Malcolm had been sitting at his desk in his office for hours. It was almost four in the afternoon and he was listening to the grumbling of his belly. Helen was out for the day and he had not eaten lunch. He had been sustained by the cup of tea he had made at eleven.
On the desk was a large leatherbound notebook, opened to a page partly covered with his own clear printed script in pencil. The first writing he had attempted in the new house.
The notebook was very fine. Aspinal of London. The leather was nice to hold in the hand, to run his fingers across. Though it was many years ago now, he remembered that the box it arrived in included a printed card that read: Happy birthday, Dad. Love, Daniel and Geraldine.
At the time, he had been surprised by his son giving him a notebook of this kind. He must have known that Malcolm always wrote on loose sheets of foolscap paper. For notes, he always carried a spiral-bound pocket notepad and a pencil stub. These weren’t recent innovations, these were lifelong habits forged in his teenage years when he first started to write seriously.
Accompanying the grumbling of his stomach were Malcolm’s doubts. In order to make use of Daniel’s present, he was consciously abandoning the method of sixty-something years of writing. The notebook wouldn’t stay open when laid on its spine and had to be held open with his left hand. The leather binding and three hundred or so pages lifted his wrist an inch off the desk, which caused him to alter the habitual slouch and made him sit further back in his desk chair. The paper in this notebook, though of a much better quality, was coarse in comparison to his cheap foolscap. The pencil scraped across the page. And finally, the paper wasn’t lined.
But he wanted to use it. It was from Daniel.
Besides, the house wouldn’t let him go back to his old ways. The foolscap paper had remained conspicuously empty of pencilled words.
The leather notebook would break the hoodoo. It was Daniel’s notebook he was to fill. He would write for Daniel. Not for Helen, as he had always done until now.
Helen had led him to rediscover the notebook. That day when she had tried to encourage him to empty the boxes of books in his office, Malcolm had, after she’d left, roused himself and, feeling equal parts resentful and repentant, had thrown more of his books onto the shelves: his battered Penguins bought cheap second-hand, tattered Everyman’s Library editions, anonymous coverless pocket hardcovers, his Virago Modern Classics, the many hundreds of books, all in poor shape, all read before he got his hands on them. Books with a past.
On discovering the expensive leather notebook in one of the boxes, he had stepped back to look at his work but was saddened to discover his much-read books looked shabby on the pristine white shelves. Almost as shabby as the reading chair he lowered himself into. Helen had tried to throw the chair out before they moved. But he had clung to it tenaciously. Rubbed raw in some places and stained and ripped, the chair was a part of him that could not be discarded. He could not remember the chair’s precise origin and he did not recall it ever being new; he supposed it had come to him second-hand. It had been in the corner of their shared office for at least thirty years, maybe more. It had been the one thing in the flat that was entirely his own.
Helen was right though. In his new office it looked out of place and, like the books, distressingly dilapidated. She had suggested getting it reupholstered but the idea had distressed him, so she had covered it with a rug.
Malcolm felt she should have waited until he was seated in the chair before she covered it with the rug. He felt as the chair and the books did, completely out of place in this new house. He too was rubbed around the edges and stained. This house was too beautiful, too clean, too expansive. And white. So white. He was a stain here. A living stain. He was almost eighty years old. He’d lived in the one place for fifty years. Fifty years. The move had been a colossal error of judgement.
The foolscap remained in the desk drawer. That Malcolm was dead to him.
Where the notebook had looked entirely out of place in their Brixton flat, it was now the only thing in Malcolm’s possession that truly suited this new house.
This white purgatory.
The grumbling of his belly continued. He lifted the pencil and wrote on. This first day of writing had been productive; he’d filled page after page, but something was different. It wasn’t the notebook or Daniel. It wasn’t the strange light of being longlisted.
It was this: it was more than fifty years since he had written alone.
In the flat, even when Helen was out, she was there opposite him. Her papers, teacup, books and silly little knick-knacks held her place. Now she had her own office across the landing. She was gone. Everything was different.
Because of this, Malcolm had avoided writing for months, the longest he had gone without since he first started writing. He couldn’t write alone, that would be admitting something. That would make it real.
He flicked through the pages he had just written and then closed the notebook.
It was real now.