Helen could hear music as she climbed the stairs. She’d just come inside after spending an hour or so in the back garden. It was in a terrible state. Neither she nor Malcolm had green fingers and both were unused to being responsible for a garden. Helen did what she could do, what looked obvious to her. She had weeded the flower beds. Some things she pulled up probably didn’t deserve such a fate. But she wasn’t versed in garden lore.
She was climbing the stairs to ask Malcolm to mow the lawn. It wasn’t a vast expanse, by any measure, but Helen couldn’t manage the hand-mower they had inherited on buying the house and hoped Malcolm would fare better. Otherwise she would have to add the expense of a gardener to her ledger, which she most certainly did not want to do.
As she ascended she could recognise the nasal whine of Bob Dylan. The music was coming from Malcolm’s office.
She found Malcolm stretched out on the sofa on her right as she entered. On the floor in front of him were their old turntable and two large wood veneer speakers turned to face him. The power cords and speaker cables ran untidily across the floor. An open box containing LPs was beside the sofa. The plastic sleeve and cover of Dylan’s Hard Rain was on the floor.
Malcolm’s eyes were closed and his left foot was keeping time with the beat.
The boxes of books she’d asked Malcolm to empty a number of times were still piled in the middle of the room. The floor-to-ceiling bookshelves she’d had built for the purpose, which lined the walls, were still pristine in virgin white. His desk, which she had asked the removal men to set against the windows overlooking the street, was beyond the wall of boxes and almost out of reach.
Her office was perfectly ordered. She had made it a priority, as soon as they moved in, to set up her office the way she had always wanted. Her bookcases were filled with her book collection. Neatly arranged, ordered and beautiful. There was also a collection of her own novels, all in hardcover. Her desk was set up against the windows, too, with her laptop and everything she needed; photos of Malcolm and Daniel, the boys and even one of Geraldine sat proudly to her right, her work lamp to her left. She had a printer and paper. Seated at her desk, if she craned her neck, she could just see the treetops of the park. She’d even found space to set up a sitting area at the end of her office nearest the door, with a reading chair and lamp and sofa for visitors, or meetings with editors, journalists, and so on.
Malcolm made no secret of the fact that he had loved the office they had shared for close to fifty years in their flat in Brixton. He would mention this arrangement in interviews. Always starting with the fact that, soon after they had married, they had placed two non-matching second-hand desks back to back in the middle of their book-lined study and worked opposite each other most mornings surrounded by even more books, manuscripts, notes, newspaper clippings and cups of tea. While Helen had moved on from a typewriter to a word processor, to a desktop computer and then many ever-smaller laptops, Malcolm had persisted with his patient scraping of 2B pencils across cheap foolscap paper.
The flat had been Helen’s before they met. Something Malcolm never seemed to remember. She had written in that room by herself.
In their new house they each had their own office. This was something Helen had dreamt of for years. A room of one’s own. Necessity had kept them in that cramped shared office. That was all. To her the romance of writing together had passed with the cessation of the impromptu sex on the desk. And that had happened soon after the talking stopped. Which was in their first five years together. Till then, their writing had been almost collaborative, but very gradually, each of them found their own voice, and took very different writing paths. In shared silence, over fifty years they, and their writing, matured.
Angered by the chaos of Malcolm’s room and his obvious disinclination to do anything useful, without speaking to him, Helen started to rip open the boxes of books and, with no regard for system or order, began to throw the books onto the shelves.
She was two boxes in before Malcolm said anything – or didn’t say anything, but acknowledged her presence by pulling the turntable power plug from the wall. She stopped what she was doing and turned to him.
‘Well, someone’s got to do it,’ she said.
‘I like the room as it is. It speaks of impermanence.’
‘Or sloth.’
‘I’m retired. There is no sloth.’
‘Writers don’t retire, they die.’
‘I found the old turntable and our LPs.’
‘They weren’t lost, Malcolm. They were in a box labelled “Turntable and LPs”. And these are just some of the LPs, mostly yours. Mine are in my office.’
‘Yours. Mine. What happened to ours?’
Helen turned back to the boxes of books and began stacking them on the shelves again, although without the passion she had shown earlier.
‘I’ve been out in the garden weeding. But I can’t manage the mower. Can you please give it a try?’
‘I only mowed it a few weeks ago.’
‘So you can do it?’
‘I can do it. I don’t want to do it. It almost killed me.’
‘You need a bit of exercise.’
‘I’m retired.’
‘Stop saying that. You’re not retired. You just need to keep writing. Something will come up.’
‘I can’t write here.’
‘No one could write here. It’s a mess. It distresses me just to see the state of this room. We just need to roll our sleeves up and get it sorted.’
Malcolm was still stretched out on the sofa; he hadn’t moved a muscle other than to pull the plug.
‘Help me put these on the shelves. Getting the boxes out of the middle of the room will help. You can arrange your books the way you like later.’
He didn’t move. She ripped open another box. It was filled with copies of A Hundred Ways sent to him by the publisher. They never knew what to do with these extra copies they sent. It wasn’t like they were going to send them out to friends and family. That would be presumptuous. In the past she used to sell them to a second-hand dealer she knew. But he had long gone out of business. The charity shops had killed the secondhand market. She pushed it towards the door and turned to open another box.
‘Aren’t you going to help?’
He didn’t answer her.
Helen then realised that this was the longest conversation they’d had since Daniel and Geraldine walked out. The acknowledgement of this made her uneasy. Malcolm always had so much to say, normally. He was never idle. Never. Seeing him sprawled out on the sofa like this was unusual. Out of character, even. She realised she had avoided conversation with him because she had been waiting for something from him.
‘Have you had time to read my manuscript?’ She hated having to ask, she felt physically sick saying the words, but his silence on the subject had forced her into it. It had been weeks since she had given him the manuscript of version three. Which was the only title it had as yet: ‘Version three’.
‘No, I haven’t found the time. Besides, my opinion isn’t useful to you anymore. I don’t understand your recent writing.’
‘This new version isn’t anything like the earlier version you read.’
‘That’s good to hear. I’ll get to it soon. I promise.’
Helen had to leave the room. As she walked to her office she recognised the opening few notes of ‘Maggie’s Farm’, which she silenced by shutting her door. The nausea she had felt returned. She collapsed into her reading chair and stared intently at the floor, trying to steady herself.
That was her husband in the other room, the man she had lived with and loved for nearly fifty years. She was sure of that fact. And yet, even knowing that, she was equally sure that somehow, he wasn’t.