The Editor's Wife by Clare Chambers

going to be in Scarborough on Saturday – my aunt is in something at the Playhouse. Perhaps I could stop off on the way back and pick it up. If it’s not inconvenient.’
    â€˜All right,’ I agreed. ‘But don’t judge me too harshly. I was only young.’

PART TWO

11
The Goddard Papers: An Apology
    The following account was written by me, Christopher Flinders, soon after the events described, and is as true as I could make it.
    IN 1983 I was in my final year studying maths at York University. I hadn’t fully considered that this would lead me to a career analysing tax liabilities: my ambitions were both more vague and more grandiose then, as befits someone who has never had to make a living. In any case, unlike my fellow students, I had another, secret string to my bow: I was going to be a writer. I had already written a hundred pages of a novel called
Ask Your Mother to Passthe Salt
, a fictitious memoir of a brutal working-class childhood, greatly influenced by my reading of D. H. Lawrence. While my friends were doing the milk round of interviews for that first foothold in industry, I was in my room, jabbing out my tale of passion and suffering on an old Imperial typewriter which amputated the descenders, and threw every capital letter just above the line.
    I had always intended to keep this embarrassing hobby to myself until such time as I had a publishing contract, when I would be able to drop it into conversation without fear of ridicule. I hadn’t really abandoned the idea of a career in business, imagining, without much clarity, that I could do both until my reputation as a writer was established. One weekend at home, however, a chance remark of Dad’s prompted me to take drastic action.
    Mum had been out for the day at a funeral – the husband of one of her bridge friends – unknown to the rest of us, and had returned from the wake carrying a mysteriously bulging carrier bag. This proved to contain one of the dead man’s suits, a three-piece, pinstriped horror, apparently hailing from the Prohibition era. It only needed spats and a trilby. I could see Mum mentally measuring me up, as I stood in the kitchen doorway, like a hangman estimating the drop.
    â€˜This’ll do nicely for you, Christopher,’ she said. ‘You’ll be needing a suit when you start work.’ She bore down on me, holding the jacket open to reveal the discoloured lining at the armpits. It gave off a jumble-sale smell of dust and the sickly, alcoholic odour of decades-old gentlemen’s cologne.
    I laughed, keeping my hands in my pockets, and backing off slightly. ‘You’ve got to be joking.’
    Mum bridled at this affront to her bereaved friend’s generosity, and her own resourcefulness. ‘Why should I be? It’s a perfectly good suit. Jermyn Street.’
    â€˜Perfectly good if you want to look like a Chicago mobster.’
    â€˜What nonsense. Reg used to wear it to work up at Barclays Bank in High Holborn. It’s a classic men’s business suit. They don’t date.’
    There’s something about a funeral, even a stranger’s, that makes you momentarily appreciate your individuality. All of a sudden I found myself bitterly resenting Mum’s insufferable bourgeois certainties: that I would be going into ‘business’; that I would require a ‘classic’ suit; that what was good enough for Reg somebody-or-other was good enough for me.
    â€˜I might not need a suit,’ I said. ‘I might not be planning to work in an office.’
    â€˜Oh I dare say you could get a job in the abattoir,’ said Mum, removing her black hat and jabbing the hatpin back through the crown with some force.
    â€˜I was thinking I might be a writer,’ I said, in the sort of offhand tone guaranteed to rile her. ‘Then I could wear any old thing.’
    â€˜A writer?’ said Mum incredulously. ‘No one’s going to