The Editor's Wife (9 page)

‘Good luck with the baby,' I said, as we shook hands. ‘If I don't see you again.' Idiot, I thought. Of course I'll never see her again.

IT WAS ALREADY
dark when I reached Hartslip, but there was a light on in the workshop. Jim and Graham had taken delivery of a new lathe and let me have a play with it. I put a few decorative grooves in a hoe handle, and then made a rustic bowl out of a piece of ash. When they knocked off at six I went indoors. The fire was dead and all the heat in the cottage had flown up into the roof. I couldn't be bothered to sweep out the grate and start again, so I ran a deep bath until the hot water gave out and stewed in that for a while instead.

My meeting with Alex had left me feeling rather drained. It was an effort moderating my conversation, remembering what I could and couldn't say, and it was tiring being dishonest, even with the best of motives. The urge to confide was almost as strong as the urge to conceal.
If she had leant on me a little harder I might have told her everything.

It was always a degree or two warmer upstairs than down, and there was a Cary Grant season on Channel Four, so I sat in bed in my thermals and dressing gown, watching
North by Northwest
on the portable TV and eating Medjool dates – the only things left in the fridge.

I was engrossed in this story of a bewildered innocent, caught up in events he doesn't understand, when I became aware of the crump of a car door slamming, and distant barking. A moment later there was a loud knocking on the conservatory door. This was irregular, to say the least. Hartslip is sufficiently remote to be untroubled by the usual door-to-door pests, and a late-night summons suggested only some form of crisis – perhaps an effect of my empathy with Cary Grant. I padded downstairs barefoot, throwing lights on as I went, and opened the door.

Carol stood there, elegantly dressed and holding a bottle of wine. She recoiled at the sight of my pyjamas and damp, uncombed hair. Now I came to think about it, they weren't really the thing to be seen in – a pair of off-white combinations from a charity shop in Pickering, fabulously warm, but hinting at the nuthouse.

‘Are you ill?' she asked, with more of reproach than concern in her voice.

‘No. I was just in bed.'

She looked at her watch. ‘At half past eight?'

‘Is that all? I thought it was later.'

‘I take it you've forgotten I was coming.'

I nodded, remorsefully. ‘Sorry, sorry. What a total doofus. Come in anyway. I'll get dressed.'

‘Well, since I've driven all the way from York,' she said, not especially mollified. ‘I've been in meetings all day and I'm absolutely starving.'

‘We'll go out. My treat,' I said, remembering the empty fridge. I leaned down to kiss her hello, and she withdrew, wrinkling her nose.

‘Are you wearing
lipgloss
?' she demanded.

‘No. I've been eating dates.'

‘In bed?' She shook her head sorrowfully.

‘Make yourself at home,' I said, fetching a corkscrew and glasses from the kitchen and leaving her to it. Upstairs I climbed wearily back into the clothes I had discarded earlier, and switched off the TV. I still wasn't entirely persuaded that it wasn't the middle of the night. With a last wistful glance at my rumpled bedclothes, I rejoined Carol in the sitting room.

‘It's looking nice in here,' she said, uncorking the bottle with practised hands. ‘You've tidied up. Though not for me, evidently.'

‘I'm so sorry. It completely slipped my mind. There's been so much going on lately . . .' I tailed off, realising that this sort of vague excuse couldn't really be substantiated. Pretty soon I would have to come up with some specific goings-on.

Fortunately, Carol was in forgiving mood. ‘Oh God, yes of course. You lost your job. I'm so sorry.'

She handed me a glass of wine and we stood there awkwardly, drinking, Carol still in her overcoat, too cold to take it off and uncertain how long we'd be staying.

I shrugged. ‘I'm not that bothered. I'll find something else sooner or later.'

‘Have you started looking?'

‘No.'

‘I've got a friend who works in recruitment. Why don't I email her your CV?'

‘I don't know if I want to work in finance any more. I might do something completely different. With the money from Dad's house. It's an opportunity, isn't it?'

‘Absolutely. Take a risk.'

‘It's not as if I've got any dependants to worry about.'

‘Does that ever bother you?'

‘What?'

‘Not having dependants.'

