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4. TWO YEARS EARLIER

It had been seven years since Nancy died and yet I still hadn’t got round to sorting through her things. Her clothes hung in the wardrobe. Her shoes, her handbags. She had tiny feet. Size three. Her papers, letters, still lay on the desk and in drawers. I liked coming across them. I liked picking up letters to her, even if they were from British Gas. I liked seeing her name and our shared address written down officially. I had no excuse once I’d retired though. Just get on with it, Stephen, she would have said. So I did.

I started with her clothes, unhooking them from hangers, taking them out of drawers, laying them out on the bed, ready for their journey out of the house. All done, I’d thought, until I saw a cardigan which had slipped off its hanger, and was hiding in a corner of the wardrobe. It is the colour of heather. Lots of colours actually. Blue, pink, purple, grey, but the impression is of heather. We had bought it in Scotland before we were married. Just before we were married. Nancy used to wear it like a shawl: the sleeves, empty of her arms, hanging limply at her sides. I have kept it, I’m holding it now. It is cashmere. The moths have got at it and there is a small hole on the cuff which I can fit my little finger through. She hung on to it for over forty years. It has outlived her and I suspect that it will outlive me too. If I continue to shrink, as I undoubtedly will, then I might soon be able to fit into it.

I remember Nancy wearing it in the middle of the night when she’d get up to feed Jonathan. Her nightgown would be unbuttoned, with Jonathan’s tiny mouth around her nipple and this cardigan draped around her shoulders, keeping her warm. If she saw me watching from the bed she would smile and I would get up and make tea for us both. She always tried not to wake me, she said she wanted me to sleep and that she didn’t mind being up. She was happy. We both were. The joy and surprise of a child delivered in middle age when we had all but given up hope. We didn’t bicker about who should get up or who was stealing whose sleep. I’m not going to claim it was fifty-fifty. I would have done more, but the truth is that it was Nancy Jonathan needed most of, not me.

Even before those midnight feasts, that cardigan was a favourite of hers. She wore it when she was writing: over a summer frock, over a blouse, over her nightdress. I’d glance over from my desk and watch her at hers, striking out at her typewriter, the limp sleeves quivering at her sides. Yes, before we became teachers Nancy and I were both writers. Nancy stopped soon after Jonathan was born. She said she’d lost her appetite for it, and when Jonathan started at the infants’ school she decided to get a job teaching there. But I’m repeating myself.

Neither Nancy nor I had much success as writers, although we both had the odd story published. On reflection, I would say that Nancy had more success than I, but it was she who insisted I carry on when she gave up. She believed in me. She was so sure that one day it would happen, that I’d break through. Well, maybe she was right. It has always been Nancy’s faith which has driven me on. But she was the better writer. I always knew that, even if she didn’t acknowledge it. She supported me for years as I produced word after word, chapter after chapter, and one or two books. All rejected. Until, thank God, she finally understood that I didn’t want to write anymore. I’d had enough. It just felt wrong. It was hard to get her to believe me when I said it was a relief to stop. But I meant it. It was a relief. You see, I’d always enjoyed reading far more than writing. To be a writer, to be a good writer, you need courage. You need to be prepared to expose yourself. You must be brave, but I have always been a coward. Nancy was the brave one. So, that’s when I started teaching.

It did take courage though to clear out my wife’s things. I folded her clothes and put them in carrier bags. Her shoes and handbags I put into boxes which had once held bottles of wine. No inkling, when that wine came into the house, that the boxes it arrived in would leave containing my dead wife’s accessories. It took me a week to pack everything up but longer to remove it from the house.

I couldn’t bear to let everything go at once and so I staggered my trips to the charity shop. I got to know the two women at All Aboard quite well. I told them the clothes had belonged to my wife, and after that, when I dropped by, they would stop what they were doing and make time for me. If I happened to turn up when they were having coffee, then they’d make me a cup too. It became strangely comforting, that shop full of dead people’s clothes.

I worried that, once I finished the job of sorting through Nancy’s things, I would fall back into the lethargy I’d been in since I’d retired, but I didn’t. As sad as it was, I knew I had done something Nancy would have approved of and I made a decision: that from then on I would do my best to behave in a way that, if Nancy were to walk into the room, she would feel love for me and not shame. She would be my editor, invisible, objective, but with my best interests at heart.

