her when she ages, as she must; will my love
withstand her getting sick; is it a love
she can rely on? She has these night-
mares now and then, where I run off
with a younger woman or she’s in pain
from cancer or stress makes her hair
fall out. I push a strand away. That time
in Venice, I say (it must have been winter-time,
the duckboards were out) – remember, love?
We’d just the weekend and had to hare
round the churches and galleries. At night
we took a water taxi and drank champagne,
no Bellinis, in Harry’s Bar, then slipped off
early to the hotel and took our clothes off
and lay there like this, in a kind of no time,
our bodies glowing, immune to all pain.
I can see it now: the sheets, our love-
making, the shimmer of the night-
lights on the water – but I can’t picture your hair.
Cutting your hair off won’t lessen my love.
It’s tenacious and timeless, like the night.
Hush, now – no more pain. You are not your hair.
Cut Lip
Saudi Arabia’s Interior Ministry says a Yemeni man convicted of robbery has had his right hand cut off, the first such punishment carried out in the kingdom this year …
Is it true they cut robbers’ hands off in Saudi Arabia?
Then put me on a plane there. I mugged my girl.
She has no bruises or black eyes to show for it,
but her lip is split where her teeth bit when I pushed her.
She’d come home late and wouldn’t tell me where she’d been.
The more I pressed, the less she’d say, till I lost patience
and seized both wrists to shake some sense in her, catching her chin
as I did – which was how it happened, a bead of blood on her bottom lip.
Till last night all I’d given her was love bites. Now she flinches
when I come near. They should put me in the stocks (‘There he is,
the bastard who hurt his girl!’), put my eyes out with a brooch,
or fly me to Jeddah to have my hands cut off.
Posterity
I’m in love, I said, several odes ago.
But that’s to simplify. Our love’s hush-hush.
I can’t go tell it to the mountain
or whisper it like Midas in the reeds.
Why these poems, then, so open and intimate?
Because they’re written for your eyes only,
not to be published till we’ve stopped loving
(sorry, typo: living), maybe not even then.
The woman in the sea, the girl with long hair,
the bed, the shower, the books –
it’s the story of what happened to us
but only you, my love, will know it’s you.
What the fuck? These weren’t Rob’s kind of poem. Not that they altogether lacked his celebrated formalism. But where was the impersonality, the elusiveness, the ambiguity? The word ‘I’ screamed from every stanza. UNP1 the folder said. UNPUBLISHED, I took that to mean. But what if it meant UNPUBLISHABLE? UNPRINTABLE? Or UN-POPE-LIKE, poems he’d discarded as uncharacteristic or second-rate? And why the 1? Were there more – 2, 3 and 4 – to come? None of the poems was dated. The folder they were in had been deposited in the Martello Sonnets crate, as though poems dating from that time. But the references to historical events suggested they must have been written recently. And the tone was so intimate: all but one were addressed to a ‘you’. Why would someone whose poems had been described as ‘hermetic’ suddenly allow himself to appear naked? Ted Hughes had done something similar in the Birthday Letters. But Hughes was suffering from cancer and wanted to get the poems out before he died, whereas Rob had gone suddenly, unexpectedly, with no time for a last grand gesture. Even if there had been time, he wouldn’t have been so unguarded. What’s your greatest fear? I’d once asked him. Transparency, he replied.
The poems were neatly handwritten, as though final copies. I remembered Rob, in Brandon, telling me how he wrote out copies of poems by Robert Frost (one of the few American poets he liked) in the hope Frost’s inspiration might rub off. Maybe these poems were of that kind: work by an unknown master, or a master unknown to me. Still, supposing these were Rob’s poems, what did they say? That he had loved Jill passionately. That she was a refuge to him. That they had an exciting sex life. That he felt possessive of her. That she sometimes felt insecure. That he once accidentally cut her lip during an argument and felt terrible about it. That she had told him to write honestly, about love and sex. That he had followed her instructions and memorialised her in the process.
