‘Are you seeing anyone?’ he said, eventually.
‘I was. Not now.’
‘Don’t you miss it?’
‘The sex?’
‘The falling in love.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but then the excitement fades and you discover you’re not right for each other.’
‘The killer is when you’re still in love but she isn’t. I had that once. As you know.’
‘Did you ever hear any more?’
‘About Corinne? Nah. I thought of trying to contact her before I left the States. But how would I? And there’d have been no point.’
‘You’re over her, then?’
‘Did I say that?’
‘What a pair of sad gits we are.’
‘It all feeds the writing,’ he said.
His poems began to appear in journals. And within months, to my amazement (and envy), he got some reviewing work, too. Editors liked his fearlessness: he was the new kid on the block, cudgel in hand, ready to take on the old guys. ‘It helps that I don’t know anyone,’ he said. ‘Once you’re friends with other writers you’re sunk’ (I was unpublished and didn’t count). But writers can’t make a living without contacts. And though he continued claiming not to know anyone, people got to know him – editors, publishers, radio producers. ‘I’m enjoying my fifteen minutes,’ he said, stressing his lack of credentials – failed PhD student, second-rate academic, wannabe poet. ‘They’ll soon tire of me.’
One evening he phoned with big news. Neither of us had mobiles in those days and I had to be dragged from a football match on television to take the call. The bareness of the hallway created an echo and it was difficult to hear above the noise of my housemates. ‘Humbold’s been executed,’ I thought Rob said, and had to get him to repeat it – I’d no idea who Humbold was or why his execution was so important. Finally I got the point. Homeboy had been accepted; Rob’s first collection had found a publisher. A bottle of champagne was on ice. Would I come round to celebrate? I’d rather have stayed and watched the match; I didn’t fancy hearing him gloat. But what are friends for? I put on my coat and headed for the Tube.
Luckily, the gloating wasn’t excessive. It turned out he’d been trying to find a publisher for over a year; that the collection had been turned down at least half a dozen times; that many individual poems he’d written had also been rejected by journals. In his triumph, he seemed to exult in previous failures, and brought out a folder of rejection letters, most couched in faint praise until the inevitable ‘but’ (‘admirable formal control but’, ‘intelligent and surprising but’), though the one he took most pleasure in, to the point of reading it aloud in a pompously academic Ivy League drawl, came from a small magazine in Boston and skipped the faint praise entirely (‘your quaintly English reliance on traditional metre and rhyme betrays a wilful ignorance of, or disregard for, the postmodernist aesthetic to which this journal is proudly allied’). To send his work to a magazine like that showed how desperate he’d become, Rob said. Only now that he had found a home for his collection could he own up to the ‘kickings’ he’d had in the past.
If kickings wasn’t the word, he probably said beatings or knifings. The language of victimhood was a routine with Rob: enemies were always out to get him. He could afford to talk that way because it was untrue, as any listener would tell him. I was the listener that evening. Fuck the rejections, I said, you’re having a book out. I’d been delegated to do his gloating for him.
A knock on the door interrupted us; then a female voice and my first sight of Jill. She was renting the flat above Rob’s, on the ground floor, and though they’d barely exchanged a word till now he’d left a note inviting her round. Sorry to be so late, she said, she’d only just got in. She was wearing a long woollen cardigan and looked cold, though it was June. She looked tired too – her fjord-blue eyes were rimmed with red and she was runny-nosed. Her face was round and white and heavy, like a dinner plate in a fancy restaurant, and her lips moved when Rob spoke, mouthing his words half a second after he’d said them, as though struggling to understand. I’d have guessed she was older than him (though when they met some years later, Marie spotted at once that she was younger). Her body was slim but somehow unlived-in, and her hair sensibly short. She sat straight-backed, while he poured her a glass of champagne, and dutifully toasted his success. But she drank only that one glass, even after he’d opened a second bottle, and though she asked a question or two about the kind of poetry he ‘went in for’, her interest was no more than polite: she didn’t read modern poetry, she said, it had been ruined for her at school. She and Rob talked about the landlord and the other tenants, and which local shops and restaurants to avoid. When I asked her what she did for a living she said I didn’t want to know, it was boring, her only skills involved numbers, not words, and even those skills were limited; if she’d any talent she’d be working in the City, earning zillions, rather than wasting her life in the charity sector – not that the charity she worked for wasn’t doing vital work, on the contrary, helping the elderly was as important as helping children, but the workers on the ground were the ones who mattered, not the fundraisers or publicists or the likes of her, Jill, whose job was to balance the books and whose time was spent at her desk, in front of a screen, not cooking for old people or keeping them company or wiping their bottoms. With Rob, self-deprecation was a performance in inverted vanity, but with Jill it seemed alarmingly genuine and I remember thinking: when someone does herself down like this, is there a risk she’ll do herself in?
When I said I was off, Jill stood up and said she must be going too, and Rob, rather than protest, ushered us out, with a peck on the cheek for Jill and a hug for me.
‘What did you think of my neighbour?’ he asked next time we met.
‘She seemed very quiet.’
‘What’s that mean? Mousy?’
‘Nervous. Rather down on herself.’
