The Editor's Wife by Clare Chambers Page B

insurance company in Croydon, while I was a source of anxiety and disappointment. Mum and Dad were relieved that I was at least supporting myself and not sponging off the state or them, and I was able to propitiate them with offerings of cod nearing the end of its shelf life.
    When I was sacked from that job for misjudging a gap between two parked cars and putting a deep gouge down the side of the van, I decided a fresh approach was needed. I would work for three months, during which time I would try to save as much as possible, and then write for three months, or until I ran out of money, when I would repeat the pattern. Luckily jobs were not as scarce as they had been, and I was not choosy, becoming variously a plasterer’s labourer, a builder’s mate and a cashier at MeccaBookmakers. This method was much more successful, and over the next year and a half I produced about half of
The Night Wanderer
, which was to be my first and last published work.
    When I reached my twenty-fourth birthday, I had a sort of crisis. I suppose I had set myself that date as the deadline by which time I would be a successful writer, and yet I was still living in one room in Brixton, operating this schizophrenic three-month-shift system, and no one – apart from the girl whose indifference had killed off
Ask Your Mother to Pass the Salt
– had read a line of my work.
    I knew nothing about publishing, and no one who could advise me of the protocols of submitting manuscripts, but I was desperate for some professional feedback. My own conviction and self-belief were no longer sufficiently nourishing to sustain me.
    I chose Penguin, because it was famous and distinguished, and Kenway & Luff, a small independent firm, for no better reason than that they had discovered and, many years on, still published Ravi Amos, to my mind the greatest living novelist. To these two I sent copies of the first three chapters of
The Night Wanderer
, along with a very brief letter of introduction. I suppose, having lost faith in my own critical judgement, I was placing my fate squarely in the hands of others. If the verdict was negative, I would give up, crushed. If positive, I would continue with redoubled energy, but either way, a decision would have been made.
    I never did hear from Penguin, but the day the letter arrived from Kenway & Luff remains fixed in my memory as a peak experience, never to be equalled. I can still picture the crisp golfball typeface, and the stiff cream-coloured envelope, franked with the K&L logo.
    Dear Mr Flinders
    I enjoyed the first three chapters of your novel and would be keen to see more. Perhaps, since you live in London, you would like to come in for a chat. If so, please give me a call on the above number.
    Yours sincerely
    Owen Goddard
    Editor
    Nothing would ever be as good as those first few words of affirmation: not signing my first contract, receiving my first advance or seeing my finished novel in hardback for the first time, with my name on the jacket.
    I had to exercise the utmost will power not to pick up the phone and call him straight away. Rather than appear callow and over-eager I forced myself to be patient and allow a dignified interval to elapse. I judged three days to be ideal – any longer and Owen Goddard, Editor, might have forgotten me or changed his mind – and for three days I carried his letter in my pocket, in a fever of anticipation, and read it again and again to check that I hadn’t missed any nuance.
    When at last I called he was out of the office and I had to leave a message with a secretary, who assured me he would ring back. The phone was a communal one, three flights down in the hall, and I had no great confidence that any of my anonymous housemates would bother to come and fetch me. I haunted the stairwell, afraid to go out in case he rang in my absence.
    At five thirty on the following day he called, full of apology for the delay. I couldn’t put an age to him, but he