The Editor's Wife (15 page)

‘Thanks,' she said, accepting drink and compliment with equal composure. She took a sip and flinched violently. ‘Wow!' she said, blinking back tears. ‘I can see why you're not drinking. Shall we go down to the bar and get something decent?' She gestured our intentions to Owen, who stood, chin in hand, nodding earnestly, still a hostage to the tweedy academics.

‘He's flagging,' she said, as she clip-clopped down the stairs in her high heels. ‘One gin and tonic then I'll go and rescue him. I bet they're not even talking about John Cowper Powys. They're probably asking him how to get an agent, or if he'll read their rotten novels.' She stopped, remembering perhaps that my relationship with Owen was built on similar foundations. ‘What are you having?' She produced a little white purse from a little white handbag.

I had to let her pay, because I didn't have enough money for two drinks and my tube fare, and although I didn't mind walking home, I would still be sunk if she ordered doubles, as was quite likely. The pub was crowded and smoky, full of sharp-suited office workers enjoying a midweek drink – a very different clientele from the Powys Society. Not a gallstone in sight.

There was nowhere to sit, and hardly anywhere to stand.

‘How's the writing going?' Diana asked, when she'd
secured our drinks and found a space near the door, which was open onto the street, admitting warm evening air, scented with diesel.

After I'd explained that I was experiencing a poverty of ideas to match the regular sort of poverty, and was back at work on a building site, we were joined by Owen. Sure enough he was carrying an elderly manuscript, slightly chewed at the edges and tied up with string. The topmost page appeared to have taken quite a mauling over time and had now almost disintegrated.

‘Oh
Owen
,' said Diana, giving it a baleful look.

‘I know, I know,' he sighed. ‘Military memoirs. But what could I do?'

‘You can give it to Bina to read,' I suggested. ‘She doesn't mince her words.'

Owen laughed. ‘I think this old boy deserves someone a bit more tactful.' He glanced at the throng around the bar. I felt paralysed by my inability to offer him a drink. If only the meeting had been on a Friday night instead of a Wednesday I'd have had my wages from the building site and could have paid my way and hang the rent. I could feel the few coins in my pocket, useless as stones.

Diana had disposed of her gin and tonic and was rattling her ice cubes, expectantly it seemed to me. The taste of my pint and the smell of other people's smoke had brought on a desperate craving for a cigarette, but I'd finished my last packet at lunchtime. I wondered if there was anywhere in Battersea that sold them singly, like the newsagent in
Streatham High Road that David Creerson and I used to frequent after school.

I refused Owen's offer of a refill, and to hide my embarrassment, made an excuse about needing the Gents. It was on my return that I caught sight of a familiar figure, sitting alone at a small table from which all other chairs had been removed except one, on which he was resting a proprietorial foot. Gerald. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt, shorts with a crease down the front, khaki socks and sandals, and toying with a glass of Coke.

‘Hello, what are you doing here?' I said, when I'd come within range, keeping my back to the bar so I wouldn't be seen by Owen. For some reason, possibly related to Gerald's appearance, I was reluctant to introduce them.

‘I'm supposed to be meeting someone,' he replied, looking neither surprised, nor especially pleased, to see me. ‘But she hasn't turned up.' He never did have any shame when it came to admitting his romantic failures.

‘Oh, well, look, could you lend me five quid?' I said in a rush. ‘I'll pay you back,' I added, in case he'd had experience of more ambiguous types of lending. I realised, as he chewed over my request, that this was our first conversation in about six months, and it might have helped my cause if I'd made some preliminary enquiries about his health, job, etc. before weighing in with demands for money. But there wasn't time for that: Owen was already ordering drinks. If I was to have any hope of intercepting him I needed to move quickly.

‘I haven't got a five-pound note. Only tens,' Gerald
was saying, after a covert inspection of the contents of his wallet.

‘Well, can I have ten then?' I pleaded. ‘I get paid in two days' time. I'll send it straight back to you.'

‘Better not post it,' said Gerald, trying to peel two new tenners apart. ‘Just drop it in sometime, or I'll call round and collect it.' He handed it over with great ceremony, and I made the noises of gratitude appropriate to a feckless younger brother on the cadge before bolting for the bar.

