I remember thinking that it’s late for whoever it is to call, I hope nothing has happened to Mum or anyone in Marie’s family.
It hadn’t. It was Jill.
‘I hope it’s OK to phone,’ she said. ‘I never know when people go to bed.’
‘We’re still up.’
‘Especially if they have young children.’
‘It’s fine, Jill. We always watch the ten o’clock news.’
‘Only – if you’re free to talk – I’ve been reading the poems. And I thought I’d better call now rather than wait.’
‘Fair enough.’
‘I don’t like them. I don’t like them at all. They give the wrong impression of Robbie. A bad impression. All that sex for a start, in such intimate detail. It’s like pornography.’
‘Erotica, I think he would call it.’
‘Is there a difference?’
‘Erotica’s subtle.’
‘Whereas porn is for wankers. Isn’t that all you’re saying?’
‘No,’ I said, too surprised and unsettled by her idiom to be articulate. ‘I think it’s more than that. It’s –’
‘Whatever it is, you can’t publish. It’s not Robbie’s sort of poetry.’
Hadn’t she told me she wasn’t much interested in his poetry? Now here she was coming on like an expert.
‘I don’t believe he had the experiences the poems describe,’ she said.
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ I said, to placate her. ‘It’s what poets do. They speak in the first person, but the voice is sometimes another person’s, not their own.’
‘Even so, people will think they’re about Robbie. That he spent all his time having sex with different women.’
‘Until he met you.’
‘The poems don’t say that.’
‘It’s how he sets up the sequence. You’re there at his desk at the start and you tell him: Feel free to write whatever you like.’
‘He always did that anyway. Me bring him a coffee when he’s trying to write a poem about war or politics on his laptop? It never happened. None of it did. And he comes across as such a liar, whereas people always said how honest he was. He can’t have been in his right mind when he wrote those poems. That’s why he didn’t publish them. You can’t either, or you’ll destroy his reputation.’
‘Modify it, not destroy.’
‘OK, then: you’ll destroy me. I have good memories of Robbie. I hate the idea of a bunch of voyeuristic strangers getting off on his porny fantasies.’
‘I understand how you feel …’
‘Do you?’
‘But I think you’re misreading the poems,’ I said.
‘It’s how others will read them.’
‘You’re being over-dramatic.’
‘I’m being realistic.’
‘I’m sorry you’re upset, Jill, but I’m sure when you’ve calmed down –’
‘I’m perfectly calm. I’m just telling you what I think.’
‘– when you’ve had a chance to reflect and read the poems again –’
‘I don’t need to read them again. I know what I think and nothing’s going to change my mind.’
Marie was in bed by the time I finished the call. But she’d overheard.
‘What did you expect?’ she said. ‘I told you.’
Knowing Jill might phone him, I emailed the poems to Louis next morning. An automated message came back to say he was out of the office for a few days and wouldn’t be reading emails until he returned. The delay gave me some breathing space. There’d be an onslaught once he looked at the new poems, and I needed time to work out what I felt.
Talking to Marie is how I usually do that and on Monday we had a quiet night in. We’d recently put ourselves on the 5:2 diet. Mondays and Thursdays were our fasting days.
‘I’ve had an epiphany,’ I said, as she doled out the rocket and watercress salad with grated parmesan and pomegranate seeds – the final two hundred calories of our meagre allowance.
‘Bully for you,’ she said, flinging the serving spoon into the sink. Because she adhered to it more strictly than I did, she found the 5:2 regime testing.
‘Jill probably knew all along that Rob had affairs. That’s why she’s kicking up: not from the shock of the new, but the familiarity of the repressed. The poems are making her relive what she’s been trying to forget. It’s like a double blow.’
‘Triple,’ Marie said, ‘supposing you’re right. First, he’s serially unfaithful. Then his poems rub her face in it. And in between he dies on her. That’s three kinds of trauma.’
‘It would explain why she was so obstructive when I started looking through his papers. She was afraid of what I’d find.’
