‘Doesn’t sound like Robbie.’
‘No, that’s what I thought. But poets develop. He seemed to be working out a new way to write. For instance, there’s a poem where he remembers you going to Venice together.’
‘I think he once went, for the British Council, and I’ve always wanted to go, but we never did.’
‘Really? Maybe he chose Venice for the rhyme scheme. It’s a complex poem, a sestina. He talks about you having long hair.’
She laughed. ‘I used to, as a student. Right down to my waist.’
‘There’s another poem based on a photo of you.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Swimming. He’s looking at an old photo of you and wondering who took it.’
‘I suppose there must be one. I can’t remember.’
‘If there isn’t, it’s poetic licence. The swimmer’s you, but in disguise.’
‘You’ve lost me,’ she said. ‘How can you call it a candid poem if it uses disguises?’
‘I agree. It’s confusing. But the poems are quite something. Lexy will be excited, as I say. Louis, too.’
‘I’d like to read them before they do.’
‘Sure. When I’ve finished working through the crates, I’ll show you everything. I’m hoping there’ll be more.’
‘As long as you don’t take anything away.’
‘It’ll all stay here. As we agreed.’
‘And I wouldn’t want poems being published that reflect badly on Robbie.’
‘Absolutely. None of us would.’
Who’s she to judge what might reflect badly on him? I thought, as I went back to work. She doesn’t even read poetry. The crates were more interesting since I’d found that hidden folder. Surely there must be an UNP2. Maybe a 3, 4, 5 and 6 as well.
But there were no more surprises in the third crate. Nor, when I rushed through it, in the fourth. The work was all slog. With no love poems to lighten the load. Before I left, I looked at the precious folder again – then buried it where Jill couldn’t find it.
‘Of course she said that,’ Marie shouted from the bathroom. ‘If you’d written love poems for me, I’d want to read them before any strangers did.’
‘Louis and Lexy aren’t strangers. She knows them both.’
‘All the same. You’d think Rob would have shown her. Love poems? It’s not loving to use Jill as material and not even tell her.’
‘He may have been saving them up as a surprise. For their diamond wedding anniversary, say.’
‘Yeah, right.’
Marie likes to take a bath last thing; she gets back pains, perhaps stress-related or perhaps to do with giving birth three times, and finds a hot soak relaxing. She came through, rose-tinted, and sat on the bed, a towel tucked over her breasts and a run of water-beads on each shoulder.
‘Are they any good?’ she said.
‘I find it hard to judge.’
‘If they were masterpieces, you’d know.’
‘Masterpieces aren’t always recognised at first …’
‘Sweet Jesus,’ she said, suddenly Irish. ‘You must have formed an impression.’
‘I like them. But I don’t know what Louis will think. I emailed him copies yesterday.’
‘I thought Jill wouldn’t let you to take anything away.’
‘I took photos with my iPad. When she was in the garden. Then made documents of them when I got home.’
‘Bloody hell, Matt. That’s really bad. What will she say when she finds out?’
‘She won’t. I’ve sworn Louis to secrecy. OK, it was sneaky. But what choice did I have? Legally, I can remove anything I choose. But I don’t want to alienate her.’
‘If it helps, I’ll give you my opinion.’
‘Hypocrite! You object to me making copies, but now you want to read them.’
‘Eventually. After Jill’s read them.’
‘I’ll consider it,’ I said.
‘You’d better,’ she said, flapping the towel at me as she slipped it off, ‘Mr Keeper of the Flame.’
She slid in beside me, her body hot and damp. Like a wet flame, I thought, sleep’s logic overcoming me.
Louis didn’t get back to me for over a week. He pleaded busyness and a trip to the States, but I could tell he was lukewarm.
‘There aren’t enough for a collection,’ he said. ‘And it won’t make much of a splash. Poet writes a few vaguely sexy love poems to his wife. Big deal. We need more.’
‘I’ve still a couple of crates to look through. It’s not promising, but you never know.’
‘What about his computer?’
