The Poets' Wives

by David Park

  Was it foolish nostalgia, a selective amnesia, that now made her think of their early days when what existed between them seemed like a force of nature, when he had blown into her life with all the strength of instinct and impulse that rendered every practical consideration inconsequential? He cared nothing for the things she had been told it was important to believe in, and because she hadn’t ever known why exactly she too should believe in them, they had been swept away in the flood of what she could give no other name to than passion. Despite the cold that peppered her cheekbones and made her pull the collar of her coat higher she warmed with the heat of the memory. Five years younger than him and with only the thinnest knowledge of books or poetry, it seemed like an adventure that life had never given her and might not ever give again. And yes he did woo her with words, whispering them in her ear like the sea’s soft lace that now frilled and lightly enticed the shore. He had taken all of her – no, that wasn’t true – she had given all of herself with not so much as a glance backwards or forwards but desperate only to exist in the moment where it seemed that there resided everything that she could ever need. And yes she was there in some of the earliest poems, unnamed but woven in the weft and warp of the words. If there wasn’t a single one dedicated formally to her she knew she was part of some, even if it was only because she had stood in the shadow of the described experience.

  A long time ago. A lifetime away. A time when he knew how to be light and funny, skilled in impersonation and accents, a lover of a late-night drink and a well-told joke. What had blunted that? What had stopped the whispered words in those closest moments that spoke as often as not of the sun, the moon and the stars? Perhaps it was her fault. Perhaps in the end she could never be enough to satisfy whatever need it was that rendered him distant, making him drift slowly away into some other orbit that she could only barely glimpse and never explore. Even when he came back to her it was never the same, and never was there that sweet tumble of mysterious and only half-understood words that he had used to woo her. She thought of Desdemona and the greed with which she devoured Othello’s tales then swept it aside with the knowledge that whatever emotions she had once stirred in her word-spinning lover, none had ever achieved the intensity of jealousy.

  They never collided in anger; he never humiliated her in public or criticised her. Perhaps he didn’t need to. Instead there was just a slow release like clasped hands gradually slipping the tightness of their grip and then both of them falling slowly backwards into the separate pathways of their lives.

  A man was fishing on the rocks at the end of the pier, his casting arm flung out over the sea but the line invisible in the dusk. She would walk along the stone pier that was girdled on both sides by protective rocks and speak to him. Ask him if he had caught anything. She’d ask him if it was her fault for not being enough. If she should have built her own life and tried to find someone who would love her for what she was and only ever use words that were true and which would endure longer than it took a flurry of passion to spend itself. There had been someone else – just the one and lasting no more than a few months. Almost twenty years ago a work colleague looking for comfort on the back of his divorce and afterwards nothing but a daily embarrassment until he had applied for a transfer. If anything she was glad when he’d made his escape, knew she had done it merely as a sad little kickback against her husband’s latest indiscretion but it had only made things worse, when despite her hints and willingness to avow confessional remorse, she had faltered into silence against the bulwark of his indifference.

  There was a green light blinking again. She thought of Gatsby standing in supplication to the light at the end of Daisy’s pier. That was one thing for which she should be grateful – her self-education, her diligent pursuit of books. And if that too had failed to make her worthy then at least it had bestowed a pleasure and a critical knowledge that she could use. So in time she was able to recognise the weaker of his poems, the ones that were space fillers, the ones she knew without being told were what he labelled as ‘confetti’ and those that deserved the praise. The poems that were truest worried her most because she couldn’t bring herself to understand how such perfect truth could spring from someone who was so frequently false. These she found threatening in that they seemed able to rise up above her and shadow her, almost taunting her with their complete detachment from the life the world assumed they shared.

  She looked back to the shore where the sea-facing houses had their uncurtained windows lit. No need to draw them perhaps when all that peered in was the sea. A bird teased and skimmed itself across the water, its wings almost touching the springing snare of the waves. Her feet crunched an unseen shell. Once she had tried to write her own poems, hiding them scrupulously from his gaze before her fear of his discovering them and imagining the scorn of his laughter made her destroy them, cutting each into the tiniest fragments as if they were love letters that if discovered might destroy her life. It made her hope that on the morning after next when she would gather with her daughters in this very place that the wind would have died away and the tide would be outgoing, taking the final remnants of his being far out to distant seas.

  She wanted Rory to be there. Her only son, sweet as love in her memory. She wanted him somehow to come back to her through the years. Her feet stumbled in a wedge of soft sand and when she momentarily stretched out her hands it felt as if her body was reaching to pull him back from the grasp of death.