Connubial love, then. A celebration of uxoriousness. With acknowledgement that a close relationship could also involve hurt and upset. How good were the poems? I’d have to read them again before I could judge. They were certainly direct.
I was still exulting in the fact that I had finally found something when Jill walked in.
‘How’s it going?’ she said.
The door was half open, so I ought to have heard her coming up the stairs. But perhaps she’d come up some time ago. Her light step on thick carpet allowed her to move around the house undetected. For all I knew she might have glanced in the room several times before. Here she was now, anyway, with a glass of water in one hand and a plate of shortbread biscuits in the other.
‘I thought you might like these.’
‘That’s kind. I meant to be off by now, but I got immersed.’
I was sitting in Rob’s chair, with a plastic crate on the floor beside me and the UNP1 file in my lap. The chair was a better place for me to be seen than on the daybed, and looking busy was better than lolling about, but Jill had a look of disapproval nonetheless. She ought to have been used to me by now. But only Rob ever sat in that chair; only Rob ever should sit in it.
‘What are those?’ she said, nodding at the plastic crate and the contents lying on the floor
‘It’s his third collection,’ I said. ‘All the notes he took and drafts he wrote.’
I felt thankful that she’d asked me about the crate rather than the folder, the contents of which I’d seen enough of to want to hide from her, at least for now. Embarrassed, I closed the folder as casually as possible, laying it face down on the desk.
‘Would anyone really be interested?’ she said.
‘Yes. To see how the poems evolved.’
‘It seems mad to me. Surely the final versions are all that matter.’
‘Not to scholars. They want to see what sort of feelings and occasions underlie a poem; what sparked it off; the first stumbling lines and phrases; the way he pulled it all together.’
She shrugged and smiled, as though to say: I’m baffled, but proud that my husband’s poetry should exert such interest. The reaction was encouraging: she’d begun to see the point of selling the papers. The care with which she stepped round them seemed to prove it.
‘Thanks,’ I said, standing up to take the glass of water and plate of biscuits from her and turning round to gaze out the window in the hope she’d do the same rather than ask about the folder.
‘The garden’s looking nice again,’ I said.
She was busy in the kitchen when I left that day. ‘I’ll let myself out,’ I shouted, glad to get away without having to speak to her again. The new light she’d been shown in embarrassed me: the nakedness, intimacy and desire. She’d surprised me the other week, playing football with the kids. But nothing had prepared me for this. Had I got the wrong impression of her from the start?
9
A week before his first book of poems came out, the Independent carried a full-page interview with Rob. I remember seeing someone flick through it on the Tube and then buying a copy from the newsagent’s when I got off, just to be sure I hadn’t imagined it. It was unheard of for a
poet, let alone a debutant poet, to be granted such space. But Rob, so the interviewer claimed, was ‘the coming man of British poetry’, a ‘major talent’ who’d ‘burst on the scene fully formed’ after ‘spending his twenties and thirties perfecting his craft’. The accompanying photo showed Rob glaring fiercely into the lens. His ferocity was ‘legendary’, so the piece said, referring to his ‘caustic reviews, in which no living writer is spared’. The collection, it concluded, was a ‘shoo-in for awards. You’ll be hearing a lot more about Robert Pope in the years ahead.’
When I called Rob to congratulate him, he pretended to dismiss the piece: ‘She misquoted two of the poems and garbled everything I said.’ But he didn’t take issue with the fulsome praise.
That interview set the tone. The reviews were fulsome, too. It was his presentation of small-town Britain that made him unique, critics said. As well as his sensitivity to the surrounding countryside, he’d a gift for observing urban spaces – avenues with lime trees, yellowbrick terraces, steel-shuttered corner shops, dogshit-slimy parks, lonely bus shelters, overgrown ponds, and wooden benches plaqued with local names. ‘What we hear isn’t the voice of a single poet,’ one reviewer wrote, ‘but the rhythm of a whole community, a collective urbs, our nation as it is today.’ He was praised for a lack of nostalgia on the one hand and, on the other, for his use of traditional verse forms; though new to the scene, it was as if he’d been around forever. Already he had a label: ‘the small-town muse’. Since he’d grown up in a village, had lived for some years in America and was now based in London, I found the label ironic, and to his credit so did he. Just as long as they don’t call me a Middle Englander, he said.
