‘Give Rob his due. He’s left most of his royalties to Jill.’
‘And left you with muddled instructions. I warned you: where there’s a will, there’s woe.’
‘You’re always so hard on him.’
‘He was a difficult man.’
‘But now he’s dead.’
‘Now he’s dead, he’ll be even more difficult. Wait and see.’
6
‘He called it his study,’ Jill said, opening the door. ‘He hated the word office. An office means colleagues. He didn’t have any. Only books.’
They lined all four walls, narrowing the doorway, crowding the window, forming an arch over the cupboard on the left. The deeper shelves were double-stacked, the paperbacks in front of the hardbacks, like children in family photos posed with the adults behind.
‘The people before had it as a children’s bedroom. The wallpaper was light yellow, with pink dolls and blue teddy bears. Robbie spent our first weekend here stripping it with a metal scraper. I can’t work in an effing kindergarten, he said.’ She laughed. ‘I took the next week off to get the house in order. With instructions not to disturb him, now he was back at work. He’d emerge every so often to make tea. And cook for us both every evening. But he locked himself away from nine till five. Routine, routine, I need my routine, he’d say. When we moved here he was terrified he wouldn’t write another word.’
A wide rosewood desk stood in front of the window, its surface clear except for a pile of books to the left and an old Olivetti typewriter in the middle. Two large blinds covered the window.
‘It’s strange to see a desk without a computer,’ I said.
‘You know Robbie. He hated them – he’d type up poems when they were finished, but he wrote almost everything by hand.’
Writers who used word processors were sloppy, he once told me (this was after I bought an Amstrad in the 1990s): they dashed down their first thoughts, knowing they could revise them later, but then skimped on revision – whereas with a typewriter you made sure what you were writing was a final draft, or as near as could be, to avoid the effort of retyping. I couldn’t understand the logic: what was so onerous about retyping a poem that took up less than a page? Without my Amstrad, then a succession of Macs, I wouldn’t have completed my novel. Still, pen and typewriter had worked for him.
‘Everything he wrote will be here, then?’
‘Should be. He was very organised. I’ll pull these blinds up so you have more light,’ she said, tugging the cord. ‘There’s a good view of the garden,’ she added, encouraging me to peer out. But it was the suddenly spotlit desk I stared at, or rather the chair in front of the desk, a black, fake-leather orthopaedic chair, bare of cushions – the chair he’d sat at when writing his last two collections, which I’d been rereading, along with his earlier ones, in preparation for my role. I imagined him in the chair, his back to the room, his head tilted downwards to where his hand held a pen or was pressing keys or lay loosely on the desk. The vision passed. He’d been here and now he was nowhere. But his smell still lingered in the room – an apple-and-woodsmoke musk I’d first noticed on one of our walks around the Brandon campus lake and which I associated, for no good reason, with beavers. Was it a certain brand of deodorant? I’d never asked him and wasn’t about to ask Jill.
I moved next to her and looked out the window.
‘The garden’s south-facing,’ she said. ‘By midday the sun shines straight in, so he always kept the blinds down. I suggested he move the desk to the side, then the blinds could stay up and he’d have a view, but he refused. If I look out, I’ll never get any work done, he said.’
Flowerbeds ran down either side of the long lawn. There was a small terrace outside the kitchen diner, with a metal table and two chairs, and a small fishpond below. An empty bird feeder stood next to it. Fruit trees, rose bushes and privet hedging added some shade and privacy. Brick walls separated the gardens either side. At the far end, in front of a wooden fence, was a vegetable patch.
‘Too suburban a view for him, eh?’
‘Sorry?’ she said, though I could tell from her tone that she’d heard.
‘He might have thought it too, you know, cosy and bourgeois, for a poet … I could be wrong.’
‘Robbie didn’t think like that at all,’ she said, turning away from the window. ‘Any papers will be in his desk. Or in the filing cabinet. Or in the cupboard behind you. I’ll let you get on. I’ll fetch a coffee up later.’
The offer of coffee felt more like punishment than hospitality. I’d have to tread more carefully in future.
