The Editor's Wife (7 page)

‘What do you do instead, then?' I asked. ‘In the evenings, I mean.'

‘Well, homework. I've got exams this summer. And I'm teaching myself the guitar.' She blushed slightly. ‘And sometimes I do a bit of my rug. I'm making a rag rug. It's really good fun.'

I nodded, smiling encouragement.

‘Why don't you come along to one of the PUSH meetings with Gerald?'

‘Push?'

‘Pray Until Something Happens. Group prayer is really powerful. It cured Vivian's mum's arthritis.'

‘I haven't got arthritis,' I said.

She laughed. ‘You don't have to have something wrong with you. You could just come anyway.'

‘I don't think so.' I went to put the kettle on, hoping its whistle would bring Gerald in from the garden. On the tea tray, beside a china bowl of lump sugar was a pack of cards, probably left over from one of Mum's bridge afternoons. It was a nice new deck, sharp-edged and slippery. ‘Do you want a game of rummy or something?' I asked, forgetting that cards, like TV, might be regarded as ungodly, but she nodded, so it was obviously OK.

She didn't seem to have heard of any of the games I suggested, and couldn't remember the rules of the one
game she knew but hadn't played for years: donkey. I gave the deck a last shuffle and put it back on the tray.

‘I can play chess,' she said at last, in a tone which implied she already knew I played.

We had just set up the board between the fruit cake and the chocolate mallows when Gerald came in, drenched, but glowing with the satisfaction of a job well done. He dried his hair on the roller towel on the back door and raked it flat with his fingers before sitting down to tea. I was about to make my getaway when Katharine pushed her king's pawn forward and said, ‘Your move,' so I felt obliged to continue, while Gerald sat watching, absent-mindedly eating his way through the plate of sandwiches.

She wasn't a bad player, which was a pity, because I wanted the game to be over as quickly as possible (on my terms of course), and the only way to guarantee that was to play like a moron. Although I was keen to escape I had too much pride to allow myself to be beaten by a girl, particularly a Christian, rug-making friend of Gerald. She, in any case, was in no hurry, taking her time over every move, and so the game proceeded its laborious way towards stalemate, while Gerald made the tea and looked on with no great enthusiasm.

By the time it was over the sandwiches and cake had been disposed of, so I stood up and made some excuse about having to finish my homework, at which point Katharine looked at her watch and said, ‘I ought to be getting home. I haven't got lights on my bike.'

Gerald gave me a baleful look, before leaning down to tuck his trousers back into his socks.

There were no more weekend bicycle trips to Crystal Palace, and for a while no mention of Katharine, from which I deduced that one experience of Gerald on his home territory had been enough for her.

‘What happened to that girl from the church?' Mum ventured to ask him one day, when he was mooching about the kitchen, getting in her way.

‘I don't know.' He shrugged. ‘I haven't decided.'

‘Did the bike ride not work out?' A thought struck her. ‘The tea was all right, wasn't it?' She was making scones for her bridge ladies, and there was flour on her glasses and in her hair.

‘Yes. There was nothing wrong with the tea. It went fine apart from Christopher interfering.'

‘You didn't!' Mum turned on me, wagging the rolling pin, which shed flakes of raw scone mix on the lino. ‘I told you to keep out of the way.'

‘They played chess for practically the whole afternoon,' said Gerald bitterly.

‘Only because you were totally ignoring her,' I protested. ‘I was just being polite. I don't even like her!'

‘I was teaching her how to mend a puncture.'

‘Chess and bicycle maintenance,' said Mum, rolling her eyes. ‘I'm amazed she's not been back!'

‘She seemed quite happy to learn,' said Gerald stiffly.

‘In the rain,' I added.

Mum ground the pastry cutter into the dough until it screeched against the kitchen table. ‘If you'd only had a sister, you wouldn't be so clueless,' she sighed. It was the first time it had ever occurred to me that Mum might harbour private disappointments, or indeed thoughts of any kind.

