‘I’m amazed they ask that.’
‘I’m the one asking.’
‘Life.’
‘Wrong again. I’ll get the coffees.’
‘So,’ I said, when he returned with our cappuccinos, ‘if a house is burning down and it’s a choice between saving a Michelangelo or one of the tenants –’
‘Oh, that old conundrum.’
‘Say an eighty-year-old with cancer.’
‘Easy. The Michelangelo.’
‘What about a healthy sixty-year-old?’
‘They’d have had their best years by then.’
‘A forty-year-old mother of two? A teenager? A child?’
‘I might weaken, out of sentimentality,’ he said, ‘but I like to think not.’
He was fond of playing devil’s advocate. That’s what I assumed he was doing that day. If he’d been as brutal as he pretended, Jill would never have stayed with him – she’d left her first husband, after all. But some of the poems were brutal. She could live with them if they stayed private, just about. Should they be published, though …? The threat was there, and I didn’t take it lightly.
‘It’s emotional blackmail,’ Louis said, when I phoned him that evening. ‘She’s using every means possible to stop us. I’m sorry she feels as she does, but it’s time to get on. I sent the poems to Lexy this morning. I’m going to push for a decent advance and an early pub date.’
‘Fuck. I told Jill that only you and I have seen the poems.’
‘She needs to get real. They can’t stay a secret forever.’
‘It’s Louis who needs to get real,’ Marie said, when I got off the phone. She’d muted the volume on the television to listen in. Now she turned it up again. ‘They should stay a secret.’
‘If Jill could accept they’re fiction …’
‘He still betrayed her in his imagination.’
‘We all imagine doing terrible things. In dreams, for instance.’
‘Dreams don’t count. We’re not responsible for them.’
‘But that’s what literature is – a kind of dreaming.’
The ten o’clock news began, with shots of refugees at a barbed-wire border post – shouting, weeping, begging for food and drink.
‘Books have an effect on whoever reads them,’ Marie said. ‘Like watching this stuff has an effect. Or hearing Mabel cry has an effect.’ She reached for the remote again and turned the volume down for confirmation; yes, the cries were coming from upstairs, not Lesbos. ‘Your turn.’
I trooped upstairs, still arguing with her in my head. Surely art belonged to the kingdom of inconsequence, where anything could and should be said: no limits, no censorship, no comeback. Or was that naïve? For Marie – and for Jill – art was as real as a human cry. There it was, craving your attention, breaking your heart.
Aaron Fortune emailed again. Give him his due, he was persistent. He could now confirm that he’d be visiting England in the spring, he said. Though he took the point that, as a literary executor, I couldn’t entrust ‘any old academic’ with Rob’s papers, he could assure me of his discretion and integrity. Perhaps we could meet? The email was more plaintive than pushy. I deleted it, all the same.
On the paper, we ran a review of Chris Kraus’s reissued novel I Love Dick that made me go out and buy a copy (something no self-respecting literary editor – bombarded by proofs and freebies – would normally do). It’s about Kraus and her husband Sylvère’s joint obsession with a fellow intellectual called Dick to whom they write a series of letters and with whom Kraus has sex a few times. The letters are the basis of the book, part-memoir, part-novel, part-theoretical essay. On the penultimate page, the stalked and enigmatic Dick (thought to be based on the English sociologist and cultural historian Dick Hebdidge) expresses his discomfort to Sylvère about being ‘used’ as material: ‘I still enjoy your company and conversation when we meet, and believe, as you do, that Kris [sic] has talent as a writer. I can only reiterate what I have said before whenever the topic has been raised in conversation with you or Chris: that I do not share your conviction that my right to privacy has to be sacrificed for the sake of that talent.’
I wasn’t looking for a connection, but there it was. I do not share your conviction that my right to privacy has to be sacrificed for the sake of that talent. It could have been Jill.
‘He comes over as an arsehole,’ Lexy said.
Orange light bathed her face. Behind her, to the west, the slow-moving pods of the London Eye were pulling the sun down with them.
