The Editor's Wife (32 page)

I replied with a look.

‘OK, OK. Just thought I'd give you first refusal. Anyway, I've got to go. I'm due in court.' She stood up, tugging at the hem of her jacket.

‘Don't!' I yelped, as she moved in for a hug. ‘My ribs!'

‘Sorry,' she replied, dropping a delicate kiss on my forehead. ‘God, you smell absolutely rank. Hasn't anyone given you a wash since you've been here?'

‘Not that I'm aware.' I ran my fingers over my cheeks, which were itchy with stubble. ‘I could do with a shave.'

‘You look like an old tramp. Do you want me to go and kick up a fuss?'

‘No, please don't.' I felt suddenly exhausted.

She stopped at the door. ‘You will think about what I've said, won't you?'

‘I've already decided.' Now that I'd said my piece all my indignation against Jeremy had evaporated. I felt nothing but sympathy for the man. And at the back of my mind was the memory of that other ‘perfect gentleman' who hadn't lifted a finger against his wife's lover. Layers and layers.

Carol wilted. My God, I thought. She really does love him. ‘Oh don't look so bloody tragic,' I said. ‘Of course I'm not going to the police.'

‘Oh, Chris. But do you really forgive him?'

‘If forgiveness is what he wants.' Privately, I suspected it was his career rather than his conscience that was his priority, but why not be generous? ‘But only on condition that you leave me out of all future domestic disputes.'

‘Promise.'

She let herself out, and a minute later I could hear her haranguing one of the nurses. I relaxed back into my pillows, weak with relief, and savoured the unique calm of a post-Carol silence.

MY NEXT VISITOR
was Alex. she was dressed in outdoor clothes and carrying a moulded plastic car seat, like a gardener's trug, in which her baby lay trussed in blue quilting. His cheeks had puffed out considerably since I saw him last: he didn't look nearly so wizened.

‘Hello,' she said, parking the trug in the visitor's chair and perching on the end of my bed. ‘I wasn't expecting to spend another night under the same roof as you quite so soon.'

‘I'm not stalking you,' I said. ‘Honest.'

She smiled. ‘How are you?'

‘Fine. They're chucking me out tomorrow. They did a brain scan and couldn't find anything, apparently.'

Alex acknowledged this feeble joke with a polite laugh.

‘Turns out even my broken toe wasn't broken. What about you? How's this little chap?'

‘He was a bit jaundiced, so they kept him in for some ultraviolet treatment. That's why he's so red in the face.' Under the pressure of our scrutiny he gave a tiny hiccup and a milky trickle flopped from the corner of his mouth. Alex whipped out a large muslin rag from her coat pocket and pounced, dabbing at the baby's wet lips. ‘But he's OK now, so we're going home today.'

‘Has he got a name yet?'

‘Yes. Larry. Larry Owen Canning.'

There was a silence. Alex looked suitably sheepish.

‘Alex, why didn't you tell me you were Owen and Diana's daughter in the first place?'

‘Because you wouldn't have told me anything interesting about him. You'd just have told me what you thought a daughter would want to hear.'

I was about to deny this when I remembered that it was precisely this sensitivity that had prompted me to excise the references to Lawrence Canning's suicide from my manuscript before handing it over.

‘Anyway,' she went on, ‘you didn't ask. You only asked me about Lawrence, and I told you I was his daughter-in-law. Which is true.'

‘But all that stuff about writing a biography . . .'

‘I never said anything about writing a biography! You just jumped to conclusions. I said I was researching his life, which I am. But not to make a book out of it. I just wanted to know what he was like. I never gave him much thought when I was young. Our stepfather, Gene, took his place, and—'

‘You've got a stepfather?'

‘Did have. He died of cancer four years ago.'

‘I'm sorry.' Beneath the conventional politeness I really was sorry, not for this Gene, whom I'd never known and wouldn't miss, but for the unfairness of life. In any decently run universe tragedy wouldn't strike in the same place twice.

‘He was a lovely person, and all the time he was alive I never felt the lack of a father. But then when I got pregnant it set me thinking about my origins, and what sort of genes I'd be passing on.'

‘Couldn't you just have asked your mother what he was like?'