I’d waited over six months to contact Jill – from August to March. Spring will be a good time, I thought: longer days, the easing of grief, a fresh start. I wrote her a letter. Then when a fortnight went by without her replying, I phoned. She’d been in Australia, she explained, in part for a holiday, in part to see Rob’s sister (who was doing better since being moved from a psychiatric unit to sheltered housing). Though she apologised for the delay, she put me off coming to see her for a fortnight, then cancelled and put me off for another week. Saturdays and Sundays were no good, she said: she was busy at her office all week and needed the weekends to recover – besides, I had my family. It occurred to me that she was reading Rob’s stuff, to pre-empt me. Or tidying his papers, to make my task easier. Or making a bonfire of them, as widows have been known to do. I arranged with Leonie to take a Friday off. It was mid-April before I finally visited the house.
‘Be gentle with her,’ Marie said, as I left home. ‘I wouldn’t want someone coming here and looking through your stuff.’
Jill had asked me to arrive at eleven. I allowed extra time for the journey (Tube to Charing Cross, hour-long train ride, fifteen-minute walk) and, having arrived too early, walked past the house, number 93, and continued to the end of the street. Rob and I had always met in town – in Soho pubs, Covent Garden restaurants or at launch parties in publishers’ boardrooms, never here. ‘I’m going into exile again,’ he’d announced over lunch one day back in the early 2000s. ‘Where?’ ‘You’ll not have heard of it. A place in Kent called Hadingfield.’ He was disparaging – of the town, the house they’d found, himself for ‘copping out’. It was madness, he said, they might as well have stuck a pin in the map at random for all the sense it made. Jill would have to spend an extra hour a day commuting. He’d have no friends nearby. The town had no university, no culture, nothing to recommend it. Living there would be the death of his art, for sure. Livelier than I’d seen him in a while, he enjoyed listing the negatives. Only when pressed did he admit that he and Jill would have more space, a garden, some peace and quiet. That there’d been increasing problems where they lived in Parsons Green (‘drum-and-bass all night from the flat below, herds of stampeding children in the one above’). That from Kent it wouldn’t be as far to visit his mother in her nursing home in Sussex. That a change might be good for his poetry … Then the sad-clown mask went back on and he moaned about being ‘driven out’, ‘neutered’, ‘sent back to the suburbs where I began, God help me’ – Semi-Land, he called it, ‘because everyone’s half dead’. It wasn’t the first time he’d upped sticks. Even so, I couldn’t help wondering if there was more to it. However jokey, ‘exile’ was a strong word.
Duly warned, I shouldn’t have found the neighbourhood surprising, but its blandness shocked me all the same: the net curtains, toytown roof tiles, neat front gardens, glossy front doors. VOTE CONSERVATIVE posters decorated a couple of bow windows, whether as gloating reminders of the last general election result or as early campaigning for next month’s local council elections. Towards the end of the street a woman emerged from her house, an automatic smile on her face as she went through her exit sequence: the five beeps on the alarm keypad in her hallway; the slam of the front door; the click of her heels down the garden path; the clack of the gate latch; the uck-thuck of the car doors unlocking as she thumbed her ignition key from ten feet away; the leather squeak as she climbed in; t
he metal door thudding as she closed it; the engine whinnying into life; the tyre scrunch as she reversed two feet, then the slither as she pulled away. These were the sounds Rob had lived among – not silent fields punctuated by tractor-grind or bass-thuds from an inner-city flat, but a suburban in-between.
The door to number 93 was black, with stained glass. Jill was quick to answer when I rang the bell. She looked better than she had at the funeral – less grey, less lined, with a smile that was faint (a faintness mirrored or enhanced by her pale orange lipstick), but which didn’t seem forced. She was wearing a black skirt and maroon blouse, as though dressed for work, which made me, in my jeans and jumper, feel too casual. Of course, this was work, but I’d assumed we could approach it informally, since we were meeting not as business associates but as two people who’d loved Rob. My emotions were running high, with the fact of Rob’s death newly borne in on me because of where I was, in the doorway of his house (a house I’d never visited, but often imagined), with his wife, now widow, standing three feet away. Of course, I’d thought about him many times over the past months, but intermittently, between doing my job, looking after the kids, eating supper with Marie, going to see my mother – whereas for Jill he was an ever-present absence. Perhaps that’s why when I stepped forward with the intention of kissing or even hugging her she took a step backwards, not flinching so much as straightening up, and why she held the palm of her right hand open and her arm outstretched as though to wave me through, like a butler or maidservant directing the new arrival to join the other guests in the drawing room. She wasn’t being cold or discourteous; nor did I take it as a reproach. But whether instinctively or by design, she was refusing the equivalence that a kiss or hug would have signified. We both loved him, yes, but it was she with whom he’d shared his life.
