The Editor's Wife (28 page)

‘Here, crush these spices,' I said, passing her the pestle and mortar, determined to halt this dangerous slide into introspection. She was onto her second bottle and tears couldn't have been far away. She rolled the roasted spices off the skillet and began to pound them vengefully.

There must be something therapeutic about the process of communal cooking. Soon all three of us were labouring contentedly, slicing, grinding and stirring, while the rain beat on the windows and the doors rattled in their frames. Whoever was responsible for cutting up chillies was obviously more interested in the process than the outcome, as the curry was unanimously agreed to be too hot.

We ate off the kitchen table from my odd collection
of boot-sale crockery. (I'd surrendered all the Wedgwood in the divorce and never felt the need to replace it.) Carol found my supply of household candles and stuck one in an egg cup. ‘Diamonds and candlelight,' she said, fluttering her ringed fingers near the flame. ‘A girl's best friend.'

The Bee Gees had been replaced by David Bowie. ‘This is like being a student again,' she said, through numb lips. ‘Cheap plonk and sharing a kitchen.'

‘And vegetarian cooking,' I added.

‘And loud music.'

‘And leaving the washing up until the next meal.'

‘I never went to university,' said Gerald.

Because we were in our forties and sensible now, we did wash up, and dried everything, even the plates, and put it all away and wiped the surfaces. The leftover curry I piously covered and put in the fridge with no real intention of ever revisiting it.

In the sitting room, Gerald was on his knees by the grate, trying to revive the embers of a dying fire, while Carol was poking about in the cupboard in search of amusement. ‘You've got Monopoly!' she said in an accusing tone. ‘When do you ever play that?'

‘Never,' I said. ‘I hate Monopoly. I hate winning it and I hate losing it. Mum and Dad would never play it with us when we were kids and now I can see why.'

‘I think it's a sign of maturity when you start hating Monopoly,' Carol agreed.

‘I like Monopoly,' said Gerald. He had rebuilt a pile of newspapers and wood on top of the embers, and was trying
to draw the fire by holding a double-page spread of the
Yorkshire Post
over the chimney mouth. This achieved, he sat back in the armchair, cradling the TV remote hopefully and throwing occasional hostile glances at the CD player, which was still pumping out seventies pop.

Carol brought out a twenty-year-old edition of Trivial Pursuit, settled herself on her nest of cushions, and began reading questions aloud, frequently scanning ahead and supplying the answer in the same breath. ‘Who famously said of Ronald Reagan – oh, ha ha, that's Gore Vidal.'

Gerald gave a hiss of annoyance. He generally liked quizzes, but Carol's delivery was proving a serious impediment to his enjoyment.

‘This stuff seems so dated now,' she said. ‘Baader–Meinhof and Arthur Scargill and perestroika. Like something from another century.'

‘It was another century,' Gerald reminded her. ‘Does anyone mind if I watch the weather forecast?'

We shook our heads and Gerald switched the music off with visible relief. Through the shock of silence came the rumble of a car engine, and a dazzle of headlights was scattered in the raindrops on the blacked-out windows.

Carol leapt up. ‘That'll be Jeremy,' she said, more in excitement than alarm, it seemed to me.

‘He doesn't know you're here,' I said, and then, suddenly suspicious, ‘He
doesn't
know you're here, does he?'

She slumped a little. ‘No. No, you're right. Of course not.'

‘You could always go to him,' I suggested, as I opened the front door. She shook her head, affronted. It was drama she wanted, not some lukewarm reconciliation.

Alex Canning stood in the conservatory, shaking beads of water from her fleecy hair. She was wearing a vast plastic poncho, beneath which only her small, booted feet were visible.

‘What a night!' she laughed.

‘I didn't think you'd come.'

‘I nearly didn't. I tried to ring, but I couldn't get through, so I thought I'd better show up in case you'd waited in specially.'

‘I was in anyway,' I said. ‘I've got company. Come in while I go and find the folder.' I helped her to lift off her poncho and showed her into the sitting room to perform introductions.

Gerald acknowledged the visitor with a nod and turned back to the weather forecast. ‘Flooding up in Castleton,' he said.

‘Hello,' said Carol, flushing slightly as her eyes travelled downwards, taking in Alex's pregnant silhouette. ‘Remind me how you two know each other.'

