The Editor's Wife (34 page)

‘You can't go yet. I made a cake for tea,' said Diana.

‘But I must,' I replied.

She insisted on giving me a slice to take home, wrapped in a serviette, like a child at a party.

They all came to the gate to wave me off. Apart from those vague offers of reciprocal spare rooms Diana and I had made no plans for a future meeting. I didn't even have her phone number, and when I mentioned this no one could put their hand on a piece of paper or a pen. Craig went back indoors and returned with a yellow highlighter pen and the back of the cot instructions, and was berated by Alex for giving away a potentially vital document. I gave Diana my mobile number, and she gave me hers, and we pocketed these scraps of paper with due ceremony.

‘If you're ever in London,' Diana said.

‘Yes. Next time you're up north . . .' It was all hopelessly unspecific. A few large drops of rain hit the
pavement like ink blots, and great bruise-coloured clouds came bowling overhead. I grazed cheeks with Alex and Diana in turn, shook Craig's hand and kissed Larry's scurfy little head, and then I was in the car and the rain was coming down in glass rods. As I drove off I glanced back at the storm-darkened windows of the house, and saw Diana's face, pale in the shadows.

I FOUND MY
way to the A64 and had driven for about five miles before I noticed I was heading south instead of north. My mind had been turning on the unsatisfactoriness of the whole experience, in particular our failure to arrange another meeting. ‘If you're ever in London' was such a conventional piece of politeness it hardly gave grounds for hope. Perhaps, I thought, with a plunge in spirits, this one encounter had been enough to satisfy Diana's curiosity.

I realised I had a raging headache. I wondered if it was anything to do with the accident – some dormant clot or swelling that the brain scan had failed to pick up and which would snuff me out as I sat at the wheel. I would die at forty-five, never having read
Ulysses
or gone skiing, or seen the Northern Lights, and with no
children to walk behind my coffin. Then I imagined Gerald trying to organise my funeral and dispose of my possessions, and I resolved to live. I rummaged in the dashboard compartment where I kept mints and loose change and broken sunglasses, and found a foil package containing three soluble aspirins, vintage unknown. There was no water in the car, and it occurred to me that I'd had nothing to drink since breakfast except a glass of champagne. No wonder I had a headache.

Just before the next roundabout there was a single-storey hotel with fake thatch and PVC windows.
The Open Arms. Hotel Restaurant Bar
read the sign.
Non-residents welcome.
The name rang a bell – a faint but insistent summons.

I swung into the car park, a desolate expanse of gritty pot-holed tarmac lashed by slanting rain. It was mid-afternoon, midweek, and there was no one in reception. The bar was unlit and empty, apart from a woman in an overall listlessly steering a Hoover in figures of eight around the islands of tables and chairs. When she heard the door open, she kicked the Hoover switch with a slippered foot, vanished through a side door and reappeared a moment later behind the bar, minus overall. It was only when the strip light flickered into life that I recognised the careworn features of Patty, my ex-cleaner/lover, and knew now why the name of the hotel was familiar. The pleasure I felt in seeing her made me wonder whether my subconscious hadn't directed me there all along.

‘Hello,' she said, with a surprised smile that made her look almost pretty. ‘What are you doing here?' She put her hands to the back of her head and gave her ponytail a quick tightening tug.

I dropped the aspirins on the counter. ‘I took a wrong turning. I need some water to take these with. And something to drink. A pint of lemonade, or something.'

Patty turned her nose up at the aspirin, and rummaged in a scuffed handbag, producing a packet of prescription painkillers that had been withdrawn from the market over a year ago.

‘I didn't think you could get these any more,' I said, forgetting that Patty inhabited those margins of society untroubled by petty regulations. She examined and discarded several glasses before finding a clean one and filling it with tap water. ‘I can get them,' she said.

The glass smelled of wet dog, but I was too dehydrated to care. ‘It's so great to see you,' I said, pushing it back for a refill.

She gave me a sardonic look. ‘If you wanted to see me you could just pick up the phone, you know. You don't have to wait until you happen to take a wrong turning.'

‘I know. But you're such a busy woman. How's . . . er . . . thing? The man from Ceroc?'