A month or so after the infamous first date I was upstairs in my bedroom trying to smoke a cigar. My best friend David Creerson had swiped a bunch of them from his dad's humidor and dished them out at school, and I had been saving mine for a quiet moment. It gave off a fusty smell of old men's clothes, which intensified almost unbearably when I finally got it to light, and I was puffing queasily out of the open window when I saw Katharine wheeling along the path on her bike. She was riding it like a scooter, standing up, both feet on the same pedal, as though to distance herself from the illegal activity of cycling on the pavement. She was wearing an embroidered blouse, a gingham headscarf and blue cotton trousers that were not quite denim. Jeans for people who aren't allowed to wear jeans.

Gerald was out at his new Saturday job in Sainsbury's at Stockwell. He was in charge of broken eggs, checking all the boxes for cracked shells and breaking the rejects into waxed cartons to be sold by the scoop. At the end of the day any unsold slop was his to keep. It was always omelette in our house on Saturday night.

I withdrew slightly, so Katharine wouldn't see me,
keeping the snout of the cigar just poking over the window ledge. From behind the curtain I watched her chain her bicycle to the lamp post and a moment later heard a rap on the letter box and the sound of voices.

‘Hello, I'm Katharine Clement from the Faithful Few. I came to tea a few weeks ago.'

‘Hello dear.' This was Mum. ‘I'm afraid Gerald's not here at the moment. He's working up at the new supermarket. He won't be back till six. He'll be sorry to have missed you.'

Then the words which made me fumble my cigar so that it went spinning into the front garden, where it embedded itself in the privet hedge and continued to smoulder.

‘It isn't Gerald I've come to see, it's Christopher.'

We walked along the east side of the common, Katharine pushing her bike between us. My one thought was to get her away from the house before Gerald came back. I had given Mum a beseeching look as I came down the stairs in answer to her summons.
Get me out of this
it plainly said, but she had replied with the bland smile of one determined not to get involved.

I let Katharine do most of the talking: I had nothing to say, and in any case needed my concentration to scan the horizon for anyone I knew. If Creerson, or anyone else from school, saw me with a girl in a headscarf I was finished. Her exams had started, work on the rag rug was progressing well, she had played a guitar solo in church,
and won a fiver in a chess tournament. I trudged beside her, murmuring politely at these feats, and wondering how soon I could feasibly get away.

‘Shall we go to the café?' she suggested. ‘We could sit down and have a cup of tea?'

I shook my head. I hadn't thought to bring any money, and besides the café was always crowded – I was sure to be seen. We ambled on until Katharine spotted a bench and decided to sit down, propping her bicycle on its stand and padlocking it, though we were sitting only feet away.

‘You smell all smoky,' she said. ‘Have you been smoking cigarettes?'

‘No,' I replied, truthfully.

‘You can put your arm round me if you want. I don't mind,' she said.

Obediently I manoeuvred my arm into position. It lay, stiff as a plank, along the back of the bench, my hand a lifeless slab of flesh cupping the air six inches above her shoulder. She prattled on about school, and the antics of the fifth-year leavers on their last day. Someone had started a fire in a locker and the whole place had had to be evacuated. There had been flour fights on the bus. We agreed that this was silly and childish.

I glanced at my watch. Nearly six – time to go.

‘I've got to go back for tea now,' I said. As I went to disengage my arm, I saw the distinctive figure of Gerald toiling up the hill towards Gleneldon Road, a carton of broken eggs in each hand. Something unnatural in my frozen posture must have caught his attention, because
he looked up and saw us. For a second it seemed as if he was going to wave or call out, but then he didn't, and instead walked on slightly faster, with his head down.

Gerald didn'come down to tea that night, and when Mum sent me up to investigate I found him lying on his bed, holding his stomach, a nauseous expression on his face.

‘What's the matter? Are you ill?' I asked.

‘I won't be wanting any food,' he said, without looking at me. ‘I've just eaten a bar of soap.'

THE MORNING AFTER
my trip to London, instead of calling the insurance company, or looking in the public appointments section of
The Times
, or dusting off my CV, I rang Alex Canning to arrange a meeting.

Since it was now term time I tried the number at the university. The phone was picked up on the first ring.

‘. . . that's not the only castration metaphor. Hello?'

‘Hello,' I said, refusing to be thrown. ‘Can I speak to Dr Canning?'

‘Speaking. Could I possibly call you back in twenty minutes. I'm teaching.'

‘Yes, of course. My name's Christopher Flinders and—'

‘Oh, well, in that case, hang on, I'll talk to you now.' There was a fumbling sound of a hand on the receiver and then a door closing. ‘Hello? Are you still there?'

