Amanda has sent a short story to The New Yorker. On the walk to the post office she’d felt purposeful, but the moment the envelope slips from her fingers into the box she wishes she could wrench it back. Writers she reveres have been published in The New Yorker, literary greats like William Trevor and Alice Munro, and, going back a bit, the sharp, the stylish, the tragic, Maeve Brennan. What on earth was she thinking! Amanda stares into the dark slot that has swallowed her story, and as always at the point of letting go she thinks of how the word ‘submission’ suggests humiliation, suggests a helpless yielding.
“Forget you’ve posted it,” she tells herself sternly. And in a day or two she will forget for quite large chunks of time. But just at the moment, she is stricken.
“It’s a story that needed to be told,” she says, and turns her back on the post box.
The idea had come from her neighbour, Magda Woźniak. Amanda and Magda live in the two rundown villas bequeathed to them on the deaths of their respective parents, old, high-ceilinged houses, like most others in the surrounding streets. Once occupied by migrant families, they had been affordable only because they had fallen out of favour for being difficult to heat, and in constant need of repair. But as the older generation gradually died out, so the suburb has been colonised by young professionals, couples who spend their weekdays in city offices, and their weekends renovating.
In their un-renovated homes, Magda and Amanda are the only residents on their street who remember their Menick and Woźniak parents; they are almost the only residents who remember when kids played hopscotch on the pavements, and the front yards were filled with tomato plants. On Sunday afternoons they like to sit together for a few hours, drinking coffee and gossiping. When it’s Amanda’s turn to host Magda she bakes a carrot cake, or in summer she will make a strawberry and rhubarb pie because it is Magda’s favourite, and it pleases Amanda to watch her neighbour eat – Magda, who is as thin and straight as a clothes peg, works as a contract cleaner, and Amanda worries that she still smokes, that she doesn’t eat properly.
The things Magda sees and hears and is asked to clean up after often provide the substance of their Sunday chats. Amanda has never felt compelled to write about anything she’s heard, until Magda told how she’d been sent to clear a house of the belongings of a woman who’d died. They’d been sitting on the back verandah to catch the last of the sun, the street quiet but for the distant drone of a lawn mower.
“The husband couldn’t bring himself to touch anything she’d owned, which is common enough,” Magda said. “Usually it’s because they’re not coping with the grief.”
But this husband had been different.
“He’d loathed his wife. I felt it as soon as I walked through their front door.”
“How could you tell?” Amanda poured coffee while Magda lit a cigarette.
“There was an atmosphere you couldn’t miss. Anyway, it turned out that they had slept in separate rooms, and before he took me into her bedroom,” Magda paused, and her pencilled brows shot skywards, “he pulled on a pair of surgical gloves.”
“To go into her bedroom? How very odd!”
Magda shrugged. “He was a doctor, so I suppose he had a ready supply of those gloves.”
“He didn’t wear a gown and mask, did he?”
“No.” Magda said. “But I’ll tell you this – he seemed to be holding his breath in that room. It was as if he didn’t want to breathe, just in case there was some air left in there that might have been exhaled by his wife.”
They sat in silence, Magda blowing cigarette smoke out the side of her mouth so that it drifted away from where Amanda sat, and across the garden.
“I will say,” said Magda, “that it was very close in that room. It had been shut up tight as a tomb. The first thing I did once he’d gone was to open the window.”
Later, when she’d been bagging up the woman’s clothes, Magda had found miniature bottles of vodka pushed down into the toes of shoes, and hidden in the pockets of coats and dresses hanging in the wardrobe.”
“Most were empty, but one or two were still full. I expect she’d forgotten where she’d put them.”
A question had floated into Amanda’s mind then: what if the husband had worn gloves so as not to leave fingerprints in his wife’s bedroom? If the room was being cleared it was not a crime scene, so her death had not been deemed suspicious. But what if he had caused that death? What if he’d got away with it, but was still being careful, just in case?
“How did she die?” Amanda asked.
Magda held out her mug for a refill. “He never said. Some alcohol related illness, you would think.”
Amanda had felt a quiver of unease. What if the bottles had been planted; what if the wife hadn’t ever been a drinker? It was the gloves that bothered her: they were so clinical, so calculated.
