‘I wouldn’t have the discipline,’ people say, when I tell them I’m writing a novel. In the past I didn’t have it either, but a dwindling bank account does wonders for concentration. I wish I wrote more quickly. Still, the novel’s coming along. I began it in a voice not unlike my mother’s, with occasional echoes of Jill – a woman left alone after the death of her husband. But over time the voice has got younger. And the subject matter isn’t just (or even at all) the grief of widowhood, but other kinds of loss: loss of love, trust, self, sanity, a reason to live. ‘Sounds grim,’ Marie said. But there’s humour too. And no one could call it laddish.
I hope it’ll work and find a publisher, but my heart won’t be broken if not. For Rob all that mattered was the writing. But I’ve a partner, a family, friends, interests other than books. It isn’t art that gives life its purpose. One of the last reviews I subbed before leaving the paper had this quote from Proust. ‘We accept the thought that in ten years we ourselves, in a hundred years our books, will have ceased to exist,’ it ran. ‘Eternal duration is promised no more to men’s works than to men.’ I have that pinned above my desk now. Rather than discouraging me, it spurs me on.
Meanwhile, I’ve done the odd piece for Leonie to keep my hand in. Book reviews won’t pay all the bills, but if I supplement them with features and interviews I’ll get by. Even when the money runs out, and I’m hustling for work, there are certain articles I’ll never do. Last year an Italian journalist outed the ‘real’ Elena Ferrante, using leaked financial statements to link her to a Rome-based translator. I could imagine the daily conference at my office: wasn’t this the piece we asked whatsisface, Leonie’s former assistant, to do? Another fucking missed scoop. Leonie, I hoped, would defend me. She’d say the paper had standards to keep up and that the Italian journalist had been crucified for his intrusiveness. But might she secretly regret not having pushed me more at the time? Either way, I’m relieved to have got out when I did. I was never the right person for the job. The truth behind Elena Ferrante and her novels doesn’t interest me.
And the truth behind Rob and his poems? That does interest me, I can’t pretend otherwise. But only because I knew him. Or thought I knew him, before discovering that I didn’t. Couldn’t he have trusted me with his secrets? Did he think I’d give them away? It’s not that I feel angry with him. I wasn’t his wife. What he got up to with other women – if he got up to anything at all – is immaterial. He wouldn’t be the first writer to have a complicated love life, and it’s not my place to make moral judgements. Still, I do identify with Jill. Not only did we both experience a sense of betrayal, his poems put us at loggerheads, which caused us both upset and stress.
A respectable lifestyle, a flirtatious Muse: Ovid’s description of himself may have been true of Rob, too. It’s what Jill believes, or would like to believe, that any flirting was confined to the page, or that what happened off the page, in life, amounted to no more than flirting. Who can say? Only … About a month ago I had an email from a woman calling herself Belinda (whether her real name I couldn’t be sure, since the email address – [email protected] – gave no clue). She’d read somewhere that Rob had a book coming out and had been told (by whom?) that I was his literary executor. As someone who had known Rob, she was curious about the book and wondered if I could give her a call. The number was a mobile number. I called next day. The call went to voicemail but she phoned straight back. ‘Is that Matthew?’ she said, the first time anyone has called me that in twenty years. Her accent was neutral (regionless, educated, middle class), her tone too guarded to be warm; I’d have guessed she was in her forties. How could I help? I said. She’d like to get hold of Rob’s new book, she said – she’d pre-ordered it on Amazon, but wondered if there was a quicker way. You’re keen, I laughed. Yes, I’ve read every line he wrote. Wow, I said, a real fan. Not just a fan, she said – as I told you in my email, I knew him personally. In fact, I came to his funeral. I was there too, I said, maybe we spoke. I didn’t stay for the wake, she said, I felt too sad, too shocked, his death was so sudden, he’d so much more to give. Anyway, about his book … Finished copies would soon be available, I said – should I ask the publisher to send her a copy? That would be good, she said, but in the meantime could I give her an idea of the contents? She’d read that the book was untypical of Rob – ‘daringly candid’, in fact. Not exactly, I said, the poems were adaptations of poems by Ovid, but you could hear Rob’s voice in them. Which Ovid were we talking about, she said, the Metamorphoses? No, the Amores, I said. Love poems, then? Yes. It was her turn to speak, but she didn’t. I plunged on, made anxious by her silence. They’re Ovid’s experiences as re-imagined by Rob – different in spirit to the rest of his stuff, but still recognisably him. More silence. Can you hear me? I said. I think I’ve lost you. I’m here, she said, then fell silent again. Give me your address, I said, and I’ll see about getting a copy sent. I’ll email you, she said, that’d be simpler – thanks for your help.
No email came. I left it a week, then texted to remind her, but when she finally replied – last week – she said didn’t want to be a nuisance and since the book would soon be with her from Amazon she might as well wait.