‘Do narrators have to be likeable?’ I said.
‘Not in novels. But poets are their narrators. When Hardy or Heaney describe some experience, we know it happened to them. We trust them, we warm to them, we let them take us by the hand. Whereas Rob – well, I won’t take his hand because I don’t know where it’s been. Or rather, I won’t because I do.’
‘So you’re against publishing the poems?’ I said, more combatively than I meant.
‘Did I say that? I know you two were friends. But if I can’t give an honest appraisal without you freaking out this isn’t going to work. Shall we have another glass? Mine’s Vouvray.’
The bar was crowded. I could see her texting or emailing while I waited. Her yellow plastic raincoat was draped on my chair. Five minutes in, and I already felt worn out. Lexy always had that effect. While she streaked ahead, you lumbered in her wake. And by the time you caught up, she’d moved on again, like the runner in a Zeno paradox. It was a talent for making you feel stupid.
She’d suggested the South Bank because she was going to a concert: a large glass of white and a half-hour tussle with me would set her up nicely for Philip Glass or Steve Reich or whatever she was due to hear. Actually, two large glasses. And yet she fully expected to stay awake through the concert. If it were me, I’d be asleep within five minutes.
‘He crowds his women out,’ she said, as I put her glass on the table. ‘He serenades them in order to suppress them. He pushes them under, then pretends to know how they’re feeling. Take that last poem, the one where he looks back on all the relationships he’s had. How does it go? “For a time it suited us both and afterwards there were no hard feelings,” something like that. Really? In every case? How convenient for him – easy-come, easy-go, a mutual shrug of acceptance and no regrets. I’d like to know how the women feel. I’d like to know what happens to them after he’s fucked them, got bored and moved on. They’ve no agency.’
‘So you dislike the poems?’
‘You’re not listening, Matt. I dislike what they tell me about Rob. That’s a different matter.’
‘I thought you just said that unless the persona behind the poems is attractive, the poems fail.’
‘Rob’s only work as an expression of unreconstructed male sexuality. Daft analogy maybe, but they remind me of Picasso’s paintings of himself as a bull, with his female model or muse alongside. Only, the women in Picasso’s paintings are present, however distorted. We can see them. Those in Rob’s poems are invisible.’
‘To protect their identities,’ I said. ‘He’s sparing with his physical descriptions so they won’t be recognised.’
‘We never hear them, either. They don’t speak. He silences them.’
‘Come on, Lexy. There are lines where they do speak.’
She raised an eyebrow, before taking a drink.
‘Yes, and what do they say? Nothing memorable. Nothing assertive. They whine and wheedle. Or else melt with love for the shit who’s about to betray them.’
‘You really don’t like the poems, do you?’ I said.
‘You’re like a stuck record, Matt. Whether I like them isn’t the point. I’m his editor. I’ve got to do what’s in the interests of my publishing house.’
‘Financially?’
‘Poetry doesn’t make money.’
‘What, then?’
‘The issue is whether Rob is still a good name to have on our list. Whether he’s a fit with what we’re tryin
g to achieve.’
‘Rob never fitted in.’
‘I’m not talking about conformity. I’m talking about quality. Do these last poems meet the standards we expect – that he expected?’
‘And? Do they?’
‘Shit, look at the time,’ Lexy said. ‘I need to get to the concert.’
‘I’ll walk across with you,’ I said, draining my glass.
Outside, the light was fading. Unseen birds were chittering from the concrete. I felt grumpy – toyed with and outplayed.
‘It’s too early to decide anything,’ she said. ‘I’m really busy with our spring list just now. Once things are quieter, I’ll sit down with the poems and we can talk again. There’s a lot to consider.’
‘Including Jill – we haven’t talked about her,’ I said.
‘Next time.’
‘You know what a state she’s in.’
‘Understandably. She told me.’
‘She knows you’re reading the poems?’
‘Of course,’ Lexy said. ‘I called her the moment Louis sent them to me.’
‘And she’s OK about it?’
