The Editor's Wife (10 page)

One of the hardbacks had been pulled out and not properly replaced: it was an inch proud of the others, and the dust jacket bulged at the spine.
The Magenta Staircase
by Lawrence Canning – that Bible of despair and recovery that had once saved my life, though it hadn't saved the author's. The name flew at me. It was too much of a coincidence. I did the maths, and the dates fitted. Alex's discovery of Owen via Ravi Amos hadn't altogether convinced me at the time: there wouldn't have been a
great deal of correspondence, since Owen had only been his editor for a couple of books, and had said himself that Ravi needed and tolerated almost no editing. The link with Lawrence Canning made much better sense.

I telephoned Alex on the hour and caught her between tutorials.

‘I've just twigged who you are.'

‘Oh.'

‘You're Lawrence Canning's daughter.'

‘Daughter-in-law, actually.'

Of course. I had forgotten the husband in my haste. ‘Why didn't you say?'

‘I was going to. I saw you had a copy of
The Magenta Staircase
, but then you burnt the croissants and we started talking about other things, and I forgot.'

‘That was such a great book. It helped me out of a particularly dark place. I only wish I'd read it before he died, I could have told him what a difference he'd made.'

‘I'm not sure that would have been enough,' Alex replied. ‘He didn't die of disappointment. He was clinically depressed for years. When he committed suicide he'd come off his medication because he didn't like the side effects. That's what my mother-in-law told me, anyway. I never knew him myself. He died before I came on the scene. My husband, Craig, was only eight.'

‘Poor him. He can't have had an easy childhood.'

‘No. Like so many. But his mother did a wonderful job bringing up two of them – Craig and his sister.'

‘And children are resilient. They say.'

‘Yes. It's funny but he never talked about it much, until I got pregnant. I suppose the thought of becoming a father made him think about his own father. Lawrence was ill for so much of the time, either in bed stewing in depression or manic and scary, that Craig hasn't got much idea of what normal dads actually do. His mum bought them a dog, a Labrador called Paddy, and it got run over about two years later, and Craig said he cried more over losing the dog than he did over his father.'

‘It's only natural that impending parenthood would bring all these feelings to the surface.'

‘Yes. You start thinking about your origins. Worrying, too. I mean, it's hereditary, what Lawrence had.'

‘But your husband's not affected?'

‘Doesn't seem to be. But you can't help wondering.'

I don't know whether it was the confessional nature of this conversation, or some notion of repaying a debt to Lawrence Canning, but before I could give myself time to reflect and change my mind, I said, ‘Alex, I wasn't completely honest with you yesterday.'

‘Well neither was I.'

‘I misled you about my relationship with the Goddards, and now I'm feeling guilty. But I didn't want to say anything that would reflect badly on them or me. Mainly me,' I admitted. ‘I don't come out of it particularly well.'

‘So all that stuff you told me wasn't true.'

‘No, I didn't invent anything. I just left rather a lot out.'

‘Oh.'

I was expecting more indignation, but her tone didn't give anything away. ‘I'm sorry. Are you very annoyed?'

‘No,' Alex replied, cautiously. ‘So are you going to tell me what you left out, or are you just warning me to mind the gaps?'

‘I'm going to tell you.' In the background came the slamming of doors and the scuffling noises of arrival.

‘I've got to teach now. Can I ring you later?'

‘No need. I've got everything written down in black and white. About 150 pages. I'll send it to you.'

‘Blimey, that's efficient,' she laughed. ‘You didn't need to do that.'

‘I did it a long time ago.'

‘Look, don't post it. I'm going to be in Scarborough on Saturday – my aunt is in something at the Playhouse. Perhaps I could stop off on the way back and pick it up. If it's not inconvenient.'

‘All right,' I agreed. ‘But don't judge me too harshly. I was only young.'

The following account was written by me, Christopher Flinders, soon after the events described, and is as true as I could make it.