‘He's seeing someone else. Do you mind if I smoke? I'm not supposed to when I'm working, but if anyone comes you can pretend it's yours.' She went over to the cigarette machine, thumbed in a handful of coins and
returned with a packet of Superkings, attacking the cellophane with ragged nails. She was wearing stretchy black trousers with stirrups under the feet, backless towelling slippers and a white sweater. It was the most unflattering outfit imaginable, and yet there was something about her – a flinty self-reliance – that was very attractive, and I knew that if she gave me the slightest encouragement we would end up in bed.

‘How are the kids?' I asked. ‘What are they up to nowadays?' Unless they had experienced a Damascene conversion, the answer was bound to be No Good.

Patty's lips closed on her cigarette as though gathered by invisible thread. ‘Michael gets out in a couple of weeks.'

‘Oh. I didn't know he was in. What's that for?'

‘Twocking.'

‘What about . . . the other one? What's he do?'

‘Denny. Oh he's hopeless. He doesn't do anything. He spends all day on his computer playing online poker. I say all day – he doesn't get out of bed till three.'

‘But I suppose he's got your dinner ready, bubbling on the stove when you get in from work?'

She laughed, wheezily. ‘Yeah, right.'

I could picture her returning home after a late shift, tired and footsore, to find the house trashed, the fridge empty, the sink full, and her son slumped in front of the computer, gambling away her earnings, and I felt a great surge of indignation – hatred, in fact – for these two young men I'd never met. ‘They don't seem to have inherited your work ethic, Patty,' I remarked.

‘No, unfortunately, they've got their father's drink ethic instead. I shouldn't say this, but life's actually better all round when Michael's inside. He's off the gear, I don't have to pay off his debts or clean up after him, and I'm not always dreading the next knock at the door. It's like respite care.'

‘When he gets back out he'll be living with you again?'

‘Not for long. I'm moving to Spain in a month.'

‘Really? For good?'

‘That's the idea. My sister and her husband have bought a bar near Alicante, so I'm going to work for them.'

‘So you're shifting lock, stock and barrel, and leaving the boys behind?'

She nodded, grinding out her cigarette in an ashtray on the bar. ‘I realised they're never going to leave home, so if anyone leaves it's going to have to be me.'

‘Patty, that's fantastic. You'll be free at last.'

Regret that I would in all probability never see her again was wiped out by delight at this upturn in her fortunes.

‘Yeah. I'll be glad to get away from England.' She cast a disparaging glance at the charcoal sky beyond the windows. A bedraggled crow was limping along the edge of the stone troughs on the waterlogged terrace. ‘Look,' she said in disgust. ‘Even the birds are deformed.'

I laughed, suddenly aware that my headache was lifting. All the same I had a niggling sense that something unpleasant, though momentarily forgotten, remained to be faced.

Patty watched me through narrowed eyes. ‘Anyway,' she said. ‘What have you been doing with yourself? Why aren't you at work?'

‘In the last few weeks? Oh, nothing much. I lost my job, then a woman I hardly know gave birth in my bed, my ex-wife's husband tried to kill me, and then today I met a woman who was supposed to have died twenty years ago. Apart from that it's been pretty quiet.'

Patty digested this, nodding slowly. As someone whose life had been marked by misadventure she was duly unamazed.

‘You lost your job?'

‘I took voluntary redundancy.'

‘Did you get a good payout?'

‘Reasonable.' I glanced at Patty's work-worn hands. ‘Generous,' I conceded.

‘What are you going to do?'

‘I don't know. Get another, I suppose.'

‘You could come to Spain with me,' she said. ‘If you've got nothing better to do.' Though the impulse of the moment, I knew that, Patty being Patty, this offer was sincerely meant, and although she didn't expect me to accept, she wouldn't withdraw the invitation if I did.

I could picture it clearly: a life of casual work, pulling pints and wiping tables, cash-in-hand and no thought of the future. For a moment it seemed almost possible. Patty would be easy to live with. She needed so little to be happy. We never argued, and we weren't in love,
so we would never be jealous or let down or disappointed.

