Helen had spent the day scanning Malcolm’s work. It was taking longer than she expected, partly because there was so much material, and partly because she kept finding writing she had forgotten about. There was so much unpublished writing. Good writing, too. Sketches, poems, essays and short stories. A few abandoned novels. She was falling in love with him all over again. Here was a writer’s life. She had been moving chronologically, and in doing so she was watching him grow and develop. There were things in the young Malcolm that she hadn’t realised she missed. A recklessness that was gone from the present Malcolm. He once wrote without a thought for the consequences. She now recalled how often Malcolm’s writing had hurt her. She was hurt again by some of it. But she could see beyond that to the work itself. The wife might shed a tear and wish the words unwritten, but the reader in her appreciated Malcolm’s honesty. It was a clearer record of their relationship than anything in her miscellany.
Helen had always sought to obfuscate the episodes she’d taken from life. While Malcolm would transcribe experience with a boldness that horrified her at times, she would dismantle a scene from life, break it into pieces, find what was universal in it, then reassemble it using imagined elements. His was the more effective method, but also the more difficult for those close to him to read.
‘Helen.’
Helen didn’t respond at first to the voice from the door of her office. She was reading. It was the original version of a scene in one of Malcolm’s most admired novels, Not Lost, about the disintegration of a marriage. This original version was the record of one of Helen and Malcolm’s arguments. Helen vaguely remembered reading it before. Back in the days when they read every word that either of them wrote. She’d been more resilient then. But it struck her powerfully now, because she had forgotten their arguments. She’d thought they’d had very few, but this page was awakening other memories and now she recalled that in the seventies, when Daniel was a child and they were still rather social, there had been arguments – bitter arguments.
‘Mother,’ said Daniel, from the door.
Helen lay the page down. She felt exposed. Caught in a private moment with the past. The habit of her mind to rewrite the facts of the past disturbed her as much as her inattention to the present. The mind strove for equilibrium, sorting memory as it saw fit, even against her own wishes.
Daniel touched her on the shoulder. ‘I don’t wish to intrude, but are you all right?’
‘I’m fine, Daniel. These are your father’s original manuscripts, notes and miscellany. I’m trying to make a digital record of them. But the scanner is slow and there are thousands of pages.’
‘What will you do with the originals?’
‘Protect them.’
‘How will you do that?’ asked Daniel, picking up a manila folder and opening it. It contained the foolscap pages covered with pencilled paragraphs he remembered well from his childhood. The pages that were in the office, the room he wasn’t allowed to enter. Which he did when unobserved. He’d sit at his mother’s desk and pretend to use the typewriter. Pretend he was like them. Sometimes pretending to smoke using a pencil. He was far more interested in his mother’s typewriters and then bulky word processors than his father’s foolscap pads. He never read anything he found in there. The words didn’t interest him, but the hours they’d spend away from him did.
‘I don’t know what I’ll do with them, Daniel.’
‘Would anyone buy them?’
‘I’m not going to sell your father’s literary legacy.’
‘Then what are you doing this for?’
‘I woke early one morning to discover him putting his work through a paper shredder.’
‘Did he say why he was doing that?’
‘I didn’t ask. I threw all of the papers I could find into boxes and dragged them in here. Then I hid the paper shredder. His behaviour lately has been very odd. Have you not noticed?’
‘I don’t know either of you well enough to judge whether you’re acting oddly or quite normally.’
Helen couldn’t find a reply to that.
‘What about your papers?’ Daniel asked.
‘Most are digitised and on hard drives. But I do have the manuscripts I worked on with editors over the years. My letters, as well.’
‘Did you or Malcolm keep diaries?’
‘No, though now I wish we had.’
‘Malcolm’s papers will be worth much more if he wins the Booker.’
‘I’m not looking for a buyer. Besides, he’s not going to win the Booker. Since 2014 it’s been open to the Americans. But none has won yet. They’ll award it to one of them. More newsworthy.’
‘You don’t believe the winner is chosen according to merit?’
‘Do you?’
Daniel wandered over to the bookcase to Helen’s left, then to the windows beyond the desk. ‘This is a lovely office. From your desk I bet you can see out over the park. You might be in the country.’
Helen was watching her son’s movements with interest. He was clearly agitated; his gestures were jerky and quite random, as were his thoughts. But his face was bright and cheerful. Which ran contrary to her expectations after the previous night’s revelations. That Geraldine had taken a lover wasn’t much of a surprise to Helen. She and Daniel had been unsuited from the outset. And their age difference and diverging interests had made rupture inevitable. Malcolm had said as much the first time Daniel had introduced her to them. And this knowledge had caused them both to be more reserved towards her than they already would have been.
‘Are you still set on moving to London? I don’t think you’ve thought this through,’ said Helen, stopping her work. ‘How will you see the boys?’
‘I’ll fly up on weekends.’
‘Can you really afford to do that? And where would you stay? Hotels? More money.’
‘I’ll need to rent a flat.’
‘I don’t think you’ve thought about this at all.’
‘I have. I have. I can’t stay in Edinburgh. I can’t. I’ll see her everywhere. It isn’t like London where I could move a few streets away and never see her again. It’s like a small town. And her family is everywhere. Her friends. It’s impossible.’
‘So is leaving your boys, Daniel! You need to think of them. A long-term plan. From nursery school to university. They’re so young. You need to brave it out, for them.’
‘I know what I must do. There are many musts in my head, not all of them achievable. When I think of the boys I think of her and when I think of her I think of him. And I can’t allow myself to think of him. I don’t have a long-term plan because there is no long term. I can’t think long term.’
‘Then what are you going to do now? Today. Tomorrow. Next week?’
‘I don’t know. I’d move into the flat below. But Amy is very comfortable down there. She’s entrenched. You won’t get her out easily.’
‘She can go tomorrow if you’d like to move down there. I think she’s done what she came to do. She’s promised to make her recommendations to me this evening. I’m expecting her any minute now.’
‘I don’t want her to leave, at least not yet. She’s at odds with the life you and Malcolm have made for yourselves. She’s doing you both good.’
‘How do you come to that conclusion? You said earlier you don’t know us.’
‘She’s chaos. You’re order. You need each other.’
Helen thought about this for a while. Her life didn’t feel ordered.
‘I heard you help Amy downstairs last night. Was she very drunk?’
‘She was and she wasn’t. I found her trying to enter the basement of your neighbour across the road, but then she was quite lucid in her speech.’
‘She drinks too much. Malcolm and I can’t keep up with her. She has the capacity of a problem drinker. Personally, I don’t know what to make of her. She behaves in a manner that’s alien to me. She lives like a gypsy and yet she has more money than the Queen.’
‘Self-destructive, perhaps?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know how her mind works. She’s clearly bright and astonishingly beautiful – more so now after we’ve been giving her regular meals – but she sullies both these attributes continuously by the choices she makes.’
‘So she’s self-destructive, as I suggested.’
Helen placed another page on the scanner.
‘I heard you both go downstairs late last night but I didn’t hear you return,’ she said. This had just occurred to her.
‘We talked. She didn’t want to be alone.’
‘I saw her leave early this morning. She looked like she was going to the gym. But she never returned. An hour ago I received an email saying she’d been waylaid by friends and was on her way home.’
‘Did she write – home?’
‘No, I don’t think she did.’
‘Be careful, Helen.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘Amy, she’s probably only healthy in small doses. Too much Amy could be toxic.’
‘Only for some.’