‘Then why didn’t she look before you did? It was months before you got involved.’
‘Maybe she did look. Who knows how much was there originally: there could have been love letters, diary entries, journals, all sorts, which she then destroyed. But the poems were so well hidden she didn’t find them.’
‘Whether she already knew about his affairs makes no difference. It’s the idea of other people knowing that she can’t stand.’
‘But she can’t stop us publishing. That’d be denying him his rights as an author.’
‘His right to write smut. I’ve read the poems now, remember.’ She had, over the weekend, more than once, with expressions of sympathy for Jill and renewed outrage at Rob for having written them. ‘They’re one long fuckfest.’
‘Jesus, you’re grumpy. Don’t be such a prude.’
‘I see Jill’s point, that’s all.’
‘Thank God, tomorrow’s Tuesday,’ I said, nodding at her watercress.
‘Piss off,’ Marie said, slamming her fork down and disappearing to watch television. She was full-stretch on the sofa when I went through, leaving no room for me to join her.
Later, naked, before brushing our teeth, we weighed ourselves. I’d not lost anything, but Marie was lighter than the previous week. She didn’t say so – we still weren’t speaking – but I could tell from her face in the mirror. And once in bed, burrowing down, she let me know that we were friends again.
‘You didn’t deserve that,’ she said, afterwards, ‘but I’ll not have you calling me a prude.’
Jill phoned again on the Tuesday evening.
‘Sorry about the other night,’ she began.
‘No need to apologise,’ I said, relieved: perhaps we wouldn’t have to do battle after all.
‘It was late and I was upset and expressed myself badly.’
‘It’s fine. I understand.’
‘You probably think I’m priggish.’
‘Not at all.’
‘Now I’ve read the poems again, I realise it wasn’t so much the sex that upset me, it was the morphine poem. About his mother.’
‘Which one’s that?’
‘He talks about her dementia.’
‘I must have missed it.’
‘You can’t have. It’s the worst. However difficult their relationship, Robbie loved his mother. He’d never have done what the poem says.’
‘Done what?’
‘Killed her. Go and read it. Then you’ll see why it can’t be published.’
Morph
i.m. E.R.P., 12.09.07
She might have had a year of being less –
her breath a wisp, her eyes a chalky mist,
her hands too weak to tug the sheet up to her chin –
and me content to leave her swinging in
the playground she’d gone back to since dementia
kicked in, but for the thing I heard her utter
as I sat beside her bed, Push Dad, higher Dad,
words she whispered so intently I obeyed,
unscrewing the bottle and filling the spoon
like the parent she took me for. Go on,
I said, down the hatch, spoonful after spoonful,
till her mouth gaped open with the thrill
of soaring upwar
ds, and she was happy
at last, and so, to have pushed her there, was I.
Why had I skipped past the poem before? In part because I’d not understood it. In part because I was too absorbed in the sex poems. And in part because of where Rob had placed it, halfway through the latest batch. (‘With a collection, you have to start strongly and finish strongly,’ he once told me. ‘Readers lose their concentration in the middle.’) Now I had it in front of me, some of the imagery came back: the bedsheet, the medicine bottle, the swing. He’d even pencilled in a dedication. His mother was called Elizabeth. I couldn’t remember exactly when she died, but 2007 sounded right.
Could he have killed her? As far as I knew he’d nothing to gain from his mother’s death. The flat she owned after downsizing had already been sold to pay the fees for the nursing home and little of the money remained; he wasn’t that hard up anyway, thanks to Jill’s salary and his own occasional earnings. The only gain would have been his mother’s: relief from pain; an easeful exit from a life she no longer thought worth living. So I reasoned, supposing the poem was true. But I also excused it on the opposite grounds, that he must have made it up. If his mother had been at home, perhaps he could have given her morphine. But in a home, could he really have got away with it? The scenario must be imaginary. The setting suggested as much; the imagery was of Rob and his mother alone together in a domestic space, not in a crowded institution.