His publication party was in a gallery off Queen Square. I’d been expecting something modest – it was only a poetry collection, after all – but had to fight my way in past writers I recognised from photographs, not all of them poets. I took some fizz from the drinks tray and looked in vain for Rob. Did I write poetry? a woman in a turquoise dress asked, looking over my shoulder. The clinkety-clink of a wine glass brought us to order. Rob’s editor, Charles Durrant, introduced himself. He was proud of his poetry list, he said, but no collection made him prouder than Rob’s, ‘perhaps the most important I’ve published in twenty years’. Rob shyly hung his head. ‘Perhaps?’ I could imagine him thinking. ‘Why so mealy-mouthed?’
By the time I got to speak to him, the crowd was thinning out. I assumed the woman at his elbow was from the publicity department.
‘Clarice works for the FT,’ he said introducing us.
‘On the travel pages. But I’m here because I’m family.’
‘And there I was thinking you’d come for me,’ Rob said.
Her hand touched his sleeve. They’d clearly met before. When Charles came up to sweep them off to dinner, Rob took me aside.
‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘the party was expensive; they won’t stretch to a meal as well.’
‘No worries. Are you and Clarice …?’
‘She’s Charles’s daughter.’
‘Ah.’
‘And young enough to be mine.’
‘Even so,’ I said.
‘Yes, yeah – poet’s laurels, droit de seigneur, perk of the job. I wish.’ Charles was beckoning him. ‘Yep, coming!’
It became a pattern. Whenever I ran into him at launches or parties, there’d be a woman with him and he’d introduce us, and I’d infer they were having a relationship, then next time he’d be with someone else. I shouldn’t exaggerate. Perhaps it happened only four or five times. And whenever we met at his flat (which bore no signs of joint occupation), he’d deny involvement with anyone: ‘The odd fling, that’s all. Since Corinne, there’s been nothing serious. Once bitten, twice shy. I just prefer being with women – present company excepted.’ One night, more drunk than usual, he recalled ‘the childishly pink, unusually elongated’ nipples of a woman he’d slept with. But he didn’t tell me her name. And the context wasn’t the boastful recital of a conquest but a discussion of aesthetics: why female bodies are inherently more beautiful than male bodies, and the human form is more inspiring than landscapes, and physical sensation as valid a measure of beauty as intellectual appreciation. We still had such discussions in those days. They only stopped when he married Jill.
It would be unfair to say that everything else stopped then, too. Even before they married, we met less regularly. He took to cancelling at the last minute. The cancellations sometimes came as a relief: not only was I now full-time on the listings magazine, I’d begun to make progress on my novel. But in lonelier moments I resented being dropped. Now he’d made his mark, I’d become the junior partner again – protégé and underling. We still got on when we did meet. He was more guarded in speaking about his life, but encouraged me to talk about mine. And if we went our separate ways before midnight, rather than drinking through the small hours, it showed we were becoming more sensible. It didn’t matter. It’s how it was. I had my life and he had his. All the same …
For months he didn’t tell me that he’d moved from the flat. That he was living with Jill, now divorced, in Parson’s Green. That they were already making plans to buy a house together.
