The Editor's Wife (6 page)

I climbed the stairs, squeezing more water from the spongy carpet with each step. It was the same story up here: the rooms at the back of the house, directly below the water tank, were devastated, fronds of wallpaper hanging down like seaweed; beds and bedding saturated and reeking. Only my old bedroom, at the front of the house and two steps up from the landing, above the flood plain, had been spared. Gerald had evidently been encamped in here for some time, as a tower of
Daily Telegraph
s, their crosswords meticulously completed, sat on the bedside table, alongside a number of unwashed plates. On the window sill stood a candelabra from the dining room and several stumps of candle. The image of Gerald holed up in here without electricity in the middle of winter, doing the crossword by candlelight, while the house rotted around him, was almost too much to bear.

Various items from around the house, deemed worthy of rescue, were stacked on top of my chest of drawers, brought together, by this emergency, in surreal proximity. A breadbin disgorged hundreds of family photos; china shepherdesses clustered around a cast-iron mincer; a plaster bust of Beethoven glowered down at Dad's hearing aid. A leather rugby ball, wearing a blonde beehive wig from the sixties, brought before me a memory of Mum at her cousin Glenda's wedding, trying to teach me the foxtrot. She would have been in her thirties then – ten
years younger than I was now – and yet to a child's eyes antiquated beyond all imagining, one of the last generation so repressed as children that they couldn't wait to grow up and get old, and were gleefully middle-aged at twenty-five.

I was glad to find something of importance among this sorry collection: a box file of papers relating to Dad's death, the house and so forth. Among them I found what I needed: the name and number of the insurance company and various old utility bills. I put these in my pocket, intending to deal with them when I got back to Hartslip. In what was left of the daylight I swept as much of the water as I could over the lip of the doorstep, and used whatever towels, sheets and blankets I could lay my hands on, apart from those in Gerald's eyrie, to swab out the rest. These huge, sodden cloths I dumped in the back garden. I opened two small upstairs windows to allow some air to circulate and disperse the pond smell. I found a claw hammer in a bucket of tools under the kitchen sink and used it to take up the stair carpet, which I dragged outside to join the blankets.

While I was engaged in this task the left-hand neighbour, Mrs Prickett, who had been out when I tried the doorbell earlier, came out to investigate these curious happenings on the pretext of summoning her cat for its tea. She was a stringy, rather intense woman, in her early fifties I guessed. I remembered her from Dad's funeral, where I had made a point of introducing myself to everyone there that I didn't recognise and thanking them for
coming. I wasn't sure if she was divorced, widowed or abandoned. There seemed to be no Mr Prickett. On the strength of that momentary contact, she hailed me as an old friend, nodded sympathetically over my predicament, and made no objection to the unneighbourly desecration of the back garden with piles of smelly carpets – an all too rare example of courtesy rewarded. ‘Is there anything I can do?' she asked.

‘You haven't seen my brother Gerald lately, have you?' I asked. ‘He seems to have gone missing.'

‘No, I haven't,' she replied. ‘Whole weeks can go by when I don't see him. He keeps himself very much to himself.'

You can say that again, I thought.

‘The last time we spoke was about a fortnight ago. He was going to Redhill to take his umbrella to the menders.'

I let this remark pass. Later it occurred to me that only Gerald could make a journey of fifteen miles to get an umbrella mended and yet ignore a pile of broken glass on his own doorstep.

My last tasks were to clear this away and fix the broken pane in the dining room. I was tempted to leave it as a gaping hole, since there was nothing in the house to appeal to either burglars or squatters, and a through draught was just what the room needed, but I realised that this breach of security would send Gerald into a frenzy. Mrs Prickett – Avril – lent me a dressmaker's tape so I was able to measure up the frame, and then I took a walk along the high road until I found what I was
looking for and hardly believed still existed: an old-fashioned ironmongers that sold screws by the ounce and could cut me a piece of glass to size.

