The Poets' Wives

by David Park

  There was so much more to be done before the morning – it seemed important to her to have everything cleared and aired before her daughters arrived. She didn’t want that sense of damp, of must and untidiness, lingering over what might be their last memory of the cottage. She sat on the bed as if tired again and wondered if her daughters had instinctively understood the slipping grasp of love that was their parents’ marriage and in that realisation had absorbed a reluctance to follow a similar path. It upset her to think that this might be so and suddenly drained of will she curled herself on top of the bed and faced the almost empty wardrobe.

  As a comfort she told herself that in those early years, when Don was still taken by the novelty of fatherhood and had enjoyed the children, they’d given them a secure and happy childhood. C. S. Lewis had once taken summer holidays in the village and she remembered how the children gathered avidly at the cottage fire and Don would read the Narnia stories, pleased when they wouldn’t allow him to stop. A lifetime away. She looked at the black bin bags and the empty wardrobe that suddenly seemed cavernous and tried to remember how it felt when love first invited you to step inside and share its mystery but the welter of the intervening years made it impossible to recall that first flush of light, the sense of stepping where no other footsteps had ever smirched the snow. Then she got off the bed and grabbed the last item – his blue dressing gown – and knew if it had been a film she would have pressed it to her face and inhaled the vestiges of the loved-one but instead, already feeling angry at the foolish fancy of her earlier imagination, held its clogged and matted mustiness at arm’s length, then quickly bundled it into a bag where it bulged outwards against a tear in the over-stretched plastic.

  She carried the bags out to the car and threw them in the back – there’d be time to leave them off before her daughters’ arrival. They smudged against each other like giant plums with their skin bruised and leaking. When she went inside again she sat down at the fire with another glass of wine. She would have liked to burn everything but it wasn’t physically possible and would have taken too long, not to say risk setting the chimney on fire. It was when the children had grown older that he had lost interest in them, when they no longer needed him and slowly realised that after all he wasn’t Aslan. He had become a kind of commentator on their lives rather than a participant, watching from an increasingly remote and critical position, forever prone to the same complaint that no one told him anything. She could never forgive him for the disappointment he had felt in them whatever they achieved and how at times he had deliberately let that disappointment, even when it was unspoken, leach into their consciousness.

  He’d driven them away, driven her children away from her so that all of them had sought lives far from their home. She told herself that was why Rory had died in the Atlas Mountains, that it was his father who was to blame that he had died in such a place, so far away and beyond the reach of her love. A young man who had climbed Mont Blanc on his twentieth birthday, who had walked in high places and completed some of the less difficult climbs in the Himalayas, dead as a result of a fall from a path where every day middle-aged out-of-breath tourists safely followed their guide. Late at night and on his own: it was decided that he’d somehow lost his footing and hit his head on a rock as he slid down the steep scree. A child herding goats had found him in the morning, his body so unmarked the boy had thought him merely sleeping. A tragic accident, the authorities had called it, and quietly led them to believe that it had been a dangerous choice to go walking at night and that his purpose in doing so would always be unknown. Her son dead amongst the stars and the snow-caps of distant mountains. She knew she was going back. After everything was finally done and this last business settled she would return to that very place because she needed to go there without her husband, without his book in which he wrote over her grief with the public permanence of his own. Somehow if it was only her, and with all the love that her memory of her son burnished every day, she knew she would be able to evoke him into even momentary life again, finally bring him home.

  She forced herself to stir, was clear-headed enough to know that self-pity would bring nothing but a paralysing loss of will. She promised herself that she wouldn’t drink any more wine – there was too much work to be done – and she started by piling the shelves of books into cardboard boxes, occasionally separating some that belonged to her, or one that she wanted to keep. When she reached the collections of other writers’ poetry she checked each one and if any was a signed copy or had a dedication she set it aside. She would take the rest to the second-hand bookshop in Belfast near the university and donate them. She’d organised them in the boxes carefully with their spines up so that the girls could peruse them and take anything that caught their fancy. But she didn’t imagine they would – not even the yellowed and grubby Narnia paperbacks that somehow had managed to linger on despite the intervening years of neglect. Her daughters didn’t seem to do nostalgia or looking back and she wasn’t sure if this was a good or a bad thing.

  She saw the copy of the Aeneid that she had earlier placed on the mantelpiece. The book still lolled partly open where it had been folded over the arm of the chair. Out of curiosity she glanced at the pages to find that he had been reading in Book 6 where Aeneas journeyed down into the Underworld. She thought it a wonder he needed to read it at all given the amount of time he had spent with it over the years. She let her eyes take in one of the many sections underlined in pencil where Aeneas tried three times to embrace his father but three times the phantom melted in his hands ‘as weightless as the wind, as light as the flight of sleep’. She closed it and stuffed it in the box, didn’t want to think about what meaning, if any, it might have. And it wasn’t the Underworld that he’d instructed her to give him to but the eternal motion of the sea and the dawning brightness of a new day. It suddenly felt like she was required to facilitate this, his one last escape, the final avoidance of what weighted everyone else in death.