I was too late: Owen was already pocketing his change and dismissed my belated offer to pay with polite insistence. I could have returned Gerald's money unspent, but decided to hang onto it. Food and fags at least would be back on the menu tomorrow.

‘Diana's just told me you're struggling to make ends meet,' Owen said. ‘I'm sorry to hear that. You can do without additional pressures when you're trying to finish a book.'

‘I shouldn't complain,' I said, not wanting to be too much an object of pity. ‘No one's going to pay me to sit around and write, are they?' I realised I had unwittingly echoed Mum's sentiments, which had so riled me when I had first broached the subject at home. ‘Anyway, I know if I'm ever desperate I could always move back in with my parents.' I didn't add that this would involve the sort of climb-down from which my self-esteem might never recover, and was the very last resort before sleeping rough. In any case, it was hard to imagine how I would ever get
any work done with Mum and Dad fluttering around me like moths, the whirring of parental solicitude forever in the background.

‘There are various organisations that give grants to writers in financial difficulties,' Owen said. ‘The Society of Authors, and so on. But now I come to think about it, you may have to be already published, or have a contract. I'll look up the details at the office tomorrow and let you know.'

Once they had finished their drinks, Diana didn't seem inclined to linger. She had left the twins with a baby-sitter – a local teenager of dubious character.

‘Have you?' said Owen, with a trace of concern. ‘How dubious exactly?'

‘She's a bit light-fingered. I thought we were ideally placed to rehabilitate her as we've nothing worth pinching.'

They insisted on giving me a lift home. Diana had parked the car in a side street in a tight space behind a skip, one wheel up on the kerb. Miraculously it hadn't been ticketed or clamped, a result which seemed to give her a gambler's buzz.

‘I didn't have time to hunt around for a proper spot, or I'd have been late.' Owen raised an eyebrow. ‘Later,' she conceded.

Alma Road was blocked as usual, an empty car idling in the middle of the road while the driver conducted his business in a nearby house.

Diana was admiring the houses' brightly painted
brickwork. ‘What a vibrant neighbourhood,' she enthused, as we waited patiently behind the abandoned vehicle. ‘It makes Dulwich look so staid and drab.' Presently the driver erupted from an open doorway, swearing vibrantly, and glared at us as though our presence had somehow inconvenienced him, and not the other way around, before jumping into his car and roaring off, music throbbing in his wake.

Uniquely, in my experience, there was a space outside my building. ‘Why don't you come in for a coffee?' I said, impulsively. I felt to advance our friendship any further it was necessary for them to see how I lived – a gesture of self-revelation shamefully at odds with my failure to introduce Gerald only minutes before.

Diana seemed to have forgotten her concerns about the delinquent babysitter, but Owen was more hesitant, and decided to call home from the communal payphone in the hall, to reassure himself that all was well.

I noticed that the smell of dope in the hallway was even stronger than usual, and when I glanced up I could see wraiths of smoke hanging above our heads. There was the familiar collision of sounds from behind the closed doorways as we passed: a wailing baby, the rattle of an Arabic radio station, canned laughter from primetime TVs in full voice, and now, as Diana followed me up the wide, uncarpeted staircase, a new sound – a woman's heels, ascending.

I must have premeditated my invitation to an extent, because I had made some efforts to clear up before I left,
dumping unwashed crockery in the shared kitchen, throwing clothes into drawers and twitching the covers back over the bed to hide my grey, crumpled sheets. It was, I realised, as I pushed open the door, excessively spartan when tidy; the room of someone just out of prison, perhaps. There was only one armchair – so deep and unstuffed that when Diana sat down the tops of the arms were level with her ears. Apart from this and my bed, the furniture consisted of a wardrobe, chest of drawers, bookshelf, washbasin and my writing desk and stool, on which Owen now perched. The yellow walls were pockmarked with the scars of generations of picture hooks, and scraps of brownish Sellotape remained in rectangular formations marking the sites of former posters. The room's only ornamentation was a framed print of some leathery fishermen which Mum and Dad had brought back from St Ives and which was now propped against the wall, awaiting hanging.