“What was he like, the husband?”
Magda thought for a moment. “He was … like a heron,” she said slowly, “all legs and beak. Sad looking, I suppose you could say, and scrupulously polite.” But Magda, picking up cake crumbs with her fingertips, which, like her hands, were red from scrubbing, and from contact with cleaning chemicals, had one more surprise.
“There was a nursery room,” she said. “The wallpaper and matching curtains were yellow and white – sunflowers and bunnies. There was nothing else. No furniture, nothing in the built-in wardrobe. But when I lifted the rug to sweep underneath, I found something.” She had reached into her bag and pulled out a paper boat. “I kept it to show you.”
Magda set it on the table beside their coffee mugs, and they stared at it: a tiny boat made of paper torn from a lined notebook. On the prow, its name: Erris.
“Look, there’s more.” With her reddened fingers, Magda gently unfolded the paper sail. Inside, pencilled letters that seemed about to fade before their eyes:
I was never mad
“Shouldn’t you take this to the police?” Amanda said.
“They’d laugh their legs off,” Magda said.
The flattened paper, with its creases, looked like something you would find blowing along the street, and yet its pencilled message rushed at Amanda; it entered her chest as a formless, aching beat. She picked up her mug and steadied herself with a mouthful of the strong black coffee.
When Magda had gone Amanda had thought she probably wouldn’t write about it – after all, it seemed like the start of a crime story and she wasn’t a crime writer. But then neither was Alice Munro, yet her stories teemed with violent deeds. So Amanda had sat down at her writing desk and allowed herself to imagine Alice beside her, guiding her hand and thoughts, and when the story was finished she had thought it one of her best.
Amanda has other stories out on submission. Her life is one of writing, and waiting, and while she waits she must maintain her hope, while ignoring the obliterating silence that emanates from the places she has submitted work to. The silence of editors and publishers is matched only by the silence of the grave, but then occasionally a note of encouragement flutters in, a small white ghostly bird that lands chirping on her desk. It was after one such message that she had converted the garden shed into her writing room.
There have been successes; stories published in anthologies, one or two in the company of well-known authors. A reviewer once described her prose as ‘finely tempered and meditative’, and a literary agent had read that review and made contact. The agent had suggested that Amanda expand her story into a novel, and she had tried – draft after draft. But the agent had wanted a racier style, and eventually it had become clear to both of them that Amanda couldn’t write in that vein. She didn’t even read the sort of books the agent was suggesting she write.
Walking away from the mail box in which her story, in its crisp white envelope, floats in the first dark pool of its outward journey, Amanda turns towards the station. Dry leaves tumbled by the wind make a scratching sound that sets her nerves on edge. She wonders whether William Trevor ever becomes discouraged, or Alice. Surely they are both so well published that they are past the point where they could ever feel dejected. Poor Maeve Brennan, though, for all her wit and skill, she had touched rock bottom. Maeve’s editor at The New Yorker had been William Maxwell. Imagine! Maxwell is another writer Amanda reveres, and a beautiful human being, too, by all accounts. She saw a picture of him once in which his face had seemed to shine with goodness. To deserve such an editor, a writer must be exceptional. On her better days, Amanda tells herself that anyone can dream.
In the railway station entrance, a woman with mad bright eyes and straggling grey hair jiggles a placard on a pole: Christ is Coming and He will Repay Unbelievers with Affliction! She thrusts a leaflet at Amanda, who accepts it and shoves it into her bag, noting that the woman is no older than she is and might even be a year or two younger. It is then that Amanda feels herself sinking, as helpless and as doomed as when she had drifted into the deep end at the swimming baths as a child, while her mother sat on the grass, engrossed in a book. If it hadn’t been for someone else’s mother jumping in and hauling her out she’d have drowned. But who will haul her out now? Her story is on its way to one of the world’s iconic magazines.
On the train, searching in her handbag for a mint, Amanda takes out the crumpled leaflet. What affliction, she wonders, is in store for her? She scans it to see whether there is a date for the predicted Rapture, because with luck it will arrive before the New Yorker receives her submission. It will certainly come before they respond. Then again, you never know: her story is compact, and sometimes an editor is desperate to fill a small space, though never, she suspects, an editor at The New Yorker.
