I went back to the scrapbooks, picked them up and took them over to the chaise longue spanning the biography shelves down one side of the room. Chaise longue? Couch? Or do I mean daybed? It was like the one in the Pre-Raphaelite painting of the death of Chatterton. I sprawled there for the next hour, looking through the scrapbooks. The later one had cuttings and photographs that, for whatever reason, had interested Rob. I could see no obvious connection with his work, but an academic might make something of them. The childhood scrapbook was more fun. He’d begun it at the age of six and continued with it into his teens, and it showed his different preoccupations during that time: birds, cowboys, stamps, dogs, cars, astronauts, guns, atomic bombs, Auschwitz, football, pop music and films, especially films in which pretty women appeared, the last few pages of the scrapbook being a gallery of starlets, none of them naked, but all in poses that a thirteen-year-old would have found sexy and each with some defining feature – high cheekbones, flamingo legs, conical bosom – that he must have looked for in girls and either found or grew tired of by the age of fifteen, since that’s when the scrapbook ended, with a last cutting from 1971, leaving several blank pages at the end.
‘Having fun?’ Jill said from the doorway in a tone that suggested I shouldn’t be: to loll about with a teenage scrapbook full of glamour pics was a clear dereliction of duty. ‘I wondered if you’d like a sandwich. It’s nearly one o’clock.’
‘Already?’ I said, closing the scrapbook. ‘I lost track.’
‘Ham and cheese sound OK?’
‘Please don’t go to any trouble.’
‘I’ve made them already. Come on down.’
It was less an invitation than an order: she was banishing me from the room as a punishment for suspected frivolity.
We sat at the kitchen table, two tall glasses of water in front of us. She’d sliced the sandwiches diagonally and set them on an oval plate, with cucumber and tomatoes round the side.
‘I love granary bread,’ I said.
‘It’s wholemeal. How are you getting on?’
‘Early days, but yes, it’s going well. All the drafts and workbooks for his collections are there. They ought to be worth a bit.’
‘An American university once approached him. It’d be like selling your children, he said. He wouldn’t consider it.’
‘But you might?’
‘Me?’
‘Or Louis and I, as executors, on your behalf. His will instructs us to sell his manuscripts to a suitable archive. Any proceeds from his literary estate will go to you.’
‘I have my job. I’m not short of money.’
‘But if academics studying him could look at his papers and see how his work evolved –’
‘It depends what’s there.’
‘We retain copyright. Nothing of his could be quoted without our permission.’
I explained how copyright works. And permission fees. And the prestige attached to an archive. Her lips moved as I spoke, silently repeating each word. I remembered how she had done that the first time we met, and how I’d taken it for slowness or even stupidity. Now it struck me that the mouthing was for my benefit not hers – as though without her help I’d be blind to the import of what I was saying. I felt self-conscious, under contract to be as earnest as she was.
‘Another sandwich?’ she said, holding out the plate.
‘I’d better get back to work. You’re going out soon, aren’t you?’
‘In half an hour … I understand what you’re saying about an archive, but I’m not sure about letting his papers go.’
‘Of course. I don’t mean to push you.’
‘He liked to keep everything beside him.’
‘All I’m doing is establishing what’s there – I’ll draw up an inventory before we decide. Incidentally, I can’t open the filing cabinet or the top drawer of his desk – do you have keys?’
‘For the filing cabinet. Not for the desk. I know the drawer you mean. It’s always been jammed.’
She stood up and went to the Welsh dresser, a gloomy old antique (‘monstrosity’ would have been Marie’s word), the top and bottom of which didn’t match, the lower half an oak cupboard with two doors, the upper a shelf unit in lighter wood, with china cups dangling from hooks, commemorative plates standing upright and a small drawer underneath, from which Jill pulled a looped cluster of keys.
‘Try these. The filing cabinet came from the insurance office where his father worked. It’s a horrible old thing, but when he heard they were chucking it out he asked to have it. I’ve always wanted to get rid of it. If there’s nothing in it, maybe I will.’