IN 1983 I
was in my final year studying maths at York University. I hadn't fully considered that this would lead me to a career analysing tax liabilities: my ambitions were both more vague and more grandiose then, as befits someone who has never had to make a living. In any case, unlike my fellow students, I had another, secret string to my bow: I was going to be a writer. I had already written a hundred pages of a novel called
Ask Your Mother to Pass
the Salt
, a fictitious memoir of a brutal working-class childhood, greatly influenced by my reading of D. H. Lawrence. While my friends were doing the milk round of interviews for that first foothold in industry, I was in my room, jabbing out my tale of passion and suffering on an old Imperial typewriter which amputated the descenders, and threw every capital letter just above the line.

I had always intended to keep this embarrassing hobby to myself until such time as I had a publishing contract, when I would be able to drop it into conversation without fear of ridicule. I hadn't really abandoned the idea of a career in business, imagining, without much clarity, that I could do both until my reputation as a writer was established. One weekend at home, however, a chance remark of Dad's prompted me to take drastic action.

Mum had been out for the day at a funeral – the husband of one of her bridge friends – unknown to the rest of us, and had returned from the wake carrying a mysteriously bulging carrier bag. This proved to contain one of the dead man's suits, a three-piece, pinstriped horror, apparently hailing from the Prohibition era. It only needed spats and a trilby. I could see Mum mentally measuring me up, as I stood in the kitchen doorway, like a hangman estimating the drop.

‘This'll do nicely for you, Christopher,' she said. ‘You'll be needing a suit when you start work.' She bore down on me, holding the jacket open to reveal the discoloured lining at the armpits. It gave off a jumble-sale smell of dust and the sickly, alcoholic odour of decades-old gentlemen's cologne.

I laughed, keeping my hands in my pockets, and backing off slightly. ‘You've got to be joking.'

Mum bridled at this affront to her bereaved friend's generosity, and her own resourcefulness. ‘Why should I be? It's a perfectly good suit. Jermyn Street.'

‘Perfectly good if you want to look like a Chicago mobster.'

‘What nonsense. Reg used to wear it to work up at Barclays Bank in High Holborn. It's a classic men's business suit. They don't date.'

There's something about a funeral, even a stranger's, that makes you momentarily appreciate your individuality. All of a sudden I found myself bitterly resenting Mum's insufferable bourgeois certainties: that I would be going into ‘business'; that I would require a ‘classic' suit; that what was good enough for Reg somebody-or-other was good enough for me.

‘I might not need a suit,' I said. ‘I might not be planning to work in an office.'

‘Oh I dare say you could get a job in the abattoir,' said Mum, removing her black hat and jabbing the hatpin back through the crown with some force.

‘I was thinking I might be a writer,' I said, in the sort of offhand tone guaranteed to rile her. ‘Then I could wear any old thing.'

‘A writer?' said Mum incredulously. ‘No one's going to pay you to sit around all day and write, you know.'

‘I'm already halfway through a novel,' I said, feeling bound to support my admission with some evidence of industry.

‘Do you hear that, Derek?' said Mum. ‘Christopher's writing a novel.' She turned back to me, a puzzled look on her face. ‘I don't remember you being any good at English at school.'

I refused to acknowledge this comment.

‘You won't have time to be writing when you've got a proper job,' Dad observed, almost wistfully. ‘All those sorts of plans fall by the wayside when you start working.' He addressed this remark to Mum rather than me. It was meant to reassure her, and me I suppose, that all would be well without her nagging. Time and natural progress would see me safely and comfortably aboard the treadmill. No need for any hectoring.

Mum bundled the suit back into its plastic bag, muttering about having the trousers taken up for Gerald.

Dad's intention to pacify me had the reverse effect, and I left university the next day without completing my degree.

All the way back on the train, I'd been considering the implications of his remark about ‘plans falling by the wayside'. It had such menacingly biblical overtones of loss and waste, and precious seeds coming to nothing. I could see the truth of what he said. If I became an accountant, or a banker, I would be busy, industrious, keen to impress. I would be in competition with other eager graduates and all my energy and creativity would be siphoned out of me in the cause of advancing my career. Once I had a salary, of course, I would quickly become used to it, and my tastes
and expectations would inflate accordingly, until that monthly income would only just cover the expenses of living, and there would be no escape.

