Helen was still unused to the sounds of the house. She lay in bed and listened. She’d been dreaming. The other life still lingered. The whirring noise that had woken her was not repeated. Street noise. House silence. Was it already past seven? Malcolm was evidently up and about as his side of the bed was empty. She glanced at the alarm clock. Six. She wasn’t sure whether the noise that had roused her was of Malcolm’s making or the neighbours’. It had sounded like some sort of motor and she couldn’t reconcile this with her knowledge of Malcolm’s morning customs. She might have dreamt it.
Now that she was awake there was no trying to get back to sleep. Those days had long gone. She was now lucky just to sleep through the night. She took her time getting out of bed, pausing to place herself in the week. Wednesday. Read through manuscript, again. Visit Waitrose. Hair appointment tomorrow. Then she rose in slow stages. Covers aside. Lifted torso. Deliberate swing of the legs.
Although it was August, the room felt cold. She put her feet into her slippers, stood sighing, shuffled forward, lifted her dressing gown off the hook on the back of the door and made her way to the loo. Out on the landing she paused to listen. The house was still and silent.
When she found herself in the kitchen a few minutes later, she paused again. She couldn’t recall whether she had washed her hands after going to the loo, or what she had been thinking about between the landing and kitchen. As she aged she had to consciously interrupt this tendency to act habitually. She knew habit to be the enemy of creation. But it seemed the more she pushed back against these partial losses of self, the more often she found herself standing as she did now, conscious of a return.
In the time it took for the kettle to boil she had tried and failed to reconstruct the missing minutes and had tossed the tea angrily into the pot, when it occurred to her that the kettle hadn’t been boiled that morning. It was only six in the morning, and though an early riser, Malcolm was never up much before this. He too had his habits. A sudden horror filled her. So sharp and bright that she gasped and gripped the kitchen bench to prevent her from collapse. But she didn’t collapse. And the horror passed as quickly as it had begun. Reason had stepped in to assuage her fears. And to further convince herself that all was well, she continued what she was doing. She buttered a piece of toast, poured two cups of tea, adding a merest drop of milk to Malcolm’s and a generous amount to her own. She even went so far as to stand there at the bench eating her toast and jam as she might on any given morning. This wasn’t the first time she’d had a presentiment of Malcolm’s death. The man was nearing eighty and had never taken care of himself other than to quit smoking in his forties.
What she had the most difficulty in doing was imagining a world without him. This wasn’t just as Helen, the wife. This failure of the imagination was suffered by Helen, the novelist. Which greatly surprised her. Nothing she could construct seemed in the least possible or likely. Never had her creative efforts been thrown into such harsh light. All pains to conceive a possible future without Malcolm were fiction and only fiction. Untruths. A terrible admission for a novelist.
Malcolm’s tea wasn’t getting any warmer.
At the top of the stairs the whirring noise again. She hadn’t dreamt it. She pushed open Malcolm’s office door with her foot, as she had a cup of tea in each hand. He was standing at his desk in his pyjamas with his back to her. No dressing gown. Bare feet. The whirring ceased. She saw him lift some papers from his desk and the whirring began again. He didn’t hear her approach.
She placed the cups of tea on the still empty bookshelf near the door and noticed the open top drawer of the filing cabinet which contained all of the foolscap pages of her husband’s writing life. Original manuscripts, drafts, notes, sketches, short stories, poetry, journals, everything.
Over the noise of the machine, with voice raised, Helen asked, ‘Malcolm, what are you doing?’
He didn’t respond.
She stepped forward and looked around her husband. On top of the desk was a large black machine and into it Malcolm was feeding a slim manila folder. ‘Brighton’ was the only word she caught before the shredding machine swallowed the folder.
She knew what that folder contained. Brighton 1979 poems. And it broke her heart to think she would never, nobody would ever, see those poems again.
Helen shut the filing cabinet drawer. But Malcolm had another folder in his hand. She looked at his face. His expression was vacant. She touched his arm and he shook her off.
‘Malcom, no!’
This time she didn’t see what the folder contained. And it only occurred to her to unplug the machine after it disappeared for good.