‘Oh, she wouldn't tell me anything revealing about their marriage, would she? She never even mentioned you, for instance. Until now.'

‘Oh.'

‘So I had no idea your manuscript was going to contain anything . . . personal.'

‘I wouldn't have shown it to you if I'd known your mother was still alive. I feel as though I've betrayed her privacy.'

‘It's OK. She understands, now that she's read it.' Alex glanced at her watch. ‘In fact she's coming to pick us up any minute now. I could tell her to come in and say hello.'

I remembered Carol's comments about my unsavoury smell and appearance, and shook my head. ‘I'd rather not meet her in my pyjamas.'

‘No. OK. Perhaps you'll come to lunch with us when
you're out, instead. Mum's going to be staying with us for a week or so to help me with Larry.'

‘Is your husband back from the States?'

‘Yes. I've sent him off to Mothercare to get supplies. He's got a list as long as your arm. You wouldn't think someone so tiny could need so much stuff.'

For some reason I thought of Gerald and his rucksack of life's essentials.

‘I'd better go. Mum will be waiting.' Very carefully she picked up the trug. The baby gave a shiver of protest and opened his eyes. ‘Oh my God, he's awake,' Alex said, looking at him with a curious mixture of love and fear.

I felt suddenly sorry for her in her newfound happiness, because she would never again have nothing to worry about.

‘
I'M SO GLAD
to see you've recovered.'

‘I'm not sure I have.'

‘Well, you look a lot better than when I last saw you, upside down in a ditch.'

‘Oh, I see what you mean.'

Diana and I sat facing each other across a coffee table littered with unopened post, childcare manuals and a dismantled breast pump. For someone who had been dead twenty years she looked remarkably well. Not so Alex, the host of this strange reunion, who had greasy, unbrushed hair, a complexion ravaged by lack of sleep, and two spreading milk stains on the front of her shirt.

Her house was a Victorian terrace in York, similar in appearance and layout to the Goddards' place in Dulwich. In fact, as I walked up the path, carrying champagne and
flowers, and heard the gate clang behind me, I had a flashback to those earlier visits, and was momentarily drenched in nervous sweat.

This uncomfortable sense of déjà vu was reinforced a second later when Alex opened the front door and I found myself confronted by Equus, the glowering wooden rocking horse. Now, as before, he obstructed the stairs and had been pressed into service as a coat rack.

The rest of the ground floor was overwhelmed by the trappings of new parenthood. A large pram was parked in the middle of the sitting room, which also had to accommodate a rocking-seat, play mat, A-frame of dangling rattles, and an airer hung with tiny white vests. There were more of these steaming on the radiators. Every shelf and ledge was crowded with pastel blue cards of congratulation.

Diana herself was in the sitting room when I arrived, bobbing up and down with a restless Larry in her arms, so the potentially hazardous moment of negotiating a kiss or handshake was averted. I wondered if she had planned it that way.

‘Hello, Chris, how nice of you to come,' she said, as if I was just another old mate, dropping in to see the baby.

Although her voice was absolutely, eerily unchanged, her blonde hair was now short and neatly styled, and there were deep smile lines around her eyes and mouth, even when she wasn't smiling. She was wearing a linen suit and high heels – not to my mind the most suitable outfit for grandmotherly mucking-in, but then she had always
tended to dress formally even on informal occasions. It only occurred to me later that it might possibly have been for my benefit.

Alex brought us coffee and retrieved Larry, who had by now started to cry. It was a surprisingly penetrating sound to be produced by such little lungs, not unlike the bleating of a Swaledale in distress. Over Diana's shoulder I could see her in the hallway, pacing to and fro with her precious burden, bent-backed with weariness.

It's impossible to swap adequate résumés of twenty years, so we didn't try. In fact we didn't even approach the subject of ‘back then' until much later on in the conversation. To begin with, we stuck to the more recent past: she lived in Wimbledon and worked for herself as a literary agent specialising in teenage fiction. Her other daughter, Justine (née Teeny), worked as her assistant and was currently holding the fort.

‘When I go home she's coming here to see Larry,' Diana explained.

‘Has she got any children of her own?'