I didn't go to see my tutor. He was quite a persuasive man and there was every chance he would succeed in talking me round, so I sent him a cowardly note instead.

I am leaving for personal and health reasons,
I wrote – a phrase which struck me then as rather clumsy for an aspiring prose stylist. Then, since my rent was paid until the end of term, I hunkered down in my room like a fugitive, and waited for the rest of my life to begin.

OVER THE NEXT
two years I wrote six opening chapters of six different novels.
Ask Your Mother to Pass the Salt
had come to a standstill after I made the mistake of showing it to a girl I was trying to impress. She had hung onto it for three weeks and when I finally pressed her for a verdict, said that it was nice, but a bit bleak, and then admitted she hadn't finished it.

During this period I moved back to London, to a rented room in Brixton, and got a job as a fish-delivery man, thinking that manual work would leave my mind free to soar. I had to drive an antiquated van full of crates of fish packed in ice, from a cold store in Bermondsey to restaurants all over the West End. There was so much play in the steering wheel it was almost impossible to hold a straight course. Clipping parked cars, dodging traffic
wardens and carrying crates down to steaming basement kitchens in Soho, where half a dozen Chinese boys would be gutting sharks, or flaying vegetables, all in the same tight space, while cockroaches scurried over the floor: none of this turned out to be conducive to creative flights. I was so worn out in the evenings that I seldom picked up a pen. By the time I'd had a bath to scrub away the smell, a couple of beers to chase away depression, and made myself a frugal supper, I was too tired and fuddled to write.

There was one positive development from this period: an improvement in relations with Mum and Dad, who had taken my decision to drop out as a personal affront. It was an unusual situation, and a reversal of the normal family dynamics, since Gerald was established in a steady job, processing windscreen claims for an insurance company in Croydon, while I was a source of anxiety and disappointment. Mum and Dad were relieved that I was at least supporting myself and not sponging off the state or them, and I was able to propitiate them with offerings of cod nearing the end of its shelf life.

When I was sacked from that job for misjudging a gap between two parked cars and putting a deep gouge down the side of the van, I decided a fresh approach was needed. I would work for three months, during which time I would try to save as much as possible, and then write for three months, or until I ran out of money, when I would repeat the pattern. Luckily jobs were not as scarce as they had been, and I was not choosy, becoming variously a plasterer's labourer, a builder's mate and a cashier at Mecca
Bookmakers. This method was much more successful, and over the next year and a half I produced about half of
The Night Wanderer
, which was to be my first and last published work.

When I reached my twenty-fourth birthday, I had a sort of crisis. I suppose I had set myself that date as the deadline by which time I would be a successful writer, and yet I was still living in one room in Brixton, operating this schizophrenic three-month-shift system, and no one – apart from the girl whose indifference had killed off
Ask Your Mother to Pass the Salt
– had read a line of my work.

I knew nothing about publishing, and no one who could advise me of the protocols of submitting manuscripts, but I was desperate for some professional feedback. My own conviction and self-belief were no longer sufficiently nourishing to sustain me.

I chose Penguin, because it was famous and distinguished, and Kenway & Luff, a small independent firm, for no better reason than that they had discovered and, many years on, still published Ravi Amos, to my mind the greatest living novelist. To these two I sent copies of the first three chapters of
The Night Wanderer
, along with a very brief letter of introduction. I suppose, having lost faith in my own critical judgement, I was placing my fate squarely in the hands of others. If the verdict was negative, I would give up, crushed. If positive, I would continue with redoubled energy, but either way, a decision would have been made.

I never did hear from Penguin, but the day the letter arrived from Kenway & Luff remains fixed in my memory as a peak experience, never to be equalled. I can still picture the crisp golfball typeface, and the stiff cream-coloured envelope, franked with the K&L logo.