Amanda returns the leaflet to her bag – she is not a sharp enough writer for The New Yorker. Not yet. And if the world does not end and save her, she can only pray that whoever reads it will not write a cruel letter. Because it takes her so long to recover from the shame of failure, which in some twisted way is like the creeping shame she has felt after rough treatment from one or two men she has known, men who are no longer in her life. But why, she wonders, do women accept the blame that shame implies? Why do writers? I was never mad: damn it, what had happened to that woman!
From the suburban station where she alights, she will catch a bus to where her daughter lives. Amanda is hazy on the details of bus numbers and timetables, but when the bus arrives she checks with the driver, and climbs on board.
If she had been able to satisfy that literary agent, her life would have been different. Friends would not roll their eyes when she refuses to lunch because it cuts into her working day. Lizbie would be proud of her. There would have been money to fix up the house, and she could have afforded a car. But lately Amanda is full of vague aches and pains; the literary skill she aspires to takes time to develop, and at least she hasn’t poured precious years into books that will be read once and discarded. What she yearns for in her writing is to hit one true note. A note that will make sense of something, perhaps of everything, a note that will crack the obliterating silence, once and for all.
She suspects that the story she has just written might have hit that note. If she has been able to capture what she felt when she first heard it from Magda – the sealed room, those gloves, that tiny message, and her sense of something hidden that needed to be uncovered, something dark and rotten, even evil, which has masqueraded as normality.
At the last moment, Amanda recognises the row of shops on the corner of Lizbie’s street and she presses the stop button. When the bus lurches to a halt she moves to the front.
“Have a good day, lady,” the driver says as she steps down.
Ignoring his peeved tone, Amanda thanks him, and sets off towards the sea.
She has brought Lizbie a jar of raw organic honey; she has brought pecans, and almonds, and a block of beautiful white nougat with pistachios. Lizbie has grown increasingly haggard in the years since her husband’s death; she looks a little like the woman who handed Amanda the leaflet outside the station, only younger. Amanda reminds herself that there have been times when she, too, let herself go down. Widows do, and then after a while they pull themselves up. The difference is that she’d had a small child to care for, and it’s this that worries her about Lizbie – there seems so little to tether her to life. Every Monday afternoon, Amanda takes the train and the bus to bring whatever small treats she can gather. She would come more often if Lizbie would let her.
Amanda remembers her daughter as a newborn with the shock of hair that had suggested her name, because of Hardy’s poem: ‘And, Lizbie Browne, Who else had hair bay-red as yours, Or flesh so fair’. She remembers her skipping cracks in the pavement, and then as a stroppy teen, impossible to deal with once she was on the pill.
At Lizbie’s gate she pauses, steadies herself with a few deep breaths before turning in.
Months pass without news of her submissions. But Amanda is engrossed in reading and re-reading Maeve Brennan’s The Springs of Affection as if a painstaking progress through its pages will show her how to emulate Maeve’s stripped yet devastating prose. By the time The Springs of Affection first appeared in print Maeve Brennan had spent time in a mental hospital. But could you ever guess that from reading her masterpiece? Apparently, Maeve had thought people were trying to poison her by putting cyanide in her toothpaste.
I was never mad: what failure, what shame, what guilt had caused the doctor’s wife to fold a tiny boat and write inside its sail?
Amanda has begun another story; it’s set in the year following her husband’s death. After Joe’s brain tumour she had sunk to her lowest, yet she’d done her best to look after Lizbie. The form of the story is slowly coming to her, and she has put the Do Not Disturb sign on the door of her writing room. But on Thursday afternoon she is interrupted by a furious knocking. When she is slow to respond, Magda shouts, “Are you in there?”
Amanda is still half in the world of her story when she opens the door.
“Sorry,” Magda waves a newspaper, “but will you look at this.”
She opens the paper on Amanda’s desk, and points at a black and white photograph in which a woman gazes unsmiling over her left shoulder at the camera. Her hair is scraped back into a ponytail, exposing a face in which the mouth is dark with lipstick, the eyebrows curved like the wings of a bird. “It’s that doctor’s wife.”
