The Editor's Wife (14 page)

I followed Diana into the kitchen where she was simultaneously making tea and smashing the ends of the roses with the back of a cleaver, with the practised air of someone used to receiving flowers. The bouquets from Leila and Ravi Amos had been divided and arranged, and I found myself considering by what process a person might
graduate from owning only one set of cutlery to owning
four vases
. It was little details like this that spoke most clearly of the decade of maturity that separated me from the Goddards and their kind. I began to notice more of these features that had escaped me yesterday: a row of wellington boots by the back door, ranged in order of size, with fairy-tale neatness; and hanging from a hook a floral apron – a proper Stepford Wives affair with ruffles at the shoulders.

Diana caught the direction of my gaze as she handed me my cup of tea. ‘Owen bought me that as a joke,' she explained. ‘And I started wearing it as a joke, but then after a while I found I was just wearing it.' She produced a battered tin from one of the cupboards, and cut me a piece of ginger cake the size of a brick. The lemon meringue pie had apparently been another of these jokes.

‘Do you spend all day baking little treats for your family and any stray visitors?' I asked. I felt I was entitled to take certain liberties after her faux pas of the night before.

‘Not all the time,' she said. ‘I work in the mornings while the girls are at playgroup.'

While we drank our tea she told me that since leaving Kenway & Luff she had worked at home, proof-reading books supplied by Owen and various other contacts in publishing.

‘Do you think you'll go back full-time when the twins are at school?' I asked her.

She shook her head. ‘I don't think so. The school day is so short. And office hours are so long. I don't want to
farm them out. I'm a bit old-fashioned like that.' At some point she had discarded her glasses, and was taking care in reaching and replacing her teacup.

‘Do you want more children?'

‘No. No more. It's very tiring – you wait.'

She was so easy to talk to – like a much older sister, or a young aunt – that I found myself telling her all about my childhood, growing up in Streatham, and my relationship with Gerald, to which she kept returning. As the mother of twins, I suppose she was interested in the subject of sibling rivalry, and how best to head it off.

At some point Pinky and Perky came down in search of refreshments. While Diana made them banana and honey sandwiches I showed them how to make jumping frogs by folding paper. I'd forgotten that disconcerting way children have of pressing right up against you, talking straight in your face. I had one clamped to each leg, tweaking at my T-shirt and buffeting me with questions. They were so cute and unselfconscious, it gave me a sharp pang to think that soon they would have to become reserved and suspicious, and believe all men devils.

Diana had made me a sandwich too. Perhaps I had disposed too eagerly of the ginger cake, or perhaps she saw me as just another hungry child. ‘Oh look. You've cut the crusts off,' I said. ‘Even my own mother never did that for me.'

I was still there at six o'clock when owen came in from work. I heard the slap of his jacket being flung over
the back of the wooden horse. He didn't seem remotely put out to find me at his kitchen table eating his food.

Diana rose to kiss him. ‘Christopher just called by to bring us these,' she said, pointing at the roses, now arranged in yet another vase. ‘Wasn't that kind?' There was something not quite candid, I felt, in her use of the word ‘just'.

Before Owen could reply he was set upon by the twins, clamouring to be lifted up, overflowing with their day's news. ‘Daddy, Daddy, we went to the park and saw a squirrel and do you know what? It was dead.' ‘Daddy, Daddy, this morning Wesley was sick in the sandpit, and I was special helper and I got to do the weather.'

‘Hello,' he said to me cheerfully, when at last he had disengaged himself and expressed due amazement at these tales of death and illness. ‘I'm glad to see you got home in one piece. It occurred to me after you'd ridden off that we really should have called you a cab.'

Since the evidence of my survival was before him, I could do little more than smile and apologise for the inroads made into his whisky.

‘Are you staying for something to eat?' he asked. ‘What are we eating tonight, Dinny?'

‘No,' I said, leaping up before ‘Dinny' could start preparing still more food. ‘Really, I was only passing,' I added, compounding my earlier lie by reusing it.

‘Well, if you insist,' said Diana. I had the feeling she'd had enough of me, which wasn't unreasonable after four hours.