‘He either handwrote or used a typewriter.’
‘Or hidden under his mattress?’
‘Ha ha.’
‘How’s Jill been?’
‘Tricky to start with. Then co-operative. Now nervous about what’s in the poems.’
‘You’re sure they’re about her? That last one made me wonder: “it’s the story of what happened to us/but only you, my love, will know it’s you.” Why will only she know, when we all know they’re married?’
‘He’s having it both ways – writing about Jill, but keeping her name out of it. She becomes a kind of Everywoman.’
‘Not the Other Woman?’
‘Who would that be?’
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I’d better get on. Let me know if you find anything else.
‘Meanwhile …’
‘Meanwhile, understood, if Jill gets in touch I’m not to tell her I’ve seen the poems.’
My mum phoned every Sunday at six, though lately she had taken to phoning on other days as well, for no particular reason, it seemed, except to complain that the news everywhere was so depressing – terror attacks, war in Syria, refugees. For once she was upbeat. Did you read about the tiger and the goat? she said. The goat was put in the tiger’s cage in a Russian zoo. It was meant to be lunch, but the two of them made friends. The goat even sleeps in the tiger’s bed. Lovely story, Mum, I said, if true. I read it in the Mail, she said. You don’t want to believe everything you read in the Mail, I said.
Later I looked online and found the story on various websites, all with the same details: the brave goat, the unvoracious tiger, their unlikely friendship. I could see why it appealed to Mum. Like the tiger, she felt lonely and imprisoned: how wonderful it would be if someone could turn up and change that. I read it differently, as a story destined to end badly, with Jill the tiger and me the goat. At first, I’d found her scary. Then she’d seemed friendlier. Now she was suspicious of me and showing her teeth. If I wasn’t careful she’d have me for lunch.
It was June by now and quiet on the paper, with the silly season under way. I tried to stay engaged, especially with circulation falling and jobs under threat. But since starting work on Rob’s archive, my concentration was poor. I’d reach the last sentence of a fiction review I was supposed to be subbing and have no memory of having read it – like a driver wondering where the last ten miles had gone. Even mid-conversation with somebody, I’d find my mind wandering. If the books pages had been less of a backwater, I might not have drifted so easily. But when you’re staring at a green screen, with the gentle pit-pat of keyboards the only sound, it’s easy to float off.
Luckily, occasional dramas broke in to bring me back, and within a few days there were two. The first involved the news desk. How would I like to go to Italy to interview Elena Ferrante? they asked. Like everyone else I’d been reading her. And I could see it would be quite a coup: the first ever in-person interview with a writer whose identity had so far been a secret. For a moment I even had fantasies that she or her publishers had specially chosen me, having read something I’d written, my novel even, which persuaded them I was the right man for the job. But it turned out no interview was on offer: that what the news desk had in mind was for me to snoop around and ‘solve the mystery of the ageing recluse’. I took the idea to Leonie, who a few years before had stopped them sending a stringer to Alabama to fl
ush out Harper Lee. She agreed the idea was naff and that I might waste weeks getting nowhere, but said that if I fancied it I should go. I told her I didn’t. That the truth behind Ferrante’s fiction didn’t really interest me. That I’d my own theory of what she’d experienced and what she’d made up, and I didn’t want the facts getting in the way. Fair enough, she said, but I could see she was disappointed, if only because of the pressure she was under to sex-up our books coverage. The episode left me feeling insecure.
The bigger drama involved the arts desk, with whom we share most of the Review. Notionally we’ve an agreed allocation of space, but since the paper fluctuates in size, according to the number of adverts, there’s a weekly squabble over who gets how much. When the ads are arts- or books-specific, it makes life simpler, but the reader offer ads are floaters and that’s where battles rage. The row this time was over an offer for a deckchair, which clearly belonged in a different section altogether, but – with apologies for the last-minute foisting and the promise of more space next week – the ads department insisted one of us take. Deckchairs were for reading, Michael, the arts editor (my age, but already white-haired) said. Ah, but deckchairs were also for listening to music in, Leonie said. It was all quite jokey at first but both refused to budge.