The first challenge was to locate the right key: the lock had a wide slit, seemingly made for one of the dozen or so large keys on the loose metal ring, but it was a smaller one, the smallest of all, in fact, which fitted. I felt excited, sliding the heavy bottom drawer open, all the more so on seeing the metal dividers, each of them carefully labelled. But the labels were the insurance company’s, not Rob’s. And almost all the compartments were empty. The three that weren’t contained 1) his own birth, degree and marriage certificates, along with his parents’ death certificates, 2) publishing contracts, and 3) freelance earning slips, tax returns and letters from his accountant. Admin and finance, in other words. Of marginal interest to a biographer, perhaps, but not to me. Still, at least the bottom drawer had something in it. Unlike the top, which slid open to reveal grey metal and empty space.
As Jill had told me, though I couldn’t resist trying, none of the keys fitted the desk. And if the top drawer had always been jammed, there was no point trying to force it. I went back to the first crate, intending to itemise the contents. But it was already almost two o’clock, when Jill would be going out, and it didn’t seem worth starting. Leaving the room as I’d found it – desk drawers closed, cupboard door shut, cushions on the daybed uncrumpled – I made my way downstairs.
‘You didn’t upset her, I hope?’ Marie said, in bed that night.
‘No, but she was prickly.’
‘I’d be the same.’
‘As though his room’s a shrine. She won’t let me remove anything.’
‘Good. There’s enough clutter here as it is.’
‘I had to bite my tongue when she said she’s not ready to sell his papers. It’s not up to her.’
‘She feels vulnerable. You’re probably the first person to go in that room since he died. And she doesn’t even know you that well. We should take her out.’
‘I vaguely mentioned it as I was leaving. She either didn’t hear – or pretended not to.’
‘It’s no good being vague. We have to call her up and suggest a date.’
‘An evening with the Ice Maiden – I can’t think of anything worse.’
‘Sunday lunch, then. Here. With the kids.’
‘She hates kids.’
‘Rob hated kids. Jill doesn’t.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Trust me. When are you next going over?’
‘Two weeks today. If she doesn’t cancel.’
‘Let’s ask her before then. For Sunday week, say. We’re not doing anything.’
‘You ask her. She doesn’t like me.’
‘Don’t be stupid. She needs to learn to trust you, that’s all.’
Marie was right. She always is, except when’s she wrong and I’ve never heard her own up to being wrong, not even after losing the five-pound bet she’d made with me that Jack would be walking by thirteen months, a figure she arrived at on the grounds that she had taken her first steps at eleven months, and I (according to my mother) had taken mine at twelve, which meant that even allowing for slower development in our first-born, genetically he was bound to, it stood to reason (‘Hah, stood,’ I said). At a year, Jack was still shuffling round on his bottom and showed not the slightest interest in pulling himself up by grabbing a chair leg or low table, let alone in moving his feet forward when one or other of us held him steady with his arms aloft, so I felt pret
ty confident about winning the fiver, inexperienced as I was compared with Marie in the area of child development, though admittedly it’s talking not walking she specialises in. He finally walked at fourteen months, gigglingly traversing the three feet of laminate flooring between Marie, kneeling by the fridge, and me, in the middle of the room, both of us ready to catch him. I won the bet, I said, whooping with delight not at winning but because the moment when a child takes its first steps is such a relief (as I’ve experienced again with my other two), laying to rest at least one of the fears parents are afflicted by – that the helplessness they saw when their child was born will remain and he/she will never walk, talk, sleep through the night, run, catch a ball, swim, ride a bike, eat with a knife and fork, learn to read, learn to count, make friends, etc. – in short, grow up. I won the bet, I said again, you owe me a fiver, but Marie said I must have misremembered, that I’d predicted he wouldn’t walk till sixteen months, which meant her prediction of thirteen was closer, and that in any case we’d not shaken hands on it, let alone made a bet for money, and, though, yes, we’d had conversations about when Jack might walk and I might have thought I’d made a bet, she disapproved of betting, so it was most unlikely she had.
