The Executor

by Blake Morrison

  ‘But the tittle-tattle has begun. It’s exactly what I feared. We had an agreement to keep the poems secret.’

  ‘I’m sure there’s a simple explanation.’

  ‘I did a lot of thinking over Christmas, and read the poems again, and thought we might reach a compromise – with a pamphlet say – so you could do your duty, while holding some poems back.’

  ‘It’s an idea …’

  I was going to say ‘but’, but she got hers in first.

  ‘But it’s too late for that. I’ve already spoken to a lawyer. If you try to publish even one of the poems, I’ll fight you all the way. You may be Robbie’s executor, but I have rights too.’

  ‘She does, it’s true,’ Petra Wainright said. ‘The law places a high value on freedom of speech. But the right to disclosure isn’t absolute. There’s sometimes a duty to treat information as confidential. The likely effect of publication is relevant too. Which is why you’re here, I guess.’

  ‘Here’ was a fourth-floor meeting room adjoining the boardroom: octagonal table, chrome and leather chairs, bottled water, swirly abstract painting on the wall. I’d never been up there before: any meetings involving Editorial take place on the second floor, just along from where we sit. The fourth-floor meeting room was for outside clients – advertisers, sponsors, printers, distributors and so on. Perhaps litigants as well, since Petra seemed at home there, unscrewing the lid of the silver flask on the side table and pouring us both a coffee.

  ‘Black?’

  ‘With milk, please.’

  Coffee would be good; I’d come in early, after a broken night (Mabel was teething again). Petra passed me the steaming cup.

  ‘Publication could be an issue if your friend had a difficult relationship with his wife and intended the poems to hurt her.’

  ‘I’m sure he didn’t,’ I said. ‘As far as I know they got on perfectly well.’

  ‘Trouble is, the law takes a complex view of intention. If he knew his wife might suffer by reading the contents, some judges might think that sufficient culpability. Absence of actual ill will is not a defence. If a defendant wilfully abuses a plaintiff’s right to legal protection, if he’s negligent and acts without caring whether he causes harm or not, he may be liable.’

  ‘That’s pretty worrying.’

  I’d never met Petra before; there’d been no reason to; authors and agents may grumble about book reviews, but they don’t tend to sue. But if it was true that Jill had spoken to a lawyer (and she’d told Lexy and Louis the same), I needed to know where we stood. Petra had been recommended to me as sharper and less stuffy than our other lawyers. Her career path might be as conventional as theirs (private school, Oxbridge, law conversion, training contract, qualification as a solicitor), but this was her first job. The black trousers and grey cardigan were an attempt at gravitas. But she looked about sixteen.

  ‘The key concept is recklessness,’ she said. ‘In other words, indifference to the likely consequences where there’s a risk of harm. The relevant case, if you’re interested, is Wilkinson v Downton in 1897. I looked it up after getting your email. Mr Downton thought he’d amuse the clientele of the Albion pub in Limehouse by telling the landlord’s wife, Mrs Wilkinson, that her husband had fractured his leg in an accident on his way back from the races and had sent a message asking for her help to get him home. It was only a joke, but the shock caused her to have a nervous breakdown. She and her husband sued Downton. Their case was that he should have anticipated the effect of his story – that even if he’d not intended to cause harm, he’d behaved recklessly. A bit like those Australian radio hosts who called the hospital where the Duchess of Cambridge was having her baby and pretended to be the Queen – the nurse who answered fell for it and there was a tremendous hoo-ha at the security breach, as a result of which the nurse, ashamed at having been so gullible, committed suicide.’

  ‘I don’t see what any of that has to do with a book of poems.’

  She smiled. ‘I knew you’d say that. But it does. Wilkinson v Downton was the relevant tort in that recent Rhodes case – you know, the pianist whose ex-wife sought an injunction on a memoir he’d written detailing the abuse he suffered as a child. She claimed that if their autistic son read it he’d be distressed. I’ve got the judgment here for you. The first set of judges found in her favour. Then the appeal court overturned the injunction. Their view was that it would be an inappropriate restriction on freedom of expression. That publication of a book shouldn’t be stopped simply because another person might suffer psychological harm from reading it.’