‘Not really. I've never given it much thought.' Until today, when I'd had variations of the same conversation twice. ‘Shall we go and eat?'

Back I went to the Crown in Hutton, since it was the nearest and best place that served food, and Carol didn't want to drive far on top of her journey home.

Patty, minus the man from Ceroc, was now serving behind the bar. She gave me a pointed look as I walked in with my second woman of the day. I frowned and shook my head in demurral. I would have to collar her later and
explain. I didn't want her putting me down as the village sleaze monkey.

‘I've done my homework on Gerald,' Carol said, as she studied the menu on the blackboard above the fireplace. From her handbag she produced half a dozen photocopied pages. ‘If he doesn't go voluntarily, the executors can take him to court and obtain an order for possession against him, requiring him to move out.'

‘He is one of the executors,' I said. ‘I'm the other one.'

‘Oh. In that case, you could apply to the court to have him removed as an executor.'

‘I don't think it'll be necessary now,' I said. ‘He seems to have evicted himself.' I related the developments at Gleneldon Road. Carol tittered.

‘Perhaps you should stick some flyers to lamp posts, like people do with lost cats,' she suggested when I returned from the bar, having ordered her a steak, very rare, with chips. I wasn't especially hungry myself – that brief interval in bed had confused my metabolism. What I really fancied was a bowl of cornflakes.

‘I'm not sure what to do,' I said. ‘I don't know when he stops being Gerald just being his usual nomadic self, and when he starts to become a missing person. Anyway, thanks for this.' I pocketed the folded documents. ‘If I can ever return the favour . . .'

‘Well, as a matter of fact,' Carol said.

‘What?'

‘You'll probably say no.'

‘Try me,' I said, uneasily.

‘I'm looking for a sperm donor.' She said this in the same offhand tone as you might say, ‘I'm looking for a window-cleaner.'

‘What?'

‘I want a baby before it's too late. It almost is too late.'

‘Can't you and Jeremy . . .?'

‘Oh, we've had every test under the sun. If they told me to stand on my head and piss in a bucket I'd do it,' she sighed. ‘But anyway it's not me, it's Jeremy who's infertile. His attitude has always been, if it happens, it happens. But it's clearly not going to happen if I don't do something. I'm forty-seven this year.'

‘But . . .'

‘We don't have to have sex, if that's what's bothering you. You can jerk off into a beaker. That's no problem.'

‘You make it sound so tempting.'

‘You wouldn't have to make any contribution, or have your name on the birth certificate or anything. In fact that would be awkward.'

‘That's big of you. Jesus, Carol, you've got some front.'

‘I know, I know, but you're not a woman: you don't know what it's like to feel your only chance of parenthood slipping away. It's like a permanent state of grief.'

I couldn't believe this was the same Carol who'd been so fiercely anti-children while she was married to me, and so paranoid about getting pregnant that she'd used the Pill and the cap at the same time.

‘Can't you adopt? Isn't that what people generally do?'

‘I'm too old for that. And there's not exactly a glut of
newborn babies out there. Even thirteen-year-olds don't give up their babies for adoption any more.'

‘I'm sorry for your predicament,' I said, lowering my voice as Patty appeared with Carol's steak. ‘But I can't help you there.' I didn't say
You had your chance.
I didn't even think it. Not really.

‘It's OK. Don't feel bad.' Carol dredged her chips with salt and pepper and began to eat them very fast with her fingers, her appetite apparently unimpaired by this permanent state of grief.

‘I don't!'

‘You're not my last hope. I've finally, after two years of grovelling, managed to persuade Jeremy to let me try a sperm donor. His argument was always, “You don't know what you're getting.” That's why I thought of you. You haven't got a wife or kids to consider, and I know there's nothing wrong with you, genetically speaking.'

‘You don't know anything of the sort. Look at Gerald.'

‘Ha ha. Point taken.'

‘Anyway, I'm pretty sure when Jeremy agreed to your using a sperm donor, he was imagining an anonymous syringe – not your ex-husband.'

‘If he's OK with the idea that it's not genetically his baby, I don't see what difference it makes whose it is.' Carol cut into her steak with a confident slicing motion, releasing an outwash of watery blood.

