The Poets' Wives

by David Park

  The white blossom always the harbinger of spring, the tree’s bronzed stretched arms suddenly heavily laden with an avalanche of snow. Rory climbing in the blossom. Momentarily hidden from view. Then his smiling face suddenly bobbing like a buoy out of the white-flecked sea. She remembered it. He had told him to get down, that he’d fall and break his neck, and was annoyed when the girls had encouraged their brother to go higher still until he shouted again and eventually Rory had slithered out of the branches and down the trunk, white blossom speckling his hair. A white garland of blossom. But not a garland of blossom, instead a wreath.

  They had stored his body in a back room of the local school. A makeshift coffin resting on a table under an ancient map of the world. One of the teachers had given her almond blossom – pale pink and white – and she had placed it on the coffin lid. A makeshift coffin under a tattered map of the world.

  She set the poems down and walked back to the uncurtained window but again found just a black pool that showed nothing but her blurred reflection and more than anything she didn’t want herself. She let her hand touch the glass as if to brush herself away but its coldness insisted on her presence and then she knew that she had two other children and they would come in the morning for this last thing they had to do. And she would be there for them when they got off the train and she’d be pleased to see them even though she knew that Anna, at least, would have to show her irritation at having to make this journey. But it would be a small price to pay for their company and she would have given anything to have them both there that very night.

  She poured herself another glass of wine but made it smaller than the previous ones as a kind of apology for breaking her promise. The fire was fading and she shovelled on what was left of the coal and hoped she hadn’t left it too late to save. She even thought of driving all the way home and then coming back again first thing in the morning and so avoid the necessity of spending the night in the cottage but she knew she had drunk too much to make that a possibility. So instead, slowly and as if generated by a great effort of will, she lifted the pages of poems again and started to read. Poems about the seasons and astronomy, about the beach in winter, about politics and the war on terror. She read them all but not as carefully as she had done at the start and it felt now as if there were too many words and she was grateful that none of them seemed to sail close to her. She couldn’t concentrate and knew she had drunk too much. She knew she should go to bed and try to sleep it off so that she could greet her daughters brightly in the morning but there weren’t many pages left and she didn’t want to have to return to them before packing them off to his agent so forced herself to finish the final few. Part of her wanted to leave these last poems until the morning but she told herself that like taking some bitter-tasting medicine it would be easier if she consumed them in one deep gulp.

  The collection ended with a sequence of six sonnets called Legacy and she didn’t need to read very far to know that they were love poems. That awareness prevented her intention of one quick gulp and she read them slowly and carefully, understanding almost from the start that they were love poems to someone who wasn’t her. There was nothing by name or physical detail that confirmed this to the world but there was enough in terms of references to place and experiences, enough in their emotional resonances, to ensure she realised that he was writing about a love shared with another. She supposed that love was Roseanne and she was angry that he should write these poems where his lover’s ‘unbroken constancy of love sustains and endures’ and not care that she should know the words belonged to someone else. So this was to be his legacy to the world, his legacy to her. She could have crumpled them in her hand as her anger stirred and flared but something prevented this. What was it? A stupid final loyalty – if not to him but to the work? An insistent knowledge that the words belonged to more than her or even him, that she was their trusted custodian and it was her final obligation to see them pass into the hands of others? So she tried to tell herself it wasn’t about the love he felt for someone else, that it wasn’t about the love he didn’t feel for her – it was about the words, only about the words, and these had an existence and a need to exist that journeyed beyond whatever now kindled her spirit into anger.

  She dropped the poems to the floor and stared at the fire that had managed to kick-start itself into a new faltering lease of life. She would take them home with her, photocopy them then send them to his London agent. And then she would never read or look at them again. She’d have them gone from her, dispersed to the world like leaves blown off a tree and if they withered into silence and indifference then so much the better. What she had to do was owed not to him but to something greater and she’d see it through despite everything. She knew too that she would sell the cottage, sell it in part to spite him because he had loved it so much and it was where he had written these last poems but also because it no longer held the memories of her childhood summer or her own children’s. The place had been subsumed by more potent memories so let some other family take it on and make something new of it, something that was uncomplicated and which made them happy and stronger.

  The urn was still on the hearth but after reading the poems it felt as if he had escaped its confines and blown by some invisible wind the ash of his being was finely riddling and sifting through her no matter how hard she tried to turn herself away. She attempted to convince herself that when with her daughters they released him to the elements she would finally experience her own release but as she climbed the stairs the thought brought no sense of conviction. She wouldn’t sleep in the room he used when he stayed in the cottage but rather the front room with its two single beds. That would also bring her closer to the sea and she told herself that its steady ebb and flow might lull her into an easier and quicker sleep, wash away the unwanted whispers of her husband’s words.

