The Editor's Wife (3 page)

I ignored this remark, ‘Everything sorted out at the office?' I said, with exaggerated cheerfulness. ‘Crisis averted?'

‘What? Oh, yes.' She shook her head impatiently.

‘You must be exhausted. Work, work, work.'

She looked at me suspiciously. ‘I am quite tired, actually. I think I'll go up.'

‘I saved you some chilli,' I said, indicating the bowl. ‘I thought you might be too busy to eat. Too busy working.'

‘You needn't have bothered. I've already eaten,' she replied. She could tell from my tone that she wasn't going to get off to bed without a row, so fake gratitude was
pointless. She took her coat off and slung it over the back of a chair, then stood waiting for it to begin.

‘Jeremy all right?' I asked.

‘What?'

‘Jeremy. Standish. Your colleague. He was there, wasn't he?'

‘He was there as it happens. What's your point?'

‘I bet he's good in a crisis,' I said. ‘Working away. Beavering away, I should say.'

‘Can I look forward to this sort of reception every time I work late?' she enquired coldly.

‘Are you going to be making a habit of it, then?'

‘Possibly.'

‘You can see more of these crises looming up but you can't do anything to prevent them?'

Carol exhaled sharply and folded her arms, exposing the long, ringless fingers of her left hand, with their bronze-lacquered nails. It was a moment or two before the significance of their nakedness hit me.

‘You've taken off your wedding ring!'

Carol looked at her hand as if for confirmation. ‘It was too tight,' she said, blushing through the lie. ‘It was constricting.'

‘I bet it was!' I retorted.

‘Oh go and fuck yourself.'

‘I don't have much alternative, do I, since you're out every night screwing your boyfriend.'

‘Don't make me hate you more than I already do,' she said.

This exchange of civilities went on, at an increasing volume, and covering the usual range of accusations and counter-accusations, well rehearsed in previous rows: my lack of trust, her lack of trustworthiness, her selfishness, my control-freakery, inequalities in our contributions to household expenses and chores, and ever downward to the petty stuff of which divorces are made, until the neighbours could stand no more and called the police. Whether it was the shouting or the sound of the bowl of chilli being thrown through the (closed) kitchen window that had them reaching for the phone, I'm not sure. But our ranting was soon interrupted by the arrival of two uniformed officers. ‘Thank God you've come,' said Carol, attempting to lay claim to the role of victim. ‘He's being ridiculous.' She ushered them into the kitchen, as if they were prospective buyers, come to view the property.

‘We've had reports of a disturbance,' said the taller of the two, glancing around.

‘Well, we're in the middle of an argument,' I explained. ‘That's not illegal, surely?'

With one movement their eyes swivelled to the broken windowpane, through which the cool night air, faintly scented with onions, now streamed. I suppose with the tomato sauce dripping down the jags of glass it did look rather gory.

‘What's all this about?' said the other one, surveying the damage.

‘Oh, she threw a bowl of chilli at me,' I replied.

‘I didn't throw it
at
you,' Carol objected.

‘Look, we're not interested in your domestics,' said the tall policeman, over the chirping of his walkie-talkie. ‘It's after midnight and people round here are trying to sleep. So are you going to keep it down or do we have to take this further?'

‘I don't want him staying here,' Carol said shrilly.

‘I don't want to stay here,' I retorted. ‘If I wasn't over the limit I'd get in the car and go right now.' I turned to the policemen. ‘I'll just chuck some stuff in a bag and sleep in the back of the car if that's allowed.'

This agreed upon, I snatched up an assortment of my belongings, dragged the duvet off the spare bed and went to doss down in the car, which was parked in the driveway facing the house. Then the policemen left, and from inside the house came the scrape and rattle of Carol locking me out for ever.

Of course there was no prospect of sleep. However I tried to dispose myself I was cold and cramped, my marriage was over and to add to my pain I knew that Carol would be warm and comfortable in our king-size bed, and moreover sleeping peacefully, as she always seemed to after a row, her heart all the lighter for having evicted me.