I confirmed that I was.

‘Thank you so much for getting back to me,' she said. ‘I'm not supposed to take calls when I've got students. Very unprofessional. But I've had such trouble tracking you down.'

‘I've moved a few times over the years,' I agreed.

‘I think it was your brother I spoke to,' she went on. ‘He wouldn't give me your current address.'

That figures, I thought.

‘Did he forward my letter?'

‘Not exactly,' I said. ‘But I got it eventually.'

‘Oh good. So you know what this is about.'

‘Owen Goddard.'

I hadn't spoken his name aloud in over twenty years, and I had to swallow hard to dislodge the pebble of remorse and guilt that instantly lodged in my throat.

‘Yes. I assumed from the contents of the letter I've got from you to him that you knew each other quite well.'

‘I wouldn't say that, necessarily,' I said. I still wasn't sure how much I wanted to tell her. Not everything, by a long stretch.

‘Have you any other correspondence from him dating from that time? It would be incredibly helpful to have copies.'

‘I might have. I'd have to have a rummage. There wouldn't be much. I'm not a great hoarder.'

‘Is there any chance that we could meet?' she went on. ‘I don't know what part of the world you're in.'

‘I live about twenty miles north of York.'

‘Oh that's no distance. I could drive up one morning. Is there a particular day that suits you?'

I glanced at the Cheese-lover's Calendar that Carol had given me for Christmas: apart from a dentist's appointment some months hence it was blank, the empty, jobless days unrolling ahead of me. ‘I'm not too busy at the moment,' I said. ‘You can pretty much name your day.'

As soon as I had put the phone down, having agreed a time the following week, and given directions to Hartslip, I went straight up to the loft – a tiny hatch above the landing, reached by a nylon rope ladder. It is impossible to climb a swinging rope ladder while carrying anything substantial – a powerful disincentive to hoarding – and not much had been deemed worth the journey, so it didn't take long to find what I was looking for. A zip-up canvas holdall that had moved unopened with me from place to place over the years.

I carried it down to the sitting room and unpacked it in front of the fire. Unzipping it released a puff of twenty-year-old air, piercingly redolent of my old bedsit in Brixton. It was a combination of cigarette smoke, Chanel pour homme, and that cannabis and fried chilli smell that had soaked into the very fabric of the building. I was assailed by a nostalgia that verged on panic: when I closed my eyes and breathed in the scent so particular to that time and place I was almost afraid to open them again in case I found myself back there, and all the years in between just a dream.

I took out the artefacts one by one. A black cashmere sweater, worn almost to mesh at the elbows. A gold and aquamarine pendant, still in its velvet box, unworn. Eight hardback copies of
The Night Wanderer
by Christopher Flinders (Swift & Deckle 1987) First edition. Unread. A ring binder of 150 handwritten pages. A Christmas card. An invitation. Two letters.

From this haul I selected just the invitation and one of the letters to give to Alex Canning. The other letter – a model of brevity – I put back.

On the agreed morning, and punctual to the minute, Alex Canning came bumping down the muddy track to Hartslip Cottage in a rusty hatchback that belched clouds of blue exhaust. The driver's door was so badly dented that it no longer opened and she had to shuffle across to the passenger side to get out. The rest of the car's bodywork bore the untreated dimples and scrapes of past skirmishes.

It was a cold morning, with a hard frost and a weak January sun, so I had lit a fire early to let the room warm up. I had spent the hours leading up to the appointment tidying the place, excavating the table from beneath cliffs of paperwork and clutter, wiping layers of dust from every horizontal surface, and beating some life back into the depressed cushions of the couch. Since the defection of Patty, my occasional cleaner/lover, standards had slipped somewhat, and it was only the threat of visitors that stirred me to action. It was always worse in winter, with the open
fire puffing out clouds of ash and soot, and mud from the farmyard being traipsed in on the soles of my shoes. Anyway, the sitting room looked quite presentable and homely when I'd finished, and not nearly so much like the habitat of a solitary middle-aged man with few friends. While emptying the waste-paper basket (a wedding present from Gerald), I turned up my watch, which I'd thought lost for ever and had already successfully claimed on insurance.