‘You could get work as a tax adviser,' she was saying. ‘I've got loads of contacts out there.'

‘But none of them pay any tax,' I pointed out. Patty's ‘contacts' – used-car dealers, nightclub owners, market-stall holders – operated in a parallel economy of cash and favours which admitted no regulation.

‘That's true,' she agreed.

‘Maybe if you'd asked me the same question a couple of weeks ago,' I said, ‘I'd have jumped at the chance, but . . .' The thought of living in a different country from Diana, having only just rediscovered her, was too much.

‘But what? You've got a woman?'

‘There is a woman. I wouldn't say I've got her.'

‘It's not that young pregnant bird I saw you with in the Crown at Hutton?'

‘No, no. Not her.'

‘The other one. The older one with big hair and the leather coat.'

‘Oh God, no, that was my ex-wife,' I said, hoping that her detailed recollection was down to the fabled observational skills of women, rather than a deeper personal interest. ‘No, this is the woman who was supposed to be dead.' I gave Patty the briefest possible résumé of my dealings with Diana.

‘And you're still in love with her. That's nice.'

‘No, I'm not. I don't really know her any more. I just
badly want to see her again. She's a grandmother,' I added, apropos of nothing.

‘So am I,' Patty reminded me, bridling. ‘On paper.' I'd forgotten that Michael had fathered a daughter by a former girlfriend, now bitterly estranged. Patty had never seen the baby. The girlfriend had spurned all her overtures of friendship and offers to babysit, though she had cashed Patty's cheque.

‘Is she married or what?'

‘No. Widowed, like you,' I said, seizing on this one point of symmetry in their unequal fates. And it was then that I remembered what was troubling me, fizzing at the edge of my consciousness like an upturned bluebottle. Diana had mentioned a friend in London who took her to the theatre. This could only mean a boyfriend, a partner: it was not an expression you would use to describe an outing by two women friends. I suddenly knew without any doubt that it was this man, whoever he was, who was taking Diana on this
jaunt
to see the Northern Lights, a phenomenon, like Niagara, that you wouldn't choose to visit alone, unless it was a burning ambition – and Diana's enthusiasm had been tepid at best. The thought had hardly had time to surface before jealousy landed like a cudgel, knocking the breath out of me. It was crippling in its intensity – a monstrous mutant version of long-forgotten adolescent rejections, utterly untempered by maturity. I thought of Gerald eating that whole bar of soap.

For something to do, I gulped down the last of my water. It landed in my stomach as acid.

‘Do you want another?' asked Patty, oblivious to my inner turmoil.

‘No. I could do with a proper drink, but if I start now I'll get hammered and I've got to drive.'

‘You could stay here – there are always empty rooms. I'll slip you a key.'

I shook my head. ‘I'll just get going.'

Patty spun her loose watch strap around her skinny wrist. ‘I knock off at six. If you waited another half-hour you could give me a lift,' she said.

Patty lived on the edge of Middleton in a belt of council properties all faced in the same grey pebbledash, striped with moss-coloured stains from the leaky guttering. A group of pre-teenagers was sitting on a garden wall watching one of their mates kick a slack football against the side of a parked car. They had the slumped posture and bored expressions of those for whom the empty hours of youth are a heavy burden.

‘I wouldn't be that age again,' said Patty. ‘Would you?'

‘Not really. No.'

A distant thumping, just recognisable as music, issued from a house on the end of the row.

‘Stop here a minute,' said Patty. As we watched, a car sped down the street and slewed into the kerb. A window was wound down and an empty can was ejected, followed by a brown paper bag: the remains of a takeaway. The driver leant on the horn. Patty gave a hiss of annoyance. A moment later, in response to this summons,
Patty's front door opened and a young man emerged carrying a six-pack of lager under each arm. He was wearing jeans and a Leeds United shirt, and his skin had the sunless pallor of the computer addict. He pulled the door shut behind him with one foot and, crossing the front yard in two strides, vaulted the low garden wall and climbed into the passenger seat of the parked car. The driver revved furiously, holding the car on the handbrake until the tyres screamed, and then rocketed away in a miasma of exhaust and burnt-off tread.