I had never realised, until forced to spend the night underneath it, how dazzling our halogen security light was, and how easily activated. It burst into life at irregular but frequent intervals, to defend the property from passing cats, moths, falling leaves and motes of dust. On
and off it went, for hour after hour, not only keeping me awake, but illuminating my predicament for the benefit of the whole street. I had no alternative but to try and disable it.

There was no lock on the side gate – a security lapse rather at odds with the unsparing vigilance of the arc lamp – so I was able to fetch a rake from the garden shed. Standing well back, I jabbed the wooden handle hard up into the glass. The halogen bulb exploded with a sound like gunshot, and I got back into the car, swathed myself in the duvet, and with that small victory under my belt, slept at last.

I was still in that deep phase of early sleep from which even a gentle awakening is a trauma, when the car door was wrenched open and I felt rough hands seizing me. All around there was a commotion of lights and shouting and running feet, and before I was properly conscious I found myself face down in the flower bed, my arms pinned behind me, someone's knee on my back, and my face pressed into a cold mulch of bark chippings and dead leaves. After a further mauling I was dragged to my feet and it was only then that I realised that my attackers were in fact policemen, kitted out in flak jackets and helmets as if for an armed siege, and with automatic rifles trained on me. This did nothing to subdue my sense of terror: one inadvertent twitch from me, a touch of the jitters from one of them and Carol would be on
Breakfast News
enjoying her fifteen minutes of fame as a grieving widow, the old hypocrite.

It's curious but, even years later, when we were divorced and back on friendly terms, and could laugh at our many differences and foibles, this was one incident I could never comfortably discuss. It was an indignity too far, to have had my antics with the garden rake mistaken by those same well-meaning neighbours for the work of a deranged gunman, and it certainly played its part in putting our marriage beyond retrieval. For one thing, I could never show my face in the street again.

It was about ten years after our separation that I ran into Carol again. My department was investigating a local businessman for tax evasion, and Carol was the solicitor he'd appointed to stonewall us while he massaged his accounts. I recognised her name from the paperwork – Carol Standish – and she recognised mine, because she rang up and we arranged to meet for a drink after work. I no longer felt any bitterness or resentment towards her: we had by now been apart longer than we'd been together; she had remarried and I had had several relationships varying in intensity and duration. At that first meeting it came back to me what good company she could be. She had always been very sharp and funny, in a heartless, amoral kind of way – qualities much more entertaining in a friend than a wife. We began meeting every few months or so after that. Carol was living and working in Leeds and did not often need to come to York, but if for any reason work brought her that way she would call me, and I would buy her lunch or cook her dinner at Hartslip. Somehow, now
that I wasn't her husband, she didn't find my exertions in the kitchen on her behalf nearly so oppressive. I didn't ask her what Jeremy made of this unorthodox friendship, or if he even knew of it, and she never said.

One evening, over a bottle of wine, the conversation turned to the subject of happiness. We agreed that we were neither more nor less happy than at any other stage of our lives, and concluded from this that an individual's day-to-day levels of happiness are fairly constant, and unaffected by changes in circumstance.

‘But you must be happier now with Jeremy than you were with me?' I said. ‘Or what's the point?'

‘I suppose I am,' Carol replied, sweeping her bushy, wheat-coloured hair back off her face and adjusting the clips that held it in place, checking the result in a pocket mirror. She had always been one for public grooming: she had once waxed her legs on a crowded InterCity train, oblivious to the glares of her fellow passengers. ‘It's the living with that's difficult. The give and take. You know what I'm like.'

‘I certainly do.'

‘Why am I so crap at compromising?' she asked, dividing the last of the wine between us and looking regretfully at the empty bottle.

‘I don't know. Could just be plain old selfishness,' I said cheerfully. She was looking very pretty, in a skirt and heels and a tight, stretchy shirt that strained across her chest, gaping between the buttons. She had even painted her nails, an adventurous shade of blue.

She laughed, unoffended at this diagnosis. ‘You're so easy to talk to, Chris, because you know me so well. Nothing I said or did would shock you, would it?'