‘Oh no. She's defiantly free and single. I'm wondering what she'll make of Alex becoming a mother.'

‘Are they very close?'

‘Yes. Even though their personalities are quite different, there's that weird twin thing between them. You haven't got any children yourself.' This was a statement rather than a question.

‘No.'

‘I'm surprised. I imagined you with a large family. Boys.'

‘Well, I didn't really choose my life in every detail. It just sort of happened to me.'

‘I think that's true of all of us.'

This philosophical musing was cut short by the reappearance of Alex, minus Larry, who had been jigged to sleep and laid in his pram. A damp patch on her shoulder marked the recent site of his sweaty little head. She was carrying a plastic baby monitor, and gazing around helplessly for a clear surface to put it on.

‘You look like death,' said Diana, with a mother's bluntness. ‘Why don't you have a lie-down, while I get lunch?'

‘No. I'll get lunch. You talk to Chris.'

‘I can talk and cook at the same time,' said Diana. ‘I'm versatile like that.'

‘I can do any cooking,' I protested.

‘Oh yes,' Alex remembered, smiling. ‘Your curry. I think that's what sent me into labour.'

‘That was Gerald's fault. He was on chillies.'

‘Dear old Gerald,' said Diana, fondly. ‘Running over the moors in a hurricane to call an ambulance.'

‘The running was no problem,' I assured her. ‘It was having to use a mobile phone that nearly killed him.'

‘Really? Is he still as . . . er . . . eccentric as ever?'

‘I'm afraid so. He's getting worse if anything.' I outlined some of his recent behaviour, including the incident with the tent, and Diana folded up, giggling. A laugh is as individual as a signature or a fingerprint: that sound, more than anything I'd seen or heard so far, brought before me
the Diana of twenty years ago, and for a moment I was lost for words at the strangeness of it all.

‘Perhaps I will have a lie-down if you're sure,' Alex was saying.

‘Yes, do. Give me that,' replied Diana, taking hold of
the baby monitor. She brought it into the kitchen and parked it on the worktop where it fixed us with its green winking eye.

‘I think she's finding it all a bit of a strain,' she whispered, when Alex had settled herself on the couch, out of earshot. ‘She's always been a very organised person, always in control. And she has very high standards. But babies are such little anarchists. They won't be ruled.' She began to assemble various foodstuffs on the table: smoked salmon, olive bread, and several waxed-paper packages of cheese.

‘Shall we drink your champagne?' she asked, hesitating by the open fridge. ‘There's no point in leaving it for Alex because she won't drink it while she's breastfeeding. She's read somewhere that it makes the milk fizzy.'

‘Can that be true?' I laughed.

She shook her head. ‘I don't interfere. I'm sure I had some barmy theories of my own when the twins were born. In fact I remember insisting we left a light on all night when they were only a few days old, in case they were afraid of the dark.'

‘Well let's drink it then,' I said decisively. ‘Any opportunities for celebration should be seized.'

I'd just untwisted the wire cage from the cork when the baby monitor gave a cough and a row of lights began to jitter madly. Diana froze. There was another cough, and then some rustling and a series of squawks, building in intensity. ‘Damn,' hissed Diana.

Through the open door we watched Alex roll off the couch onto all fours and drag herself up to standing. She looked at her watch. ‘Five minutes,' she said bitterly.

‘He might go off again,' Diana suggested, without much conviction. She turned off the monitor: Larry's reproachful cries were perfectly audible without amplification.

‘I've only just fed him,' Alex complained. ‘I can't feed him again, can I?'

‘You can if you want to. Or Chris and I could take him out in the pram for a walk while you go on resting.'

Alex looked torn. ‘What if he doesn't stop crying?'

‘I'll bring him back. I promise. But the motion will probably send him to sleep.'

‘What about your lunch? This is ruining your day.'

‘We won't be long. Stop worrying.'

Ten minutes later, preparations for this expedition were complete and Diana and I left the house pushing a pram containing a now red-faced and roaring Larry, while Alex watched, stricken, from the window. By the time we'd reached the end of the road he'd fallen into an attentive silence, his tiny features etched with a frown of the deepest suspicion. Halfway round the block he was asleep.