The Poets' Wives

by David Park

  Then as she releases it he signals her to sit and says, ‘There is one more thing. You might wish to hear it.’ He hesitates until she nods her permission for him to continue. ‘There was a group of criminals in one of the barracks who had marked out their own territory as was the custom but they weren’t a bad bunch as criminals went. They’d barter and exchange news and although they stuck together they weren’t violent – I think they were just as frightened as the rest of us. I got to know some of them. One night I was invited to join them and because I hadn’t a single thing worth stealing I went to where they’d holed up and when I went in Osip was there. There was an upturned barrel and on it a candle and some white bread, bread like no other I’d seen in the camp, and Osip was reciting his poems to the sitting circle of men. They listened in silence and sometimes when he’d finished a poem they’d call for him to deliver it again. And when he spoke I never before, or after, heard such a silent listening in the camps. It stays with me. He was a great poet, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, he was, he was a great poet.’

  They sit in silence for a few moments then as she rises he also levers himself up from the chair and going to the dresser opens a drawer and lifts out a sheet of newspaper. She doesn’t understand what he’s doing and then decides he’s going to show her some story but instead he lifts the bluebells out of the glass jar and wraps them in the paper.

  ‘For the grave you don’t have,’ he says as he hands them to her.

  Then she thanks him again and she is gone, taking the stairs and making herself think, not of death and an unmarked grave, but the light of a candle in the darkness, a loaf of white bread and the sound of poetry. It gives her something to hold on to even now when she knows all the rest. And when she steps out into the street she tilts her face up to the light and lets the strengthening sun touch it the way he used to touch it when they’d been apart.

  Soon her residency permit will expire and she will have to leave Moscow again. There won’t be much for her to pack, she thinks as she sits in the apartment and inspects its contents once more. Her eyes linger on the bluebells that she’s placed on the small table beside her bed and which give the room its only brightness of colour. There are still things to be done, phone calls to be made. Surely they must come for the poems soon and give them back to the world. She will phone Surkov yet again and see what progress has been made by his committee that is supposed to be reviewing the situation. Not much, she guesses, and believes that there are those who are still determined to block any publication. Perhaps Osip is still too great a reminder of what was done and will always prove so. But she will not let it go, not let the poems sift and spill like sand through her hands. She has carried them this far, she will carry them further if she needs to. And of course they will be happy for her to disappear once more out of Moscow – the further the better as far as they are concerned. No one wants a constant witness to past failures haranguing them at every opportunity – some of the things she has said to the apparatchiks in the past few months would have sent her hurtling to the camps in previous years.

  She lights another cigarette. She has started to smoke too much but allows herself this one indulgence. As always there is the low murmur of life from beyond the thin walls of the apartment block. Indistinct and fragmented it exists as a permanent hum in the ears, peaking into consciousness only when a baby cries or voices are raised in one of the constant disputes over the communal areas. She must find a new place to live and be settled before the winter comes. Already her body is complaining of its weariness, telling her of its reluctance to set out once more towards an uncertain destination. Has it been life’s cruel joke that her name means hope? It’s a question to which she never knows the answer.

  But it is hope and her memory that must not fail her now, not after coming this far. She sits on the only seat and watches the evening light drifting gently through the window. Is it part of the plan for a great new world that insists they must live high in the sky like birds in little nest boxes? She stands and goes to the glass. Soon she will need to start the preparations for her journey but not just yet. They truly believed they had silenced everyone, cut or bought their tongues. One more thing about which they were mistaken and how it must fill them with the very fear in which they dealt. For now there are living tongues in the skulls of the dead and they will speak for all the nameless, voiceless ones who were swept into the abyss. There is nothing they can do to stop them. She understands this at last because whatever happens, whatever they do, there will always be those who will not hide in silence. And she has resolved in the days since hearing the circumstances of Osip’s end that she is going to be her own voice, as well as the preserver of his, and write her story that is also his but also hers alone, write it for those who are still to come and who must know the truth of what was done.

  Outside, soft-edged striations of clouds sift their way through a blue sky like the cigarette smoke that slowly spirals about her. She thinks of a candle, white bread and the spoken words. A sacrament, holy and true, even there, even in that place. She goes closer to the glass so that her face is almost touching its coldness. Some day the cage doors will be thrown open, bluebells planted on the grave she will never see. Her lips begin to move. A voice for the dead, the words engraved eternally on the hidden chambers of the heart.

  Lydia

  1

  The fruit in the bowl had either withered into a shrivelled blackness or else blotched itself luridly with decay. On the kitchen table a loaf of bread was white-furred and blue-measled. In the vase on the window sill the heads of flowers wilted wearily, a brown wreath of fallen petals circling its base. No one had entered the cottage after her husband’s body was taken away and John Gibson’s phone call had been at pains to assure her that everything remained untouched, as if he imagined that because of her absence from his final moments, she would think it important to see the scene in its final state. In the subsequent weeks, however, he had gone on cutting the grass, just as for the past twenty years. It looked as if it had been done in the previous few days and she tried to rekindle the fresh scent that had greeted her arrival in the hope of dispelling the damp mustiness now seemingly infecting every corner of the cottage.