It was early evening and dark by the time I had finished, and I had to do the puttying by candlelight. Before I left I stuck a note to the kitchen table which just said:
Gerald, where are you? I'm worried. Call me. Chris
but I didn't really believe he intended to return. The fridge, dark and silent without its power source, had been cleared out, apart from an ancient grapefruit which imploded when I picked it up, releasing a puff of blue powder. On my way out I took the liberty of removing a new front door key from the little row of wooden pegs in the hall and gave it to Avril. She took my number and promised to call if there were any further domestic crises, and to tell Gerald that I had been looking for him, in the event that he put in an appearance. There was something conspiratorial about her eagerness to be involved, which hinted at long-term loneliness. Still, I was glad to have an ally on the ground.

Although I hadn't set off that morning with anything like enthusiasm, I left the house with a considerably heavier heart. I had not only failed to locate Gerald, but I was now saddled with a plumbing emergency, to remedy at a distance of two hundred and fifty miles. The condition of the place at least explained Gerald's absence and possibly his silence. If, as I suspected, the pipes had frozen and burst because the power had been cut off thanks
to his refusal or inability to pay the bill, he wouldn't necessarily have been in a hurry to call me and confess.

I wondered which of his erstwhile ‘landladies' – girlfriend wasn't quite the word for the succession of older women with whom Gerald had lodged over the years – was putting him up. Or whether, in fact, he was dossing at a hostel for down-and-outs, as he had been known to do in those interludes when the host/parasite relationship had temporarily broken down.

The other reason for my uneasy spirits concerned the discovery, on the bedside table of the room Gerald had been occupying, of a family photo taken on the pier at Cromer in 1976 when I was fifteen. It was the last time all four of us went on holiday together: the following year Gerald and I rebelled and stayed at home, and Mum and Dad took their revenge by going somewhere interesting – Salzburg, I think. I remembered the occasion of the photograph – or at least my outfit – perfectly well. Paisley shirt, hipsters, heeled boots – these last regarded by Dad as an abomination, strictly for ‘nancy boys'. It was one of those typical holiday snaps taken by an obliging stranger: posed, but not composed, exactly fifty per cent sky, with a tilted horizon. Gerald was glaring, Mum and Dad were smiling regally, determined to go on record as enjoying themselves. It was impossible to tell what my mood might have been because someone – Gerald evidently – had excised my face from the picture. At first I thought the hole was a cigarette burn, but on closer inspection I could see the blunt, snipped edge, and I was immediately put
in mind of more than one ropey crime novel I'd read, where the killer obligingly signposts his intentions by defacing old college photos of future victims.

Although I didn't suspect Gerald of plotting murder, I couldn't help finding it disturbing and I wondered what had prompted this outburst of vandalism, and how long ago it had taken place. Perhaps the picture had reminded him of some incident on that holiday when I had been especially obnoxious. This wasn't impossible, but coming on top of the business with the changed lock it didn't reassure me greatly. It seemed that the game of sibling rivalry, in which I'd always been a reluctant player, was destined to go on and on, without a goal or a winner and, since the death of our parents, without either audience or referee.

It was after midnight when I reached Hartslip, and I was freezing cold and exhausted. I'd missed my connection at York, or rather the railway timetablers had carefully arranged it that way, and when the train to Malton finally did turn up the heating was on the blink. I'd laid a fire in the grate at home before I left, ready for the following morning, but I lit it now, and sat in front of it with a big pot of coffee, thawing out. All the way home I'd been chewing over the problem of the flood and wondering if I could organise the necessary repairs without going back to London, and how much the damage would have wiped off the value of the property. It was only now, as I hunted in my pocket for the insurance details, that I came
across the letter addressed to me that I had salvaged from the hallway. I opened it with a slight sense of foreboding. It was written on headed notepaper from the University of York and was dated three weeks earlier.

Dear Mr Flinders

I am researching the life of the editor Owen Goddard and I have in my possession a letter from you dated October 1984 in which you thank him for a gift of money. I wonder if you remember the background to that incident, or if by chance you have kept any other correspondence from Owen Goddard, or have any recollections which might shed light on that period of his life. I work at the university as a lecturer in the English Department, but am currently in London doing some research. If you have any material that might be of interest I would be delighted to meet – at your convenience.