I haven’t told Louis about the call. Cherchez la femme, he once said, before we suspected there might be several of them. If he knew, he’d be angry with me for not asking more questions: was Belinda just a friend? Or The One? Or one of many? I might have pushed her, but how much would she have owned up to, in a phone call with a stranger? I might get in touch again when she has read the book. But Marie says to leave things be and Marie is always right.
I’ve reached an accommodation with Rob as well. We no longer talk. I still think of him, of course, but not every day. And if ever I’m tempted to update him on the world he has left behind – war, terror, refugees, Brexit, Trump, Theresa May – I tell myself he wouldn’t want to hear, not just because the news is mostly bad, but because his only interest was in pushing me to get the poems out. That’s done with now. The book will be published next month. Love’s Alphabet, we’ve called it, after much debate (Postmodern Love, After Ovid and The Lyric Libido were among the discarded alternatives). Love’s Alphabet by Robert Pope, pure and simple, with no reference in the blurb to the Amores. There are numbers and epigraphs above each poem, and anyone who cares to can hunt down the source, but that’s as far as it goes. I like to think Rob would approve. It was Lexy who noticed that in his final version of the poems – the one I found in his desk drawer – all the titles were one-word titles, and that each began with a different letter of the alphabet, or rather twenty-six of them did. And she convinced herself, if not me, that Rob had been planning what she called a double-alphabet version of the Amores, first A to Z, then Z to A, with his Prologue added to make fifty-two poems in total, ‘also the number of weeks in the year’. Numerological tosh, I thought, but Rob was fond of structural patterns of that kind. She has done a little editing, to supplement Rob’s final revisions, but there’s been no major tidying up: the libertine and lecher are given their voice. I take my hat off to Lexy. Those months of holding Louis and me at bay gave her time to win over Jill, who eventually agreed to there being more poems in the book than any of us expected, including several to which she once objected and probably still hates.
Lexy’s powers of persuasion haven’t been the only factor. Something in Jill seems to have softened. I’ve been to visit a couple of times and noticed the change. Her eyes are a warmer blue again, her smiles less forced. When we looked at the drafts for the cover design, we sat together at the kitchen table – alongside each other, not opposite. She even said she was looking forward to publication, ‘if only to draw a line under everything’. While I was there, the house phone went – Sorry, she told the caller, flustered, someone’s here, could I call you later? The voice was male. It could have been her brother or someone from her charity. But if so why the embarrassment?
Rob’s been dead for over three years. If there’s som
eone else in her life, maybe the poems, and how they’ll be received, matter less to her than they did.
Leonie has taken ten of the poems and – on condition I write a short intro – has promised a double-page spread. I already know what I’ll talk about: Rob’s sudden death, our friendship, my visits to the house, the discovery of unpublished poems. I’ll refrain from discussing whether they’re autobiographical. That’s not a cop-out to spare Jill. I won’t say, because I don’t know. Leonie may push me. But I’m standing firm. Matt the Scruple.
To my surprise, I’ve also succeeded in selling Rob’s archive. Donated might be nearer the mark, given how little it went for, but I’m confident it’s found the right home. Not that the University of Chichester ever occurred to me as a potential home, until their archivist got in touch. It turned out Rob had occasionally run workshops there, despite telling me he never ran workshops. And Chichester wasn’t far from where he’d grown up. The head of the Literature Department, Corinne Day, is also a fan of his work. Not that Corinne, from Tennessee; this one’s Scottish. Still, the coincidence of the name helped persuade me we’d found the right fit, and Louis agreed we’d not get a better offer.
Until Jill reminded me, I’d almost forgotten the other obligation placed on me in Rob’s will: to destroy any ‘journals, letters and unfinished drafts’. It was easy to forget, because I’d found almost nothing of that kind. In his last years, Rob had had occasional bonfires, Jill said. It’s also possible, despite her assurances to the contrary, that she destroyed whatever journals he’d left. If there were none, why did he refer to them in his will? No unfinished drafts were left, either. All that did remain were the letters: the ones he’d received; the ones he’d sent and kept copies of; the ones he’d drafted but not sent. It seemed a pity to destroy them, but his instructions were clear.
