The kids are too young to tidy up, Marie said, if I complained, adding, on one occasion, ‘If you were younger, you’d not make such a fuss about it.’ She had a migraine at the time and later apologised, saying she hadn’t really meant it. But I knew she did mean it, the ten-year gap in our ages being a topic I was touchy about, and which Marie had learned to avoid, though the fact was always screamingly present to me, not so much because the statistics suggested I might pre-decease her by as much as twenty years (that was too distant a prospect to worry about), but because it reminded me of other gaps between us, some of them minor (like the lack of overlap between the television programmes we watched as kids or the music we listened to as teenagers), others weightier but get-roundable, like the disparity in our upbringing and education, yet a few that caused us more grief, like the reality of Marie having friends who were still in their mid-thirties and, as she put it, up for doing stuff, whether clubbing, weekends in Barcelona or trips to health farms, whereas my friends were people like Rob, who’d never done stuff in the first place or weren’t about to start now.
Being fourteen years younger than Rob and ten years older than Marie put me in the middle, more or less, just as having parents (a mother, anyway) as well as kids put me in the middle. My job put me in the middle, too – between my colleagues on one side and authors, agents and publishers on the other. And I was middle-aged – forty-five – and middling in height (five foot ten), weight (eleven and a half stone) and appearance (brown-black hair, hazel-green eyes, ochre-white skin). I thought about my middlingness a lot. On good days, I took heart: there I was, look, a centred kind of guy living at the heart of things. On bad, I despised myself as grey, compromised, Matt the middleman. Becoming Rob’s executor would mean more of the same, as I mediated between his manuscripts and the public, a task I hoped wouldn’t arise for some time, but if it did would have to be fitted in between obligations to the paper, Marie, the kids, my mother and my increasingly neglected ambitions as a novelist. He’d left it open to me to decline, but I couldn’t. Increasingly melancholy in recent years, he had seemed bleaker than ever at lunch – bitter, too, that the world, or his muse, had abandoned him. To refuse him would have been cruel. As my dad used to say, never kick a man when he’s down.
Marie’s peppermint tea had brewed too long; I poured half away and topped it up with boiling water. Jack’s wind-up woolly dog lay waiting to trip me at the bottom of the stairs. When I nudged it aside with my foot, its tail wagged and it let out noisy yaps. Setting down the mug of tea, I removed the A4 batteries housed in the underbelly hatch and left it lying stiffly on its side.
2
Rob and I met at Brandon, Massachusetts, in the early nineties. I was twenty-four and had been awarded a scholarship on the MFA Fiction program on the basis of a good degree and a couple of Carveresque short stories. I was immensely chuffed and couldn’t have afforded it otherwise, but (unlike Iowa’s, say) the creative writing program at Brandon was far from prestigious, as I soon found out. Rob didn’t teach creative writing. Throughout his twenties he’d been working towards a PhD on Keats. The PhD was never completed, but he succeeded in placing a chapter from it in an American scholarly journal, and on the back of that, against all odds, was appointed to a lectureship in Tennessee (‘a hotbed of Keatsians’, he said), where he taught for several years before moving to Brandon. As an authority on Romanticism, he was put in charge of the fresher course on Byron, Keats and Shelley, a course students flocked to ‘because of the James Dean Marilyn Monroe Keith Moon Mama Cass all-the-good-die-young factor, which I do my best to dissuade them of’. He preferred the postgraduate seminar he ran, on the Augustan period (‘I’m a Pope by name and nature’), because the students were fewer in number and sometimes went so far as to read the texts. It was through the seminar that we met, not because I was enrolled for it, but because Kirsten, a girl I knew on the fiction course, had taken it the previous year and described Rob as a genius – a tortured one, she added, which I took to be a reference to how he looked and spoke in class, not to the fact that (so I found out later) he’d failed to respond when she flirted with him, something so unfathomable to her (Kirsten was a very beautiful girl) that only the word ‘tortured’ could explain it, though it’s true that after a second, more decisive rejection, at which I was present, she did use several other words, including ‘weird’, ‘repressed’ and ‘fucked up’.
‘You’re both Brits,’ she said, ‘you should meet.’