  The room was cold and going to the landing cupboard she found an electric heater and when she turned on both bars the dust-coated elements left a burning smell. She turned back the duvet in the hope it would absorb some of the warmth from the fire and while she waited for the room to heat a little she went to the window and looked out to where the sea was a dark glaze watched over tentatively by moonlight and stars. It stretched uncertainly as her own life and she remembered the final poems and wondered if her need for love was truly over and if so what else did life offer to sustain and endure? Already Anna had suggested she should sell up in the city and move into a modern apartment where there’d be no garden to look after and so much less to take care of. She had said she’d think about it but now as she started to undress she wanted to ask her daughter what she should do all day in this new, pristine apartment. She wanted the garden for as long as she could manage it, wanted the slow turn and unfolding of the seasons.

  She stood close to the heater while she removed her clothes and as the heat mottled her skin thought of the cherry-blossom tree in its spring flowering. Of her son disappeared inside the white foam of blossom. She had cried when years later men had come to cut it down as its raised and wandering roots ridged up through the lawn and started to spread under the driveway. She had to agree with his insistence that it had to be done but part of her was glad that her son never saw it. An hour’s work to take away what had been there a lifetime, its trunk cut into logs and its branches fed into a machine that spewed out recyclable wood chippings and then finally a machine that sucked up every remaining leaf and twig as if it was forensically important to remove all traces of the tree’s existence. It was the first thing Rory had climbed. There wasn’t even a stump left because they had ground it down to nothing so all that remained when the lorry pulled away was a slight sump in the ground that was to be filled and regrassed.

  The map above Rory’s coffin looked as if it had been there for ever, a relic of some colonial power that had left behind their vision of the world after they had taken their leave. None of the people who laid him there could have known how many of the countries he had ventured to
or how many of the world’s high places he had walked and climbed. She who all her life stayed close to the familiar and had no adventures beyond the journey as a young woman into the unknown world of her husband’s desire somehow had a son who loved to follow far-off and mysterious freedoms. She wanted to be as brave as him so that she could still be his mother but as she stood half-naked in front of the fire she trembled a little.

  What she wanted to put on now was the white blossom of the tree that would hide the finite flaws of her flesh and give her some momentary perfection. What she wanted was beyond the world’s gaze to climb higher than she’d ever allowed herself to do. She touched her hair and felt it thinning into a coarseness of grey. Rory had pink-tipped petals in his hair when he had been released out of the white-gloved, cupped hands of the tree, standing smiling as if a page-boy at a wedding who had passed under a snow flurry of confetti. How could the mountains hold their whitened caps even in the heat of summer? How could she see them so clearly across the city’s dusty roofs where the lines of washing hung motionless in the slow wavering of the day’s final hours of heat?

  That dusk when the taxi had brought them to the edge of the square what sights had greeted her, their strangeness raging against every unprepared sense. The crowds, the music, the dancers, the animals, the hawkers and the fire-splashed sprawling food stalls. The smells of cooking and perfumes to which she could give no name. The scents of a continent that was unfolding itself before her. Like some landscape of the imagination, some terrible painting by Hieronymus Bosch – it had almost consumed her and only the knowledge that she had come to take her child home had given her the courage to get out of the car. Following an old man who had loaded their luggage in a wooden handcart and was leading them through a warren of passageways from where it was possible they would never emerge. In one of his poems he had described it as a journey to the Underworld and perhaps he was composing it even then as veiled women like shadows averted their gaze while children playing in echoing alleyways paused to look at them curiously.

  She knelt naked at the fire and bowed her head, was glad when the familiar sound of the sea reasserted itself in her consciousness. She remembered the two small white fish. Two small white fish and five barley loaves – a miracle to feed the five thousand. She wanted to enter this land of miracles where the dead were raised and storms at sea stilled with the power of words. Her son only sleeping in the boat while the fury raged all about. Finally wakened he tells them not to be afraid and stretches out his arm the way he always does when he’s offering shelter. Let the calm come, let it come so that she could still everything that now rose up inside her. Let the calm come so that she could find respite in sleep. Let her awaken and walk free from what cavernous, echoing sepulchre seemed now to entomb her. Then after hugging her naked self she put on her clothes and went back downstairs.

  In the morning the sky was bright and when she opened the front door of the cottage the sea seemed skittish, even playful, as thin trills of wave raced each other to the shore and a dog splashed into it after a stick thrown by its owner. There were other people on the beach – a young woman jogging in fluorescent yellow and black lycra, another dog walker and an elderly couple striding purposefully towards the stone pier. The day felt awake and busy and she knew she had much to do before the girls were collected from the train so she began by changing the bed she had slept in and changing the double bed in the back room. She would have to sleep in it to let her daughters have the two singles. She didn’t want to sleep in the bed where Don had doubtless conducted his affair but there was no way to avoid it and that reluctance was partially compensated by the fact that she liked the idea of the girls sleeping in the same room they had used as children, liked the idea of them being sisters again and not wrapped up in their separate lives. She wasn’t sure but she got the impression they didn’t see that much of each other in London. Perhaps if nothing else this last ritual for their father might draw them closer.