  ‘That’s reassuring.’

  ‘Yes. There’s no general law prohibiting the publication of material that will distress another person. So long as it’s not libellous, of course.’

  ‘But if the contents are disputed? If they’re lies?’

  ‘If they’re lies about another person, then you’re into the area of defamation. That’s not the case here, is it?’

  ‘I don’t think so. The people in the poems aren’t given real names. And any lies or inventions are about the poet himself.’

  ‘In any case, I doubt truth is a meaningful concept in relation to poems. Or am I being thick? I don’t get much time for poetry.’

  ‘Me neither. But my friend’s wife – widow, that is – feels the scenarios in the poems have been fabricated. She also objects to the poems being sexually graphic.’

  ‘I don’t know how a judge would define graphic. But unless it’s obscene, writers can use whatever language most effectively gets their message across. Vivid description isn’t an issue.’

  ‘But intrusion into the privacy of others is.’

  ‘Yes. It’s the difference between Articles 10 and 8 of the Human Rights Act. On the one hand, there’s the legitimate interest of writers in telling their story to the public and the corresponding interest of the public in hearing it. On the other hand, there’s the right of those being written about to personal safety, protection and privacy. I’ve photocopied the judgment in another case, from 2006. A Canadian folk singer successfully stopped the UK publication of a book by a friend and former employee, on the grounds that it contained confidential personal information that she’d no right to disclose. Here, take it with you.’ Our fingers brushed as she passed the photocopy. Her hands were white marble – as small as Emma’s, but colder. ‘There’ve been several comparable cases involving celebrities since – more a problem for the tabloids than for this paper, but the issue sometimes comes up. Your friend’s wife isn’t famous, is she?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And the poems aren’t obscene?’

  ‘Candid, yes. Obscene, no.’

  ‘Except that she claims they’re untrue, you say. In the Rhodes case, Lord Neuberger said it would make no difference if the experiences described in the memoir were invented. He came down on the side of free speech, which includes, so he said (I’ve got it here), “not only the inoffensive but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome”. Then he quotes someone saying that “the freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having”.’

  ‘So if Rob’s wife does bring a case –’

  ‘Rob’s the name of your friend?’

  ‘Robert Pope. You may have heard of him.’ She shook her head. ‘From what you’re saying, if she brings a case and it comes before judges like those in the Rhodes case, she’s not going to win.’

  ‘If she goes to any half-decent law firm, it won’t even come to court. Given the substantial costs involved, she’ll be advised not to pursue it. But there are some unscrupulous lawyers out there.’

  ‘On balance, though …’

  ‘On balance, I doubt she’d succeed. She can pursue one of two arguments. First that publication would cause her distress, and second, that publication would infringe her right to privacy. Most judges will feel that the right of an author to publish his work overrides both of those.’

  ‘There’s one further argument she might u
se: that he didn’t intend the poems to be published.’

  ‘Really? What grounds does she have?’

  ‘I found them among his papers after his death. It’s not clear what he intended.’

  ‘Interesting. But it’s not a matter for the law at this stage. It’s up to his executors to make a judgement. Is that just you?’

  ‘Me and his agent.’

  She drained her coffee and looked at her watch. ‘I hope that’s been of some use. I doubt your friend’s widow could succeed in stopping publication. It might be worth your talking to her, though, to avoid any unpleasantness.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve talked to her many times. But there’s no obvious compromise.’

  ‘Well, let me know if I can do any more.’

  We stood up and shook hands.

  ‘What sort of man was he, Robert Pope?’ she said, opening the door.

  ‘Strange mixture. Great company when I first knew him. Rather gloomy and disappointed later on.’

  ‘But a good writer? An important writer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The appearance of whose poems is arguably in the public interest?’

  ‘Insofar as poetry is ever in the public interest, yes.’