‘Did you hear Ravi on Radio Four this afternoon?' Owen asked her.

Her hand flew to her mouth. ‘I forgot to listen,' she said. ‘Stupid of me. Was he good?'

Owen nodded. ‘You know what he's like. He always talks as if he's being interviewed anyway.'

All the time he'd been standing in the kitchen he'd had at his feet a splitting carrier bag. Now he deposited it on the table its contents were revealed as a vast typescript, many hundreds of pages long. ‘Just a bit of light reading for tonight,' he explained, and I felt a discreditable pang of jealousy for the unknown author, for having finished his novel and staked a claim for Owen's attention, and very possibly a precious place in Kenway & Luff's list.

‘Is it any good?' I asked, in the carefully casual tone of a wife asking if her husband's new secretary is pretty.

‘I doubt it,' said Owen, which cheered my envious heart. I privately hoped it would turn out to be
horseshit
– a piece of literary-critical jargon which I'd picked up from Bina, the overeducated receptionist, and now found almost indispensable.

I DIDN'T SEE
the Goddards again for some months. I tried to go back to
The Night Wanderer
with the same zeal and urgency that had seized me after my first meeting with Owen, but with little success. That mysterious and magical inspiration that seemed to have its source somewhere outside and beyond me, and had delivered a torrent of ideas for that brief period, had vanished like mist, and there was nothing I could do to bring it back. I laboured to produce even a page of usable material in a day, overwhelmed by the size of the task still ahead of me. I had celebrated too soon, as if the harvest was in, when only half the seeds were planted.

Then I ran out of money. Mecca Bookmakers, which had, I now realised, been cushy and well paid, especially since winning punters tended to tip as lavishly as they
gambled, wouldn't take me back. I had to beg and grovel to get punishingly hard work on a building site, digging out foundations with a pick and pushing barrowloads of rubble up and down steep ramps. I was back into my old routine of see-sawing between menial jobs which left me no time to write, and unemployment which left me nothing to live on.

My friends had given up on me: when the writing had been going well, I resented interruptions and repelled all visitors; when it was going badly I was morbid company.

Progress on the novel was agonisingly slow, and seemed to bring the ending no nearer. Like the horizon, it receded at exactly the rate that I advanced. I had a vivid childhood memory of swimming out to sea at Charmouth to retrieve a plastic beach ball which someone – Gerald, presumably – had thrown over my head. Every stroke of front crawl which brought me closer to it simultaneously wafted it further away, until I was out of my depth and rigid with cramp, and Dad had to come steaming out and save me.

My rescuer on this occasion was owen. Although I had his number as a lifeline, it was he who rang me first, as though sensing my distress.

He was calling to invite me to a lecture on
Wolf Solent
that he was giving to the Powys Society, but also to check that my silence wasn't due to anything sinister.

As before, I felt myself drawing immediate strength from his interest in my welfare. I suppose the
relationship must have been similar to the rapport between a popular teacher and favoured pupil, something I'd never experienced during my years at school, though I'd often dreamed of it.

Towards the end of the conversation, I managed to forget the consuming importance of my own troubles and detected a note of melancholy in Owen's voice.

‘You sound a bit low,' I ventured. ‘Is everything OK with you?'

‘I'm a bit shaken up, actually. One of my authors, Lawrence Canning – I think I lent you his book – has died. Committed suicide.'

I felt death's icy hand on my shoulder for a second, and was unable to stop the ghoul in me saying ‘How?' instead of the more pertinent ‘Why?'

‘Jumped under a train.'

‘Oh dear.' A literary sort of death, I thought. Selfish, too. ‘Hard luck on the poor train driver, I always think.'

‘Yes, awful,' Owen agreed. ‘He apparently left a note apologising, so it was thoroughly premeditated.'

‘Did he give a reason?' I tried to imagine that last, resolute walk down the platform and what it might have taken to deflect him.

‘I don't know exactly what the note said. But I know he'd been seriously depressed for a long time. I've got a horrible feeling it might have had something to do with
The Magenta Staircase
. He was devastated at how badly it did. Even though I'd tried to warn him. Good books don't always rise to the top on sheer merit. They just don't.'