‘Chris is lending me some material for a piece of research I'm doing,' said Alex, perching on the arm of the couch. She looked at the Trivial Pursuit board on the coffee table. ‘Are you in the middle of a game? I don't want to interrupt.'

‘No, these killjoys won't play,' Carol replied – a piece of pure invention. ‘When's your baby due?'

‘Three weeks,' said Alex.

Gerald, annoyed by this interruption to the weather forecast, turned up the volume, and drew his chair even closer to the screen, on which was an image of fire crews sandbagging the River Esk.

‘Is it your first?' Carol went on.

‘Yes.'

‘How exciting. Was it planned?'

‘Carol . . .' I protested.

‘What?'

‘That's a bit personal. You don't have to answer,' I added as an aside to Alex.

‘Don't be silly. Women love talking about their pregnancies.' She beamed at Alex, her expression misty with drunken goodwill. ‘Have you got any good names up your sleeve?' She ploughed on without waiting for an answer. ‘I've got a thing about Clem at the moment – for a girl or a boy. You can have it if you like, since it doesn't look like I'll be needing it.'

Oh God, here we go, I thought. ‘Would you like a cup of coffee, Alex?' I asked, to head off this line of discussion. ‘Or are you in a rush?'

‘Oh . . .' Alex hesitated. ‘Well, I wouldn't mind, if you're making some. I didn't get a chance to have anything at the theatre. I've just come from the Playhouse in Scarborough,' she explained to Carol.

Having achieved a change of topic I felt it safe to withdraw to the kitchen. Through the open door I could overhear their conversation.

‘Oh, that so-called comedy? I saw that last week. What a load of shite, didn't you think so?' Carol was saying.

‘It wouldn't have been my normal choice, but my aunt was in it, so I felt obliged to . . .'

‘Was that your aunt?' Carol said, with great interest and no apparent remorse. ‘She needs to choose her scripts better. What else has she been in?'

Alex recited a short list of unfamiliar titles from the obscurer reaches of the TV schedules. ‘She does a lot of radio work,' she finished, a shade defensively.

‘Her voice was very familiar,' Carol conceded. ‘Did you say you hadn't eaten anything? There's some lovely leftover curry. Chris, whack a nan bread under the grill,' she called out. ‘We've got falling blood sugar levels here.'

‘I'm all right, really,' said Alex.

‘It's no trouble,' Carol insisted, getting to her feet, suddenly energetic in the face of a mission. A moment later she was whisking about the kitchen, opening cupboards, banging the microwave door, and generally getting in my way. Shortly a bowl of reheated vegetable jalfrezi and a slightly charred nan was set before Alex, who was going to have to eat it, hungry or not.

‘It's a pity you weren't here earlier,' Carol said as Alex took her first tentative mouthful. ‘We could have played solo. Or mah-jongg.'

‘I haven't got a mah-jongg set any more,' I reminded her. ‘You took it.'

‘So I did. Gerald, can we turn the TV off now? It's a bit antisocial.'

‘I only wanted to see the weather forecast,' he grumbled. ‘Apparently there's a lot of flooding north of here. Twenty-six millimetres of rain fell in Penrith today.'

‘That's hardly a
forecast
,' said Carol.

Gerald hit the switch and shambled out to the kitchen, returning a moment later with his third packet of jelly, which he unwrapped and offered round. There were no takers. I had a sense that I had lost all authority in my own home.

‘Christ, Gerald,' said Carol, watching in fascination as he disposed of cube after cube. ‘I thought you were supposed to be vegetarian. That stuff's just boiled-up hooves and trotters.'

‘I'm not “supposed to be” vegetarian,' he replied, still chewing. ‘I just don't much like flesh.'

‘Well, this curry is very nice,' Alex said politely, blinking back tears. ‘Very warming.'

I took the hint and fetched her a glass of water. The cottage suddenly seemed crowded, and it struck me that in all the years I'd lived there I'd never had this many people under my roof at one time. I'd never hosted Christmas, or thrown a party, never had a group of friends round for dinner. Richard and Sally might have popped over from the farm, and I'd brought individual women back now and then, but most of my socialising tended to be done elsewhere, and this was just the quiet place I came back to when it was all over. I wasn't sure whether this invasion felt entirely benign.