  ‘Then it sounds like a case of publish and be damned. I bet you never thought you’d hear a lawyer say that. But that’s what it comes down to. Nice meeting you, Matt. Good luck.’

  I read the Canadian folk singer stuff during my lunch break. Niema Ash had written a memoir about her former friend and employer Loreena McKennitt. Over a longish career, McKennitt had always protected her privacy with (in Ash’s words) ‘the iron safeguard of a chastity belt’. The one exception came when her fiancé died in a boating accident; afterwards, Loreena became involved with a charity promoting nautical safety and would sometimes get personal for the sake of the cause. On every other aspect of her life – including her health, diet and domestic arrangements – she was abnormally sensitive. Probably no book would have been acceptable to her. That a supposed friend should write one enraged her. She hated the descriptions of her grief after her fiancé died. She hated the suggestion that she was mean with money. She even hated Niema’s description of her cottage. The judge took her side on this: ‘It is intrusive and distressing for Ms McKennitt’s household minutiae to be exposed to curious eyes,’ he said, arguing that to describe a person’s home – the décor, the layout, the state of cleanliness, the behaviour of the occupants – was ‘almost as objectionable as spying into the home with a long-distance lens and publishing the resulting photographs’.

  ‘Confidence’ was a word that kept coming up – as in duty, breach and betrayal of. ‘That the confidence was a shared confidence,’ the judgment read, ‘which only one of the parties wishes to preserve does not extinguish the other party’s right to have that confidence respected.’ Shared confidence: a contentious issue. Did the women in Rob’s poems know that they’d be written about? How would they feel seeing themselves in print? Would they even recognise themselves? It wasn’t like a servant dissing a former employer. In Rob’s mind, he was eulogising them. All the same. They might feel, as McKennitt had, that they’d been spied on, if not with a long-distance lens, then with a secret camera – the eye, or ‘I’, of a poet.

  I googled other cases where an invasion of privacy was at stake. Woodward v Hutching (1977), where a former press agent to Tom Jones wrote salaciously about him for a tabloid. Von Hannover v Germany (1999), in which Caroline, Princess of Hanover (daughter of Prince Rainier), was granted an injunction to stop the German press publishing photos of her children, but failed to prevent them publishing photos of her, even when she was going about her daily business rather than fulfilling public duties. Beckham & Another v News Group Newspapers Ltd (2005), when the Beckhams tried to stifle allegations from their former nanny that their marriage was in trouble. A v B plc (2002), in which a married Premiership footballer sought to suppress a story about him having sex with two women. The outcomes varied and the cases had limited application to Jill. More relevant, and worrying, was the original judgment in the Rhodes case, granting an injunction to his ex-wife on the grounds that Rhodes had been ‘reckless about causing … psychiatric injury’ to their vulnerable son. Jill wasn’t a child, but with the help of a good lawyer she could be presented as vulnerable: a betrayed wife and grieving widow. The Rhodes judgment had eventually been overturned, and the book was duly published. But not before its author had been forced to spend tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, on lawyers’ fees.

  It was something I hadn’t considered before: the possibility that Louis and I, as executors, might have to spend money fighting for publication. Whose money? There was none in the estate for us, and though Louis’s agency doubtless made a handsome profit, he was only one of several partners. Would the others consent for agency money to be spent in that way? On an author who’d earned them little or nothing? It seemed highly unlikely.

  ‘Some guy dropped off a book for you,’ Marie said, when I got home that evening. ‘I’ve left it by the bed.’

  ‘What kind of guy?’

  ‘Youngish. With a beard. Said he met you at that party at the Brothertons’.’

  The Brothertons live three doors away – they have a boy the same age as Noah and had asked us round for drinks one evening. An account manager for an ad company was among the other guests, a languid man in a blue shirt who perked up when I described my job. ‘I’m a bit of a writer myself,’ he said, and asked what the chances were of getting a book of poems reviewed on our pages. Remote, I told him: if he wanted to develop his skills, he should join a writing group. Oh, he wasn’t a beginner, he said, he’d just had a collection privately published – perhaps I’d like to see it. I had smiled vaguely in reply, disinclined to be rude, but remembering the example that Rob had set when ‘pestered’ (his word) by would-be poets. I’d been standing next to him after a reading when a nervous young man came up and presented him with a large typescript. Rob smiled, nodded and looked delighted to be given it – then, as the young man wandered off, put a finger to his lips (‘Shh’) and dropped it in the nearest waste bin.