  At her breakfast she forced herself to eat as much as possible and drank two cups of instant coffee in an attempt to banish the residue of the wine, afterwards hiding the bottle in a cupboard. She opened a couple of windows slightly but turned up the central heating and gave the place a final tidy carried along on her own rising tide of excitement. In the brightness of a new day and with the expectation of their arrival the cottage didn’t seem so echoingly empty or ghostridden and the only thing on which she stumbled was what to do with the urn. It still sat on the hearth where she had left it but she neither wanted to confront her daughters with it nor leave it where it might suggest a disrespect, so after some confusion she lifted it and placed it beside his books and papers on the table, trying to make its setting as natural looking as possible. Its black surface was struck by sunlight and she could see the white whorled print of her fingers so taking a teacloth from the kitchen she carefully polished them away. She lit a modest fire more designed to give the room visual warmth than for any practical purpose and brushed the hearth clean of its spill of dust and ash.

  It was important to her to present herself as well as possible so she spent more time than usual in choosing her clothes and doing her make-up. But the lipstick she applied seemed too bright and taking a tissue she wiped it off again and settled for a simple brush of lip salve. She hadn’t slept well and the dark circles under her eyes looked deeply engrained but after she had finished camouflaging the night’s disturbance of broken dreams and time’s steady reclaiming she consoled herself that she passed muster and her appearance, however flawed, was better than greeting her daughters as the merry widow. She cleared up the kitchen and was checking the fridge looked respectable when through the window above the sink she saw a gull swooping on the white slivers of fish. Going to the back door she rushed out flapping the tea towel in the air and shooing it away until it lumbered skywards screeching its complaint, then removing what was left of the fish wrapped them tightly in tinfoil and dropped them in the bin. The ring of her mobile phone made her start. It was Francesca telling her that they were about twenty minutes away. Her daughter sounded light, expectant, and that pleased her. As she held the phone to her ear she could smell the fish on her hands and when she had finished she washed them slowly and carefully, then used a hand cream before making some real coffee and placing the croissants she had bought the day before on a plate in the middle of the kitchen table.

  There was nothing more to do and after a final check in the mirror and giving herself a modest approval she took one last look round the room before she headed for the car. It was true the station was only five minutes away and easily walkable but they would have overnight luggage at least and might welcome the chance to finish the final part of their journey in comfort. So she parked close by the station exit, saying good morning to those who recognised her and once receiving sympathy from a woman whose name she didn’t know but who was familiar to her from her visits to the local Costcutter. As she waited for the train to arrive it suddenly felt like a scene from The Railway Children except it was her two daughters who would step on to the platform and not some falsely incarcerated husband. He had his own confinement now even if in the morning they were to release whatever of his spirit still existed. At least then it would finally be over and they could all return to their private places and make what they might of their lives. She wondered if her daughters would now be more forthcoming with their invitations to stay although in their defence she conceded that both inhabited tiny flats for which they paid exorbitant rents. Perhaps the sale of the cottage might be used to help them find the deposits that would allow them to clamber on to the bottom of the housing ladder.

  It was Francesca she saw first, hurrying towards her in the slightly childlike manner that still characterised some of her movements, her case bouncing along the uneven concrete. Perhaps her wealthy London clientele found it endearing or perhaps she was able to suppress it in her business dealings. But for the moment at least she looked like a young girl on the first day of h
er holiday and the affection with which she hugged her seemed sincere and heartfelt.

  ‘Francesca, thanks for coming. It’s good of you to come all this way.’

  ‘It’s OK, it’s OK. Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m doing fine but where’s Anna?’

  ‘She’s coming. She was filing some copy on her laptop. Here she is now.’

  Anna’s embrace was hampered by her laptop case but her daughter’s kiss on her cheek felt affectionate. As always she wore some indefinable London style that marked her as a temporary visitor rather than a resident. It wasn’t that her clothes were particularly modish or sophisticated but rather that she seemed at a slight distance from everything, was constantly evaluating it and perhaps secretly unfavourably.

  ‘I just had to email some stuff,’ she said as she sought to strike a working balance between her overnight bag and her laptop case. ‘How are you?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said, thinking that her daughter didn’t trust her to know what ‘copy’ was. ‘Good flight?’

  ‘A little bumpy in places,’ Anna said as they walked towards the car with the wheels of Francesca’s case squeaking in time to their steps.

  When their bags were loaded and they had taken their seats silence settled for a moment and she searched for something to say before she started the engine.