  In the grate the thick bed of ashes remained uncleared while on the black, salt-spotted hearth hunkered the final small pile of bleached driftwood that her husband had gathered. Propped open on the arm of the fireside chair was a copy of Virgil’s Aeneid with his reading glasses resting on top – the ones he still refused to wear in public. She lifted them and from habit polished the perpetually smeared lens with the hem of her blouse, then folded the arms and set them on the mantelpiece. Closing the book she placed it beside the glasses.

  The crimped seat of the leather chair still retained his creased print. Of course she should have come sooner to tidy up but something had prevented her and so when she had been summoned too late to do anything, and his body already removed to the morgue, she had simply asked John to lock and secure the place. There was the funeral organisation to preoccupy her, made both easier and more complicated by the detailed list of instructions. Even a sudden and unexpected death had not caught him unprepared for his claim on posterity and she had followed his wishes as directed with the minister firmly locked out of the service, bar a few and speedy necessities of ritual. He would have enjoyed the orations of his fellow poets, all white-haired men but with steady voices as they read the chosen poems and gave their eulogies. One chose to read a poem Don had written in the first week after they had taken ownership of the cottage located on the North Coast and renovated it as much as money had allowed. They always referred to it as the cottage even though in reality it was a rather ugly bungalow built between the wars by the local stationmaster. The poem described the expectant breakers spending themselves and then drawing slowly back into the emptiness of the starless night. A cold poem, she had always found it, but in the richness of the voice delivering it at the funeral it had momentarily assumed
unfamiliar warmth.

  She could hear the low thrum of the sea now and it was enough to remind her of the dampness of the cottage that seemed to clam and veil her face. It wasn’t enough simply to switch on the central heating – she knew she needed to see the fire lit to disperse the coldness that lingered insistently over everything and which she wanted to dispel before her two daughters arrived in the morning. She stared at the chair again, then moved it slightly away from its place at the fire. It was where John had found him. Saw him through the window when he didn’t answer the door. Dead from a heart attack at sixty-seven years of age, an attack that gave him no warning of its imminent arrival and twisted his face into a shape that made it angry and strange to her fleeting glance before the mortuary drawer had been closed again. As she had driven home she guessed his anger arose from having been given no prior sign and so had been deprived of the creative blessing of a tumour, or slow spread of cancerous cells, that would have allowed him to chart his demise, bleed every aspect of his mortality into metre.

  She looked again at the leather chair in which he had died and saw its mottled and bruised patina, the whitened circle on the arm where a cup had once balanced, the fine tributary of creases where his head lolled in his daily doze. Everywhere she looked was infused with his being – the chair itself; the books and papers splayed across the desk under the window where he chose to write; the CDs out of their cases; the half-finished crossword on the side table. The force of him was always, and continued to be, so real that she found it difficult to accept that he was dead, almost expected at any moment to hear his voice. Forty years of marriage had ensured that parts of them were grafted to the other so that it wasn’t possible any more to know where she ended and he began. But already she had begun to feel different and she thought that what she felt was lighter, freer and at the same time a little frightened of feeling these things when it was still as if he was the ever-present observer and attempted scribe of even her hidden parts. She looked at the glasses on the mantelpiece watching her and, seeing their case on the table acting as a paperweight, placed them inside and snapped the lid.

  What she knew she had to do now was complete her last duties before she could be absolved and finally released. She turned again to the fire and taking off her coat knelt to light it but as she did so remembered the urn was still in the car, wedged in the back between her case and the Tesco bags of groceries she had stopped for on the way to the coast. She knew the girls were not staying any longer than was needed before they scurried back to their lives in London and in truth neither of them had displayed much enthusiasm for returning so soon after the funeral, even when she had relayed their father’s wishes for his final leave-taking. So the fact that they had eventually agreed to come after conferring with each other at some length was due, she guessed, to her need and what she hoped had been the subtle calling in of past favours. She didn’t want to do it on her own, didn’t want even to be there alone in the cottage if truth be told because it didn’t fully feel as if she was on her own and his insistent presence was unsettling and edged with too many things she didn’t want to think about.