One morning, quite soon after that clear-out period, I was on my way to the underground station. I had woken with a real sense of purpose: got up, washed, shaved, dressed, breakfasted, and was ready to leave the house by nine. I was in a good mood, anticipating a day spent in the British Library. I had been thinking about writing again. Not fiction, but something more solid, factual. Nancy and I had sometimes holidayed on the East Anglian coast and one summer we had rented a Martello tower. I had always wanted to find out more about the place, but every book I’d found on the subject had been so dry, so lifeless. Nancy had tried too, for various birthdays of mine, but all she had come up with were dull volumes full of dates and statistics. Anyway, that’s what I settled on as my writing project: I would bring that marvellous place to life. Those walls had been soaked in the breath of others over hundreds of years and I was determined to find out who had spent time in it from then until now. So that morning I had set off with quite the spring in my step. And then I saw a ghost.

I didn’t have a clear view of her. There were people between us. A woman pushing her child in a pram. Two youths ambling. Smoking. But I knew it was her, I would know her anywhere. She was walking quickly, with purpose, and I tried to keep up but she was younger than me, her legs stronger, and my heart raced with the effort and I was forced to stop for a moment. The distance between us grew and by the time I was able to move again, she had disappeared into the underground. I followed, fumbling to get through the barrier, fearful that she would get on a train and I would miss her. The stairs are steep, too steep, and I feared I might fall in my rush to join her on the platform. I gripped the rail and cursed my feebleness. But she was still there. I smiled as I walked up to her. I thought she had waited for me. And then she turned and looked right at me. There was no smile returning mine. Her expression was anxious, perhaps even scared. Of course it wasn’t a ghost. It was a young woman, maybe thirty. She was wearing Nancy’s coat, the one I had given to the charity shop. She had the same colour hair as Nancy had had at that age. Or at least that’s what I had seen. But when I got up close, I realised the colour of this young woman’s hair was nothing like Nancy’s. Brown yes, but fake, flat, dead brown. It didn’t have the vibrant, living shades of Nancy’s hair. I could see that my smile had alarmed her, so I turned away, hoping she would understand I hadn’t meant any harm, that it was just a mistake. The train came but I waited for the next one — I didn’t want her to think I was following her.

I didn’t fully recover until halfway through that morning. The quiet of the library, the beauty of the place, and the comforting tasks of reading, making notes, making progress got me back to the place I had been when I started my day. By the time I got home in the early evening, I was quite myself again. I picked up one of those Marks & Spencer meals on my way back from the tube as a treat, an easy supper. I opened a bottle of wine but drank only one glass. I don’t drink much these days; I prefer to have control over my thoughts. Too much alcohol sends them haring off in the wrong direction, like out-of-control toddlers.

I was keen to go through my notes before bed, so I went to my desk to make a start, but there were still papers of Nancy’s littering the surface. I flicked through circulars and old bills, knowing already that there was nothing of real importance there. If there had been, then wouldn’t it have made its presence felt by now? I tipped the lot into the wastepaper basket, then took my typewriter from the cupboard and set it down in the centre of the cleared desk, ready to start work the following morning.

When Nancy had been writing she had had her own desk, a small oak one which now sits in Jonathan’s flat. When she stopped, we agreed that she might as well share mine. She had the right-hand drawers, I the left. She kept her manuscripts in the bottom drawer, and although there were others stacked on the bookcase, the three in the desk were the ones she had had most hope for. I knew they were there, but even so it gave me a shock to see them. A View of the Sea, Out of Winter, and A Special Kind of Friend, all unpublished. I picked up A Special Kind of Friend and took it to bed with me.

It must have been nearly forty years since I had read those words. She had written the novel the summer before Jonathan was born. It was as if Nancy was in bed with me. I could hear her voice quite clearly: Nancy as a young woman, not yet a mother. There was energy in it, fearlessness, and it threw me back to a time when the future had excited us, when things that hadn’t happened yet thrilled rather than frightened. I was happy when I went to sleep that night appreciating that, even though she was no longer with me, I had been lucky to have had Nancy in my life. We had opened ourselves up to each other. We had shared everything. I thought we knew all there was to know about each other.