‘Sure.’
I’d left the country to get away from them. But anything to please Kirsten.
‘There’s a bar he goes to on Thursdays after class. We could hang out there.’
The bar was mock Western: swing doors, wooden floor with sawdust, lassos and cowboy hats festooning the walls. The last place I’d associate with Rob. But he was different back then – less fixed in his ways.
He was alone at a table in the corner, with a beer, the New York Review of Books and the air of someone who doesn’t want to be disturbed. With his T-shirt, jeans, mass of hair and bushy forearms, he looked more like a construction worker than an academic. The only pedagogic touch was his beard, with its premature dabs of grey.
Kirsten ploughed in. ‘Hey, Professor Pope, can we get you a beer?’
‘Um, not really,’ he mumbled, which I took to be a refusal of the beer, rather than a protest at the title – he wasn’t a professor, but every lecturer at Brandon, however lowly, got called that. He didn’t look as if he recognised Kirsten, let alone knew her name.
‘This is Matt,’ she said, undeterred. ‘From London.’
‘From Norwich, actually,’ I said, thrusting my hand at him.
‘What brings you here?’ he said, reluctantly shaking it.
‘The Fiction course.’
‘You could have stayed home. What’s wrong with UEA?’
‘Brandon offered me a scholarship.’
‘Well, good luck. I don’t believe creative writing can be taught. Certainly none of the poets here should be teaching poetry.’
‘I’m enjoying myself so far.’
‘It’s only October,’ he said. ‘You wait.’
‘Are you sure you won’t have a beer, Professor Pope?’ Kirsten said, oblivious to how badly things were going.
‘Robert, please,’ he said. ‘Go on, then.’
‘I’ll get them, Kirsten,’ I said, helping him out with the name.
‘I insist – you guys sit there and catch up on the old country.’
‘Sorry if we’re intruding,’ I said, once I’d sat down.
‘I’m only reading this shit. Ten thousand words on John Ashbery. Christ, he’s not even any good.’
Not having read Ashbery, I was stuck for something to say. Rob didn’t seem to mind. He spent the next five minutes telling me – and once Kirsten had returned with the drinks, the half-hour after that telling both of us – why Ashbery was no good, and Wallace Stevens not much better, and that the whole American literary-critical ‘circus’ were either stooges of the CIA or dimwits who couldn’t tell a Hardy from a Heaney. I could follow barely half of what he was saying, but I enjoyed the spleen. He waved his arms around a lot. The word ‘repressed’ seemed way off the mark.
The incident that made Kirsten use it of him was yet to occur. And there was no reason to see it coming. Both of us were equally wide-eyed, would-be novelists whose opinions on what constituted good writing were still at the infant stage and who couldn’t imagine ever becoming as knowledgeable as Rob. Far from resenting our presence, he seemed to enjoy having an audience, one that wasn’t there by compulsion (as his undergraduates were) and wouldn’t argue back or cut him off (as his fellow profs doubtless did). A bar, rather than a lecture theatre, seemed to be his natural habitat. From time to time, I glanced across at Kirsten. ‘Open-mouthed’ is the cliché for awestruck listeners, but she was tautly attentive rather than slack-jawed, smiling and nodding as if she too thought ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ the least fatuous
of Ashbery’s poems, even if horribly flawed.
‘I love poetry,’ Kirsten said. ‘Expressing your feelings – that’s so creative.’
‘Is it?’ Rob said.
‘When something’s come from inside you and you share it.’
‘Piss and shit come from inside you – you wouldn’t share them.’
‘Poets are so physical,’ Kirsten said, undeterred, ‘so intimate, so erotic, it’s what I’m aiming for in my own writing. I just love Whitman’s “Song of Myself”.’
‘Terrible title, terrible poem. “Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” – what bollocks.’
‘What about British poets?’ I said, to spare Kirsten from Rob’s harangue. More vituperation followed. I wish I could remember all the epithets he used, and though I did later write a few of them down, Boswell-fashion, they seemed lame without hearing his voice, or rather the voices of the poets he was taking off. He’d a gift for mimicking regional accents, Northern Irish as well as Liverpudlian, that Kirsten couldn’t have appreciated, though she laughed as if she did.