  She had to empty the overflowing ash pan from the grate, silently criticising him for his lack of diligence, and taking it out through the back door deposited its contents in the ash pile at the corner of the low hedge that separated the small garden from the ploughed field beyond. Then going back inside she lit the fire, using the last of the firelighters and the dried-out bits of driftwood before adding coal from the plastic bucket. He always insisted he couldn’t feel warm unless he could see flames. A lifetime earlier during their courtship he had once asked her what she could see in the fire and she hadn’t understood and so said something about flames and coal and he had laughed and called her a literalist, teased her about an absence of imagination. As the wood caught it hissed and crackled in protest. It was the last of his gathering in and now she saw many different things in the flames. He often liked to describe himself as nothing more than a beachcomber. But she knew enough to know that little in words was ever simply itself and that everything was loaded with some reverberating meaning.

  Warming her palms against the gradually growing flames she pressed them together as if in momentary prayer. But she didn’t pray any more – that was something he had taken away from her right at the start with his bitter mockery of what he saw only as superstition and backwardness. There was only ever room for one God in their marriage and it wasn’t one who watched over them from some heavenly paradise, and without him ever expressing it in words she knew that what she was supposed to worship was poetry, which he habitually declared was the highest form of art. Everything else – her, the children, their lost son, the daily realities of living – all were subservient to that deity. And as she levered a little air into the base of the fire she wondered how the poet and his art had become so indistinguishable in his mind. When had he first assumed this divinity?

  She couldn’t remember but took some pleasure from knowing that it wasn’t imagination had paid for the refurbishment and extension of the cottage – the putting on of a new roof, installing central heating and an updated kitchen and bathroom – and it wasn’t imagination that had put food on the family table and paid the bills down all the years. The cottage itself had been left to them by her mother and although almost immediately he had annexed it as a place for writing, the actual house was part of her childhood summers when all the family had come up from the city and spent most of each July and August there, in what was now only a blurred haze of roaming through days that seemed to stretch slowly to remote and gentle dusks. He had smothered her memories with the press of his own which insisted on their primacy through the reality of his printed words. So she struggled to recall much beyond the fishing trips in the bay in Gibson’s boat, catching crabs in buckets or the occasional dance up in the church hall. Mostly now when she thought of the past it was his memories that loomed large and subsumed hers. His early poems had often proved his most popular, worming their way regularly into anthologies about childhood and the new collection to be used in Northern schools. There was ‘Home Calling’, describing their childish games ‘in streets shadowed by dusk and the silhouettes of cranes’ where they played until the shout of his father summoned him home. She thought it strange that no one had ever queried how his home in the Edwardian suburbs had been shadowed by shipyard cranes but, if they had, he would no doubt have explained it as poetic licence.

  Poetic licence. Yes, that was what he based his life on, a licence to be selfish, eternally happy taking the comforts of her labours in a frequently dull nine to five job while contributing little himself to the budget beyond a few meagre bursaries that were a spit in the ocean of the cost of raising a family and keeping a roof over their heads. If poetry was such a rich and beneficent god why did it pay so much less to its followers than just about any other profession? No one bought poetry, no publishers had doled out huge advances for any of his five slim volumes and if he could muster an audience at festivals or readings and sustained a decent reputation, it never translated into financial security. For that he was reliant on her and her former life of managing in the public health service where there were never enough beds, never enough staff and never enough money to make her job seem anything other than a constant exercise in trying to cut a shrinking cloth to match an expanding coat. She could have accepted it because she knew her children benefited from her career if he hadn’t always affected an indifference to money while expecting what it provided. And she had never fully lost her irritation at the memory of how the children in their late teens had taken in conversation to ignoring her daily job that supplied everything they had, and instead enjoyed luxuriating in the attention generated when people realised their father was a poet. His dying was the most financially generous thing he had ever done and the life insurance policy she had taken out coupled with her modest pension ensured that she would survive. It was possible that she would have to sell the cottage, particul
arly as her daughters seemed intent on taking their holidays in more sophisticated locations and showed little desire to revisit the scene of so many of their childhood summers. But that was a decision for the future.

  She went into the kitchen, put the kettle on and then started to clear out the fridge, almost retching at the curdled sourness of the milk. At first she looked at sell-by dates but then simply swept everything into a plastic bag and knotted it for the bin then sprayed the inside of the fridge quickly and wiped it with a clean cloth. After she had finished she went to the car to bring in the bags of groceries. Out in the bay a light was winking green and she paused to let the smell of the sea spread through her senses. The vestiges of summer light were still strong enough to let her look across to the headland of Donegal. Closer by there were lights on in the clubhouse of the links golf course and on the beach an elderly man was walking his dog, its scurrying scampering speed in sharp contrast to the slow pace of its owner.

  ‘It’s good to see you, Lydia,’ John said and his unseen approach made her jump. ‘I saw your smoke. I came up to see if you need anything.’

  ‘Thanks, John. I was going to call down later after I get everything unpacked. And thanks for cutting the grass. If you’re happy, we’ll continue with the normal arrangement.’ She was conscious of the urn and transferring a bag from her right hand gently closed the boot.

  ‘Sure it’s no trouble. Can I help you with those bags?’