I noticed her in the lobby of the hotel even before we were escorted to the meeting room. There were twenty of us offenders, four women and sixteen men, of whom two stood out: Marie, with her dark hair, olive skin and intended-to-be-sensible-but-really-rather sexy pencil skirt; and a man in a purple fleece who glowered at us all so angrily that I took him to be one of the instructors. I was wrong about that. Once in the room he took a seat, like the rest of us. And whereas he continued glowering, as though disgusted to be in the company of dangerous speed merchants, the two instructors standing at the front were all smiles: they weren’t there to punish or guilt-trip but to jolly us along. In appearance and idiom, the smaller guy was a dead ringer for David Brent in The Office. The taller one talked as though he’d recently completed a degree in evolution theory, likening car drivers to hunter-gatherers with spears. We were seated at semicircular tables of four; when I’d spotted the empty chair next to Marie, I’d been quick to grab it. We were given sticky white labels with our names on – GEORGE, DAVE, MATT, MARIE our table read left to right. After half an hour of easing us in, the instructors turned to the screen and flashed up a series of statistics – the number of deaths and serious injuries each year of drivers, motorcyclists, pedal cyclists and pedestrians – and asked for comments. The glowering man was first to speak: he was a lorry driver, he said, and resented lorry drivers being blamed for killing cyclists when it was usually the cyclists’ fault, especially in London, where cyclists were crazy, ignoring and jumping red lights all the time, yet it was lorry drivers who had their licences taken away, whereas the cyclists got off scot-free. The instructors gently queried his opinions and moved on to a discussion of braking speeds, in particular the fatal difference between hitting pedestrians at 30 mph and hitting them at 40. The lorry driver spoke up again: why should he get the blame if a kid ran out in front of his vehicle? If the kid got killed that was the kid’s fault or the kid’s parents’ fault, not his. Yet he’d be the one to go to jail; the law had it in for lorry drivers; it was always them that got prosecuted. Any comments? the instructors asked. Silence. We studied our laps, too embarrassed or afraid to speak. Then Marie stood up. I don’t understand why you’re talking about blame, she said, in an accent I mistook for Scottish at first, not Northern Irish. This isn’t about blame, it’s about avoiding tragedies, we’ve just seen the statistics, if a child runs out in the road and you’re exceeding the speed limit in a car, there’s a greater risk the child will die, and if you hit a child while exceeding the speed limit in a lorry, the child will certainly die and you’ll have it on your conscience for life. OK, I hold my hands up, I was caught speeding in a built-up area, I was late for a meeting and rushing, we all do it, but what an idiot, just think if I’d hit a child that day, I wouldn’t be here, I’d be in prison or else so traumatised I couldn’t sleep or go to work, let alone drive, all I’d be thinking of was that child, and of its parents – if and when I become a parent, I want my kids to be safe from speeding vehicles, especially lorries, which shouldn’t be allowed to do 30 in built-up areas, 20 would make more sense in my view, I don’t know what other people think.
People nodded and grunted assent. I want this woman to have my babies, I thought.
Yes, but when it’s not the lorry driver’s fault, the lorry driver said, at which point the taller of the instructors invited him to step outside ‘for a quiet word’, while his colleague moved on to the next stage of the course.
This sometimes happens, the other instructor said after they’d left the room: an individual can hijack the course, we do our best to stop that happening, but it’s an interactive session and we need you to participate too – thank you, Marie, for speaking up.
Now it was Marie who looked embarrassed.
The lorry driver didn’t return.
There was a break halfway through the afternoon – tea and biscuits. I stepped outside to get some air. Marie was standing there with her mobile, listening for messages. I took out my mobile and did the same. There were no messages, but I kept the phone pressed to my ear, pretending to listen, staring over the car park with its diagonal white lines, till she snapped her phone shut and put it in her handbag.
‘You were great in there,’ I said.