Owen and Diana, of course, professed to see nothing but charm in these surroundings, but I could tell that they were surprised.

‘It's a proper garret,' Owen remarked, his fingers idling over the keys of the typewriter.

‘I could be happy in a room like this,' said Diana. ‘So free from clutter. Owen, we must have a clear-out.'

I left them discussing this while I went to make coffee in the kitchen next door. It was deserted at this hour and, for once, clean – the work of the deaf Polish lady with the loud TV, I surmised. I had passed her on the stairs
on my way out. She was wearing rubber gloves and carrying a bucket of rags and detergent. PEOPLES CLEAN YOUR OWN MESS-UP! read a notice above the cooker.

I only possessed two mugs. I found a third under the sink but it contained a rusty Brillo pad, so I decided to go without. The Nescafé had gone solid: I had to chisel out a couple of teaspoonfuls and hope no one took sugar. Tomorrow, I vowed, thinking of Gerald's ten-pound note, I would buy some fresh provisions.

Diana accepted her mug of instant coffee with rapture. No, she didn't take sugar. Instead she produced a plastic tube from her handbag which dispensed a tiny white pellet of saccharine. Once she'd tasted the coffee, she surreptitiously fired in a couple more.

‘I'll certainly look up details of those grants,' Owen promised – the surroundings, I suppose, prompting thoughts of poverty. ‘I'll be your referee if necessary. But in the meantime don't starve. Just call round to us and Diana will feed you.'

‘I can hardly do that,' I laughed.

‘Of course you can,' said Diana. ‘You wouldn't be the first. Lawrence Canning was always dropping in at mealtimes, in the early days, wasn't he, Owen?' This wasn't a particularly comforting precedent. For a moment his spectre hovered between us.

‘How was the funeral?' I asked. ‘As funerals go, I mean.'

‘Pretty harrowing,' Owen said with a grimace.

‘Your eulogy was brilliant,' Diana said stoutly. ‘I don't
know how you got through it without cracking. I was in ribbons.'

‘Well his eight-year-old son had just stood up and read a poem, so I thought, God, if he can do it . . .'

A minute or so after their departure I noticed the parcel of military memoirs sitting beside the typewriter. Snatching it up, I bounded down the stairs and then, at the first landing, I stopped. No, I thought, turning back. I'll take it round myself tomorrow. At lunchtime. No harm in that.

SO BEGAN MY
habit, sanctioned by Owen, of dropping in on Diana every five or six weeks for lunch. I never gave her any warning, never gave her the opportunity of excusing herself, and if she happened to be out I tried again the next day, and the next, until she was in, without ever letting on about my failed attempts.

The fact that I was falling in love with the wife of my mentor and friend, a man who had gone out of his way to help me, and shown me nothing but kindness, didn't trouble my conscience in the slightest. The fact that I looked forward to seeing her for days beforehand, and felt that awful Boxing Day emptiness afterwards, and thought about her endlessly between visits, and yet
kept it all to myself
seemed to me the highest compliment I could pay him. I couldn't help my feelings, went my reasoning, and
as long as I didn't act on them, I had nothing to feel guilty about. Quite the opposite: I walked around in a daze of self-righteousness at my own restraint.

Diana always appeared happy to see me, and as I got to know her better I decided her pleasure was genuine, and not just practised politeness. Her other confidantes were all mothers of young children: their conversation, though reassuring, held few surprises. It was so interesting, she said, to talk to someone whose circumstances and outlook were so different. We fell into complementary roles, as new friends often do, seizing on a characteristic and exaggerating it. She was the sensible one; I was the feckless one. She was sophisticated and cultured; I was an ignoramus. Much of this was put on, for our own amusement, because it was pleasant to play up our differences when they were no barrier to friendship, and to pretend conflict when there was none.

She was interested in my non-committal relationship with Zoe, and puzzled by its informality. I'd explained that we saw each other perhaps once a fortnight, but not as regularly as that implied, and had little contact between whiles.

‘Is she happy with that arrangement, or just making the best of it?' Diana asked.