‘She’s had a rough time – a marriage she’s running away from. But there’s something steely there, too. Something tough.’
I remembered how he had talked about Corinne: Jill was nothing like my picture of her, but both had tricky former partners.
‘Where’s the ex living?’
‘No idea.’
‘Why did they break up?’
‘She doesn’t talk about it.’
I could tell he found Jill interesting: with her melancholy and his victimhood, they made a good match. But I wouldn’t have guessed there was anything between them. Probably, at that time, there wasn’t. It was two years before I saw her again.
8
My visits to Jill fell into a rhythm. I’d arrive at ten and work on the crates for an hour or two, listing the contents in my notebook. Then I’d break off and make notes towards my own novel, or sometimes just sit, enjoying the silence, half dozing, or dipping into one of Rob’s books, the margins of which he’d filled with ‘brilliant’ or ‘bollocks’ or ‘!’ or ‘!!!’. After lunch, I’d knuckle down and spend another hour on the crates before I left. Now my visits were weekly, Jill was less jumpy about having me in the house. At 11.30 she’d come up with a coffee (‘I was making one anyway’), but I insisted on bringing sandwiches from home. I felt sneaky using Rob’s room to do my own work. But he’d always said that when the writing is flowing you should go with it, and, though more a trickle than a flow, it was as much as I’d managed in years. Perhaps he’d even foreseen this, knowing how I’d appreciate the quiet of his room. ‘Don’t worry about my stuff,’ I imagined him saying. ‘Keep going with yours. I can wait a while – posterity won’t shut up shop.’ At other times, though, I’d hear him getting on at me. ‘Some executor you are! I know scholars who’d kill for the chance you’ve been given and all you do is arse about.’ Seated though I was, I didn’t take it sitting down: ‘Oh, you’d rather have someone like Aaron Fortune, would you? He’d sort your papers out all right. I can see his monograph now: The Evolution of a Formalist: A Critical Survey of Robert Pope�
�s Unpublished Drafts. That’ll bring in the crowds.’ ‘At least he’d make an effort. Which is more than you’re doing. You’re a louse on the locks of literature, Matt.’ ‘Shut your mouth, Dead Man. I’ve found the voice of a narrator for my novel and I need to listen to it. You didn’t listen enough – your poems were deaf to any voices but your own. I’m making amends for your failure.’ That riled him. ‘My failure? You arrogant shit. Your second-rate prose has nothing to do with me.’ Our dialogues weren’t always adversarial. I’d congratulate him on an image he’d used or query a cancelled word or ask him where he was when he wrote such-and-such a line. Or, if I was feeling nostalgic, I’d ask him if he remembered the evening we walked out of a dire production of Godot or the weekend we had at that lakeside cabin north of Brandon – and if he did remember, why none of this had made it into his poems. These imaginary conversations weren’t only consoling but spurred me on to write more in my notebook.
If she’d known how I was spending my time, Marie would have accused me of abusing Jill’s trust. And I was pushing my luck with Leonie, who’d given me Fridays off ‘for a limited period’ that might expire any moment. Still, even allowing for my procrastination, collating Rob’s papers wouldn’t take long. Louis occasionally nagged me about progress, but Lexy – who I’d emailed months back to let her know about my appointment – hadn’t even been in touch. I emailed her again to say I was working steadily and had found a few uncollected poems from Rob’s early career. But she wasn’t interested enough to ask to see them. It was new work she and Louis would want. Anything Rob might have been working on in his final months. Late style.
I’d also had an email from Aaron Fortune, whose interest was the same as theirs. He’d heard that I was acting as Rob’s literary executor and wondered if I’d discovered any material left behind after ‘Pope’s untimely death last year’. As the ‘principal elucidator’ of Rob’s work, he’d appreciate being kept in the loop: I should feel free to send him photocopies, he said, and in return he’d give me his informed opinion on provenance, etc. (‘I understand you’re not yourself a scholar, so may find my input of some assistance’). I pictured him as a sallow septuagenarian in a black gown, whose hopes of making a name for himself were rapidly fading and who clung to Rob as a last resort, despite the indifference of his colleagues in Adelaide, let alone the students, who would treat his annual lecture on Rob (‘some unknown British guy’) as an excuse to send in sick notes and head to the beach. It must be hard for Aaron. But he was pushy and deserved a brisk reply. It was true I’d been delegated to look through Rob’s papers, I told him, but I wasn’t at liberty to discuss any finds with him, let alone send copies of manuscripts, at this stage. In other words, I was the one whom Rob appointed, so fuck off.
By the last Friday of May I’d finished with the first two crates. It was a sunny afternoon and my own writing had stalled, so I wasn’t in the best of moods. I thought of leaving early, but instead, on impulse, I opened the third crate to see how much was in there. The Martello Sonnets were regarded as Rob’s masterpiece, after all, the collection in which he’d found his ‘true’, ‘pan-European’ style. Built as a defence against Napoleonic invasion, the Martello towers along the south coast became (in Rob’s title sequence) a set of quirky fun palaces, their vistas outward-looking not xenophobic. Rob had rented one from the Landmark Trust for his forty-fifth birthday. The first of his sonnets celebrated the occasion: ‘Huge waves were smashing the jetty/but no hint of them invaded our party/as we danced to the beat of Boney M.’ I’d been there and couldn’t remember any dancing. But I may have left before it started. These were the empty years before Marie, and I had come alone.
