The Executor

by Blake Morrison

  ‘On privacy grounds?’

  ‘I think it’s more basic,’ she said. ‘Rob hurt her. She wants to hurt him back. I thought she was softening – till the Sunday Times item appeared.’

  ‘Yes, that was bad. How did it happen?’

  ‘It can only have been Louis. No one in my office has seen the poems, let alone discussed a title.’

  ‘You think he gossiped to someone?’

  ‘Knowing Louis, it will have been calculated. Present it as a fait accompli, make Jill think it’s going to happen anyway, and she’ll crumble – that’s what he hoped.’

  ‘Instead of which …’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I talked to one of our lawyers at the paper,’ I said. ‘In her view, there’s little chance of Jill getting an injunction.’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘So we could just press ahead. As Rob instructed in his will. We do have an obligation.’

  ‘You and Louis may have. I don’t. For me the only issue is the quality of the poems.’

  ‘And?’

  She grimaced. ‘They’re so unlike Rob. Everything he published had dignity. These don’t. They’re noisy and in-your-face. Depressingly hetero-normative, too – that kind of rampant masculinity feels so tired these days.’

  ‘People will be interested, though. Rob’s a big name.’

  ‘Was. Big-ish. We don’t want to make him look smaller.’

  ‘Are you saying Louis and I should go to another publisher?’

  She shook her head, whether as a no or from impatience I couldn’t tell.

  ‘Something else came up when I spoke to Jill,’ she said. ‘Remind me where you found the poems.’

  I sighed. I’d been through this with Louis. What did it matter anyway?

  ‘The first batch on loose sheets of paper, inside a folder. The second tucked into the back of a notebook. The rest on his laptop.’

  ‘Where on the laptop?’

  ‘Appended to a book review he’d done.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. Jill’s disputing the status of the poems. She says that putting them where he did was his way of binning them.’

  ‘He wasn’t binning them, he was hiding them from her.’

  ‘Everything he intended for publication was always typed out and put in his desk, she says, and you didn’t find anything in his desk.’

  ‘Because he didn’t want her finding the poems and destroying them.’ I don’t often get angry, but my voice must have been raised because I could see people looking over at us. ‘When posthumous work by a major author is discovered, it’s usually good news,’ I said, lowering it. ‘We shouldn’t have to fight about this.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Lexy. ‘But might it be worth you going back and checking what’s in the desk?’

  ‘It was the first place I looked. There’s nothing there. Even if there had been, Jill would have destroyed it by now.’

  ‘Well, let’s keep talking,’ she said, standing up to signal the opposite: enough chat. ‘I’m sure we’ll sort this out eventually. But by the way, you’re wrong.’ She handed me a book from her shelves. ‘When an author dies there often is a fight.’

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘We published it last year. Everyone knows the story. But this’ll refresh your memory.’

  ‘Which story exactly?’ I said, as she walked me along the corridor to the lift.

  ‘The burning of Byron’s memoirs,’ she said.

  The lift pinged open. ‘Sixth floor,’ a French female voice said.

  ‘Read the last chapter,’ Lexy said. ‘You’ll find it germane.’

  If I knew the story at all, I’d forgotten it. How within days of the news of Byron’s death in Missolonghi reaching London, six men gathered in a room in Albemarle Street to discuss what to do with his memoirs. The three key players were his publisher John Murray (whose house it was), his friend John Hobhouse (politician and pamphleteer) and the Irish poet Thomas Moore, to whom Byron had given the memoirs some years before. Hobhouse was for destroying them at once: he deeply resented Byron entrusting them to Moore rather than himself, and, though he hadn’t read them, he’d heard they were obscene – for the sake of Byron’s reputation, and to spare the feelings of his half-sister Augusta and estranged wife Annabella, they must never see the light of day. Moore disagreed. He’d not only read them, but had arranged for a second copy to be made (the original having become dog-eared after passing through so many hands); they were far less offensive than rumour suggested, he said. Murray sided with Hobhouse: he’d made a handsome profit from publishing Byron’s poems over the years, but had also had a deal of trouble because of them (threats, libel suits, angry complaints) and feared the memoirs would bring more. In the middle of discussing a possible compromise – to preserve the manuscripts, but lock them away for many years – an argument broke out over who owned the memoirs. Though Moore had sold them to Murray, a clause in the contract allowed him to buy them back – so he thought, until Hobhouse and Murray pointed out that the clause only held good while Byron was alive. Outflanked, Moore began to lose heart. And when Murray’s son appeared, by prior arrangement, to help with the burning of the manuscripts, his protests went unheeded. Within minutes, both the original and the fair copy were ash.