Marie is always right, as I say. At any rate she was right about Jill, whom she phoned the next day and invited to lunch, an invitation Jill was pleased to accept and didn’t back out of, though I’d warned Marie, as we were buying a shoulder of lamb at the butcher’s, that the chances of her coming were 50/50 at best. She came, she smiled, she drank two glasses of prosecco before the meal, she ate a surprisingly large portion of lamb and an equally large helping of summer pudding, and when we suggested a walk in the park afterwards, the ideal opportunity to slip away if she wasn’t enjoying herself, she not only agreed to come along, linking arms with Marie en route and walking ahead, while I pushed the buggy and chatted to the boys, but when we reached our favourite spot, the oblong of grass by the bandstand, at which point Mabel threw such a wobbly that the combined forces of Marie and me were required to calm her down, she, Jill, played football with the boys, revealing skills I’d never have expected (including headers, volleys, dummies and nutmegs) and of which her late husband, energetic though he’d been when I first met him, would not have been capable. Her cheeks glowed pink. Her laughter was infectious. She’d the turn of pace of a twenty-year-old. The boys loved her.
Back at the house, she stayed for tea, joined Marie in giving Mabel a bath, and read stories to Jack and Noah as they perched on the arms of her armchair. I began to think we’d never get rid of her. ‘Thank you, I’ve had such a lovely time,’ she said, when she finally left, round nine, undeterred by the prospect of reaching home in the dark after a trek across town and a limited Sunday train service from Charing Cross. She said it again in the floral thank-you notelet that arrived on Tuesday morning, signing off ‘Love, Jill’, with three xxxs underneath.
‘I told you she loved kids,’ Marie said.
‘You told me she didn’t hate them.’
‘Same thing.’
‘Did she talk about Rob with you?’
‘A bit.’
‘And?’
‘She’s lonely. They used to sit for hours without speaking, she says, but now the silence is different.’
‘Did she say anything about my visit?’
‘Just that she found it hard. You going through his stuff. You talking of selling it off. As long as it’s there, he’s there too; once it goes, he’ll be gone. That’s how she thinks.’
‘I’m trying to keep him alive.’
‘His work, not him. And for people who read his poetry, not for her. You’ve got to be sensitive.’
‘I am. I was.’
‘It’ll be better now she’s been to see us.’
‘I certainly hope so.’
That hope was soon dashed. It was Groundhog Day the following Friday. I rang the bell. She answered. I stepped forward to kiss her on the cheek. She backed away and waved me down the hall: ‘Go on through.’ I’d come at ten, to give myself a full day, but as we stood in the kitchen – ‘Coffee?’ ‘If that’s not a nuisance’, ‘I’ve made some already’ – she said she had a dental check-up at 2.30 and, with apologies for having forgotten about it, that she’d have to leave the house by 2.15. ‘No worries,’ I said, hiding my suspicion that the appointment was an invention. Why denying me an extra couple of hours should make such a difference I couldn’t understand, but I knew better than to ask about staying on without her, though that would have been the obvious solution – I could even offer to have a pot of tea ready for her return. Be patient, I told myself. Four hours was a good stretch. Make sure to use them. When she offers sandwiches at lunchtime, say you’re not hungry.
‘It was good to have you round last weekend,’ I said, coffee in hand, hoping to trigger that Jill, not the solemn gatekeeper across the table.
‘It was so nice to come.’
‘We had a great time,’ I said and she smiled at me warmly, as though reunited with the father and husband she’d spent her Sunday with: that Matt. ‘The boys especially.’
‘I enjoyed myself,’ she said, before the wariness returned – enjoyment wasn’t allowed, not now, not here.
‘Right then. I’d better get on.’
‘I’ll be in the garden if you need anything.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ I said, replacing my cup in its saucer and more or less bounding upstairs.