That’s how I read Jill’s go-on-through gesture as I stepped past her – not as an attempt to put me in my place as a grubbing acolyte, but as a reminder of our different status. I was there on sufferance. I’d been his friend. But I wasn’t hers.
Be gentle with her, Marie had said.
Stained-glass diamonds lit the floor in front of me. ‘Go on through,’ Jill said, in words this time, as I hesitated at the end of the narrow hall.
‘Through’ meant an arched doorway, beyond which lay the kitchen diner, a large airy room which once must have been two, with the fridge, stove, washing machine and dishwasher to the right, and a table and chairs to the left. The work surfaces gleamed. The tiled floor, too – ‘You could eat your dinner off it,’ my mum would have said.
‘Coffee?’
‘That’d be great.’
She’d made it already, trusting I’d be punctual. I felt reassured by that. She knew I was serious about the task ahead.
She put a tray on the table, with the cafetière and two cups – antique bone china cups, with fluted edges and floral patterns, not the chunky Ikea mugs Marie and I use.
‘Milk? Sugar?’
‘Just black, please.’
She asked after Marie and the children, remembering their names.
I asked about the Australia trip (‘exhausting’) and Rob’s sister Angela (‘sad case’) and work (‘busier than ever’).
‘Which I suppose is good,’ she added, opening up a little. ‘Stops me from maundering. I’d talked to Robbie about retiring early – maybe this year, maybe next. Now I plan to carry on as long as they’ll have me. The weekends are worst. Not that friends haven’t been kind. I’m doing OK.’
‘Good,’ I said, guilty that Marie and I still hadn’t got round to taking her out somewhere. Perhaps if we’d tried, instead of agreeing to wait till after today, she might have been less stand-offish. Was she being stand-offish? Or was it me being paranoid? I didn’t know her well enough to know.
I noticed an empty dog basket next to the fridge. She caught me looking at it.
‘Rilke’s,’ she said. ‘Our Labrador. I had to have him put down last month. He was fifteen and couldn’t walk any more. I’m glad Robbie wasn’t around to see it.’
‘He never mentioned having a dog.’
‘Really? We bought him the minute we moved here. But for Rilke he’d not have left the house. Long walks, morning and evening: that was his daily routine. More coffee?’
‘No thanks.’
‘Well, then,’ she said, putting the cups and saucers back on the tray, and pushing it to one side with a determined, down-to-business look, like a general laying out a battle plan. The table between us was clear. She stared across, hands clasped, elbows on the table, right forefinger resting under her chin. Her face was round – when I first saw it, I’d thought of a white dinner plate – and her eyes a steely blue.
‘I thought we should lay out some ground rules,’ she said. ‘How long do you think you’ll need?’
‘Until I see what’s there, I can’t say. A few visits, certainly.’
‘Fridays are best for me – I try to take them off every couple of weeks. This afternoon I’m going out at two, but you’re welcome to have till then to take a preliminary look. If you find anything worth keeping, leave it for me and I’ll make a copy. But any originals should stay here.’
‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘It’s chaotic in my house. I wouldn’t want to remove anything.’
‘I haven’t looked in his desk. Can’t bear to. Can hardly bear to go in the room, to be honest. And I wouldn’t know what I was looking for if I did. I liked his poems. But that’s probably because I loved him. Poetry isn’t really my thing.’
The desk had seven drawers: three to the right, three to the left and a wide shallow one across the middle. The top right-hand drawer was locked; I’d have to ask Jill about a key. I couldn’t open the filing cabinet, either, an ugly, grey, badly scratched upright chest with two bulky drawers; it too would need a key. But that could wait. I’d six drawers and a cupboard to explore – plenty to be getting on with.