  The desk at the window was covered in papers and documents. She didn’t know where to start but realised it was important that she organise everything into some kind of order. Through his agent he had already negotiated a modest deal with the library of an American university to buy all his papers and had spent a great deal of time archiving the raft of material into arch lever files, dating them by the titles of each new collection. She knew the files contained early drafts of poems, literary correspondence, reviews and articles he had written for journals and newspapers. As far as she was aware there was nothing included that was personal to her or the family but she resolved to check before they were finally handed over. It was another way of his side-stepping death. There were the poems themselves and the library archive where in the future she assumed a handful of researchers would ponder over every line and score-out. Already she had been asked for an interview by the editor of one of those poetry magazines that proliferated around the world and which bristled with their own unique importance, bestowing or withholding publication like oligarchs dispensing judgement. He’d rattled on about his magazine’s artistic credentials then ventured the real purpose of his contact which was to inveigle some unpublished final poem and in so doing scoop his no doubt hated rival publications. She’d declined on both requests. Passing on everything to the American college library would allow her to avoid all the other vultures circling to pick at the carcass of his work and life.

  But there were new poems. She knew he had been actively working on a collection and after she shuffled papers and unanswered letters, set aside the reference books and the old newspapers with their half-finished crosswords, she found them inside a manila folder. Some were typed, so although not the finished product, she knew that they had moved on beyond a first tentative draft while others were still at the early handwritten stage. Some didn’t have titles but each had a number that approximated to their potential order. It didn’t look as if there was a full complement but close enough perhaps. There was a title page as well – he
had called the collection Sea Dreams – a title that evoked no special insight for her but she felt suddenly nervous as she held the folder in her hands. She set the poems back on the desk and knew that if she were to read them now she would hear his voice again and wasn’t sure if she wanted that. Despite her eyes turning instinctively to the urn still sitting on the hearth it was as if in everything he conspired to surpass death, that some part of him refused to be fettered, and then she thought of Rory, who never dressed anything other than casually, buried in one of his father’s dark suits, her son who wanted all his life to venture into the bright air, buried under the cold soil, and she felt angry that it was his father who now sought to escape. Let him take back their son’s clothes of death, let him weight himself with the knowledge that his life was already lived, his poems written.

  Her hand was shaking a little as she hesitated. Already what she held in her hand was asserting its primacy and the responsibility that was hers as their custodian. She knew that despite everything else she had to deliver them safely to his agent and editor who would make decisions about their readiness for publication and their best future. She told herself that she should think of it only as a matter of economics, of adding to the modest pension on which she had started to draw. Although he could never pay her back for all the years of financial provision he could start to make amends even at this late hour. If the poems were to be published as she expected them to be, then it was probable that they would attract interest, at worst a morbid curiosity. So she tried to concentrate on that knowledge as she carried them over to her seat at the fire.

  The opening couple of poems were about his childhood and dedications to his parents. The first one was a homage to his father, a conceit based on the instruments his father used in the drawing office. The slide rule, the set square, the pencil, all became symbols of a way of living ‘set sharply square and true’, ‘the measured moments’ on which a life was built. The poem to his mother placed her in the family home sewing by the light of the fire. Then with a rather forced sleight of hand he transformed her into Penelope, a symbol of faithfulness, whose every stitch sealed and shaped her love for her family. She thought it a curiously and uncharacteristically sentimental piece too heavily laden with laboured images of love. Perhaps it was distorted by her own memory of her mother-in-law as someone unfailingly stiff whose approval of her son’s choice of wife had been enduringly half-hearted. But she knew already that in relation to the past and the biographical, writing was rarely about how things were, or even how they were remembered, so much as how they needed to be. Then despite her earlier resolve she poured herself another glass of wine.

  She had never been much of a drinker in her early life but in recent years had increased her intake. Sometimes after reading a magazine article warning of the dangers, or feeling the clamouring guilt of working in the health profession and so supposed to know better, she had returned to her abstemious former life but it never lasted more than about a month. Setting the glass on the hearth she told herself it was a comfort, a way of blurring into softer focus things that looked too sharp-edged when seen in their full clarity. She liked the idea that the poem wasn’t very good and hoped she might reach the same verdict on those she hadn’t read. Because of its proposed prominent position she knew the poem about his mother wasn’t considered a filler or piece of ‘confetti’. But perhaps she hadn’t read it thoughtfully or fairly enough. There was a pleasure in thinking that this final collection might represent a waning and that despite the inevitably respectful reviews it would receive, there would at least be an unspoken suggestion that his best work was perhaps behind him.

  But as she turned the pages and slowly read the long poem entitled ‘Sea Dreams’ she knew there was no falling away of his talents and the knowledge was coloured by both bitterness and the sense of pride she had always felt in his achievement, that in part was made possible by what she did, despite his failure publicly to recognise it. The poem was divided into five sections and chronologically followed his connection to the sea through the various stages of his life. So it began in childhood describing a small boy searching the ‘shaded teem of rock pools’ where ‘braided tresses of seaweed stirred at the brush of his hand’ and the sea itself was ‘a vast frazzle of timeless light’, then ended in his old age with the outgoing tide transformed into ‘the final unfathomable wave of mystery’. As she reread and reread, anxious now to miss nothing, part of her insisted as always that she should separate the work from the man but to do that would render the words that she held in her hand beautiful and unflawed and something in her baulked at that.