  It was easy to imagine the scene. The two Murrays, father and son, feeding thick sheaves of paper to the coals. Moore keeping his distance from the blaze, as though Byron himself were being cremated. Hobhouse keeping his as well, from a fear of being implicated in the process he had set in train. Soft grey flakes unloosening and smoke shushing up the chimney into the air of London, a long grey plume slowly dispersing and who knows what revelations fading with it as the men in the room shake hands to reassure themselves they’ve done the right thing …

  In my dream that night it was Rob’s poetry in the grate as I descended the chimney like Santa Claus, gathering all the soot flakes as I went, and rescuing the ashes from the grate, until the smouldering fragments were sheets of paper again – a triumphant feat of reconstitution, except that the pages were all blank.

  I phoned Louis the next day to brief him on my meeting with Lexy, expecting him to be even angrier than I was: how many more obstacles could Jill put in our way?

  ‘There’s nothing in the will about him putting finished copies in his desk,’ I said.

  ‘No, but she’s obviously put the wind up Lexy.’

  ‘“I’m sure we’ll sort this out eventually,” she said. Eventually! Eventually’s no good for us. Eventually might mean after Jill’s death and that could be another thirty years. We want to get the poems out now, while people have still heard of Rob.’

  I sounded more like Louis than Louis did. It was he who’d become the tentative one.

  ‘We could approach other publishers,’ he said. ‘That’s our fallback position. But Lexy holds the rights to all his earlier stuff. It could get very messy. I’d rather stick with her if we can. We just need to persuade her that she won’t face a legal hassle. Which might take a bit of time.’

  ‘Is there nothing else we can do?’

  ‘There’s the archive to sell. Where’ve you got to with that?’

  ‘The inventory’s finished. It’s a matter of approaching some universities.’

  We talked about which ones might be interested – London? Sussex? Brandon? – and what sort of money to expect. An author represented by one of Louis’s partners had just sold her archive for half a million. But she was a best-selling novelist.

  ‘Is it worth going to Jill’s again?’ Louis said, before we finished. ‘There could be something you’ve missed.’

  ‘There isn’t. I’ve been through everything.’

  ‘Go anyway. One last trip.’

  ‘I don’t see the point,’ I said.

  I hung up, feeling angrier with Louis than I had with Lexy. Since that Sunday Times leak (had it been him?) he’d lost his chutzpah. Or grown weary of fighting Jill. Or – given how busy he was with his living
authors – had decided that Rob was low priority. It seemed I was on my own.

  19

  I wrote to a couple of universities about the archive. But weeks went by and neither replied. Then another email came from Aaron Fortune, asking if I’d seen his previous ones: he had just arrived from Adelaide, on sabbatical, and was hoping to meet me, ideally at Rob’s house, so he could ‘get a feel for the topographical backdrop to his later oeuvre’. He fully understood that – this was the phrase that got me thinking – ‘the papers are under lock and key’. Still, we were both admirers of Rob and, even if he couldn’t see the archive, a meeting might be of ‘mutual benefit’.

  I replied at once. Yes, the archive was still embargoed, I told him, but as it happened we were now looking for potential buyers. Might his university have an interest? If so, I’d be prepared to show him a sample of the materials I had found.

  I doubted he’d have any influence on his university’s acquisitions policy. But he was desperate to get sight of Rob’s papers and, as I guessed he would, he emailed back claiming he did.