‘So it’s not just American poets you hate?’ I said.
‘I love America,’ he said, which wasn’t an answer, but prompted another riff, non-literary this time, on how he’d always wanted to come to the US, his great-grandfather having emigrated to Michigan as a young man to work for Chrysler, which he did for twenty years before returning to the UK with his family and, armed with advanced mechanical know-how, setting up a garage business, which had prospered so well that the Pope family was still reaping the benefits, long after they’d sold the business. He’d been told that his great-grandfather once killed a man, a no-good negro (‘his phrase, not mine’, Rob said) who used to lie in wait each Friday as the workers came out of the Chrysler factory with their pay packets, until he, the great-grandfather, bought a gun and shot him dead – perhaps in collaboration with others, Rob said, since they carried the man back inside the factory and laid him out on a workbench and left him there, rightly guessing that the corpse would be gone by Monday morning, no questions asked. ‘Probably apocryphal,’ Rob said, ‘and deeply shameful if true,’ but to a young boy the story made America seem an exciting place, and so it had proved. He’d no intention of going back to the UK in the immediate future, though to get his poems published he would have to; the stuff he wrote, such as it was, had no appeal to Ashberyites, about whom – apologies if he’d bored us with his rant – he’d said more than enough already.
Rob was impressive. And I was lonely, new to the US and in need of a new mentor. My dad had been first; then Mr Haigh, our English teacher at school (who came into his own, or helped me to come into mine, in the sixth form); then Diarmid Shannon, convener of the Modernist module at Bristol. I’d left them behind, in the UK, opening a space for Rob to fill. Even as I sat there, having only just met him, the familiar sensations passed through me – deference, admiration, the wish to learn.
The incident that made Kirsten call him ‘repressed’ occurred as I brought the third or fourth round of beers back to our table, though I caught only the tail end, which consisted of Rob saying ‘No offence’ and Kirsten looking highly offended. She had proposed, so she reported to me later, that we all have dinner afterwards, and he’d replied that it would be inappropriate. ‘Man,’ she said, ‘he might be a genius, but he’s so fucking weird and repressed. I mean, what’s inappropriate about a prof having dinner with two grad students? It’s not like we’re even taking his course. How fucked up is that?’
‘Yes, seriously fucked up,’ I concurred, not because I believed it (didn’t genius and fucked-up-ness go together?) but in the hope that concurrence would allow me to make a move on Kirsten, with whom I was by then drinking tequila over an oilcloth-covered table at her place. We’d left the bar pretty swiftly after Rob’s refusal, she having fallen silent in its wake. She’d remained more or less silent as I walked her home, and her ‘Wanna come up?’ took me by surprise. Up was the fifth floor of an old tenement building, now occupied by students. She shared the flat with three other girls, all currently across town at a gig, she told me, which seemed a good omen, as did the offer of tequila rather than coffee. Most encouraging of all was her dissing of Rob, his genius status now forfeited by his fucked-up-ness. Beyond the oilcloth-covered table was a sofa, and beyond that a couple of doors, one of which surely opened to her bedroom. American courting etiquette can’t be so different from British, can it? I reflected, as Kirsten, excusing herself, disappeared to what she called ‘the ladies’ room’, a term I associated with pubs and restaurants not domestic spaces, and anyway every room in the flat was a ladies’ room or lady’s room. Would Kirsten return wearing ‘something more comfortable’, as women did in Hollywood films, having changed into a flimsy nightdress, hair unpinned for good measure? Undeterred when she didn’t, I stood up with the intention of taking her in my arms (‘sweeping her up’ was the phrase in the film scenario still running in my head), till she cleverly sidestepped me, like someone shrinking back from a shower because the water has run cold.
‘You’re so sweet, Matt,’ she said, ‘but I’m not ready for a relationship.’
‘Sure, sorry, I didn’t mean to rush you,’ I said, though that’s exactly what I had meant. I was used to rejection and understood that my Englishness appealed to her only up to a point, one that stopped short of a kiss, let alone bed.