‘She hates the thought of anyone reading them. But she knows I wouldn’t do anything without consulting her. Here we are – I’d better go in.’
Against the backdrop of the grey concrete, her plastic raincoat glowed like a flame.
‘What’s the concert?’ I said.
‘Stravinsky and Stockhausen. Incidentally, Jill doesn’t seem to have spotted the incest poem. Just as well. That would harden her opposition even more.’
‘The incest poem?’
‘You know, the one describing Rob and his sister being left alone in a villa. He’s rubbing her with suncream and one thing leads to another.’
‘I didn’t think it was about his sister. Does it say that?’
‘You know how Rob usually begins his lines with lower case. In that poem he doesn’t.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I’ve got to go,’ she said, kissing me on both cheeks. ‘Have a look when you get home.’
The crime scene was a villa on the Med.
Or had we no choice, two kids left alone
All day, sun-dazed, unused to such freedom, half-
Naked and half-pissed? Your shoulders were red.
Gently, you said, as I slicked you with lotion,
Eking out the bottle as my hands slithered
Lightly down under, to the untouched whiteness
And nub …
We’ve never talked about it
Since. Have you forgotten? Blanked it out?
Or has the memory been the cause of all your grief?
Reason tells me we were blameless, but remorse
Rips reason into shreds. Let me take the rap.
You were innocent. Sorry if I fucked you up.
Lexy was right. The first letters of each line spelled it out. What were the chances of his having a girlfriend who had the same name as his sister and with whom he’d spent a foreign holiday in his teens? And if there had been another Angela, why would what happened be such a big deal – enough to justify words like ‘guilt’, ‘remorse’ and ‘crime’? enough to prompt a craven apology decades later? Rob had rarely talked about Angela, and then mostly disparagingly: my bonkers sister, he called her. I knew she’d spent time in psychiatric units both in the UK and Australia, in the latter case after breaking up with the boyfriend she had followed there. (Was the phrase ‘down under’ in the poem intentionally ambiguous?) The poem was a revision of his one about the paedophile in Bangkok; in this version there were two kids in it, rather than one. Sexually exploratory activity in young siblings isn’t unusual and the poem stopped short of describing penetration; Rob had told me he was still a virgin when he went to university. Still, I didn’t much fancy drawing anyone’s attention to the poem, let alone having to defend it on the grounds that he’d merely fingered his sister rather than fucked her.
Had it really happened – any more than him giving his mother morphine or forcing one of his mistresses to have an abortion? What if the salacious detail was pure invention? No one could check the facts. The subjects of the poems were anonymous or disguised and would probably never read them. There’d be no comeback – no one to dispute Rob’s version of the truth. And he’d not be around even if there were. It felt like an elaborate tease. The apology to his sister was an acrostic; even the more direct poems involved puzzles of some kind. He’d set me a series of tests. Was I resourceful enough to discover the texts he’d squirrelled away? Clever enough to decode them? And resolute enough to go public with them, despite opposition from others and my own doubts? I remembered the time, in Brandon, when he’d made me promise to come to his seminar, without telling me where it was. I’d had to find my way to his department, make enquiries and outflank the secretary acting as gatekeeper. That, too, had been a test – of my loyalty, perseverance and capacity for keeping promises. Now he was testing me from the grave.
17
The weather stayed mild all autumn. A wind blew from the south-west, bringing record temperatures and a series of storms – Abigail, Barney, Clodagh, Desmond, Eva … Thousands of migrants came with them. Those not risking boat journeys to Greece walked the long way round, some lucking it into Germany, others halted at borders en route. We watched them on the news, begging for food, water, money, blankets, common humanity. Their clothes were thin and their noses ran while we basked in unseasonable warmth. The six raspberry bushes in our back garden were still fruiting in December, while the daffodils in next door’s front were already out.