  She could never forgive Don for Rory because he alone had been allowed to reclaim her son. Reclaimed him in the eight sonnets he had written about their lost child with his supposed heartbreak preserved forever in the eyes of the world. And so even in grief he had made her subservient and what she suffered in the most terrible pain she had ever known had found no voice or release, every last corrosive drop of it gnawing away at her over the years as again and again readers of the poems offered him their sympathy. A sympathy he had never shared, in the same way he had never sought to shoulder or try to salve any of what she had endured. And in not a single poem was the love with which she had brought her son into the world and given him every one of his twenty-seven years. So the loss and grief was all his father’s, a father who through his son’s life had never been anything but disinterested and remote, in later years even that being replaced by a growing sense of frustration at his supposed lack of career.

  She reached out to her child now and pulled him from the shades into the fragmenting light of her memory so that for a second as she bowed her head lower against the wind, he was there with her because she made herself believe that love was always stronger than words, and it was the force of her love alone that caused him now to form silently about her. Her son who loved mountains and high places, whose restless adventurous spirit made him travel to worlds she could only dream of and who sent her postcards with his flowing excited writing that always told her not to worry. And he’s there now as if made of grains of light with his eyes washed clean of death by the soft shuck of the sea’s caress and he flows around her and when she asks him if he’s all right he rests his arm on her shoulder the way he always did and he’s telling her not to worry, that everything’s all right and that he’s coming home soon. He’s coming home soon and the words repeat like a whisper to which she holds tightly. That’s good, she says, and tells him she’ll air his room and stock up the fridge because he’s always a little thinner when he comes home. Once, after a longer climbing trip, he’d looked like a bag of bones and when he’d put on the fresh clothes from his drawer they’d hung so loosely on him that he looked like a man wearing someone else’s things. She tries to see what he’s wearing now but as the serried waves suddenly break white and the man fishing casts his arm towards the sea he’s already slipping away again. She calls his name aloud but it’s as if that too is borne away by the wind and the ceaseless ebb of the sea so all that flows around her now are the night’s currents and she wants to shout that the borrowed clothes of death he wears belong to someo
ne else. To someone else. To his father. She’ll give them back to her husband, a man of whom the world thinks highly. She’ll dress him in them freely and unconditionally but just let them have her son a little longer.

  The cries of gulls blown ragged by the wind sliced through the stillness of the night before slipping into silence but their echoes lingered and she turned her eyes again to where the man fishing stood motionless at the end of the pier. Might even he not help save her son and stop him fading back below the waves? Catch him on the soft hook of her love. She strode out more quickly, reaching the end of the beach then tracing the line of rocks until she found a point where it was possible to step up on to the concrete pier. It always felt like a path that was taking you into the sea itself and there was a warning sign cautioning that it could be subject to strong waves. When they were children they had often fished for crabs off the end but she had always felt a little unsafe, frightened when the others had laughed if a sudden burst of spray showered over them.

  The moon had appeared now but was soon smothered again into vagueness by clouds. The swell of the sea seemed to surge more strongly as it splashed white against the girdle of rocks on either side. She hoped that her footsteps would announce her approach because she didn’t want to materialise suddenly out of the gloom. Then she hesitated and thought of going back as she turned and looked at the lights illuminating the bar of the clubhouse. It was one of his haunts although he never played and despised all sports. Sometimes too he took an evening meal there. He did fish occasionally, if mostly without much success, and had stood in the very place that was occupied now by the solitary figure casting his arm slowly and gracefully towards the dark shift of the sea. She decided it was too late to turn back and that to do so would suggest an unwillingness to make the human contact on which the village put so much store. A few words to pass herself would be enough and then she’d return to the cottage and start to do all the things that needed to be done before her daughters arrived.

  But she hesitated as some of her old childhood apprehensions returned when the sudden surge of a wave splashed a little spray around her feet. She glanced again at the figure now standing motionless and in a sudden pulse of fear imagined that it was her husband. The same height and weight, the same straight-backed stance that made it seem as if he was braced against whatever the world might throw at him. Slipping out from cloud the moon quivered the water with thin shards of light. And if he looked at her now she knew that his face would be frozen into that same anger that was the last expression he had shown her. She stood perfectly still unwilling to go another step but at that very moment the figure turned and raised his arm slowly in greeting. She couldn’t go back; she had to go forward to the end. The path seemed to have grown narrower, the press of the sea stronger. The concrete underfoot was pitted and uneven. He was wearing a waterproof coat and a woollen hat and she was near enough now to recognise his face although she didn’t know his name. As she came close he set the fishing rod at his feet and faced her, almost as if he was waiting for her to arrive.

  ‘Not a bad evening,’ he said, pushing his hat off his forehead.

  ‘Any luck?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s giving nothing back tonight.’ He pointed with his toe to the two tiny fish, ivory notes against the blackness of his boots. ‘The most it’s shared with me is a couple of hours of peace and quiet so I suppose I shouldn’t complain.’

