A Ladder to the Sky(103)

I smiled at him, rather impressed. Maybe the boy wasn’t quite as much a fool as I’d thought. ‘Now why would you ask that,’ I queried, ‘instead of asking whether I had anything to do with Fury? Wouldn’t that be the more obvious conclusion, considering my previous successes?’

‘Because none of these traits is visible in either Two Germans or The Treehouse. Not a single time. But you do it compulsively in The Tribesman. Which, of course, was published the year after your wife died.’

I glanced around to ensure that we couldn’t be overheard, but there was no one seated at any of the tables nearby. I could deny it, of course. Indeed, my first instinct was to deny it. But as I looked at him, the resemblance between my biographer and my son seemed so striking that I believed I might be able to make him understand what Daniel never had.

‘You’re very perceptive,’ I said. ‘Are we off the record now?’

‘I’m not a journalist.’

‘No, but are we off the record?’

He stared at me, then put the top back on his pen and placed it on his closed notebook. ‘Go ahead,’ he said.

‘The thing is,’ I said, feeling a delicious rush of excitement at what I was about to say, ‘I didn’t actually write The Tribesman. Edith did.’

He stared at me for a long time, then burst out laughing. ‘Now you’re just making fun of me,’ he said.

‘No, I’m being entirely serious,’ I replied with a shrug, my expression completely neutral. ‘Oh, she didn’t write every word in the book, don’t get me wrong. A lot of it is mine. In fact, I had to rewrite some sections substantially. The traits you’ve already listed were just some of her flaws as a writer and I was, shall we say, a more experienced hand.’

‘I don’t …’ He shook his head, looking at me as if I had started speaking in a foreign language. ‘I’m sorry, Maurice, I don’t quite understand what you’re telling me here.’

‘It’s quite simple. I’m saying that the original manuscript of the novel was written by Edith. Then Edith fell down the stairs and I took what she had written, worked pretty hard on it, I have to say, and turned it into a Maurice Swift novel. As a sort of … homage to her.’

‘But you’ve never mentioned this before,’ he said.

‘Haven’t I?’

‘No. I’ve read every interview you gave regarding that book and you never said a word about your wife’s contribution.’

‘I suppose it didn’t seem that important at the time. It’s a bit like what happened with Erich, in a way. He told me a story and I adapted it for my own use. Edith had a novel, she died, and I adapted it for my own use too. There’s not a great deal of difference between the two scenarios. It was a perfectly legitimate endeavour.’

As I heard myself say these words aloud, they didn’t sound as terrible to me as I had expected. In fact, my explanation sounded rather reasonable.

‘And you don’t think there’s something dishonest about that?’ asked Theo.

‘Not in the slightest,’ I said, feigning innocence. ‘Why, do you?’

A scene from a novel flashed through my mind. The moment at the end of Howards End when Dolly, the silly girl, reveals that the house had been left to Margaret Schlegel in Ruth’s will but Henry had thrown the offending note in the fire. I didn’t do wrong, did I? he asks in all innocence.

And Margaret, who has been through so much, shakes her head and says, You didn’t, darling. Nothing has been done wrong.

Theo, however, was no Margaret Schlegel.

‘I do, to be honest.’

‘Oh, then I think you’re just being a little uptight. Look, Edith was dead. Or she was in a coma, anyway. And a manuscript existed. It was obvious that it was going to be a major success if it was knocked into shape. So, of course, I used what she’d left behind. I owed that to her. If you’d been in my position, wouldn’t you have done the same thing? Out of love?’

‘No!’ he said, leaning forward, and the look of astonishment on his face rather frightened me. Had I underestimated how seriously he would take this? ‘It wouldn’t even have occurred to me!’

‘Hm,’ I said, considering this. ‘Then perhaps I do have an imagination after all.’

‘Maurice, I don’t know how—’

‘Look, I did what I did and I stand by it, all right? What else should I have done? Publish it posthumously under her name? What good would that have done? There would have been no writer to publicize it. No one to read from it at the festivals. The book probably would have died a death. No, it made far more sense to claim it as my own and accept the garlands that came in its wake. If anything, it was a tribute to Edith that it was so well received.’

‘Fuck me,’ said Theo quietly, shaking his head and burying himself in his pint for a few minutes. From time to time he scribbled a few notes on the pad which I couldn’t make out from where I was sitting, and I didn’t enquire as to what they were. I waited until he was ready, sitting quietly, enjoying my drink, until he finally looked up at me, and I smiled at him.

‘Another drink?’ I asked.

While I was standing at the bar, I felt a curious mixture of relief and anxiety. I had told the truth, or a version of it, anyway, and had done so in such a way that I’d made it clear I didn’t believe it was anything to get too worked up over. Theo might have been surprised by what I’d said, but it wasn’t as if he could hold me to account for it. Edith’s original manuscript had long since been shredded and, if he chose to write about this in his thesis, I could either deny it or stand by every word and say that yes, my late wife had been working on a vague idea, or we had been working on it together, but it was in its very early stages when she died. And I had simply continued with the book.