Yours sincerely

Alex Canning PhD

I sat for a long time looking at the page until I wasn't focusing any more, and the black handwriting swam against the white. Owen Goddard: the name had once been holy to me, and now someone was writing his biography and wanted me to be a footnote. But parts of his story were my story too, mine to conceal if I chose. I was under no obligation to this Alex Canning PhD. I could be like Gerald: strategically unobtainable.

I would reply, though. The Goddard name was a lure I couldn't resist. It was as if I'd known all along that sooner or later someone would cast a line down the years and reel me in.

‘
THE UNTHINKABLE HAS
happened!' I wrote in my diary for 1st May 1975. ‘Gerald has got a girlfriend.' At fourteen I wasn't a conscientious diarist: the rest of the year was blank.

He had met a girl at Bible reading, of course, and somehow or other a bike ride followed by tea at our place had been arranged. I would have loved to witness these negotiations. I couldn't believe the initiative had come from Gerald, even though the choice of activities seemed to bear his hallmark, and yet why would she have chosen him?

The appointed day was sunny, which was a blessing, since the wet-weather alternative had been a trip to the Horniman Museum (Mum's idea). I watched Gerald set off on his bicycle, his hair wet-combed and parted, trousers
sensibly tucked into his socks, conveying as always that air of being twenty years older, and wondered what this girl could be like that he had so improbably ensnared.

I was out in the back garden hitting a tennis ball against the coal bunker, aiming just above a line chalked at net height, when the back gate clanged. The cyclists had returned, not riding but wheeling. The outing had not been a success. They had got as far as Crystal Palace Park when Gerald had ridden over a piece of broken bottle and punctured his front tyre. He had been forced to walk all the way back, pushing the bike, while his companion rode slowly alongside. He kept berating himself for not foreseeing this eventuality and taking the puncture-repair kit along, and I had the feeling, from the girl's expression, that this had probably been the main theme of his conversation on the journey home.

We stood, awkwardly, unintroduced, until at last I said, ‘Hello, I'm Christopher,' keeping hold of the tennis racket to avoid bungling a handshake.

‘I'm Katharine,' said the girl, smiling for the first time, to show slightly crowded teeth. She was much more presentable than I'd dared to expect, though not what you'd call pretty. I took in shoulder-length brown hair, held back off her face in a gold clip, a squarish jaw, freckles, no make-up, but a proper in-and-out woman's figure, not entirely disguised by a matronly pinafore dress.

Mum and Dad had tactfully gone out, leaving tea on the kitchen table. Ham sandwiches, fruit cake and chocolate
mallows – Gerald's favourite since early infancy. I only hoped he didn't reprise his old habit of smacking them against his forehead and peeling the cracked chocolate off the marshmallow, piece by piece. But thoughts of tea, and indeed Katharine, had been displaced by the more urgent matter of that puncture, and while we were saying our hellos, Gerald upended the bike and began stripping off the damaged tyre. That was the thing with Gerald: he'd get fixated on a project and have to complete it there and then, and nothing would deflect him.

‘You can watch how I do this if you like,' he said to Katharine, as a few spots of rain hit the concrete. She glanced skyward, shrugged and sat down on the back doorstep, hugging her knees. I left them to it and went indoors to catch the football results.

Ten minutes later, I noticed that the rain was coming down harder. He's surely not going to make her sit out there in the wet all afternoon, I thought, wishing Mum and Dad were around to intervene. I wandered out into the kitchen to put the kettle on and found Katharine sitting at the table, gazing blankly ahead, a picture of neglect. Through the window I could see Gerald still wrestling with the tyre, periodically stopping to mop his glasses.

‘Are you all right?' I said, embarrassed on his behalf. ‘Once he gets going on something . . .'

‘Oh, that's OK.' She looked grateful to have been disturbed.

Now what was I going to do with her? ‘Do you want to watch TV?' I asked.

She shook her head. ‘I don't watch television.' Now that I came to think of it, neither did Gerald since he'd joined Vivian's church.