He didn’t even tell me they were getting married. It came out after the event, at the dinner for his second collection. His publishers could afford it this time; the first book had done well. There were about ten of us present: Rob, Jill, Charles (but not his daughter), a couple of literary editors and their partners, and two women from the publicity department. No poets (Rob liked to think there were no other poets, except dead ones) and no critics (ditto). I remember the shock of what he was wearing that night: not the suit (which he always wore) but the bow tie. It was large, with red and white spots and looked like a pastiche of something, what I couldn’t tell. Rob’s line, as with the suit, was that he felt ‘comfortable’ in it. True or not, it marked him out and became a label: Robert Pope, the Bow-Tie Poet. The formalist tag first appeared around that time. This was what a formalist poet looked like.
The other shock that night was to find Jill sitting next to him. I’d not seen her since that time at his flat over two years before and thought she must be standing in for someone (a mistake reinforced by him talking far more to the person on his left than to her). And unlike Marie, who would have spotted it at once, I didn’t notice the wedding ring. Her eyes should have told me: the blue in them was deeper, warmer, more Mediterranean than Nordic. It was as though some weight had been lifted and the woman underneath – smart, attractive, independent – had broken free. The round plate of her face seemed to glow. Rob looked happy, too: vindicated in having seen her hidden qualities and vindicated by the reception of his new book, Mayday, which had already had good reviews. (‘To distance himself from the Middle Englandism associated with his first collection,’ one of them read, ‘Pope has become a complex technician – his is an Eliotic extinction of personality in the service of formal precision.’) When Charles stood up to toast Rob for his ‘quick work’, he meant the new collection. Rob picked up on the phrase in his reply. He’d been a quick worker in another respect, he said: a week ago he’d proposed to Jill and this morning, at Kensington register office, they’d become husband and wife. He made her stand up for a kiss. Invited to respond, she blushed and said the dress she’d married in – the one she was wearing – had been chosen by Robbie (she was already calling him that, I now realise), who’d insisted on the colour blue. He’d also insisted they marry in secret – no fuss, no confetti, no best man – which suited her. I caught Rob looking sheepishly at me as she sat down. The sheepish look was there again later when he plonked himself next to me.
‘I wanted it to be a surprise,’ he said.
‘It’s that all right.’
‘If I’d had a best man, then of course …’
‘I had the speech all worked out. The day we met. The years of friendship. How you were always there when I was having a rough time …’
‘Which was when you deci
ded I must be bad luck. Yeah, yeah.’
‘Jill looks great,’ I said.
‘Doesn’t she just.’
‘Where’s the honeymoon?’
‘I’m too busy with readings. She might come for a night when I’m in Cheltenham. That’ll be all. She’s done this before, remember.’
‘Were she and her ex together long?’
He laughed. ‘Are you worried we won’t last?’
‘Do you know why they broke up?’
‘What is this, Matt, the Spanish Inquisition?’
He stood up to say goodbye to someone. I left soon after. A fine mist haloed the streetlights in Soho Square. I understood already that the nature of our friendship had changed. However close we remained, however candidly I spoke to him about my life, certain aspects of his (Jill, love, marriage) were not to be broached again.
10
‘God, it’s hot,’ Jill said in the kitchen. She was wearing a light cotton dress with tiny blue flowers. Her shoulders were bare and the line above her upper lip was moist. ‘I don’t know how you can work in this. Do say if you need to cool off with a shower.’
‘I’m fine,’ I said, blushing at the thought of the poem about her and Rob having sex in the shower.
‘How’s it going? Have you come across any surprises?’
It was my first visit since discovering the UNP1 folder, which I’d been wondering how to bring up. Now her question gave me an opening – though I could tell from her tone that she expected the answer to be no.
‘As a matter of fact, yes. Half a dozen or so unpublished poems. Recent, by the look of it. Lexy will be very pleased.’
Be positive, I told myself, hoping that a show of enthusiasm would carry her along. Possessive though she was about Rob’s papers as objects or relics, the words themselves might not greatly matter to her.
‘What kind of poems?’
‘Various kinds,’ I lied. This wasn’t going to be easy. ‘Love poems mostly.’
‘That is a surprise.’
‘They’re quite direct. Candid. Erotic, even.’
The Executor Page 14