I didn’t stay long or try my luck again. By next morning I’d succeeded in persuading myself that what had happened, or not happened, was for the best: sitting in class with Kirsten would have been awkward otherwise. My heart lurched a little when I saw her, but I smiled, in a no-hard-feelings, business-as-usual kind of way, which seemed to work, because we went for coffee after class, and talked some more about the text we’d been discussing, a D. H. Lawrence story that I liked and she didn’t, her objections to it being (I couldn’t help but feel) more than a little predictable, focusing as they did on Lawrence himself, or a received feminist caricature of him, rather than the text. Now I’d no reason to hold back, I let her know what I thought of her argument, even using the word ‘lightweight’ at one point, which I suppose was vindictive: literary criticism as sexual revenge. She took it well, but we were cooler with each other after that and I put the humiliation in her flat behind me.
I didn’t give much thought to the early part of the evening, either, till I bumped into Rob on the steps of the college library the following week. He was on his way in, with a clutch of slim volumes, and to my surprise he recognised me. After disowning the volumes – ‘all horseshit, it turns out, I don’t know why I bother’ – he asked if I’d wait a second while he returned them, then maybe we could grab a coffee. I know he said ‘grab’, because it seemed too American a usage for him, as did ‘horseshit’, and I remember reflecting that if someone as resolutely English as Rob could resort to US idiom then the same thing would eventually happen to me, which hardened my resolve to leave once the course was over, not because I disliked the place, or the language, but because I missed England and even more so (embarrassing to admit at twenty-four) my parents.
‘Let’s skip the coffee and have a walk,’ Rob said, when he emerged.
The walk took us from the library, past the Medical Center and Science Block, out on a path that meandered through halls of residence down to and round the campus lake then up again through a small wood bisected by cycle paths to the Arts Building. Rob walked as quickly as he talked; I struggled to keep pace with him in both regards. Many of our best conversations that year – soliloquies from him underscored by occasional footnotes from me – took place while we were walking round the campus, or in town, or even, once, round his local supermarket, where Rob was so preoccupied discussing T. S. Eliot (was he or wasn’t he anti-Semitic?) that he took an hour to fill his shopping trolley.
I didn’t feel he was trying to impress me or flaunt his knowledge. He just lived in a world where the latest book (or review, or article) he’d read was all that exist
ed, and from which he couldn’t move on till he’d articulated what he felt about it. That day of our walk the subject was Larkin: the biography and letters had recently come out and, in the light of what they showed about Larkin (as misanthrope, misogynist, racist and porn addict), Rob had been rereading the poems. His position was clear even then, and hardened over subsequent years: the life was one thing, the work another; a nasty man might still be a great poet. The argument was more complex, of course, but that’s what it came down to, and it was just as we came down to the lake, the eastern end of it, where the sludgy reedbeds opened out to deeper water, that he reached a conclusion, with a phrase that still resonates: ‘The life’s irrelevant. Being alive on the page is all that counts.’
I’d been told that there were beavers in the lake, and was looking out at what might have been a beaver’s dam when Rob said:
‘That girl you were with the other night.’
‘Kirsten.’
‘She’s not your girlfriend, is she?’
‘No.’
‘Good.’
In the two hours we’d spent together at the pub, and the half-hour walk till then, literature had been Rob’s only subject. The switch to Kirsten came as a surprise. As a relief too – I’d begun to feel bombarded.
‘When you were at the bar, she asked me to have dinner,’ he said.
‘She told me. And you said that having dinner with us would be inappropriate.’
‘You weren’t included.’
According to his version – which seemed altogether possible, rather than some self-aggrandising fiction – while I’d gone to buy drinks, she’d suggested that the two of them go on to a bistro near her flat, ‘and maybe coffee at my place afterwards’. When she’d come on to him before, he’d pretended not to notice. But this was blatant, and though he was no longer teaching her, which would have made it OK, just about, to accept her invitation, he didn’t fancy it. Unable to say so, he’d used the excuse of inappropriateness instead, ‘a coward’s way out’, he added, ‘but she’s probably nice underneath the pushiness and I didn’t want to upset her’.
The Executor Page 3