‘I didn’t mean to bang on, but that guy …’
‘The Neanderthal.’
‘I must have sounded awful: Miss Prim, the teacher’s pet.’
‘You said the right thing. Everyone thought so.’
‘Someone just asked me if it was a set-up – he thought the lorry driver and me were plants.’
‘But you’re not.’
‘No. I’m an offender. Same as you. We’d better go back in or they’ll fail us.’
‘The Holiday Inn, Brentwood,’ I said, as we entered the lobby. ‘Has anyone ever had a holiday in Brentwood?’
The instructors switched us round to work in groups. Marie’s was the noisiest table; there were only three on mine (the departing lorry driver left the numbers short). We were asked to study photos and assess potential risks; my parents say that I’ve always been bad at anticipating danger and they’re probably right; certainly, I was rubbish at the exercise – I kept glancing across at Marie and the man next to her, with whom she seemed to have hit it off. Then came a short film, which ran three times: the driver of a car at a T-junction briefly looked right, then left, then pulled out. The camera pointed down the road so that we saw what he saw. I too missed the motorbike approaching from the right. The noise of it crashing into the car still made me jump third time round. To finish off, we were asked to write how we might drive in future. More carefully I put, the same answer everyone gave.
I’d been sitting at the back of the room, Marie at the front, and with all the handshakes and thank yous to be said as we filed out I lost her. Outside I scanned the vehicles leaving the car park; if nothing else, I might get a wave. After five minutes, I gave up and went back inside to use the Gents – and there she was, in the lobby, sitting on a low leather sofa, a tall glass with a slice of lemon in front of her.
‘Fizzy water, I trust,’ I said.
‘G and T. That film shook me up.’
‘So the teacher’s pet thinks it’s OK to drink and drive.’
‘I came by train. The station’s a twenty-minute walk. I’m fortifying myself for the hike.’
‘Can I get you another?’
‘No, I’m fine.’
The bartender was quick, but even the sixty seconds he took felt too slow.
‘So you’re not driving either?’ she said, nodding at my glass.
‘It’s fizzy water.
Have you far to go?’
‘Hackney.’
‘You’re joking. I live there too. I’ll give you a lift.’
‘I bought a return ticket.’
‘I’ll get you there quicker than the train will.’
‘Have you learned nothing?’
I laughed. ‘Without speeding.’
‘Promise?’
‘Promise.’
On the drive she told me about her childhood (in Belfast), her degree (at Southampton) and her job as a speech therapist (in Haringey) – NHS work mostly, though she also had a few private clients. At best it was hugely rewarding: to see a five-year-old who refused to speak at all during the first session, who struggled with the simplest words (‘book’, say, which came out as ‘bot’, or ‘milk’, which came out as ‘malt’), who’d been teased and made to feel stupid at infant school, who screamed and kicked and head-banged in frustration when the words came out wrong, whose hostility kept breaking through no matter how patient you were and how careful to encourage – to see that child persevere, and its vocabulary increase, and its speech become intelligible, and its confidence and self-esteem flourish, was a wonderful thing, a gift, the best feeling she knew, all the more so when the child was a recent immigrant for whom English was a second language. Though for every case like that, it had to be said, there were several where you made no headway because
the child’s speech problems were the tip of the iceberg, the source of them lying in parental issues (violence, sexual abuse, poverty, neglect, alcoholism, drug addiction, depression, mental breakdown) that were beyond your remit and which the specialists you liaised with, the social workers and child psychiatrists, also lacked the time, skill or resources to remedy, however hard they tried.
‘What about you?’ Marie said, as we dropped down from the North Circular. I’d kept her talking till then, not just because I wanted to know all about her but because my work seemed trivial in comparison.
‘I’m a writer.’
‘Cool.’
‘Not that cool. I’m a freelance journalist.’
‘So you publish stuff in newspapers?’
‘Occasionally. Mostly book reviews and arts features.’
‘How did you get into that?’
