Read Online The Editor's Wife by Clare Chambers - Free Book Online Page B

‘Hello? Are you still there?’
    I confirmed that I was.
    â€˜Thank you so much for getting back to me,’ she said. ‘I’m not supposed to take calls when I’ve got students. Very unprofessional. But I’ve had such trouble tracking you down.’
    â€˜I’ve moved a few times over the years,’ I agreed.
    â€˜I think it was your brother I spoke to,’ she went on. ‘He wouldn’t give me your current address.’
    That figures, I thought.
    â€˜Did he forward my letter?’
    â€˜Not exactly,’ I said. ‘But I got it eventually.’
    â€˜Oh good. So you know what this is about.’
    â€˜Owen Goddard.’
    I hadn’t spoken his name aloud in over twenty years, and I had to swallow hard to dislodge the pebble of remorse and guilt that instantly lodged in my throat.
    â€˜Yes. I assumed from the contents of the letter I’ve got from you to him that you knew each other quite well.’
    â€˜I wouldn’t say that, necessarily,’ I said. I still wasn’t sure how much I wanted to tell her. Not everything, by a long stretch.
    â€˜Have you any other correspondence from him dating from that time? It would be incredibly helpful to have copies.’
    â€˜I might have. I’d have to have a rummage. There wouldn’t be much. I’m not a great hoarder.’
    â€˜Is there any chance that we could meet?’ she went on. ‘I don’t know what part of the world you’re in.’
    â€˜I live about twenty miles north of York.’
    â€˜Oh that’s no distance. I could drive up one morning. Is there a particular day that suits you?’
    I glanced at the Cheese-lover’s Calendar that Carol had given me for Christmas: apart from a dentist’s appointment some months hence it was blank, the empty, jobless days unrolling ahead of me. ‘I’m not too busy at the moment,’ I said. ‘You can pretty much name your day.’
    As soon as I had put the phone down, having agreed a time the following week, and given directions to Hartslip, I went straight up to the loft – a tiny hatch above the landing, reached by a nylon rope ladder. It is impossible to climb a swinging rope ladder while carrying anything substantial – a powerful disincentive to hoarding – and not much had been deemed worth the journey, so it didn’t take long to find what I was looking for. A zip-up canvas holdall that had moved unopened with me from place to place over the years.
    I carried it down to the sitting room and unpacked it in front of the fire. Unzipping it released a puff of twenty-year-old air, piercingly redolent of my old bedsit in Brixton. It was a combination of cigarette smoke, Chanel pour homme, and that cannabis and fried chilli smell that had soaked into the very fabric of the building. I was assailed by a nostalgia that verged on panic: when I closed my eyes and breathed in the scent so particular to that time and place I was almost afraid to open them again in case I found myself back there, and all the years in between just a dream.
    I took out the artefacts one by one. A black cashmere sweater, worn almost to mesh at the elbows. A gold and aquamarine pendant, still in its velvet box, unworn. Eight hardback copies of
The Night Wanderer
by Christopher Flinders (Swift & Deckle 1987) First edition. Unread. A ring binder of 150 handwritten pages. A Christmas card. An invitation. Two letters.
    From this haul I selected just the invitation and one of the letters to give to Alex Canning. The other letter – a model of brevity – I put back.
    On the agreed morning, and punctual to the minute, Alex Canning came bumping down the muddy track to Hartslip Cottage in a rusty hatchback that belched clouds of blue exhaust. The driver’s door was so badly dented that it no longer opened and she had to shuffle across to the passenger side to get out. The rest of the car’s bodywork bore the