‘Do you really need that column of crime shorts?’ Michael said.
‘We’ve held it over for three fucking weeks already,’ Leonie said. ‘Why do you need a fucking interview with a dancer as well as a fucking review of the new Swan Lake?’
‘Because he’s the hottest act in town, with a big show opening next month, and it’s a fucking exclusive.’
‘Next month? Why run it this week, then?’
‘Because someone else will do a feature on him by next.’
‘I thought you said it was a fucking exclusive.’
‘Yes, and a sight more fucking exclusive than a batch of fucking crime fiction reviews no one will read anyway.’
So it went on, degenerating by the minute, until the ads manager came up with a compromise, to which Leonie and Michael grudgingly agreed: if we took the deckchair, the smaller ad for the new Orson Welles biography could move to Arts. I was used to these rows, if not on such a scale, but the new assistant arts editor, Emma, who’d arrived only a couple of weeks before, looked shell-shocked. I ran into her in the queue at the local Pret that lunchtime. She waited till I’d got my chicken tikka wrap.
‘Heavy stuff,’ she said.
‘You’ll get used to it.’
‘It was like watching Timon of Athens.’
‘From the front stalls.’
‘With blood and spit landing on you.’
We walked back together, laughing and complicit. And whenever we came across each other for the rest of that week – at the coffee machine, say, or by the water cooler – we’d exchange an ironic smile and raise-of-eyebrows: how ridiculous our bosses were! You’d never catch us losing our cool over six hundred words of Review space! Leonie would have called me disloyal if she’d known. And though Marie had been urging me to find new friends, she might not have approved of one who was young and female. Still, it was good to have an ally about the place.
My next two visits to Jill yielded little of interest. Despite what I’d said to Louis, I felt hopeful there was more and worked hard to find it, setting aside the notes I’d made towards my novel while I went through the remaining crates. The one unexpected item was a pair of brown folders. The first was marked LETTERS: SENT. Whereas the folder in Rob’s desk contained letters and cards sent to him, these were printed copies of his replies, their tone untypically gracious and modest. The second, much fatter file was marked LETTERS: UNSENT. Mostly they were drafts of letters to newspapers. Poets should stay out of politics, he always said, but he’d obviously struggled to keep his mouth shut. There was one letter to the Guardian condemning the invasion of Iraq; another about climate change and the perils of ignoring it; and a third, written just weeks before he died, about a monument he’d seen on the East Coast in memory of thirty-two Dutchmen who kayaked to England during the Second World War, only eight of whom survived (‘I hope one day there’ll be similar monuments to the refugees who’ve perished in recent months while making similarly desperate journeys’). At the bottom of each he’d typed UNSENT, preserving his image as a poet who refused to express his opinion on anything other than poetry.
There were some private letters, too, addressed to people who’d crossed him in some way, including one to a theatre producer he’d talked to at a party about adapting a play by Terence (‘I wasn’t talking about Rattigan, you deaf cunt, I was referring to the Roman dramatist, 195–159 BC’) and another to Marcus Downe, who’d reviewed Rob’s last book for us – I scanned it to see whether he’d included me in his diatribe, but he hadn’t. These, too, were letters he’d dashed off, then thought better of. Like Moses Herzog, I thought, in Saul Bellow’s novel, who composes letters by the hundred.
UNSENT: I could imagine it as the title of a book. But Rob had asked for his letters to be destroyed. There was nothing for me here.
To my relief, Jill seemed less wary again and insisted that I break for lunch. She’d made quiche and salad rather than sandwiches and, without asking, poured me a glass of white wine.
‘So,’ she said, ‘any more discoveries?’
I shook my head. ‘It looks like that’s the lot,’ I said, through a mouthful of lettuce.