‘With difficulty. Are you hungry? There’s a nice Greek place coming up here on the right.’
‘Odysseus! I love it there.’
She ordered shish kebab, I had kleftiko, and with home just a short walk for us both (‘I’ll leave the car and collect it in the morning,’ I said), we shared a bottle of retsina. In the course of explaining what I did, I mentioned my novel, which had come out a couple of years before.
‘Should I have heard of you?’
‘Christ, no,’ I said.
‘What’s it called?’
‘The Return of Rasselas.’
‘Rasta-who?’
‘Rasselas – a character created by Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century,’ I said, careful not to suggest she should have known. (She wasn’t the first person to think that the name had something to do with Rastafarianism.)
‘So why did you bring him back?’
‘Good question.’
I smiled and drained my glass.
‘Which deserves an answer.’
‘Let me walk you home and I’ll tell you,’ I said. ‘Shall we get the bill?’
We kissed goodnight outside her door, by which time the conversation had moved on from Rasselas and why I’d revived him to the desirability of the neighbourhood, which till then I’d felt little affection for, but now, thanks to Marie, seemed the perfect place to live. We talked of meeting up again soon. To phone her next day would have looked desperate, I decided, so I left it till the Sunday. ‘What kept you?’ she said, when I did.
I moved in with her three months later. Neither of us was young. She’d lived with a boyfriend, Tom, for five years in her early twenties; I’d had a series of relationships, three months here, eight months there, none of which had worked out. Both of us were ready for children. Both of us wanted children. And we conceived a child on our wedding night, at home, after the registry office and a party for friends – a good old-fashioned thing to do, except that the child was our second: we’d married as a present to ourselves for surviving two years of nappies and sleeplessness, though the real present was Noah, born forty weeks later after a two-hour labour (which was twenty-seven hours fewer than Jack had taken).
Would we have stayed together if we hadn’t had children? Suppose one of us hadn’t wanted them – what then? It’s a debate we’ve sometimes had, with the childlessness of others – not least Rob and Jill – brought in. I say debate, but it’s a sensitive issue for us both. I once upset Marie by telling her that I couldn’t imagine a life without children (Jack was six months old at the time). ‘Oh, right, but you can imagine one without me, if I’d not been fertile you’d have left me by now, thanks a lot,’ she said. It wasn’t what I meant, but she was feeling miserable, after a bout of mastitis. On another occasion she complained that she’d started having children too late: women’s bodies were better adapted for having them in their early twenties, she said. In your early twenties you were with Tom, I said, not me. True, she said, but Tom wasn’t parent material. But if you’d got pregnant? I said. I thought I was once, she said, and when my period came I felt disappointed. So if life had panned out differently, another man would have fathered your children and you’d have been happy with that, I said. Every child’s a gift, she said. That’s not an answer, I said. Who knows if I’d have been happy, she said, it’s irrelevant, what matters is whether I’m happy with you. And? I said. You know I am, she said, except when you get jealous like this.
We’ve each had our touchy moments. But love overrides them. Solid, friends call us. I’ve never doubted our three children are mine and Marie knows that I’ve not looked at another woman since the day of the speed awareness course. Why would I? More than parents, teachers, friends and all the books I’ve read, it’s she who helped me grow up.
I got the call at the office a couple of weeks after the funeral. Only Marie phones my extension – everyone else emails – so it took me a moment to grasp who the caller was.
‘What do you mean, both of us?’ I said.
‘It’s common enough,’ Louis said. ‘After we talked at the wake, I realised that’s what he’d probably done. I tried to find you to say so, but you’d rushed off. I spoke to his solicitor yesterday. The will was straightforward: he left everything to Jill. The codicil concerns his literary remains. Nice phrase, eh? He named us as joint executors. Officially I’m general executor and you’re literary executor. But in effect we’ll be acting together.’
‘Right.’
‘You sound dubious.’
