‘They’ll make you revisit the past. And I know how much you miss him.’
She shrugged. ‘Maybe they’ll console me. When will you be back again?’
‘I’m not sure. Apart from finding a buyer for the archive, I’ve done all I can here.’
‘But we’ll need to discuss what to do about the poems.’
What’s to discuss? I resisted saying. Louis and I are Rob’s executors, not you.
‘I’m pretty busy at work,’ I said.
‘Come on a weekend,’ she said. ‘Bring Marie and the kids. Now you’ve finished, things will be more relaxed.’
In the hall downstairs, for the first time ever, she kissed me on the cheek: now my occupation of Rob’s room was over, she could afford to be affectionate.
‘When you began I wondered how serious you were – whether you’d just cut and run. But you’ve worked really hard, Matt. And I’m grateful. I know Robbie would be grateful, too.’
‘All I want is to respect his wishes.’
‘Don’t worry about the poems upsetting me. I know what Robbie was like. I’m sure it’ll be fine.’
‘That’s good to hear,’ I said, wondering once again if I’d underestimated her.
Siesta
May my siestas often turn out that way! (1.5)
An afternoon in the old colony, during monsoon season.
The roads were under water, but the rickshaw-man surfed through.
We sat in the kitchen, gossiping over tea and biscotti,
while rain barrelled down beyond the blinds. The light was dusk-light,
less for songbirds than for bats, but with a glow through the slats
that printed lines across our faces, black on white, white on black.
I’d come with a queasy stomach and a migraine,
so she suggested I lie down in her bedroom. It felt cool in there,
on the divan, under the rotor of the ceiling fan,
while kids played in the street and rain rat-tat-tatted on the glass.
At some point she came through and asked was I feeling better
and did I mind if she siesta’d too? She lay on her side behind me,
her hand on my hip, her breathing deep and steady, as if she’d dropped off,
until the hand moved down a bit – all this and what followed
without a word spoken, just the chop-chop of the fan,
the swish of her underthings, and the whap-whap of naked flesh.
Sometimes I find the memory hard to credit, as if I’d stolen it
from a porn mag, but then the shutters come back and the slats
across her body and the rain rat-tat-tatting on the glass.
Predatory
i
For the hunter, pursuit is all … (2.9a)
‘When will I see you again?’
they’d ask, some minutes after.
But for me the thrill had gone.
All I wanted was to be alone,
savouring our time together,
which – as I tried to explain
(though they didn’t seem to hear) –
was impossible with them there.
ii
… when I’m sick of the whole business,
some kink in my wretched nature drives me back (2.9b)
Then the reverie would fade
and I’d need to share my solitude.
You’re gorgeous, I’d say,
and mean it, but in bed
they could be anyone
and once it was done
I’d be out of there, pronto.
Bastard, they’d go,
but aren’t we all on a journey
to discover ourselves,
and never mind
the guff about finding
our other halves.
Private v Public
There appeared before me Elegy … Behind her stalked barnstorming Tragedy (3.1)
It’s a man’s favourite dream or worst nightmare,
Two women fighting over him in public.
There I was in Caffè Nero, with Eleanor,
Going over the draft of a new poem,
When in off Oxford Street walked Tania,
Both beautiful in their own way –
Eleanor blue-eyed, high-cheekboned, short-haired,
Her voice rising at the end of sentences,
Tania tall and intense with an Amnesty badge
Pinned to her blouse and black leather boots –
Each, till then, unaware of the other’s existence.
I was torn between confessing and running away,
When Tania snatched the poem from my hands
And over the hiss of the espresso machine
Read it aloud in a mocking voice.
‘Call this love poetry?’ she said, reaching the end.
‘I daresay she thinks it is. Huh, I’ve read
Better verses printed on Valentine’s cards.
Are your horizons no wider than a double bed?
Don’t you read the news? 500 shot dead in Cairo.
Famine in Somalia. The polar icecaps melting.
Poverty and homelessness like never before.
You should be writing about things that matter
Not the sex you hope to get by flattering
The tits off some slag you met five minutes since.
Here’s your key back. You’re welcome to him, love.’
She turned – then Eleanor spoke. ‘Pompous bitch.
Because he’s stopped writing you love poems,
You think you can rubbish the whole genre.
Catullus? Dante? Petrarch? Shakespeare?
You can’t call their poems Valentine’s slush.
True, his are no good. That’s why I’m here –
As his tutor, trying to help him improve.
Did he tell you he signed up for mentoring?
Nah – no more than he told me about you:
According to his poems, he’s been living
Like a monk while waiting for the woman
Of his dreams to come along and now she has,
A woman with blue eyes who writes poetry,
Only he’s too shy to tell her what he feels …
Well, I’m not so daft as to fall for that line,
And anyway I’m married with two kids.
Slag, did you say? You owe me an apology.’
Tania stood there speechless, eyes as sharp
As the pin holding her Amnesty badge,
While Eleanor clenched her fists ready for more.