We didn’t discuss this in front of the archivist from Chichester (a gloomy young man called Eugene) when he came to remove the crates. But after we’d finished loading them in his van and he’d driven off, I took the three folders with Rob’s letters down the garden. The weather was implausibly warm for late October, the trees turning gold, stray leaves scattered about the flowerbeds and lawn. Jill followed me with a box of matches. In her pink padded jacket and lime-green boots she looked frolicsome rather than sombre, spring-like not autumnal. The bottom of the metal brazier was lined with ashes and charred twigs. I tipped them out on to the compost heap and began stuffing letters in, making twists so they’d burn more easily. Let me help, Jill said, and pulled out a letter from the RECEIVED file, pausing to read it aloud – ‘Dear Mr Pope, as a great admirer of your verses could you please give me feedback on the enclosed epic?’ – before scrunching it up and dropping it in the brazier. Following suit, I read out a letter from the SENT file: ‘Dear Melanie, my only creative writing rule is: ignore everything you’ve ever been told.’ Laughing, Jill took over: ‘Dear Rob (if I may), we are looking for a patron for our Preserve the Cormorant campaign and wonder if …’ I topped that with an UNSENT: ‘Dear Laurence, I don’t normally object to kind reviews, but yours was so inane I feel I must protest …’ We took it in turns, our laughter growing louder, as though we were hearing Rob in person, the man we both loved in our different ways, who’d divided us in death, but enriched us when alive. There we were, on the same side, next to the rim of the brazier. I’d a sudden impulse to hug Jill and think I would have done, but at that moment she stepped away, hunching over the matchbox, striking a light, then holding it to a twist of paper. The flames quickly caught, the paper browning and blackening, small yellow buds flickering, then large red tongues, a hearty blaze we stoked by chucking on more letters, not in single twists now but thick sheaves, the fire – quicker than we were – leaving no time for further recitals, each of us hurling in great wads of paper (some pages typed, others handwritten) until the last of the letters had been consumed and we threw the cardboard folders in for good measure, holding our hands out for warmth as dusk fell chill around us and Rob’s words went up in smoke, thin grey flags spilling out into the darkness while the fire died down, my mood (I can’t speak for Jill) both jubilant and sad, the pair of us transfixed by the embers, till all that remained was ash and we turned without a word towards the house, leaving Rob behind, his letters destroyed, but his name preserved both in an archive and in a soon-to-be-published work, all of which (the sifting and the selling, the disseminating and the destroying) was as his will had specified and, whether his reputation rose or sank as a result, was in accordance with the duties imposed on me as executor – duties which, in good conscience, to the best of my ability, I had faithfully carried out.
Love’s Alphabet
ROBERT POPE
My morals, believe me, are quite distinct from my verses – a respectable life-style, a flirtatious Muse – and the larger part of my writings is mendacious, fictive, assumes the licence its author denies himself.
Ovid, Tristia (II. 353–6)
Contents
Anon
Bed
Couple
Dawn
Etiquette
Frank
Gorse
Hair
Illicit
Jealousy
Knave
Lies
Mirror
Nostalgia
Outsider
Paying
Questions
Rules
Shower
Thanatos
Unwanted
Vodka
Wardrobe
X-rated
Yo-yo
Zero
Anon
None but you shall be sung in my verses (2.17)
I’m in love, no getting round it.
But our love’s hush-hush.
I can’t go tell it to the mountain
or whisper it like Midas in the reeds.
Why these poems, then?
Because they’re written just for you,
not to be published till we’ve stopped loving
(sorry, typo: living), maybe not even then.
The woman in the shower,
the bed, the books, the hotel room –
it’s the story of us
but only you will know it’s you.
Bed
May my siestas often turn out that way! (1.5)
A house-call in the old colony, during monsoon season.
We sat in the kitchen, gossiping over gin and tonic,
while rain barrelled down beyond the blinds. The light was dusk-light,
less for songbirds than for bats, but with a glow through the slats
that printed lines across our faces, black on white, white on black.
I’d come with a queasy stomach and a migraine,
so she suggested I lie down in her bedroom. It felt cool in there,
on the divan, under the rotor of the ceiling fan,
while kids played in the street and rain rat-tat-tatted on the glass.
At some point she came through and asked was I feeling better
and did I mind if she siesta’d too? She lay on her side behind me,
her hand on my hip, her breathing deep and steady, as if she’d dropped off,
until the hand moved down a bit – all this and what followed
without a word spoken, just the chop of the fan,
the swish of her underthings, and the whap of naked flesh.
Sometimes I find the memory hard to credit, as if I’d stolen it
from a porn mag, but then the shutters come back and the slats
across her body and the rain rat-tat-tatting on the glass.
Couple
A really determined couple is hard to resist (3.3)
His watch on the floor, her hair on the pillow,
the assuaging bottle of Chablis.
Dawn
What’s the hurry? All lovers, men and girls, resent your coming … (1.13)
Rosy fingers, lark ascending, gold disc cresting the skyline …
Give it a rest. Why do you think the curtains are drawn?
Call back in an hour – till then go bother someone else.
Insomniacs, factory guards, nurses on night shift: they’ll be glad to see you.
But to us, under the duvet, you’re a dentist’s lamp, a prison searchlight,
the naked bulb of a torture cell. I reckon you must be single or divorced.
Or if married, unhappily so – harried from bed by your shrewish wife.
Now you’re bugging us with noise as well, the wooden sill ticking
like a cicada as it warms. Bully! Clock-watcher! Control freak!
We’re hiding out inside each other, the den where it’s always night.
Etiquette
… this ritual (3.13)
The Executor Page 27