‘Practically nothing,' I said, thinking of the leg-waxing incident.

She leant back, hands clasped behind her head, putting those shirt buttons under additional pressure. ‘I sometimes wonder if I'm cut out for monogamy,' she sighed.

It cost me a pang to turn her down: repaying Jeremy deed for deed would have been a pleasure, but I had learned a lesson about married women in my London life, and I would never cross that line again.

She didn't take my refusal to heart. In fact she seemed rather relieved, and admitted that she always felt rotten after her lapses, but couldn't seem to help herself. ‘I must be such a terrible person,' she lamented. ‘How can I be so awful? Poor Jeremy.'

‘Oh don't worry,' I said soothingly. ‘He knew what he was taking on. He knew from the off that you're a woman who cheats on her husband.'

She took off one of her shoes and hit me with the spiked heel. It was excruciatingly painful, and I thought what a lousy masochist I'd make. Carol, on the other hand, would have made an excellent sadist, but I didn't mention this while she was armed.

We parted affectionately, without any future arrangements to meet up, and it was four months before I heard from her again. It was the same story. She was visiting a client in York, could we have dinner afterwards? This was
the pattern that we fell into, approximately three times a year, and the state that our rather too amicable divorce had reached at the time of the incidents that I'm about to relate.

I'D LOST MY
enthusiasm for the horse riding and mackerel fishing, with the thought of a confrontation with Gerald hanging over me, so I decided to ring him and get it over with. I dialled the number for Gleneldon Road and got the answering machine which, a year after Dad's funeral, still disconcertingly bore his disembodied voice, apologising for not being able to come to the phone. I hadn't prepared what I was going to say, and was in any case thrown by hearing Dad's ghostly message, so I just said, ‘Gerald. It's me. Can you ring me when you get this? Or I'll try you later or something.' I regretted it as soon as I hung up. Now he would be expecting my call and have armed himself against my objections. I had surrendered the element of surprise.

I picked up his letter to roll it into a spill for the fire,
then noticed a hand-written PS on the back which I'd overlooked earlier.

There was a pregnant woman looking for you here the other day. She left the enclosed.
Typically, he had forgotten to enclose whatever it was, and I was left to contemplate this intriguing development with slight unease. What a difference that one word ‘pregnant' made to otherwise promising news. A review of my sexual history over the past nine months was reassuring (in one way, if not in another). There had been a one-night stand with a woman from the office, who therefore wouldn't need to go looking for me in London.

And then there was Patty. She used to come in once a week to clean for me, after I put an advert in the newsagents at Middleton. She was only thirty-nine but she had one of those prematurely old faces, ravaged by smoking and rotten luck. Her husband had fallen into a canal and drowned while drunk, and her teenage sons appeared to treat her as little better than a servant and were regularly up before the courts. She had three jobs – domestic cleaning, bar work at the Crown in Hutton and general skivvying at a hotel off the A64 called the Open Arms – but in spite of putting in a sixty-hour week was always broke. I had coaxed all this information from her one morning over coffee. She was funny and easy to talk to, and there was something very attractive about her resilience, and before long we began sleeping together. Then there followed an awkward period when it wasn't entirely clear whether I was paying her for the cleaning
or the sex, so I stopped paying and she stopped cleaning. Soon after that she met a bloke at Ceroc and moved in with him, so then I didn't get the cleaning or the sex.

In the afternoon I worked off my frustration over Gerald by helping Richard in the top field. He was taking down an ash tree that had been struck by lightning, so I took the trailer and loaded it up with branches and spent a happy hour with my chainsaw, reducing them to firewood. I stacked most of the logs, Swiss-style, against the side of the house, saving a few which I split for kindling with a brand new hatchet, bought from Richard's Traditional Farm Tools workshop. Then, to ring in my Gap Year, as I was starting to think of it, I used up the last of the daylight to walk to the Blacksmith at Lastingham for a pint. I looked in at the crypt at St Mary's church on the way, taking care not to get caught up in evensong.