I wondered if Owen was issuing me with a veiled warning, and then felt disgusted with myself for gazing on someone else's tragedy and seeing only me.

‘I wonder whether I did him a disservice in getting him published,' Owen was saying. ‘Such a pointless, pointless waste.'

‘You can't take the blame,' I replied. ‘No one can really know what drove him to it. It's bound to be so much more complicated than one single cause.'

‘Yes, you're right. He was a very complicated man. Very disturbed. It's all there in the book – and yet the book is so uplifting, so hopeful. Now I've got to think of something to say at the funeral.'

‘Unqualified praise.'

‘Yes, that usually has to wait till we're dead.'

As soon as I had put the phone down I went straight to the shelf and pulled out my unread copy of
The Magenta Staircase
. Lawrence Canning's dead eyes stared out at me reproachfully from his photograph on the jacket. Guiltily I opened it at the first page and began to read. ‘Everyone, it is said, has a story that burns to be told. Mine has been fuelled by three generations of hatred.' Equally guiltily, I closed it again and replaced it on the shelf.

The meeting of the Powys Society, at which owen was due to speak, was held in the upper room of a pub in Battersea. The audience seemed to be made up of lonely fanatics, hippy postgraduates, and older female
academics with unbrushed hair and misbuttoned cardigans, whom I thought of as Iris Murdoch types. It was only afterwards that Owen told me one of them
was
Iris Murdoch.

I had arranged to meet the Goddards there: they would be arriving separately, Owen straight from work, early, Diana from home, late. ‘She never gets anywhere on time,' Owen warned me.

He spoke for forty-five minutes about
Wolf Solent
, without notes, pausing only once, when the door creaked open to admit a late, flustered Diana. She dropped into the empty seat beside me at the back and, after a moment or two of convalescence, produced a pad and biro and proceeded to make notes. I thought this was taking wifely devotion to extremes, until she moved her hand, and I saw the words
plasters, rice krispies, yoghurt, jam
. . .

She caught me looking and gave me an apologetic smile. Something in this trivial incident, some fleeting intimation of disloyalty perhaps, made my heart kick a little faster. I took the pad and pen from her and wrote PAY ATTENTION in stern capitals before passing them back. Beside me I felt her tremor of silent laughter.

I HAVE ALREADY HEARD IT IN REHEARSAL, she wrote. TWICE.

I nodded solemnly, but didn't look at her, and settled back to listen to the rest of the lecture through the haze of a dawning infatuation.

The revelation that Diana was, after all, my type, didn't cause me any uneasiness: it was only proper that Owen
should have a gorgeous wife, and no less than he deserved. I was happy to admire her from a safe distance.

The lecture was followed by a period of questions from the floor. As is often the case, this was dominated by one or two pedants trying to demonstrate their great erudition by challenging Owen over infinitesimal matters of accuracy or interpretation. He fielded these with his usual charm and diplomacy. Often the questions weren't questions at all but pieces of pure self-advertisement. Even the benign world of Powys appreciation, it seemed, was not free of petty power struggles.

After the formal part of the proceedings was over the chairs were stacked against the wall and there was a surge for the refreshments table, on which were glasses of warm white wine and orange juice, and a bowl of greasy peanuts. The lonely fanatics loitered awkwardly, unassimilated, and then slunk off. Everyone else had formed intimate unbreachable clusters, and there was soon quite an imposing background babble of conversation, not all of it literary.

‘Gallstones,' I heard one woman say to her neighbour as I tried to elbow my way through the throng to fetch Diana a drink. She wasn't a regular at these events, and since Owen had been cornered by a couple of tweedy academics, had no one to talk to but me. She was wearing a bright yellow sundress and there was a matching flower stuck in the clip holding up her hair.

‘You're looking very lovely and summery,' I said, thinking this sort of heavy-handed gallantry was acceptable
given the difference in our ages, and the best way to disguise the fact that I fancied her. She was certainly the smartest woman in the room by some stretch.