The Editor's Wife (2 page)

I stood gazing at the scene in a kind of reverie, and then as I jumped down from the stile a pheasant burst out of the long grass at my feet and took off with a terrific beating of wings. The sudden explosion of noise in the stillness startled me into biting the inside of my cheek, so that it was in some pain, and with a mouthful of blood, that I approached my future home.

The farmer had, as arranged, left the key in the conservatory – a cedar-framed lean-to like half a greenhouse on the front of the building. The air inside was warm and there were upturned flies on the window sills, crisp and dead. The front door opened with only a little force from my shoulder, scratching a ninety-degree curve into the flagstones and releasing a gust of chilly air, and I found myself in a tiny ante-room with a staircase to my left and a row of coat hooks to my right. Straight ahead was a bathroom, offering a loo with no seat, a chipped enamel bath, cold and abrasive to the touch, and a porcelain basin, home to a fat spider. Just before the coat hooks was the door to the main body of the house, which turned out to comprise two rooms of roughly equal size: a sitting room – though not designated as such, since it contained nothing but a fireplace – and a kitchen, unfurnished apart from a sink and a free-standing Calor gas cooker. The place had the distinctive old-building smell of swept stone and spent matches.

I climbed the steep stairs to the upper floor, nearly scalping myself on the low beams. The wood felt dangerously spongy underfoot. A tiny landing with an airing
cupboard led onto a large bedroom with low windows front and back, facing the farm in one direction and the moors in the other. I could park my bed opposite the north-facing window and wake up every morning to that view of brown hills. In my imagination I was already starting to inhabit the place, furnishing it with phantom possessions. There was a second room, corresponding to the kitchen below, accessible through the master bedroom or, for the more adventurous, through a dwarf-sized door giving onto an unguarded flight of steps which ran down the outside wall to the garden.

With a little restoration work – new bathroom, new stairs, new kitchen, plaster, paint – it would be perfect. Without any work it was . . . perfect. I could hardly bear to leave it and return to the house in York with its power shower and satellite TV and all its other burdensome comforts.

The farmer was full of apologies for what he saw as the property's shortcomings and set a ludicrously low rent, which he tried to drop still further after misinterpreting my look of incredulity. There followed a bizarre scene of inverted haggling, where I had to beat him back up to his original price.

That weekend I hired a van and transported my belongings to the cottage – essentials like mattress, fridge, guitar, armchair first, fripperies later. The bed base had to be dismantled, carried up the outside steps piece by piece and posted through the dwarf hatch because the turn in the interior staircase was too tight.

That first euphoric moment of occupation, when I stood surveying my new lodgings, knowing that I wouldn't ever be returning to the York flat, surpassed even the moment four years later when I signed on the dotted line and became the owner. The farmer, Richard, by that time a good friend, needed to raise some capital for a new business venture, converting one of the barns into a workshop for making traditional hand tools. He knew that I was rooted in Hartslip Cottage and wouldn't commit the unforgivable sin of selling it on to some rich southerner to use as a rental property. In fact I promised that I would offer him first refusal if I ever came to resell.

Once it was mine, renovation became a possibility – a duty, perhaps. But by then I had grown so used to the crumbling plaster and the bare boards that I hardly noticed them, and if I did it was only with the friendly eye that sees more beauty in an old and interesting face than in a young and perfect one.

I HAD INTENDED
to spend my first day of unemployment – the first day of exciting new career opportunities, as the Redundancy Reorientation Counsellor had urged me to consider it – taking one of Richard's horses out for a canter, followed by a pub lunch at Hutton and then mackerel fishing at Whitby.

