Helen checked her inbox. There had been no reply to the email she had sent to Clarissa. She had waited a week before sending the same email again. And now another week had passed since resending that. And this was phase two. Her phone calls, and the messages she had left, had gone unanswered, too.
Their relationship was officially at an end.
Helen stared at the inbox. It was 5 am. She slept for just four or five hours a night now. The screen was the only light in the room. She closed the lid and sat in darkness until she noticed the faint hint of light coming through the edges of the drawn curtains. Then she stood and opened them. The dark cloudless sky above gave no hint of the coming dawn.
Thinking about this new Clarissa was painful.
She could happily recall their working life together. Opening up to her had been a long process – a few books before Helen could share her writing in the raw, her ideas still unclothed by art. Their partnership, for that is how Helen considered it, was based on mutual trust. To have Clarissa handle her work with such care and consideration was reassuring. Clarissa’s edits and comments were couched in respect. Helen had always considered the work as being more intimate than friendship.
Over the years Helen had counted on Clarissa for more than just editorial advice. She learnt to consider her a confidant. In moments of doubt she had called on her, meeting for lunch or evening drinks. She had shared her domestic affairs, she had discussed her relationship with Malcolm, her anxieties about Daniel. Clarissa had responded to these with the same care and consideration. She had offered sound advice, or reassurance, whatever was necessary.
Helen turned on the desk lamp and started unpacking one of the three boxes that had been by the door for a week. They contained the files she had rescued from Malcolm’s paper shredder. She switched on her printer, which was also a scanner, and arranged a selection of folders on the desk. Opening her laptop she saw there were no new emails.
Acknowledging the one-sided nature of her relationship with Clarissa pained Helen. She had considered Clarissa a friend while Helen was just work to Clarissa. One of her many writers. Now that Clarissa was retired she wasn’t required to keep in contact. So she didn’t.
Reviewing their working life under this suspicion was altogether too painful. And mortifying. She would not do so. What it said about her was awful. She had always had a good opinion of herself. Not to say she was narcissistic or a great egotist, but she had always assumed she was a good and likeable person whom others wanted to know and be acquainted with. But when she looked at the bare facts of her life she saw that this wasn’t the case.
Twenty years they had worked together. But she had to admit that her relationship with Clarissa was all one way. Clarissa knew everything about Helen. What did Helen know of Clarissa in return – only that she was married to Hugh, they had three daughters, Cyn, Ali and Liz, lived in Putney and had a share of a villa in Provence.
Helen had never met Hugh, nor had she visited the house in Putney. She remembered Clarissa’s daughters’ names because she had made use of them in a novel. Framed photos of them had cluttered Clarissa’s desk at Sandersons. Early on, Clarissa had invited Helen over for dinner, but there had never been time. And Clarissa stopped asking. She only remembered the villa in Provence because when Clarissa had mentioned she was going away for a month to the south of France, Helen had resented it. The editor holidays in France while the writer can’t justify the cost of a weekend away in Brighton.
And Clarissa had been Helen’s only close female friend. But it wasn’t friendship, though, was it?
What Clarissa did outside their shared work wasn’t relevant to Helen. She knew Clarissa was well respected in the publishing world and that she had mentored other editors and had written a few books on editing novels, but this only served to convince Helen she had the best editor in the UK. She didn’t want to discuss different approaches to editing with her. Just as she wouldn’t discuss paper quality with the printer and she wouldn’t discuss RAM with the guy who sold her laptops.
Helen began to scan the contents of Malcolm’s files.
She sighed. How blind she had been. And how ironic her failure was. Her novels were all about female relationships. She was admired for her depictions of female friendship. Clarissa had even said as much herself.
Clarissa’s abandonment hurt because she had assumed they were friends.
But how could they have been when her commitment to her work and Malcolm was total?
Her marriage was a wall blocking intimacy with others.
Big love, true love, and complete compatibility were all-encompassing. To find a man like Malcolm who was also a writer – an intellectual who shared her obsession with perfection, with good work – was beyond her early expectation. To then remain in perfect harmony with him for another fifty years was exceptional. In her delight and excitement, she neglected all others, even, since he left home, her own son.
But now . . .
Malcolm was drifting away from her. And she had no one to talk to.
She was holding a loose sheet of foolscap, empty but for a little three-verse poem. It was written in the tiniest script, as if Malcolm had been ashamed of its contents. It was a filthy little thing. She remembered him writing it. A product of their first hungry months together. They were different people now.
She felt desperately sad, but no tears fell. Her heart felt dry.
Did she want a public record of the poem? Or was it something just for them?
She scanned it. There was no them. That is why she was doing what she was doing. None of their work was theirs anymore. Malcolm didn’t have the right to destroy his work and she didn’t have the right to censor it. Good and bad would be saved for posterity.
His behaviour recently had verged on the bizarre. The attempt to destroy his work. The hilarious but ultimately self-defeating radio interview. His refusal to accompany her to the awards night. His watching of daytime TV. It was all strange and upsetting. And the way he was with her. Courteous, obliging and good-humoured. More like hired help than a husband. And he wasn’t writing. He wasn’t reading. He lay about listening to records.
There was no denying it. The very moment Clarissa ended their working relationship, Malcolm had begun to drift. The cause was the same, that damned book and what motivated it, but whereas Clarissa could cut and run, Malcolm could not. Malcolm shared Clarissa’s idea of Helen and both had been disappointed, that was evident. She now wondered if he shared her disgust, too. Because it had to be disgust. Nothing short of disgust would compel a decent woman like Clarissa to behave so abominably towards her. If Malcolm were merely disappointed, she might win back his respect. But if he were disgusted, like Clarissa, the break would be final. He would continue to drift further and further away.
Malcolm would never leave her. He felt he had a duty to himself, and to her, to remain. But merely remaining was just not leaving, which she wouldn’t endure. She needed more from him. Love. His love had always been entwined with respect. If she had disgusted him by her actions, then there could be no respect. Which is why he seemed recently to refer to her in the past tense. Helen had always . . . Helen used to do this or that . . . You used to like . . . But especially so when describing her as a writer. He used a tense that prohibited a future.
The house was all she had. She had been dreaming of such a house for all of her adult life. She loved it with an ardour that surprised her. Malcolm was wrong to detest the house. The house was an end and was distinct from the means. The novel was the means, the advance was the means, even the decision to write such a book was the means – detest all of the means, but the house itself was just a house, clear of any wrongdoing. She wanted him to love the house. If he loved the house she could endure his loveless toleration of her.
Helen wanted to keep the house, to mend her relationship with Clarissa and to force Malcolm to love her. That was why she had written the two new versions of the novel. The last version was more herself than anything she had written in the last ten years. She thought it her best work. But neither would read it.
Amy had read it.
But Clarissa and Malcolm would not.