The morning after Daniel’s funeral, as I lay in Helen’s bed, I turned my smartphone into a dumb phone. I don’t know why. But it felt the right thing to do. So I did it. I deleted my Facebook account, my Tumblr blog, my WhatsApp account, my Snapchat, my Instagram and my Twitter, and then I removed my email permissions.
None of these companies make it easy to escape. They kept asking me if I was sure. Yes, I’m sure. Are you sure, you’re sure? Yes. This is irreversible. I know.
But it felt good killing them off one by one.
My phone was just a phone. And it was on silent.
I was free to do whatever I liked. I had the money to do what I pleased. But most days I lay on the bed in the flat watching Netflix on my laptop. I was binge-watching episodes of Orange is the New Black. And when I was finished, I planned to move on to House of Cards. Bingeing on TV was something I had never done before. But I quickly developed an insatiable appetite for it.
I didn’t have to be idle. There was work for me to do. But since I’d given my phone a lobotomy, whenever I opened my email on my laptop I clicked highlight all and, after a cursory glance at the sender and subject lines, pressed delete.
I saw emails from publishing friends asking for favours. People I’d never let down before. But I didn’t care. What had they ever done for me? Nothing. What did they know of my life? Nothing. There were emails from Liam and even a couple from Julia. Another from Josh. But they were deleted with the rest. I even saw an email from Max. Delete. He had my number.
Helen had been just as inactive, but she had more class, and had been binge-reading Jane Austen and E.M. Forster. Malcolm wasn’t idle exactly; he was finally sorting through his books. But it was taking a very long time. Every volume was drenched in memories.
We were all in some kind of holding pattern until the Booker winner was announced.
In my Netflix-induced stupor, I’d been wearing yoga leggings and hoodies. A few days before the Booker dinner I realised I had nothing to wear on the night. I’d forgotten that most of my clothes were packed in boxes in a storage unit. I ran through the truncated wardrobe I’d accumulated while staying in the flat and found it entirely unsuitable for the event.
I didn’t want to leave the flat, but I had to. There was no avoiding it. I didn’t want to go alone. I went upstairs and begged Helen to help me choose a dress for the night. She lay down her copy of Howards End and looked at me long and hard. Then nodded.
We took a cab to New Bond Street and Helen followed me from shop to shop, offering me little help. She looked tired and out of place. Thankfully, I was known in most of the shops we visited, so we were treated well and Helen was made comfortable while they fussed around me. The money I had spent in Mayfair over the last few years was obscene. And today I was determined to be excessive.
Helen actually gasped when the assistant at Hermes mentioned the price of the coat I was buying. Then, a little later, she needed smelling salts when I bought a few pairs of shoes. I just couldn’t decide on an evening gown, though. Nothing seemed right. I wanted to make a statement. The literary world was so dull. When they dressed up for black-tie events like this, they were even worse. The women were forced out of their comfort zones and chose outlandish gowns more suited to school formals. I didn’t want something full length, though all of the shop assistants in Vuitton and Givenchy tried to talk me into full-length gowns. Some of them were divine but I didn’t want class, I wanted eye-catching. And leg was going to do that. I needed something short. A cocktail dress. But nothing I tried on was suitable, though Helen eyed each with the same mild approval as the last.
We barely said two words to each other while this was going on. So I was surprised when we stopped for a bit of lunch and she said, ‘If he wins, then my sacrifice will be for nothing.’
I was trying to arrange my shopping bags under the table while weighing up whether I would risk the cold and go bare legged, so didn’t quite get her meaning at first. Shopping makes an idiot out of me.
‘Sacrifice?’
As soon as I said it I comprehended. But it was too late then. And I could see it in Helen’s face. I had messed up.
‘He won’t win,’ I said, too late.
‘Trevor said A Hundred Ways is already selling very well. Better than anything Malcolm or I have ever written before. He’s already starting to make good money from it. Trevor’s granddaughter is talking to US publishers. The German rights have been sold. Polish, Slovakian, Russian and Greek rights are in negotiations. A Booker win will make Malcolm an international phenomenon. Such sales would mean we could keep the house without publishing my book. The whole thing would have been for nothing.’
‘He won’t win, Helen. Trevor said he’d know by now. You know, if his author had won. He has spies everywhere.’
‘But if he did.’
‘He won’t.’
‘He hasn’t spoken to me. He won’t look at me. When I enter a room, he leaves. I disgust him just as I disgust myself, and for the same reason. I wanted what people like you had and I gave them what they wanted to get it.’