‘Ladies, ladies,’ I said, like a UN delegate
Urging warring factions to call a ceasefire,
‘Can’t we talk about this calmly over coffee?’
It seemed my diplomacy had worked,
Because Tania muttered ‘Sorry’ and sat down,
And Eleanor, touching her arm, said ‘Sorry’ too.
While I stood at the counter waiting for our order,
I fantasised about them becoming friends
And the threesome we’d have that night,
But while the froth rose in the metal jug
They somehow slipped past me into the street
And were lost among crowds of shoppers
Like wood nymphs disappearing between trees.
Friends
Venus, goddess, please blow my innocent perjury out to sea (2.8)
I can’t help loving your friends. Sally, Brigitte,
Daphne, Cindy – not all at once, but each has been to bed
With me. If you knew, you’d call me indiscriminate.
But would you want me to sleep with someone you hate?
In sticking to your mates I’m paying tribute
To your good taste. Not once have I heard them deprecate
Your looks or bitch about your latest coat.
They know their place, too – don’t try to compete
With you in my affections or set out
To see us divorced. If you’re ev
er in doubt
How loyal and devoted they are, forget it.
No truer friends exist throughout the planet.
Fruit
Why cheat the laden vine when grapes are ripening …? (2.14)
She called one day, asking to meet
Outside her appointed time.
‘I’ve some news,’ she said. ‘Nothing terrible,
Just something you should know.’
We met near a park in Wandsworth –
her car and mine in adjoining spaces –
and sat on the grassy slope
as the sun fell into Barnes.
Nothing terrible? It was the worst.
I’d been so careful
To keep a clean sheet. Now this.
What could have gone wrong?
I’d sometimes felt her coil scratching,
Like a paperclip or loose wire,
But perhaps she’d hoiked it out.
We were growing fruit
And she wanted me to rejoice,
To tell her I loved her
And would be with her always,
Not to look (as I must have) scared.
I took her hand and squeezed it.
She had a pink gingham dress
And a rash on her legs
From the spiky summer grass.
‘You don’t want it, do you?’ she said.
‘It’s a shock, that’s all.’
‘How would you feel if I went ahead?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
A mosquito was circling her ankle
And I slapped it dead.
‘Ouch.’ ‘I was trying to help.’
‘You’re no help at all,’ she said.
It was dark by the time we parted,
Agreeing to think things over,
Our cars turning away from each other
At the bottom of a hill.
She phoned two days later.
‘I’ve made a date at the clinic.
I don’t want you with me.
I just need a cheque.’
Blood money, she called it
The night of the weepy call
And the threatened leap
From Vauxhall Bridge.
Later she moved away
But I still get Christmas cards
With baby Jesus haloed on the front
And her name in red pen inside.
Elegiac
Though flint itself will perish, poetry lives (1.15)
These women I’ve written about – were they just bodies to me?
Had I no interest in their thoughts and feelings? Didn’t I love them?
Of course, while I was with them. But then I went back to my life,
my room, my writing (my writing about them!) and I loved that more.
If I’d been free to be with them, they’d not have loved me as much.
If I’d loved them more, I wouldn’t have been free to write.
It wasn’t a deal we shook hands on, but for a time it suited us
and afterwards there were no hard feelings: they found a new man,
and I had my writing, not erotic now but elegiac.
Yes, I loved those women. But remembering, I love them more.
14
I sat up late that night reading the poems – not just the latest batch, but the handwritten ones from earlier. The new ones were numbered: 1.3, 2.11, 3.4 and so on. A few of the previous ones had numbers too, but until now I’d paid them no attention. The numbers seemed random; the poems didn’t come in order. Had Rob been working on a sequence, but failed to bring it to completion? The numbers suggested he must have had a structure in mind, arranged in three parts. But there was no obvious narrative or through-line. Typical of a novelist to look for one, I could imagine him chiding me, but the numbers invited it. These weren’t fragments – they progressed, or promised to. Did he expect me to find the right arrangement? His will left minimal instructions. Even those were contradictory.
Some of the poems had epigraphs, too. I’ve only a rudimentary knowledge of English poetry and didn’t recognise them. Were they from the same author? Or by several different authors? Some were so fragmentary that it seemed pointless to include them. Very few were bons mots. Shouldn’t epigraphs be epigrammatic? Obviously Rob didn’t think so.
Since his death, I’d had to assimilate a series of surprises and accept how little I knew him. But nothing had prepared me for this. If they weren’t made up, what did the poems say about him? That he’d had affairs with numerous women, including Jill’s friends. That he’d got one of his lovers pregnant. That he regarded intimacy as a threat and stability as a bore. That sex formed a depressing cycle in his life – pursuit/conquest/disillusion/solitude/pursuit. That he was happier recalling affairs in words, than having them in the flesh. That he was liar, roué, hypocrite and solipsist – a piece of shit, as Marie put it.