The Martello Sonnets crate was more tidily arranged than the first two, with far less dross to wade through. Apologies, Rob, I thought, smiling to myself, I know the earlier poems aren’t dross, but even you might feel a little weary, a little unenthused, at spending your time like this, shuffling through papers, in the service of someone else. I’m not just someone, he came back, I’m me. Sure, but imagine how impatient you’d be if the roles were switched, and it was you serving my cause. As far as I can see, Matt, the only person you’re serving is yourself. Fair point, but my lack of progress that day was making me grumpy and while scrabbling through the crate I continued to berate him. You’re so predictable, Rob, I said. Here it is again, all in order, the notebooks, the typed drafts, the toing and froing with your editor. It’s not an executor you need it’s a clerk, a drudge, an automaton. If only you’d made the job more interesting by throwing in the odd surprise …
Which is when he did. Wedged between two notebooks I found a slim brown folder. UNP1 it said on the front. Inside were half a dozen or so poems, handwritten in pencil on lined sheets of paper. I could see at once they weren’t from the Martello Sonnets. At last! A find! Thank you, Rob, I said (aloud this time), though whether thanks were due I soon came to doubt.
Love and War
‘Hey, poet! You want a theme? Take that!’
Obama, Osama, 9/11, 7/7, Helmand Province, Guantánamo Bay …
I was all set to write the epic of the twenty-first century,
tapping it out on a shiny new laptop, when you came in
and put the hex on me. Herb tea? you asked. I’ll have coffee, I said,
proper coffee not decaf, and off you went with a shrug.
Homs, I typed, to spite you, Saddam, Assad, Arab spring.
But the keypad had a mind of its own: put Putin
and it morphed to Cupid, type in Libya and it came out love.
I knew it was you doing this: I could hear you humming
as the kettle boiled and refugee crisis turned to urgent kisses.
‘Problem?’ you said, bringing the coffee. ‘A little blocked today?
After those whiskies last night, I’m not surprised.’
Then you kissed me and looped both arms around my neck.
‘No poem can stop an election being rigged,’ you said,
‘or a terrorist planting a bomb. Write about love.
About sex. About us. Get it all down in intimate detail.
And drop the pompous tone – you’re not a vicar.’
I felt like a shore crab stranded at low tide. There was the world,
the planet, the crashing ocean of war, and there was me,
in my rockpool, trapped and strangely enthralled.
Shower
You’d use a pencil to pin up your hair,
so when we stood together under the rose
your nape was left exposed for me to kiss,
my hands brimming over as I cupped your breasts,
then going with the flow, down and inside to where
you were streaming, as though water could pour
upwards, not that the wetness was all yours.
It was one of those showers that runs cold
when someone next door turns on a tap, then scalds
as the heat comes back. But we treasured its force:
if I pecked at your ear, tiny pearls would trip
off my tongue, like beads from a broken necklace.
The power took my breath away, or you did,
reaching behind to soap me hard, both of us
in a lather, your body tipping forward
till your palms lay flat against the tiles, me
holding you steady at the hip, so that our slippy
to-and-fro didn’t fling us headfirst or sideways
through the plastic curtain, and we remained within
the beam, like books under a reading lamp, flood-
lit by the brilliance boring down.
And even when limescale blocked the showerhead
and the pillar became a weeping willow,
we hid like fugitives under its spread,
fused and lubricious and in flood, the water
falling in spokes, the shower like an umbrella
in reverse, blessing us with its downpour,
keeping us wet to
save us from the world.
Swim
No third party is going to share my goods …
Who took these photos of you in the sea –
hugging yourself in the shallows;
your arms raised in surrender as a wave breaks;
your tiny head in the blue-brown vastness?
You say you were visiting home,
that your father was trying out his new camera,
that if you’d wanted to impress a lover
you’d not have worn those goggles or that cap.
But how do I know you’re telling the truth?
You hate me being jealous, but you’d also hate it if I weren’t,
so I confess I’m green with envy of the waves
licking your neck and the sand under your feet
and the man who held out a towel for you
as you ran up the beach. Who was the man?
You really expect me to believe it was your dad?
Hair
It grew luxuriantly, down to below her hips
How would I feel if she lost her hair?
she asks. We’re in bed, the lights off,
the garden silent, a hot summer night.
Five minutes back, not for the first time,
a hank of it got trapped as we made love
and she cried out in frustration and pain.
I get sick of it, she says. It’s a pain.
I’m forever brushing knots from my hair.
But it veils me like a hijab and I love
how it flows over my skin. Chop it off
and I’d feel so ordinary. Last time
it was short I looked terrible … The night
sticks to our bodies and a night
train in the cutting stirs a windowpane.
We’ve had these talks before, the last time
only a week ago. I stroke her face, knowing hair
isn’t the point. She’s asking will I go off
The Executor Page 13