I’d all the stuff to look at in the plastic crates. For a university to consider buying Rob’s papers, they’d want a description of what was there. It needn’t be exhaustive, just enough to whet their appetite – at which point they’d send their own expert. Not an onerous task. Rob had left things in order. Still, I did need to sift through the crates.
I went as far as taking one down, removing the lid, skimming through and making notes. But it was laborious work and for long periods I just sat in his chair, listening to jays squabble in the garden or watching clouds drift by like fluffy duvets. It was a rotating chair, and for minutes on end I’d slowly circle in it, like an LP on a turntable, pushing down with my right foot to keep up the slow momentum and picking out the titles on the shelves as I revolved: Auden, Dante, Gunn, Larkin, Pope, Tennyson, Wordsworth. I felt guilty for not getting on. But the ambience discouraged it. After the patter of office keyboards and the tantrums of home, I found it calming. The room was a refuge – Rob’s place of exile and now mine. When Jill looked in at eleven – ‘Going well? Coffee?’ – I felt irritated, as though the room were mine now and anyone else barred from entry.
Had Jill sprayed it with air freshener? Rob’s apple-and-woodsmoke musk had almost gone. Even with the blinds down, in the half-dark, it didn’t feel ghostly. Occasionally sadness overwhelmed me, nonetheless, set off by the sight of Rob’s handwriting (familiar from letters and cards he’d sent me) or objects he’d held (the pens, the spectacles, the glass ornament with an imprint of his hand) or descending from nowhere, abstract, untethered, but real for all that. I wondered if it wasn’t Rob I was grieving for but my father – belatedly, by association, five and a half years on. I’d been in Frankfurt, at the Book Fair, when Marie phoned with the news, my mother (unaware I was away) having failed to reach me at the office. He’d been clearing leaves in the garden after lunch. My mother, napping, didn’t notice that the leaf blower had stopped. And was slow, when she woke, to spot him lying on the lawn. It would have made no difference, the hospital said. The heart attack had killed him instantly, though the paramedics worked on him for twenty minutes where he fell (‘You should have seen all the syringes they left behind,’ my mother said) and there’d been further attempts in the ambulance and A&E. I got the message too late to fly back that night, but caught the first plane to Heathrow next morning. The body was in the mortuary by then. I didn’t think of asking to see it. Perhaps I’d have felt better if I had. But my priority was consoling my mother. And within days of the funeral Marie went into labour with Jack and my
energies were focused on that. Friends said it must be comforting: after the death of a parent, the birth of a child. I was too strung out and sleepless to tell. Now, sitting in Rob’s room, my dad’s death finally registered, like a message in a bottle reaching shore years later. Perhaps I’d avoided looking at his corpse out of fear of seeing failure there. He’d retired reluctantly, imagining the school would fall apart without him and half expecting to be summoned back. When it prospered in his absence and the colleagues he’d thought of as friends stopped calling, he went downhill, gloomily marooned in an armchair. Cryptic crosswords were his only hobby. He’d little or nothing to say when I visited. But I had loved my dad and resented Rob’s memorabilia for hijacking my grief.
I didn’t delude myself that sitting in his chair would bring me closer to Rob, let alone that he was haunting me. But it was impossible not to think about him or to forget how often he’d talked about death. Two conversations stuck out, the first of them from decades back, perhaps as early as our time in Brandon.
‘I hate the thought of dying young,’ he said, and he can only have been in his thirties then, ‘because of all I’ll never live to see.’
‘Who says you’ll die young?’
‘Everyone today will die young, even if they live to be a hundred. A hundred and fifty will become the norm. Then two hundred. OK, we know about Swift’s Struldbrugs. There’s no point extending life if all it means is a protracted old age. But by the end of the next century the scientists will have cracked that. People will still be teenagers in their sixties, with acres of time for all the experiences we can’t cram in. We keep being told what a lucky generation we are, but we’re not.’
The Executor Page 11