted pouch tucked inside the pillowcase. There were several of these scent traps hidden around the place – a sachet hanging in the wardrobe, impregnated lining paper in the drawers, a bowl of dried petals and woodshavings on the window sill. I had to perform a sweep of the room like a spy looking for bugs before I could go to sleep without fear of suffocation.

When I came downstairs it was dark outside and Mum was on the phone to Great-Auntie Winnie. ‘We're having a lovely day,' she bellowed into the mouthpiece. ‘Christopher's here . . . CHRISTOPHER,' she went on, ignoring my frantic signals of denial. ‘I'll put him on. He'd love to have a word.' She passed me the receiver with a smirk.

In the evening Dad put up the card table and we played solo and finished off the After Eights. I ate a couple of spoonfuls of cold stuffing and a dry turkey sandwich, moistened by six pickled onions. Then I cycled home to Brixton with raging heartburn and went to bed, and that was Christmas. There were still ten days left until Diana was due back.

IT ENDED, AS
it had begun, with a letter on that starched, cream notepaper. Owen must have pinched a batch from Kenway & Luff when he resigned. Instructive to know that even the best of men have their petty vices.