One Saturday I took the boys to a children’s matinee at the National Theatre, while Marie sat with Mabel in the foyer. ‘How was it?’ she asked when we came out. ‘The usual toddler fare, lots of sex and violence,’ I said, only half joking. There’d been a scene in which a bear ate a rabbit (the blood represented by a scarf of red wool), though the boys seemed untroubled by it, to the point of being slightly bored. The play was an adaptation of a book and I’d been hoping they’d beg me to buy a copy afterwards – no such luck. They livened up when we walked past the Christmas market stalls. A man with a beard was producing giant soap bubbles from a pair of bellows and encouraged the boys to chase them. No longer confined by theatre etiquette, they ran, jumped and screamed along the Thames-side path.
The long countdown to Christmas included a visit to Santa at a theme park (Marie had booked ahead to avoid queues); the school nativity play (Noah was a shepherd and Jack a wise man); and the daily ritual of the advent calendar, the doors of which they took turns to open, finding a chocolate hidden in each, with Marie insisting that Mabel have her share, to the resentment of the boys, who knew that meant less for them, if not (their maths skills didn’t extend to division) by exactly how many chocolates. We bought a tree – a non-drop seven-footer – from the local Homebase and set it up in a corner of the living room. Disentangling the fairy lights took hours and when I plugged them in I found they didn’t work, which meant another trip to Homebase, where, defying Marie and the boys, who wanted coloured lights that blinked on and off, I bought plain white ones that didn’t. The house opposite – a riot of elves, reindeer, sleighs and Santas – was colour enough for the whole street. And next door had a string of flashing blue LEDs draped over its bushes and railings, like a posse of emergency service vehicles. I understood the need to offset the long nights with a pagan orgy of light. But I hated the garishness. ‘If it weren’t for the kids,’ I told Marie, ‘I’d go abroad.’ ‘Don’t be such a Scrooge,’ she said, ‘your mother’s coming and she loves Christmas.’ Did she? Had she ever? The only Christmas childhood memory I had was of her tearfully chucking away some burnt mince pies.
Marie had talked of inviting Jill around. But she’d doubtless be going to her brother’s. And now that she’d come to see me as an enemy – the man threatening to bring shame on Rob – she’d surely have refused, no matter how fond of Marie and the boys. I thought of her constant
ly in terms that varied from mild irritation (a stone in the shoe) to serious pain (a knife in the chest). I felt sorry for her, nonetheless: she’d done nothing to deserve this. How had she and Rob spent their Christmases? I wondered. Did they listen to the Queen at 3 p.m.? Put presents under the tree? Did they even have a tree? This would be her second Christmas without him: a difficult time, though maybe there were worse ones – his birthday, her birthday, their wedding anniversary.
Jill phoned me early in January – at ten on a Sunday evening. The angry call she’d made back in October had also come late on a Sunday. This time she didn’t apologise.
‘Have you seen the Sunday Times?’
I usually get it, along with the Observer, if only to check out rival books pages, but we’d spent the weekend ferrying the boys around – Jack to football, Noah to swimming, both of them to birthday parties – and I hadn’t bought either.
‘Books section. Big piece about the titles to watch out for in the year ahead. If you haven’t seen it, let me read you the last paragraph. Blah blah, here it is … “Meanwhile there’s the prospect of a posthumous collection from Robert Pope called The Compulsions of Love – a breakout book, so rumour has it, that shows the famously formalist Bow-Tie Poet in a daring new light. I can hardly wait.” I being the journalist, not me. What the fuck’s going on?’
It was the first time I’d ever heard Jill say ‘fuck’. Though it didn’t sound as if she’d been drinking, I didn’t rule it out.
‘I’ve no idea,’ I said. ‘It’s news to me.’
‘They even have a title.’
‘We’ve never discussed a title.’
‘You and I haven’t discussed it. But you’ve obviously discussed it with Louis and Lexy.’
‘Nope. Not guilty, Jill.’
‘I can’t believe this is happening.’
‘Nothing’s happening. Lexy has read the poems, but as far as I know that’s all. She hasn’t edited them, there’s no publication date and nothing has gone into production. I’ve seen the publishers’ catalogue for the next six months – there’s nothing about Rob in it.’
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