I sat in the chair, determined not to feel spooked or sentimental: yes, this was Rob’s desk and this his typewriter and these the books he’d been reading in his last days (editions of Catullus, Ovid, Petrarch, Dante and Hardy), but in themselves, as objects, they were nothing out of the ordinary, and I had a job to get on with, one that would be best achieved by avoiding thoughts of him sitting there, mid-composition. Though he’d told me his last collection had cleaned him out, I’d hopes of finding unpublished poems. There might be diaries and journals, too. According to his will, I’d have to destroy them. But what if they were masterpieces, like Pepys’s or John Cheever’s? Kafka had asked Max Brod to destroy all his work. But Brod knew better than to do so. And literature was the richer for his betrayal.
I pulled open the top left-hand drawer. It was where Rob kept his pens, pencils, paperclips, rubbers, ink cartridges. The next drawer down was full of paper: typing paper (A4), letters with his address at the top (A5), notepads, index cards, Post-its, scrap paper, all of it blank. The bottom left-hand drawer looked more promising: inside were notebooks of different sizes and textures, some with thin metal ring binding, some with calfskin covers, one with the name of a literary festival on it. I thumbed through, in search of drafts, diary entries, whatever jottings I could find, but there were none – whether lined or unlined every notebook was empty.
The wide shallow drawer contained bank statements and cheque books. The last statement was dated 2012 and, according to the stub, the last cheque he’d written, the following year, was £129.94 to Majestic Wine. After that he must have relied on credit cards and internet banking, like everyone else, though some of the entries in his paying-in book were more recent: in the six months before he’d died, he’d deposited cheques from the BBC and the Cambridge Literature Festival, neither large enough to have sustained him for more than a week, but testament to his reputation: he’d never earned much, even at the height of his fame, and he made fewer appearances in his last decade, but he and his work were still in demand.
I bent down to open the bottom right-hand draw
er. In a large, battered Jiffy bag I found various photos of Rob – publicity shots – from different phases of his career. There were also two scrapbooks: one from childhood, the other dating from the publication of his first collection. I set them aside, to look at later, and pulled out the bulky yellow folder underneath, marked LETTERS: RECEIVED. There were dozens of them, shoved in at random, it seemed, rather than sorted and dated, a few – so my sampling suggested – from fellow poets, the rest from readers, all congratulating him in one way or another: for this image or that line, this use of rhythm or that insight into nature. At the top of each, Rob had put a tick and scribbled ‘Replied’.
The six folders in the middle right-hand drawer had the titles of Rob’s collections written across them. At last, some original manuscripts, I thought, but the folders contained only cuttings: reviews of Rob, interviews with Rob, essays about Rob, Books of the Year recommendations of Rob’s latest volume. I smiled at the thought of Marie flicking through them and snarling ‘egomaniac’ as she did. But the bad reviews were there along with the good, Marcus Downe’s included.
The only other storage space in the room was the cupboard in the corner, which jutted out from the bookshelves that occupied the rest of the wall space. It had once been a built-in wardrobe (a metal clothes rail still ran across the top), but was now a mini-warehouse for plastic crates. There were six of them, clearly labelled, one for each of Rob’s collections. I lifted down the top one and removed the lid. Here were all the materials from his first book, Homeboy – notebooks, scraps of loose paper, handwritten first drafts, revised drafts, typed-out final drafts, torn-out pages from the magazine in which each poem first appeared, uncorrected page proofs, corrected page proofs, jacket cover proofs, plus all the matter filling the gap between composition and publication – adds and deletes, marginalia, instructions to printers. They weren’t what I was looking for, but I re-experienced some of the fascination I’d felt during my MFA, when I’d spent days in the manuscripts collection at Brandon, hoping to learn from the processes of a William Faulkner or Nathanael West. The book I eventually did publish, ten years later, was written straight on to a computer. Like most writers of my generation, I’m post-archival. But I respected Rob and the way he’d worked. Already I’d found something that would interest scholars. The only pity was the lack of a seventh crate full of unpublished work.
The Executor Page 10