  The vagueness of my smile hadn’t done the trick. Here were the poems, two copies of them, in fact: Spring Blooms for Alice by Daniel Farquhar (the Brothertons must have given him my address). ‘To Matt’, he’d written on the title page of one copy; ‘For review’, read a note inside the other. The cover featured a photo of snow-topped hills and the poems were neatly laid out over sixty-four pages. DF Press, it said inside. Daniel had made a decent job of it; even the paper was good quality. Self-publishing wasn’t an option I’d ever considered. For my next book, if and when it got written, maybe I ought to. Though he’d have hated the idea, it might come to that with Rob, too.

  I skimmed through my copy after putting Jack to bed. Give Daniel his due: not all the line-breaks were random. But it was plodding, amateurish stuff, all azure skies, falling rose petals and heartbreak.

  Marie joined me after watching the news.

  ‘What do you think?’ she said, undressing.

  ‘Nice-looking book. Pity about the contents.’

  ‘That’s harsh. I was reading it earlier. Whoever Alice is he really loves her, you can tell.’

  ‘You can tell because he keeps telling you. Not because the poems are any good.’

  ‘Some are quite moving. The one about hearing the blackbird the day after they broke up, for example.’

  ‘Birdsong as a symbol of hope. How original.’

  ‘You didn’t used to be such a literary snob, Matt.’

  ‘I’m being honest.’

  ‘So’s Daniel. It’s what people look for in writing: sincerity. That’s what I hate about you-know-who. He’s so busy showing off there’s no emotion.’

  ‘There’s desire in Rob’s poems, there’s nostalgia …’

  ‘But not love.’ She grabbed the book from me. ‘Here, look: When I took your hand/to help you in the boat/that day I thought we’d
stay/together and afloat/not that you’d slip like a ghost bride/from my side/and drift through the current and away.’ She shut the book and stashed it on her side of the bed.

  ‘The rhythm’s clunky and the rhymes are facile.’

  ‘But the feeling comes through.’

  ‘There’s no comparison,’ I said, as she turned off her bedside light. ‘Rob’s poems are accomplished. These are crude.’

  ‘Rob’s are crude. He can’t get over having a willy and looking for vaginas to stick it in.’

  ‘But the forms he uses – sestinas, sonnets, rhyming couplets –’

  ‘Fuck form,’ she said, turning over, ‘I need some sleep.’

  18

  Winter slipped into spring, but deadlock remained. I was caught in the middle: between Rob, who’d left instructions, and Jill, who disputed whether we were following them; between Louis, pushing to get a collection together, and Lexy, reluctant to commit; between Articles 8 and 10 of the Human Rights Act; between Marie’s allegiance to a wronged woman and Aaron Fortune’s to scholarship. Whatever the outcome, someone would be unhappy.

  I emailed Lexy, to see how things stood, and she invited me to her office. Though notionally open-plan, it was arranged as a series of cubicles, with shelves, filing cabinets and potted plants deployed to create privacy. Lexy’s cubicle was by the window, overlooking a gloomy street. She seemed more relaxed than when we’d last met. Because she didn’t feel so embattled? Or because she behaved differently at work? I searched for Rob’s books on her shelves and found them – six slim volumes – tucked between fat novels and glossy art history books. Lexy’s tastes were diverse: though she mostly looked after novels and poetry, she published non-fiction too. A balanced portfolio, Louis would have called it. I wouldn’t have minded her as my editor. In a short time, she’d assembled an impressive list.

  ‘I talked to Jill again yesterday,’ she said.

  ‘Any luck?’ I said.

  ‘She’s still adamant.’