‘Maybe you could take the class instead of me?’ I asked with a smile, knowing as the words emerged from my mouth that it had been the wrong thing to say, for you frowned as you took a long drink of your wine. When you returned the glass to the table, your lips held a faint purple stain that, for some reason, put me in mind of a priest I had known as a child whose lips always had the same tint. He used to come to my school to talk about the importance of keeping ourselves pure for our future husbands and had a particular obsession with a red-haired friend of mine who, he claimed, had the devil lurking inside her.
‘They wouldn’t want me,’ you said. ‘They want rising stars, not has-beens.’
‘They’d be lucky to have you,’ I said.
You threw me a look, one that said Please don’t patronize me, and I changed the subject immediately. Christmas was still three months away but we discussed where we might spend the day, with your family or mine, settling on yours. And then we talked about my sister, Rebecca, who had recently gone through a messy divorce. There were two children involved, my nephews Damien and Edward, and this only complicated matters as Rebecca was behaving appallingly towards their father, Robert, making it difficult for him to see the boys and then complaining that he didn’t spend enough time with them. I’d always liked my brother-in-law and wondered why it had taken him so long to leave my sister, who had spent a lifetime bullying people, including me, but I was obliged to take her side. I confided in you, however, that Robert had phoned me the previous evening and asked whether we might meet to talk.
‘To talk about what?’ you asked.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘He said that he’d prefer not to discuss it over the phone and asked whether he could call over to the flat next week. I told him that we weren’t there any more, that we’d be up here in Norwich for the next eight months, and he hummed and hawed a bit and said that he could always drive up if I had an afternoon free.’
‘I hope you told him no,’ you said.
‘Well, I didn’t know what to say,’ I replied. ‘It was all so unexpected and he just stayed silent on the phone, waiting for an answer.’
‘So you told him yes?’
‘I think I did.’
‘You think you did?’
‘All right, I did.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Edith! If Rebecca finds out you’ve been talking to him, she’ll show up here shouting bloody murder and before we know it she won’t let us see the boys either.’
‘Why should she find out?’ I asked.
‘Because people always do. It’s impossible to keep secrets within a family. Anyway, he’s hardly driving all the way to Norwich for a friendly catch-up, is he?’
‘I don’t know why he’s driving here,’ I protested. ‘Like I told you, he didn’t go into details over the phone.’
‘Well, it will only lead to trouble, I promise you that. He’ll want you to get involved with the custody hearing.’
‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly do that.’
‘Of course you couldn’t! But he’ll ask you to. He’ll want you to talk about all the things your sister has done over the years, about the verbal abuse, about the time she hit him—’
‘Christ, do you think so?’ I asked, for it had been just over a year since I had run into Robert in a supermarket and seen the black eye discolouring his face and, although he denied it, I knew who had given it to him. She used to hit me too when we were children, even when we were teenagers. Vicious, uncontrollable violence that would burst out of her like lava from a volcano whenever she thought our parents were favouring me over her. She only stopped when I started punching back.
‘Well, I’ll worry about it when it happens,’ I said with a shrug.
We grew silent again and I tried to build my resolve to ask you the question that had been preying on my mind ever since I’d accepted the position at UEA.
‘And what about you?’ I asked finally. ‘Have you decided what you’d like to do while we’re here?’
‘To do?’ you said. ‘In what sense?’
‘Well, to fill your days,’ I replied. ‘Are you going to do some writing?’
‘What’s the point? Publishers aren’t exactly beating a path to my door, are they?’
‘You could start something new?’ I suggested.
‘Why would I do that?’
‘Because you’re a brilliant novelist,’ I said, and you looked at me with such a wounded expression that for a moment I thought you were going to stand up and walk out. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I never know what to say when this subject comes up. I hate to hear you sounding so defeated.’
The truth was that I hated how unhappy you became whenever we discussed your stalled career and, although you would have grown angry had you known, I pitied you for it too. But more than anything, it just annoyed me. I wished you would simply accept that things hadn’t turned out as you’d hoped and work to improve them. For God’s sake, you were only thirty-four years old! Most writers are just starting their careers at that age! But things had come so easy to you at the start, hadn’t they? You were only twenty-four when you published your first novel and probably hadn’t been mature enough to cope with the success that Two Germans brought your way. And I think even you would agree that you rushed your second, The Treehouse, which is why it had been such a disaster. Your third book was turned down because it really wasn’t good enough and the three that followed were rejected because by then you were simply throwing ideas at the wall and hoping that one would stick. Which was when you said that you were done with writing for ever. That you’d only ever had one good idea and even that hadn’t been yours, it had been someone else’s story that you’d simply transcribed, receiving praise not for the quality of the book itself but for how you’d exposed a man with a treacherous past.
And yet when I read the books that followed, I could see why they had been met with failure or rejection, for they were utterly devoid of authenticity. And – the worst crime of all – they were boring. But then, you always said that you struggled when it came to thinking up good ideas, didn’t you? That if someone gave you a story, you could write it better than anyone else, but that you needed that basic idea to begin with.
‘You shouldn’t forget that you love writing,’ I said quietly, hoping that you wouldn’t overreact to my words.
‘I don’t,’ you replied, pouring another glass of wine for yourself but ignoring my glass, which was almost empty. ‘I hate it.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘I think I would know.’
‘You hate what writing has done to you, that’s all. How it’s let you down. But the craft itself, I know you still love it. I know you do. From the first day we met you were obsessed with the idea that the world should see you as a writer.’
‘What rubbish,’ you said.
‘I remember you even told me that you thought you might only publish four or five books in your lifetime so the world would take you more seriously.’