At one of our lunches he’d speculated whether he’d have been a greater poet if he’d lived more boldly. Were the poems an attempt to show he had? Or proof of cowardice – of a secret life he hadn’t had the courage to disclose? In later years he had felt sidelined by a younger generation of poets, whom he didn’t rate (and probably hadn’t read). Were these poems his attempt to clamber back into the limelight? I remembered him gloomily quoting Robert Frost at one of our lunches: ‘No memory of having starred/Atones for later disregard.’ Perhaps he’d have published the poems had he lived longer. But it didn’t look that way: he’d scattered and secreted them for me to come across after his death. A lazier executor might have missed them. But he knew me well enough to know I’d make an effort. I might have worked faster, but I’d done as he asked. Matt the disciple. Matt the poodle. His trusted sidekick and pet.
‘Shockingly belated’ was how he’d once described his first sexual experiences, in his early twenties. Was that why the poems were so priapic, because he’d never got over his youthful excitement at getting laid? The poems he’d written at the time had been terrible, he said, but perhaps he returned to them many years later. They didn’t read like the experiences of a young man, but they might have begun that way. Or could the poems be about relationships he’d had in the States, not just with Corinne (whom he loved) but with other women? Then again, if the ‘you’ he described betraying was Jill, the infidelities must date from later, and that seemed more likely. Whether Jill or a lover, the ‘you’ in the earlier poems had been the object of tenderness. The tone here was different: cold, cynical, rapacious. The women weren’t addressed but discarded – a series of shes, some named, others not, with whom he’d had it off.
Like it or not, like them or not, we now had enough poems for a collection. Knowing the stir they’d create, Louis would want to push ahead at once. Jill might object, but she hadn’t the power to stop us and if she understood what was at stake – the posthumous discovery of new work by a leading poet – she might give the book her blessing, whatever her private doubts. There was that thing she’d said in the hallway, too: that I needn’t worry, she knew what Rob was like. I was feeling optimistic. Marie would have warned me not to be. But I hadn’t yet shown her the latest poems, nor emailed them to Louis. For now I was keeping them to myself.
When I remember the following weekend I think of things unrelated to my reason for remembering it.
I remember the mist that came and went, shutting us in, then seeming to clear – the white cotton turning a satin blue – then flooding back again. The sun was a silver coin behind a layer of tracing paper.
I remember an aeroplane crashed somewhere, killing all passengers and crew, and people speculating that it had been shot down by Islamic State militants.
I remember a boat full of refugees capsizing off the island of Samos, and bodies washing up.
I remember a post-match press interview with José Mourinho, whose Chelsea team were suffering a run of defeats, and how he refused to answer questions, just kept saying, ‘I have nothing, nothing to say.’
I remem
ber we drove in early to the Royal Academy, knowing there was no congestion charge on a Sunday and that we could park for free nearby. Marie and I were both keen to see the Ai Weiwei exhibition, which, because it consisted of large constructions and installations, we thought the boys might find more interesting than paintings – and they did, though their real fascination was with the photos of Ai Weiwei himself, whose beard and twinkly eyes reminded them of a Chinese wizard in one of their books, despite the fact that there were also images of him in handcuffs being interrogated by angry policemen and soldiers.
I remember coming away with a sense of dismay that the oppressive China depicted by Ai Weiwei was the same China with whom our government was busy negotiating a major trade agreement.
I remember a politely spoken, lightly bearded man in his fifties ringing our doorbell to ask about the chair sitting on the pavement, a large, handsome wingback fireside armchair that had come from my mother and which we were fond of but had no room for in the house and (as I explained to the man) had left out the night before in the hope that someone would take it away, as had happened with previous items such as a shower screen and fire-grate. The man said he’d recently taken up upholstery and thought the chair, once worked on, would sit well in his living room. Do please have it, I said, and thanked him for asking permission (which no one had on the previous occasions) and wished him well.
I remember going to the supermarket – Waitrose for once, not Lidl – and buying fresh pesto, and trying it out on the boys, with rigatoni and parmesan, a partial success in that they ate most of their pasta, a partial failure in that they said they preferred spag bol.
I remember Noah resisting being put to bed, which was unusual for him and which I attributed to three possible sources: the Ai Weiwei show, the unfamiliar pasta or the upset in the back garden, as dusk fell, when we played Donkey with the tennis ball and he was the first to be out (with me on Donk and Jack on Don).
I remember sitting down to watch The Hunt on BBC1, not a detective thriller but a nature documentary, notable for the focus on wildebeest as the victims both of dog packs (on savannah grasslands) and crocodiles (at a waterhole), with the usual denouement of bloody innards and bone-chomping.
I remember the phone ringing just as The Hunt began its final phase, the now-requisite techy-epilogue to such documentaries showing how the cameramen got the money shot, which Marie likes to watch and I don’t.
The Executor Page 19