‘I’m looking forward to reading the love poems. Robbie wasn’t good at showing love in public. I think his friends wondered what he saw in me. And people at work wondered what I saw in him. What’s he do all day? one of them used to say. No job, sitting on his bum, leaching off you. One or two knew he was famous, but the others …’ She laughed. ‘What they forget is what a mess I was after my marriage broke up – you did know I’d been married before?’
‘Rob told me.’
‘I was very low. Could see no point in going on with life. Till Robbie saved me. Not like in a fairy story – the dashing hero and the imprisoned princess. But he did rescue me. And in return I gave him a home, love, the freedom to get on with his work. I’d have given him children, too, if I could. Sorry, it’s hard to talk about.’
‘Please don’t feel –’
‘I had a miscarriage at fourteen weeks. Rob was devastated. Me too, of course. We considered IVF. But I was forty by then and we left it at that.’
‘I’m sorry. He never mentioned it.’
‘He wouldn’t. Even we didn’t talk about it. He went off the rails for a while. Drinking too much, coming in all hours, et cetera.’ She screwed the lid back on the wine bottle. ‘It’s the one time I failed him. I was suffering too much myself to comfort him. He was better once we moved down here. Are you done?’
She stood up and cleared the plates while I sat there. The idea of Rob wanting children was hard to take in. There was so much more to him – and to his marriage – than I’d known.
Back upstairs, I put away the two letters folders I’d been looking at and brought out the last few notebooks. There were endless drafts in them for the poems that became Rob’s last collection – drafts he wrote afresh every time he changed a word or even a comma. Painstaking or blocked? I’d leave that for others. There was nothing in them for me.
Or so it seemed. One of the notebooks was a different size, A4, and spiral-bound. Halfway through, several pages had been ripped out; tiny, torn-off fragments clung to the looping wire. It wasn’t like Rob to remove anything. Or leave the evidence of doing so. Why this once? What had been there? I counted the remaining pages: 73. How many had been taken out: 11? 23? 47? There were no clues in the poems on either side; one was set in a graveyard and the other a reworking of the parable of Lot’s wife. Whatever the reason for his action – impatience, anger, embarrassment at an especially inept first draft – perhaps Rob couldn’t stand seeing what was there. Or couldn’t stand the idea of anyone else seeing it. Unless it was Jill who’d ripped out the pages – now that she k
new Rob had written poems about her, had she begun going through his papers and come across one she didn’t care for? It didn’t seem likely: to her, his room was still a shrine. Whoever removed it, what had been there? And what was it Rob had burned in those bonfires Jill had spoken of, down the garden? It was frustrating to think I’d never know.
Replacing that notebook, I turned to the next one. Tucked inside, at the back, were half a dozen or so lined sheets in Rob’s handwriting. They’d been folded in four so they didn’t protrude. The top sheet was blank, except for three letters and a single digit: UNP2.
Adultery
His watch by the bed, her hair on the pillow,
the guilt-assuaging bottle of Chablis.
Transactions
When sex gives equal enjoyment to both partners, why should she sell it, he pay?
We’re old-fashioned about it: it’s me who pays for the room,
while your contribution is you. It’s enough. You’re enough.
But I worry what it says about us. You’ve a job, a house, a car,
countless assets besides your body, yet I’m the one footing the bill.
Maybe it’s shyness: you’re embarrassed to book in at Reception.
Or fear: what if your husband saw your credit card statement?
But I think it’s because you’re romantic: you like to pretend
there’s no transaction involved. So I arrive before you do
(as I try not to later, in bed) and the business is taken care of,
and the rest is pleasure with no strings. Ovid grumbles
that his lover keeps asking for presents. You never do.
In fact, it’s me who comes away with gifts – not just the memory
of you in bed, but the books you bring, the kind I’d write if I could,
in which the hero and heroine never go to cheap hotels, all we see
is the love they make and the light pouring from their bodies.
Emails
Remember me while you’re away! (2.11)
Were I more organised, would I have kept all the emails you sent
while on holiday – the descriptions of galleries, fishing ports,
The Executor Page 15