In the end I did none of these because I remembered Gerald's letter, set aside the evening before, and made the mistake of opening it. He had used an old Amstrad with a dot matrix printer on the faintest possible setting to save ink, and green and white striped continuous paper with holes punched down the side. It reminded me of one of those optical illusions, where a page of black blobs conceals a picture of a Dalmatian: after a few minutes the
apparently random smattering of dots reassembled itself into the following message:

Dear Chris

Re: The estate of Derek Flinders (Dad) Before I begin the complicated and time-consuming job of selling 76 Gleneldon Road I was wondering whether you would consider splitting the proceeds 60–40 in my favour rather than 50–50 to acknowledge the fact that it was me who looked after Dad for the last year of his life when he was increasingly frail. There were various expenses. Also my status as a sort of sitting tenant. I know you are keen to see the house sold as quickly as possible – you mentioned millstones when you were here last – so perhaps we could resolve this as soon as possible.

Yours

Gerald

PS I haven't taken any legal advice – this is just an informal suggestion at this stage.

For a moment or two I thought
he's having me on. This has to be some sort of prank,
all the while knowing pranks of any kind to be outside Gerald's range. I read it again through a fog of rage. Of course the attempt to divert what would amount to nearly fifty grand from me to him was breathtaking, but it was his falsification of history that was the real outrage. To claim that he had ‘looked after' Dad was a travesty: on the contrary Gerald's residency – a year of
rent-free sponging – probably hastened Dad's death. As for his menacing allusions to ‘legal advice', I got straight on the phone to my ex-wife Carol for some legal advice of my own.

Unusually I managed to catch her between meetings, and after preliminary civilities she was able to confirm that Gerald was pulling a fast one. On the question of his occupancy of the unsold house, the law was on my side, but evicting him would be complicated and possibly unpleasant.

‘It's not his house,' I spluttered. ‘He was just a sort of parasitic visitor who turned up and never left. You know what he's like.'

She'd never had much time for Gerald when they were in-laws, a stance which he reciprocated in full measure.

‘I'll get back to you. I've got to see a client now,' she was saying.

‘He knows he can't just squat there indefinitely. We had all this out when Dad was still alive. Dad was just putting him up as a favour when his last woman booted him out.'

‘Gerald had a woman?' Carol was sceptical.

‘I don't know about
had
. This Irish woman put him up for a while. Took pity on him, you know, until she got fed up with him, like they all do. God, he's got such a nerve. Listen to this –' I started to reel off some of the more irritating phrases from his letter but Carol cut me off, her reserves of sympathy quickly depleted.

‘Yes, yes, save your indignation for Gerald. I've got to go. I'll call you back.'

‘Ring me at home. My office number's no good any more.'

‘Why's that?'

‘I've lost my job.'

‘Euw. That's bad luck. Or is it?' I could tell she was wondering how many precious seconds this conversational turn was going to cost her.

‘I don't know yet. It was voluntary, sort of. My department merged with another one, so it was a choice of reapplying for my own job in competition with a colleague who's got a massive mortgage, a pregnant wife and two kids, or taking redundancy.'

‘That was noble of you. What are you going to do now?'

‘I don't know. Is forty-five too old for a Gap Year?'

‘Ha ha. Look, keep your pecker up and we'll talk about it when I come to dinner. You're cooking for me next Thursday, don't forget.'

‘Am I?'

‘Yes. You can do that Thai fish slop you did last time. Bye.' And she hung up briskly before I could reply.

I met Carol at a time in my life when I was vulnerable and disorientated. I'd moved up north to complete the degree that I'd abandoned years earlier and six months into my final year I still had no real friends. I was attracted by her energy and her outspokenness and flattered by her pursuit of me. And, of course, by a very physical promise that she seemed to exude around men. Subconsciously I must have decided that if I attached myself to Carol
everything that was currently wrong with my life would be taken care of: her friends would become my friends; she would organise me and integrate me; I would be normal again.

So it proved at first. We got married six months after our first meeting, at that peak of compatibility where we had had time to reveal only the best of ourselves to each other. She was a solicitor, already established in her career, well paid and successful. I had just started to work for the Inland Revenue, and was not yet any of those things, and although this imbalance meant little in those early, passionate months, it started to rankle once other, bigger differences came to light. If I dissect our life together, I suppose we had two very happy years, two average years with turbulent patches, and one rancorous, miserable year with frequent outbreaks of hostility.

