“My wife woke up feeling awful, as she forgot to take her prescription pills the night before,” I say. “That’s why I decided to stay at home. I even canceled my meeting with a group of campaign volunteers so that I could keep an eye on her. Thankfully, she decided to stay in bed for most of the day, and all remained well.”
“What was wrong with her?”
I groan. Fact: Claire’s condition has been a considerable source of vexation to me over the years.
“If you must know, Inspector,” I say with a sigh, “my wife suffers from depression. Her behavior can get a little erratic at times. I’d be grateful if you could keep this confidential, by the way. I do not wish the press to learn about my wife’s…er…health problems.”
Richardson nods before jotting something in his notebook with a frown.
“Did you and Mrs. Evans stay at home all day yesterday, then?”
“Yes.”
“What else did you do, apart from keeping tabs on her?”
“I tried to do some writing at the kitchen table while Claire rested upstairs. But I wasn’t too productive in the end. So I decided to do some admin work in my study, while checking on Claire every hour or so.”
“What sort of work?”
“Spreadsheets. E-mails. Things that do not require inspiration.”
“And what inspires you, Mr. Evans?”
“Everyday life. The simplest things.”
“Like marital turmoil, say? Did it inspire that scene in On Death’s Door? The one in which your protagonist, Gunnar, quarrels with his wife, Sigrid, only two days before the death of their child?”
So the detective has read my novel.
“It’s impossible to say how novels are shaped by real life.” My sentence comes out more curtly than I had intended.
“How do you keep track of what inspires you?”
Fact: For one reason or another, only Monos have ever asked me that question at writers’ conferences. I don’t know why: it must be a Mono inferiority thing. But surely the detective isn’t a Mono. At any rate, I should give him my stock answer, the one I dredge out each time.
“By writing it all down in my diary, of course. Everything. The shocking, the heart-wrenching, and the absurd.”
“How do you keep track of what you have already written when you are working on a novel?”
“I just page back to what I don’t remember.”
“Then why does Gunnar come from Valberg on one page and Varberg on another? One’s in Norway, the other’s in Sweden.”
I gape at the detective. Fact: I only discovered that typo two months after publication; it somehow evaded all the editors who worked on the book. Yet none of my readers has spotted the error—until today. Richardson must have read the novel really carefully. This makes me twice as nervous.
“You clearly know your Scandinavian geography, Inspector.”
“I’m one-quarter Swedish and one-quarter Danish.”
I blink.
“You haven’t answered my question,” he says.
“All novels have…er…mistakes in them. Do you spend all your time trying to spot errors in books?”
“My job is to find cracks in what appears seamless on the surface.” The detective’s gray eyes are mutating into iron gimlets. “How would you describe the state of your marriage, by the way?”
“Happy, of course.” My words spill out in a quaver despite my best attempt at sounding confident.
“And what do you mean by happy?”
I rack my brains for an appropriate factual answer before deciding to borrow a couple of lines from On Death’s Door: “It depends on how happiness is defined. My personal definition is that you know you were happy only afterwards.”
Richardson raises an eyebrow before scribbling a couple of things down in his notebook.
“What happened the day before yesterday? Thursday?”
This is where it gets trickier. I ought to watch my words.
“I stayed in, too. I spent most of the day writing in my study. Unlike yesterday, it was a reasonably productive day. I wrote around eight hundred words. I then dealt with e-mails in the afternoon.”
“So you didn’t leave your home.”
“Nope.”
“Did you speak to anyone during the day?”
“I was on the phone in the late afternoon, to my agent, Camilla, and my campaign manager, Rowan.”
“What happened in the evening?”
“Nothing much. I fell asleep in front of the television in my study.”
“Two days before? Wednesday?”
I reach for my iDiary and scan Wednesday’s entry:
I spent a frustrating morning battling with The Serendipity of Being, but I did manage around eight hundred words by lunchtime. At noon, I trooped to the kitchen to make a sandwich for myself before Claire’s return from the Cambridge Flower School. I enjoyed wolfing down the sandwich without having to make meaningless lunchtime conversation with my wife. It’s a shame her company’s so unstimulating these days. I called Camilla after lunch to reassure her that The Serendipity of Being is coming along well.
—Thank God for that! Novelists and deadlines seldom go together. That’s a fact. But you’ll deliver, won’t you?
—I’m glad the shit storm over my Sunday Times article has died down over the past couple of days.
—Shit storms are what we need to sell your book. That must be the best promotion piece you’ve ever written-. Maybe you should do a follow-up next month.
Camilla added that our publicist, Ben, is attempting to secure a prime-time TV interview slot ahead of the novel’s release next spring. He’s pretty confident about getting one, she added, in the wake of the uproar caused by my Sunday Times article. Rowan phoned later to confirm the time of our press conference at the Cambridge Guildhall—12:00 p.m. this Saturday—to coincide with the Mixed Marriage Act, due for royal assent on Friday. I should make the most out of the fact that I’ve been in a mixed marriage for twenty years.
—Always seize an opportunity when it presents itself, Mark. This is a cardinal rule of politics. Although timing’s just as important, if you haven’t yet worked this out.
Rowan’s right. I spent the rest of the afternoon drafting out answers to possible questions from journalists, saved as “Pressconf.doc.” I then dealt with e-mails and other campaign-related correspondence. (God, I hate bureaucracy—perhaps I should get a secretary.) Dinner with Claire, who had spent the entire afternoon preparing my favorite rabbit stew. I feel bad whenever I see her slaving away in the kitchen: Why does she always try so hard to please? I feel twice as guilty whenever she tries to be nice. The rabbit was spectacular, but the conversation was again devoid of intellectual sparkle. Why isn’t Claire into fine art or classical literature? Ibsen plays, Wagner operas, or Virginia Woolf? What on earth does she see in those ditzy women’s magazines on her bedside table? Why must I bite my tongue whenever I’m tempted to discuss plot twists for The Serendipity of Being, certain that a Mono like her will never get it? Spent the rest of the evening sprawled before the television in my study, making greater headway with a bottle of Chateau Lafite Rothschild (1996) than with The Serendipity of Being.