  Feeling breathless and confined again she went to the door of the cottage and opening it looked out at the night. The cool currents off the sea broke against her and in an instant washed the fire’s heat from her face. All the lights in the clubhouse were out and there was nothing to be heard except the soft murmur of the tide taking its slow leave of the shore. Once when they had gone out in Gibson’s boat on a late-night fishing trip they had sailed under the Mussenden Temple that perched precariously on the lip of the cliff and which one day would surely hurtle on to the rocks below. A folly built supposedly as a result of an infatuation. She thought how often the words ‘love’ and ‘folly’ might be inscribed together. They had caught nothing much and her younger sisters soon became frightened by the rising swell. Now the sea was made real only by its sound – that soft rasp and shuck that were the restless prisoners of endless motion. Had her love for Don always been a mere folly? Even now after all the bitterness and recrimination that coursed through her she couldn’t bring herself to say so. Once there had been love and passion, words created only for her, whispered in the need of the darkness. And there were her children. Even Rory taken from her had existed and nothing could prise that memory away from her.

  She closed the door quietly as if there was someone or something she didn’t want to disturb. Part of her simply wanted to pack the poems carefully away in one of the boxes but her curiosity proved stronger and going back to her seat she lifted them and her glass of wine. When she’d had her one affair she had thought initially that for the first time she was experiencing a relationship that was rooted in an equal need so that for a while it felt like an empowerment but before long he had shown himself to be hopelessly weak. And in the moments – once in his car and once in a budget hotel with cigarette burns in the carpet – she had never felt that even the possibility existed of encountering whatever it was of the spirit that was always promised by the giving of the flesh. So as she held the poems she told herself that she could be strong, not intimidated by the voice speaking from the page, but it would have been easier if that voice had been strident or bombastic so that it was her angry resistance that was evoked. She knew already that the voice she was hearing was delicate and at times gentle and that made it harder to fight.

  But when she turned the page nothing prepared her to see a handwritten poem that was dedicated to Rory. She felt her anger rising that once again he should write about their son and no doubt parade emotions that she had seen no sign of. She wouldn’t read it but even as she told herself this she knew that it was impossible not to.

  It began by describing how his offerings of ‘sacrificial food, incense, oil-filled bowls’ had never been enough to entreat his son’s face ‘towards the light’ and thus like Aeneas he was compelled to journey to the Underworld, ‘but as a father searching his stolen child’. Before this journey could be undertaken, however, a sacrifice must first be made from the sacred tree, so the poem offered up his memory of Rory

  high in the cherry tree

  In spring’s first burst, balanced light as air

  Dressed in that flounce and shock of white.

  But it is his father’s shouted warning that his son will fall which ‘lays a curse upon his hidden head’.

  A description followed of the journey ‘through wasted years’ until he found his son

  in the most distant fields


  Where the spirits have their own stars and sun

  Sacred ribbons of white about your head.

  The white ribbons were linked to the snow-capped mountains that ‘cradled’ their ‘foundling child’. But it was the final two stanzas that affected her most:

  I reach out three times to fold you in my embrace

  Three times you leave me grasping only air,

  Then remember that to return is greater labour, so

  Is it love or weariness that makes me take your place

  And sends you climbing safely to the light?

  And the poem’s final lines acknowledging that

  there is a price that must be paid

  So bind me now to the best of punishments

  Stretched and hung out empty, drying in the wind

  In slow atonement for the greatest of my sins.

  The poem had no final line. At an angle to it was ‘A father’s words of love I never said’ but it had a line through it and other attempts had been scored out heavily as if to prevent them being read. She held her head up for breath then stared at the fire. She wanted to be sure and she couldn’t be sure. Was it his voice, or was it his voice in a poem, and what were the chances of these ever being the same thing? If the words were true then it was the first and only time she had heard remorse from him. If the words were false he deserved every punishment that came his way and there was nothing that she could conceive which would ever make atonement possible. Hung out empty, drying in the wind – she tried to think of his final years but could find no trace of such dramatic suffering. As self-contained as always, cocooned in his work, still enjoying the occasional pleasures of the flesh – how could these be reconciled with self-realisation and the crippling press of regret. Did he have two lives, one in the poetry where things were felt, or even felt in the imagination, while the daily pattern of his living survived untouched? Or was it that they had slipped into such remoteness that she no longer had any understanding of what really went on in his head? Some of the lines had double question marks opposite them and a few had scribbled words written in pencil that she couldn’t read. She read the poem again and again and still she didn’t know what it was it made her feel. In one moment it was as if she held a great weight in her hand, in another it seemed as if the words were so light that she wasn’t sure if they were still there or whether they had drifted away beyond her reach, beyond her comprehension.