Alex, at least, now that she had managed a respectable
proportion of the curry, was keen to be on her way. I fetched the folder of A4 pages from the desk where I'd stored them since their descent from the loft, and put them in a plastic bag.

‘No hurry,' I said. ‘You can post it back any time.'

‘Thank you. It's very kind of you.' She vanished momentarily under the plastic poncho, before her head emerged, bristling with static.

‘Goodbye,' she said to the room.

‘Goodbye,' said Carol. ‘Good luck with the baby. Remember, Clem is yours if you want it.'

‘Thank you. I'll bear it in mind.'

I stood in the doorway and watched the Red Tail lights bouncing down the track, through the gate and out of sight. The rain had eased off but the air felt heavy and saturated. There was a creeping pool of water in the corner of the conservatory, which would need investigating in daylight. In the meantime, I pulled the lawnmower and a couple of extension cables to the safety of higher ground on the sloping floor.

Back in the sitting room, Gerald had plucked an old newspaper from the log basket and was doing the crossword, and Carol was buffing her nails with a little sanding block. She had found a bottle of Grand Marnier I didn't even know I had – it must have hailed from the same era as Arthur Scargill and the Baader–Meinhof – and she had helped herself, undeterred by the crust of crystals around the neck.

‘I think I'll go up if no one objects,' said Gerald, defeated by the crossword. I didn't have that luxury, as Carol was comfortably installed on what would have to serve as my bed, and showed no sign of retiring.

His plan was thwarted seconds later by a rapping at the door. It was Alex, in a state of some agitation. ‘I can't get across the ford,' she said. ‘It wasn't too deep on the way up, but it's a torrent now. Is there another road out of here?'

This was an interesting problem I hadn't encountered before. ‘Not by car,' I said. ‘There's a footpath to Lastingham, but Hartslip is a dead end.'

‘There must be some way round it,' she said, with the city dweller's refusal to bow to the hazards of rural life. ‘What do you normally do?'

‘I don't know. It's never flooded before. How high was it?'

‘Between two and three feet.'

‘Oh my God, that is high. When it's been a foot or so I just take a run at it and hope for the best. The stream must have got dammed lower down and the water's backing up.'

‘It looked pretty fast-moving to me.'

‘Well, you're certainly not going to get a car through it.'

‘Oh dear.'

Alex, Carol and Gerald were all looking at me expectantly for a solution. ‘The only thing I can suggest is for you to leave your car on this side, and then get your husband to drive up to the other side and . . .'

‘He's in Minneapolis.'

‘Oh. Well I hate to say it, but I think you might be stuck here for the night. I mean, you're very welcome. You can have my room. Gerald and I can sleep down here.'

‘No, I really couldn't impose,' said Alex faintly.

‘Don't worry about that,' I reassured her. ‘Gerald and Carol certainly didn't.'

Carol shot me a sour look, but brightened as she turned back to Alex who, after all, represented fresh territory to organise and conquer. ‘It's incredible, isn't it, being stranded, in this day and age, because of a drop of rain. I hope I can get home tomorrow. Jeremy'll be frantic,' she tittered. Privately I doubted this last point. Perhaps I was over-identifying, but I imagined him relishing the solitude and silence.

‘By morning the water level will probably have subsided, if there's no more rain,' I said, with all the authority of someone who a moment before has declared conditions to be entirely beyond his experience. ‘Or if not, we could take a leisurely limp across country to Lastingham and call a cab from the pub to take you to the station. Pick your car up some other time.'

‘Such a lot of inconvenience for you,' said Alex, shaking her head.

‘Not at all. I can even do everyone a full English breakfast in the morning. How do you like your eggs?'

‘Fertilised please,' said Carol.

It's a serious flaw of couch design that they can seldom accommodate the fully extended human form. As I vacillated between cricking my neck at one end or my feet at the other, it occurred to me that the last time I'd slept like this was during that turbulent pre-divorce period. Now here I was again, relegated to the couch, playing doormat to Carol's boot, because her new marriage was no happier than the old. When considered in that light, my behaviour began to look altogether too obliging, but I couldn't seem to work up the proper indignation. Not being married to her was such a pleasure it made all manner of sacrifice bearable.