‘People like me?’
‘Yes, the successful. Look at how much you can spend on a coat. Thousands of pounds on a coat! I wanted to do that. I wanted all of it. It was so stupid. So stupid. And at my age.’
‘What you did wasn’t easy, Helen.’
‘Yes it was. It was a letting go. I’ve always known I could write that stuff. It isn’t rocket science even though you lot pretend it is. And then you have someone like Lee Child saying he could write a Booker winner if he wanted. Let’s see him try. Like your friend, what’s his name? Good luck to them both.’
‘Liam?’
‘Yes. Him. Didn’t you say he wanted to write serious literature?’
‘He’s desperate for the kind of respect you and Malcolm enjoy.’
‘We don’t enjoy any respect. We endure respect. We endured fifty lean years of respect. It almost killed me, all that respect. And now I’ll die because it’s been taken away.’
‘No one’s taking it away.’
‘Malcolm’s lost his respect for me. And so have I.’
‘I’ll make him read version three. I’ll stand over him until he does and then he’ll be begging your forgiveness.’
‘It’s been on his desk for three months. Untouched. I check as soon as he leaves the house. He hasn’t lifted the cover page.’
‘How do you know?’
‘A trick he taught me. We used to do it when we were starting out. Publishers used to send our manuscripts back to us in those days. It wasn’t easy to make copies. So we’d booby-trap them. If they hadn’t read them, it was easy enough to tell.’
‘Sneaky.’
The waitress came over to clear away the plates. I ordered a coffee and Helen a tea.
I wondered if Helen knew what Max had told me. She seemed to allude to it, but I didn’t dare ask her, ‘Do you know Malcolm thinks you’re dead?’ Instead I took the easy way out and said, ‘I think I like the black evening gown from the first shop best. Shall we just go back there and end our little adventure?’
‘I don’t want to go back home just yet.’
‘You’re not tired?’
‘I am tired. Very tired. But it’s a tiredness that rest and sleep won’t cure.’
‘Is there anything I can do, Helen? I want to help.’
‘No. You’ve already been very kind to Malcolm and me. We’re morbid company.’
‘It pains me that you’re not getting along when you both need each other the most.’
‘I bet you didn’t expect to be in the middle of all of this when you agreed to look at my book,’ Helen said, with a pained smile.
‘I bet you wish I’d never knocked on your door.’
Helen’s face lost the remnants of the smile and she looked me in the eye. ‘Everything that’s happened was well underway before you entered our lives, Amy.’
‘Really? You and Malcolm were still talking. Daniel was alive.’
‘In my grief I’ve said terrible things to you. I don’t believe you had anything to do with Daniel’s death. It was wrong of me to say so. I’ll never forgive myself for saying so.’
And I don’t know whether it was what she said or the way she said it, but I couldn’t speak and realised with unmixed mortification that I was about to cry. Helen’s eyes held mine and I saw, in the depths of her pain, my reflection. Here I was trying to be strong for Helen when my own life was falling apart. Tears flowed and it was completely uncontrollable. When Helen took my hand in hers, the tears were accompanied by sobs. Heads in the quiet little cafe turned. Helen stood up and came around to the chair beside me. She hugged me to her as I had done to her at the airport.
‘It’s all so shit, Helen. You and Malcolm deserve to be happy. And everything is just shit.’
‘You deserve to be happy, too, Amy. Do you know that?’
I couldn’t answer her. The idea was strange to me. Why should I be happy? What had I ever done to deserve happiness? It seemed a strange thing to say of someone like me.
Helen held me for a very long time. And after a while she began to ask me questions under her breath. And I answered them quietly. She wanted to know about Max. She wanted to know about Liam. I told her everything. She wanted to know about my parents. The tears returned as I told her. I couldn’t help them. A dam had burst and the tears flowed.
I just wish we’d been at home instead of in that cafe. I’m not one for public displays of emotion. The waitress came over at one point to see if there was anything she could do. It was mortifying.
I went to the bathroom, took one look at my red eyes and blotchy face and sighed. Things had to get better from here. They had to. I couldn’t cope with this life. It was all too much. I wanted to get back to the flat and back into bed. I blew my nose, touched up my makeup and returned to Helen.
‘Shall we go?’
‘You haven’t got a dress yet.’
Helen and I returned to the first shop and bought another dress altogether. A slip of a cocktail dress. My spirits lifted a little after they all said I looked gorgeous in it. Helen thought it was a bit showy, which was what I was going for after all. To be on the safe side, I bought the other one as well.