‘Just surprised. I assumed he’d dropped me.’
‘I’m glad he didn’t. My role’s to sell his work. I’ve not the expertise to sort through the manuscripts.’
‘I’m no scholar, either.’
‘But he trusted you. He knew you’d do it well.’
‘There might not be much to do. He told me he’d written nothing since his last collection.’
‘Let’s hope he had a late burst. Sorry, unfortunate metaphor … The solicitor says he’ll put a copy of the relevant document in the post. Then we’ll see exactly what Rob said.’
‘Before you go,’ I said. ‘Do you think he somehow knew?’
‘What?’
‘That he was dying. It makes no sense medically. I’ve researched it – there are no symptoms for ruptured abdominal aortas. All the same. Normal life expectancy for a man is around eighty these days. So why the sudden urge to appoint us?’
‘It’s no great mystery,’ he said, worldly-wise. ‘I’ve had it with other writers: once they hit sixty, they can smell their mortality. And Rob was obsessive about his reputation. As was his namesake. “Pope may be said to write always with his reputation in his head.” Dr Johnson said that – somebody quoted it in one of Rob’s obituaries.’
‘Even so. Maybe some gut instinct was telling him. Sorry, another bad metaphor.’
‘Did he keep a journal?’
‘I don’t know. We’ll have to see.’
‘You’ll have to see, Matt. Give me a call when you start.’
‘Jill might find it difficult – me going through his papers. I’ll probably wait a while.’
‘Don’t leave it too long. Writers’ reputations rise after their death. But only briefly. Then they dip. We don’t want to miss the boat. Rob would never forgive us.’
‘Interesting-sounding call,’ Leonie said when I hung up. No phone calls are private in our office. Usually it’s me overhearing hers.
‘It was Louis de Vries. Robert Pope has made us joint literary executors. My role’s to sort through the manuscripts.’
‘What about your novel? Won’t the executor stuff get in the way?’
‘You sound like my wife.’
‘Hah. If you turn up something interesting, tell me. Then we’ll splash it.’
The addendum to Rob’s will arrived in the post two days later, along with a short covering letter from the solicitor inviting me to contact her if there was anything I didn’t understand. It was dated 26 March, three months to the day – so I found when I checked my old office diary – from the lunch we’d had.
I hereby appoint my literary agent Lo
uis de Vries and my friend Matthew Holmes as general and literary executor respectively of my estate. They are entrusted with the tasks of
a) collecting and cataloguing all materials consisting of or related to my published work, with a view to depositing them, at a price to be negotiated, in a suitable archive, preferably in a university environment where students – postgraduates only – can consult them
b) assisting in the dissemination – initially in journals and then, if a sufficient number exist, in a collection – of any poems completed but not published during my lifetime
c) ensuring the destruction of any remaining work not encompassed in a) and b) above, namely journals, notebooks, letters and unfinished drafts,
these three tasks being pursuant of a single purpose, namely to sustain and enhance my posthumous reputation.
In recognition of these duties, the trustees are to receive 15 per cent of any monetary proceeds from the estate, to be divided equally between them.
Any remaining monies, as heretofore specified in my will, are to go to my wife Jill.
It looked simple enough, if not the kind of prose (pursuant, heretofore) Rob would have come up with himself. But to be asked to destroy any remaining work got me wondering about the form such destruction would take (shredding, burning, destruction of a hard drive?) and whether the parameters would be obvious: he specified ‘journals, notebooks, letters and unfinished drafts’, but if b) happened, and a new collection of poems was published, then the requirements of c) would arguably be superseded by those of a), in which case we’d have a duty to preserve those materials (supposing they threw light on his work), rather than destroy them. If it was true that Rob had stopped writing, then we’d be spared such dilemmas. Which would be sad for any admirers, but would make my role straightforward.
‘It doesn’t sound straightforward to me,’ Marie said, when I read her the document.
The Executor Page 9