  Jill was amenable when I rang, if only to underline her willingness to compromise: since she’d given in on selling the archive, we should give up the idea of a posthumous volume.

  We agreed a date and I emailed her address to Aaron. He’d be travelling from London by train, he replied: perhaps we could go together? I’d other commitments, I lied, and would meet him at the house at midday.

  The morning began badly. My socks have coloured stripes with the days of the week on them, but I couldn’t find a matching pair, and superstition makes me reluctant to wear odd ones.

  ‘I’ve run out of days,’ I said.

  ‘Sounds ominous,’ Marie said.

  I settled on a combination of ‘Monday’ and ‘Thursday’, and went downstairs to make a coffee. But the pods for the machine had run out and the grains in the instant jar were a solid purple mass.

  Outside a gale was blowing; it was more like January than May. I hurried the boys towards school – hoods up and laden with backpacks, they looked like climbers setting out from base camp. I, too, had a backpack, empty but for two novels and a screwdriver. At Charing Cross, there were major delays. Power lines down at Gillingham, someone said. I didn’t get to Jill’s till gone eleven, an hour later than planned.

  She was wearing jeans, looked half a stone lighter and had tied her hair in a teenage ponytail. Before Aaron arrives I need to double-check that Rob’s papers are in order, I told her, hoping to get to his room unhindered. But she insisted on coming with me, and hung around making conversation while I brought out the crates from the cupboard. How were the kids? How was Marie? Had we any holiday plans? Was my job at the paper going well? What did I think of the current referendum campaign? Had she mentioned that she was now working only three days a week? … As I knelt there on the floor, dully flicking through sheets and notebooks, I kept my back turned to the desk. If she suspected anything, she’d never leave.

  It didn’t look as if she’d leave anyway. At 11.40 she was still there, anxiously monitoring me.

  ‘Just to be clear,’ I said, ‘I’ll only be showing Aaron these crates – not the unpublished stuff.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘If he knows I’ve found some new poems he’ll want to see them. And if he gets wind of any dispute between us, he’ll start asking questions. So I’m not going to say a word.’

  She seemed reassured.

  ‘I’ll hang the washing out before he comes,’ she said. ‘Will you excuse me a minute?’

  A minute wouldn’t be long enough. But five should do.

  I stood by the window until she appeared below, carrying a blue plastic clothes basket. On reflection, the screwdriver seemed too crude a tool. I opened the stationery drawer instead, and retrieved Rob’s paperknife: stainless steel, solid-handled, with a tapering, serrated blade. Chances were the top right-hand drawer would be empty, or as full of dross as the other drawers, but I had to try. I pushed the knife in the lock and turned: nothing. I twiddled the blade about: nothing. I tugged the brass handle, while twiddling and turning: still nothing. I bent down and peered into the narrow crack between the top of the drawer and the bottom of the desk lid, shining the light of my mobile in for a better view. The flat brass plate of the lock was faintly visible, but nothing protruded from it vertically. Maybe the drawer wasn’t locked, just jammed, like the one in the old chest we have at home, bought from a flea market, which won’t open properly because the wood has expanded. I stood up and looked out. The thin green wires of the rotary washing line were filling out with pillowcases and sheets; Jill’s clothes basket was almost empty. I grabbed the handle of the drawer and wrenched: side to side, back and forth, up and down. The top edge was where it seemed to be sticking. To push the paperknife into the slit between desk and drawer risked splintering the wood. Jill would notice if it did. But what the hell …?

  I stuck the knife in, wiggled the drawer, jiggled the blade, and pulled, hard. The drawer came free with a loud crack, the momentum throwing me backwards on to the floor. I lay there with the drawer in my lap, laughing at the absurdity, before standing up to check on Jill: she was pegging out a last tea towel; she hadn’t heard a thing.