On the other hand, to write poetry about killing your mother was in itself dark and disturbed. The matricide might have been invented, but to imagine it in surgical detail, committing it on paper as though it were real and framing it in a rhyme scheme, suggested a brutality in Rob I’d not have expected, but, after the discoveries of recent months, I was now quite ready to believe. I felt sick even thinking about it. Had I ever imagined killing my mother? Not since I was thirteen and then only for about ten seconds after she’d stopped me going to a Hallowe’en party where she knew there would be alcohol. I’d often felt bored, irritated and exasperated by her. But I’d never willed her to die. Were she doubly incontinent, demented and terminally ill, the day might come. Even so: to write about it; to have the steel, ice, courage, mercilessness, call it what you will – that was beyond me. Maybe you needed those qualities to be a great writer. Good for Rob, that he had them. I knew my limits.
I thought of my mother standing on the step and waving us off when we’d last visited: walking stick, blue dress, stockinged legs, floppy cardigan with a red stain (tomato ketchup? blood? I ought to have asked, or wiped it off, but she’d once been so elegant and proud of her appearance, and alerting her to it would have upset her). The sadness I felt was a trinity of sadness: nostalgia for who she’d been, pity for what she’d become, fear of a future when she’d not be there. It was different for Rob. He might have been justified in wishing his mother dead, whether from compassion or because she’d mistreated him in some way – bullied, abused, neglected, emotionally manipulated, whatever. Anything was possible. But on the few occasions he’d talked about her, there’d been nothing to suggest she was a monster. When I’d had lunch with him not long after she died (peacefully, from pneumonia he said), he wasn’t especially emotional, but nor did he seem cold. And when he described her death as ‘overdue’ and ‘a relief’ he was only saying what I’ve heard other friends say after the death of an elderly parent; even his worst enemy wouldn’t have called it sinister. Still, his composure that day had been unnerving. I remember asking what it felt like to be an orphan (my father’s death was still a way off) and how he replied by paraphrasing John Donne: ‘I see no reason for tear-floods or sigh-tempests.’ Great title, he added, ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’.
In private he might have shed tears. But with me he played the hard man. Levity was our ethos. On the rare occasions we got serious, all displays of emotion were banned.
Louis and I spoke on the Wednesday.
‘Yes, Jill called me,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry, I’ve known this kind of reaction before, with memoirs and biographies. Everyone’s in favour of candour, except when it’s them the author’s being candid about. The poor woman’s in shock. And it may take a while to wear off. But she’ll come round.’
‘Did she talk to you about “Morph”? That’s the poem she objects to most.’
‘Remind me. The one about a swing and a little girl? Or was it a boat? I couldn’t get my head round it.’
‘It shows Rob dosing his mother up with morphine. He pushes her to a happy place and her mouth gapes open.’
‘I thought that meant she was sleeping peacefully.’
‘Jill read it as euthanasia. She’s more upset by it than by the philandering.’
‘She has her pride – of course she’d say that.’
‘But maybe she’s right that publishing it would be damaging.’
‘Not at all. Anyone with an elderly parent or relative with Alzheimer’s will identify with it. Paul Morel does the same to his mother in Sons and Lovers, when she’s terminally ill.’
‘But in the poem Rob’s mother isn’t terminally ill. It’s not clear she’s even in pain. “She might have had a year,” he says, yet he happily speeds her on her way. He actually uses that word – “happy”. Happy to have killed her.’
‘Who’s to say it’s true?’ Louis said.
‘He dedicates the poem to E.R.P. Elizabeth Rose Pope. And puts a date on it. Which I’m pretty sure will be the date she died.’
‘It’s a brave poem to write, then. Tough, but also loving and humane. Of course it should be published. If Rob’s dead and his mother’s dead, who’s affected? It’s not like the police are going to get involved.’
‘The press might.’
‘You’re the press, Matt.’
‘I’ve no control over our news pages, let alone other papers’.’
‘Controversy’s always good for sales.’
‘Rob would want the book to find its own way.’