I looked away, feeling slightly queasy. Acclimatising to Carol's moral universe was rather like trying to swap places with a drunk in a rowing boat.

‘If you're so confident there's no difference, why don't you ask him and see?' I said. For the first time I felt a sort of kinship with Jeremy, those last few wisps of resentment blown away by the passing hurricane of Carol's egotism. We had something in common at last: she would trample us both under her heels to reach her goal.

‘No fear. He's still a bit jealous of you, even after all this time. He'd hit the roof if he knew I was here. God knows why. I never give his ex-wife a second thought.'

I bet you don't, I thought.

‘Anyway, I don't blame you for refusing. It was a big thing to ask.'

Once she had finished eating, and satisfied herself that I wanted no part in her reproductive plans, she didn't seem disposed to linger.

As she dropped me off at the end of the lane leading to Hartslip, she gave a sudden gasp. ‘Oh Chris! We never talked about losing your job, and what you're going to do. I'm sorry. All I've talked about is Me Me Me.'

‘It's OK,' I replied, almost convinced by her remorseful tone. ‘It's not that interesting.'

She'd let her foot off the brake and was starting to slide away from me, so that I had to trot alongside the car to continue the conversation. ‘I know, but I was going to give you loads of advice and contacts and stuff. Look, next time I promise we'll talk about nothing but you and your problems.'

‘Hey,' she added, just before she roared off. ‘Keep your fingers crossed. I might be pregnant by then.'

THE NEXT MORNING
saw me back up in the loft, retrieving the box of family photos recovered from Gleneldon Road. Alex's comment about my unadorned walls had made more of an impression than she had perhaps intended. I had always hated trinkets and ornaments, and the sight of an overcrowded mantelpiece made the palm of my hand smart with the desire to sweep everything onto the floor, but photographs were slightly different. Even I could see that it was a form of discourtesy not to acknowledge one's family, and I wondered whether Mum and Dad, on their rare visits to Hartslip, had ever felt slighted by this omission.

Photography had been a rather amateurish affair as practised by the Flinders – stilted family groups, amputated at the ankle, or a lone figure, stranded in the middle
distance, in awkward competition with the scenery. Even so, Mum and Dad had staunchly displayed the best of these efforts, along with individual school portraits of me and Gerald, glowering from under greasy fringes. To exhibit these horrors had seemed barbaric at the time, but it can only have been prompted by blind parental pride.

My trawl through the box was disappointing. So many unidentified black and white babies in prams, blurred and bonneted with no clue as to sex or era, and nameless legions in military uniform, all no doubt as dead as Rupert Brooke by now. At last I found some faces I recognised. A wedding photograph, taken through the open window of an old Bentley. Mum and Dad, beaming from the back seat, flakes of confetti clinging to their clothes. They would have been in their mid-twenties but, although their faces were smooth and unlined, and their hair thick and glossy, they still managed to look old, sensible and fully primed for the responsibilities of adult life. Something to do with Mum's horn-rimmed glasses perhaps, or Dad's oiled centre parting. It was cruel the way fashion needed only time to make freaks of us all.

The paper had yellowed over the years to the colour of old piano keys, but I put the picture aside for framing, as it was the best and least formal from the wedding album. Had they known at the time, I wondered, that they would be the last generation to take it for granted that their marriage would endure for life, a marriage firmly founded on the principles of duty, tolerance and low expectations.
Only death had intervened to stop them reaching fifty years together, a remarkable achievement it suddenly seemed to me, and one which had gone uncelebrated. They never made much of anniversaries, and often forgot or agreed to forget, whereas Carol and I spent the weekend toasting our five years of marriage in a five-star hotel in Edinburgh and were separated before the Visa bill was paid off.

I wasn't completely comfortable with an image of the adult Gerald peering down on me from the wall, so I selected a studio shot of the two of us aged five and seven, sitting astride a bench as if riding a headless horse, and smiling broadly. It was probably the last time we had been entirely cheerful in each other's company. I found another, more recent photo of Mum and Dad on the beach at Broadhaven, looking more as I remembered them, but before they were claimed by ill health. It already had a frame, so I put it on one of the bookshelves in the alcove where it wouldn't get bleached by the sun. It was during this belated act of filial piety that I made a discovery.