  ‘Two small fish – all you need now are five barley loaves and you’d have a miracle.’

  ‘A miracle indeed if you could feed five thousand with these.’

  He lifted them up and dropped them into a white plastic bag then stretched it out towards her. ‘Could you use these?’

  She didn’t want them, wanted nothing more that was dead about her, but it was a kindness that she knew she couldn’t refuse so she thanked him and took the bag. Then he bent down and started to pack away his stuff. The moon slipped momentarily behind clouds once more and she stopped herself asking him if he had seen her son, if he could help her pull him back from the sea where he floundered alone and beyond her reach.

  ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ he said as he stood up again, before scattering what looked like tiny boluses of bread on the surface of the water.

  She thought of her son but said, ‘You knew my husband?’

  ‘He fished here a few times but I think he was better with words than he was at catching fish.’

  ‘You’ve read his work?’

  ‘Aye, I’ve read a couple. My son brought a book home from school. He’d a way of expressing things all right.’

  There was silence for a few moments and then she thanked him again and headed back down the pier. Along the shore road there was a seam of yellow house lights, made brighter by the thickening darkness. The wind had fallen away as if exhausted by its earlier efforts and only the occasional ragged splinter of moonlight scratched the blackness of the sea. She didn’t return to the cottage by the sand dunes for fear of tripping and falling but took the longer way through the main entrance then up to the road. The fish weighed almost nothing and if it hadn’t been too late for them she would have given them back to the sea so when she reached the front door she paused for a second, unwilling to bring them inside, then took her key out of the lock and, going round to the rear garden, set the two small slivers of almost perfect white on the pyre of ash.

  There was work to be done and in preparation she had brought black bin bags and some cardboard boxes. She started in the wardrobe, lifting out the clothes that hung there and folding them into the bags. There was a faint smell of must and one of the older pairs of trousers had white spots. There was too another sour smell that reminded her of tobacco although he had never smoked. The metal hangers trilled excitedly in the almost empty wardrobe. She would dump the bags at one of the local recycling points. It was a job she had already carried out at home and in truth there weren’t that many clothes he kept in the cottage. She lifted his walking boots from the bottom of the wardrobe and realised the sour smell was from the soil trapped in the grooves and ridges of the soles. Why he had stored them uncleaned in the bottom of the wardrobe she didn’t know. She held them at arm’s length and thought of all the places that he had walked in them, the same times when they were most happy together, and then sitting down on the edge of the bed remembered that he had worn them in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco when they had brought Rory home. She let them fall and stared at the way the long laces spiralled on the floor.

  The Atlas Mountains, white-capped in the distance despite the trembling waves of heat that separated them from the city and where she stood on the rooftop of the small riad in which he had chosen for them to stay overnight. The call to worship, a call that she would never heed now that God had taken her only son – about that at least Don had been right – rubbed raw at the edge of her senses and she wanted to salve it with an angry spew of words and a desperate insistence that it was all a terrible mistake and when they reached him he’d greet her with his arm outstretched, the gesture that always invited her to shelter under the shadow of his love. Staring at the white peaks of the distant mountains across the pink-walled houses with their satellite dishes and rooftop washing hanging to dry. Staring across the walls of the old palace where storks nested on woven beds of sticks. Crying in a strange country where the heat of the day pressed right to the edge of the settling darkness and gave no respite or mercy. Never had she felt so far away from home and yet needed to go even further, to travel in the morning with her husband and the official from the consul to identify their son and begin his return journey. From the nearby square drifted the babble of drums and voices while in the courtyard below he sat at a mosaic-topped table lit by candles and already writing in one of the black Moleskine notebooks that he always carried with him. Already writing his loss and his pain for the world to read. Who would read hers? Who would understand the slow pulling apart of her heart until it felt as if all that existed was an immeasurable abyss into which s
he was free-falling without knowing when she would ever reach its lowest point?

  She sat motionless on the edge of the bed and for a moment felt as if all her energy had drained away then turning her face caught her reflection in the wardrobe mirror. Her hair was shapeless and pressed flat as if she had been wearing a hat, cut short and too severe, and at the age of sixty-two she had given up the trouble and expense of having it coloured. Let come what will. No man would ever desire her again but she wanted no desire except to live the rest of her life with as little pain as possible and to see her daughters happy. She wouldn’t let herself go and resolved to keep making the effort if only for their sakes but she sensed a weariness spreading through her like she had never known before. The earlier sense of lightness now seemed an illusion, a mere carrying on a temporary current of air that had fallen away, so it was with an effort of will that she made herself get up again and place the boots in a separate smaller plastic bag then knot it tightly.