‘That’s not how it works these days. Never was, probably. We’ll just have to keep talking to Jill.’
‘You’ll have to. I don’t think she’ll listen to me.’
Later that week, Marie and I treated ourselves to a babysitter and a night out – first a film, 45 Years, then a meal at a Japanese restaurant. We were unlucky with the table, the only available one being near the door; Siberian winds blew in every time someone opened it. With its bleak landscapes and wan colours, the film had been depressing to watch, but was good to talk about afterwards. The couple in it, Geoff and Kate, are a week away from celebrating their forty-fifth wedding anniversary when a letter arrives informing Geoff that the perfectly preserved body of his one-time fiancée has been found in the Alps, where she slipped into a crevasse half a century ago. The extent to which Geoff loved her slowly emerges, casting a blight on the anniversary party and, in the last shot of the film, throwing into question whether the marriage can survive.
‘Great acting,’ I said, dipping raw tuna on sticky rice into wasabi, ‘but the plot-hinge is so flimsy. Didn’t you want to shake her? Of course he’s upset, being reminded of his fiancée and how she died.’
‘You’re missing the point,’ Marie said. ‘His reaction makes Kate see how random it is that they’ve ended up together.’
‘All relationships are random. You and I love each other – but if things had turned out differently we might have loved other people.’
‘Once you’re a parent it stops being random. But Kate and Geoff haven’t had children. Nothing will survive them when they die.’
‘But she knew about his past. He told her.’
‘He didn’t tell her they were having a baby.’
‘A baby?’ I said.
‘Didn’t you spot that? Kate sees it when she’s looking at the old slides that Geoff has kept in the attic. His fiancée was pregnant. That changes everything.’
‘Still, she died. And Kate has spent forty-five years with Geoff. Why’s she so jealous of something that happened
before he met her?’
‘Because what’s past isn’t past any more. A terrible secret emerges and ruins her life. Ring any bells?’
The waitress brought us green tea. I hate green tea, but they didn’t serve alcohol.
‘OK, OK, I see where this is going,’ I said. ‘But it’s different with Jill.’
‘Is it?’
‘Rob’s dead, for one thing.’
‘So? The poems will change her feelings about their marriage.’
‘There are no photos, no facts, no pregnancy.’
‘If the poems are true, there was a pregnancy. Think of Jill having to read that. A woman aborting Rob’s child. Whereas Jill wanted a child but suffered a miscarriage.’
‘Who knows if the abortion really happened. A poem is only words,’ I said.
‘Only? You once told me words are sacred.’
‘That was before I started working for a newspaper.’
‘What’s that thing Stephen Fry says? Sticks and stones may hurt my bones, but words will always hurt me. He’s right. Especially with words in a poem, coming from the heart.’
‘You don’t give in easily, do you?’
‘Not when I’m winning the argument.’
‘Shut your face and eat your sushi,’ I said, smiling. Her eyes widened in mock outrage. ‘Joke.’
15
The entrance was between two gateposts and down a gravel drive. If I’d not had flu and been told to take the week off, I’d never have gone. But by the Friday I was feeling better. And the bonus of a free day – Marie at work, the boys at school and nursery, Mabel with the childminder – made it irresistible, despite the risks. If Jill had shown signs of budging, I might have gone to see her. But according to Louis, she remained inflexible. Even he seemed a little cowed by her. There was no more talk of getting the poems out. Give it time, he said, which wasn’t like him.
I pulled up in front of the house, Victorian by the look of it, originally home to a prosperous industrialist, perhaps, or high court judge. The number of cars surprised me. The prestigious makes, too (BMWs, Audis, even a Bentley): surely the staff couldn’t afford cars like these. They must belong to visitors, I decided, but it was only midday and I’d read on the website that visiting hours were from 2 to 6 p.m. – it was why I’d come early, ahead of the crowds. Perhaps there’d been a relaxation of the rules. I took the last parking space, next to a privet hedge, and walked across to the front door. I’d no idea how I was going to manage once inside.
The Executor Page 20