The problem was that we had both come to marriage with different, but equally unrealistic expectations. She wanted her life to carry on exactly as before, with me in attendance. I had a model of family life in my mind, based not on my own parents but on a couple I had known in London. It was a collage of hopelessly idealised images: the angelic curve of a sleeping child's cheek on the pillow, the smell of home-made lemon meringue pie, a row of wellington boots by the back door, ranged in height order, the slenderness of a woman's waist, nipped in by a cotton apron . . . Of course, none of this was applicable to our situation. Carol was the main breadwinner: she wasn't going to be flitting around the house
in a cotton pinny, whisking egg whites. She hated cooking and did it as seldom as possible, taking great pride in her incompetence. She preferred to eat out and, since it was her money, we ate out. Her social life was everything to her. If a weekend approached that wasn't fully booked up with parties and dinners she would fly into a panic and ring round everyone she knew until all the gaps were plugged. When I suggested that it might be quite enjoyable, refreshingly different, at least, to stay in, she would say, ‘Fine. You stay in,' and go without me. I tried to explain that what I wanted was to stay in
with her
, but that made me sound unreasonable and repressive, as she was quick to point out. We argued over it regularly, always failing to reach a compromise, and every argument seemed to erode a little more of our affection for each other.

Then, overnight, the rows and silences stopped. Carol was happier, more attentive, more tolerant of my peevish moods and maddening habits. I knew she must be having an affair. And I knew who with, too: one of her colleagues – Jeremy Standish – because his name used to come up often in conversation, and then suddenly not at all. I carried this knowledge around with me like a bomb, which I never had the courage to detonate. On the surface we were, after all, getting on better than for a long time. The idea of revenge infidelity didn't appeal either, even supposing a suitable candidate could be found. It wouldn't have inflicted anything like equivalent suffering. On the contrary, she would have been
relieved to have me out of the way. And the infuriating fact remained: I wanted only her. And even though I knew that fate had dealt me exactly the hand I deserved, at the back of my mind, too, lurked the ghastly hope: maybe I'm wrong.

The manner of our separation was more of a farce than a tragedy. On the night in question I had arranged that I would be cooking, and Carol had seemed to be agreeable. I left the office promptly for once, as I wanted to stop off at a deli and pick up some wine and other ingredients for dinner. (I was in the habit of delaying my return home to avoid sitting too long in an empty house, but however late I left it, Carol contrived to be later.) I was halfway into the recipe, just chopping some fresh chillies and enjoying myself – a bottle of Barolo breathing on the side,
Don Giovanni
on the stereo – when she rang. There was a crisis at work; she had to stay. She didn't know when she'd be back, but too late to eat. Her tone was brisk, remorseless.

Deflated, I hung up and went back to the kitchen, in the process rubbing my face and transferring some chilli juice to the soft tissue of my eye, which didn't improve my temper. The beef was already browning in the pan, so there was no alternative but to press on with the cooking, but I had lost all enthusiasm now. From being a pleasure it was all at once a chore, bitterly resented. I felt mocked by the bunch of fresh coriander which had taken so much tracking down, the effort of acquiring it out of all proportion to its influence on the meal, which
would itself now go unappreciated. Nevertheless, I saved half the cooked chilli in a bowl, duly garnished, in case the great urgency of this legal ‘crisis' had left Carol no time for eating, but I drank the wine myself and to hell with her.

It was after midnight when she sauntered in, smelling of the pub. The house was in darkness. Dusk and then night had fallen around me as I sat at the kitchen table, the remains of the meal in front of me, the mountain of pans and utensils that I'd deployed in its preparation still unwashed. She snapped the light on and started violently when she saw me.

‘Oh my God. I thought you were in bed. Why are you sitting here in the dark?' She helped herself to a drink of water, wrinkling her nose at the mess. There was so much crockery piled in the sink that she could hardly fit a glass under the tap. ‘It stinks of onions in here,' she muttered.