  There was a single fawn-brown folder in the drawer. It had a white label on the front, with UNPFINAL written in black marker pen, and fifty typed A4 sheets inside. I stuck it in my backpack and returned the drawer to its hollow. How long since Rob had last opened it? The front of the desk was undamaged. But the drawer had left a groove where I’d pulled it through, and the tongue of the lock was slightly raised, not tucked inside the plate. So the drawer had been locked. And the key thrown away or hidden somewhere. Which showed the lengths to which Rob had gone to conceal the folder.

  ‘Are you all set?’ Jill said, stepping through the door. ‘Your chap should be here any minute.’

  I got the train back with Aaron. He was forty-something, not a septuagenarian, and wore a chunky ring on his little finger, with the letter ‘A’ on it: A for Aaron, A for Archivist. Large, loud and breezily self-confident, he was the antithesis of the grubbing scholar I’d imagined – so forceful, in fact, that he probably could have persuaded his university to acquire Rob’s papers. But now he’d been to the house, he was honest enough to admit that its only archive collection – and that a small one – was of little-known Australian novelists. And I couldn’t help feeling that his interest in Rob’s notebooks and drafts – which I’d delicately brought to him from the crates, like a white-gloved curator handling pages of the Gutenberg Bible, as he sat at Rob’s desk – was less than zealous. He showed more interest in the room, house, garden and Jill. And once on the train he bombarded me with questions: when had I first met Rob? How well did I know Jill? Had his death come as a surprise? I began to wonder if he had a biography in mind, rather than a critical monograph.

  At Charing Cross he suggested a drink, but I made my excuses (‘I’ve three kids to get home to’, ‘My sympathies, mate’) and caught the Tube. It was a relief to get away from him. Both at the house and on the train I’d been acutely conscious of the folder in my backpack. My paranoid fantasies included Jill body- and bag-searching me as I left, and Aaron switching the folder to his backpack while I fetched us teas from the train’s buffet bar. Only when I got home did I dare undo the zip and confirm the folder was there.

  The fifty sheets didn’t contain fifty new poems. There were only three I’d not seen before. But all had numbers and epigraphs, forming a sequence. And the three put a new complexion on the rest.

  Prologue

  ‘And now an urgent SOS message –

  Will Publius Ovidius Naso,

  Otherwise known as the poet Ovid,

  Last seen before his exile to Tomis,

  And thought to be travelling in Africa,

  Please return immediately to Rome,

  Where his banishment has been revoked

  And his wife is dangerously ill.’

  I didn�
�t listen. I knew it was a trick.

  That Augustus or whoever had succeeded him

  Would insist my exile was permanent.

  That a reception committee would be waiting,

  With shackles, if I dared show up.

  That my wife had probably remarried by now

  Or – weren’t such messages a code for this? –

  Was already lying in the morgue.

  They’d got it wrong in any case. Africa?

  I was in London, and had been for aeons.

  The new technologies were bewildering at first

  But you adjust. I’ve travelled widely in my time –

  In other times, too – and there’s little to choose

  Between one epoch and the next.

  Drink, politics, violence and traffic:

  That’s all it comes down to in the end.

  Oh, and sex. I’m famous for knowing about sex,

  The poet exiled for writing erotica.

  But here’s the thing (more shameful to admit

  Than it was to publish the poems):

  The affairs, the mistresses, the jealous passions

  Incited by Corinne – I made it all up.

  The only sex I had was with my wife

  And there was little enough of that.

  In London, too, I lived like a celibate,

  Wasting away in a one-bedroom flat.

  Then that SOS came and I went a little crazy.

  Why hold back any longer, if my wife was dead?

  Softening my speech with Latin vowels

  And hiding my grey with Grecian,

  I practised the art of seduction at last,

  Two thousand years after I’d taught it.

  And I was writing again. Or re-writing.

  The Amores Revisited. The Amores Revised.

  A new story, and a true one, but with the old story

  Like a palimpsest below. Sometimes I’d show

  One to my latest lover. But most were taboo.

  I knew they’d hurt her. And hurt the other women, too.

  In life, I was gentle; in the poems, brutal.

  I tried to edit, to make myself nicer, but it didn’t work.