Together they stare at it, and as the woman stares back at them Magda says, “The police are investigating her death.”
“Why now?” Amanda says.
“Something turned up,” says Magda. “It seems she had written to an old friend right before she died. The friend had moved around a lot, but when the letter finally found her, she took it to the police.”
Police have opened an investigation into the death of Mrs Erris Cleary …
“Was she buried?”
“Cremated.”
How, then, was anything to be proved? Amanda leans closer to study the face – sharp, grave, alert, intelligent; the woman’s pose, her severely pulled back hair, remind her of Maeve Brennan. People have been tried for murder even without a body; there have been famous cases.
Magda says, “I should have gone to the police.”
“They’ll want to speak to you now,” Amanda says. “You still have that paper boat, don’t you?”
Magda pulls a face, and shakes her head.
“Even so, we both saw it.”
“I’ll go tomorrow morning, before work,” says Magda. “There’s that local police station near the hospital.”
“If you like, I’ll come with you.”
Tossing and turning in the early hours, Amanda wonders whether she should write to The New Yorker and withdraw her story. She wonders why, if that doctor had killed his wife, he would run the risk of bringing in a contract cleaner? Because he had wanted someone, a random stranger, to witness the wardrobe full of bottles!
In Amanda’s story there are two endings. Without an autopsy it could be the same in real life. The doctor’s wife might have hidden those bottles, or they might have been planted; her husband might have killed her for reasons of his own, or he might only have hated her alcoholism. But then why put on gloves to go into her room? If the husband never harmed her, Amanda would like him to explain the gloves.
Amanda rises early, and a pain in her hip that is new sets up a protest as she shuffles to the kitchen to fill the kettle. By the time Magda arrives she is dressed and ready, still tired, but moving more freely. Exercise eases the stiffness: Amanda knows this, yet she is a reluctant walker.
“I wish I hadn’t thrown out that boat,” Magda says. “I feel so stupid.”
“You weren’t to know.” Amanda gathers her purse and keys. “How could anyone be expected to?”
They set off under a clouded sky, along streets not yet clogged by rush hour traffic. This would be a good time of day to walk, Amanda thinks, if she could ever get motivated.
The police station has a sealed look, and Magda scans its blank windows with anxious eyes. “Do you think they’ll take us seriously?”
They mount worn slate steps, and push through a heavy door into a waiting room. There are scuffed white walls, and a lofty ceiling; light flares in a trio of windows high above their heads. Aside from the two of them, an old lady with bandaged legs dozes under a wall heater, and a hazel-haired young woman perches on a bench seat; she glances up at them, her eyes a wounded blue.
There is no one behind the glassed-in counter.
“At least my first job’s not ’til ten,” Magda says.
They sit side by side, and as Amanda shifts her left buttock to ease her hip she marvels at how the young woman’s spine never touches the back of the bench. What it must be like – the absence of pain, and no inkling that one day that will change. The young woman brings out a string of beads from her bag; they are lumpy and dark, with a little chain and a cross, a rosary; she cups them in her hands for a minute, and then puts them away.
A female police officer appears at the counter, and the young woman rises from the bench with a bird-like grace. The old lady still dozes, and Amanda wonders whether she is only there for the heater.
“Maybe we’ll be next,” says Magda.
A sudden flood of light at the windows washes over them, illuminating Magda’s small plain face with its sun-damaged skin and smoker’s wrinkles. A surge of love for her friend catches in Amanda’s throat: who’d have ever thought they would get this old. She turns to watch the young woman, whose body is poised at a tentative slant as she speaks to the policewoman. She nods, and hands a yellow envelope across the counter, and after a minute or two, a door Amanda has not noticed slides open, and the young woman walks through it and disappears.
Amanda thinks of her story in its envelope, slithering into the dark of the post box. Life is full of hidden doors and unexpected openings. She will not withdraw her work. It might be wishful thinking, but her gut feeling is that this one will find a decent home – maybe not The New Yorker, but somewhere that means something. If at last she has hit that one true note it must be allowed to ring, it must be allowed to shatter the silence.