The Poets' Wives

by David Park

  When she woke she wanted her window to show the sea but instead all it revealed was the back square of grass, the mist-silvered field and the grey ash pile at the foot of the separating hedge. She showered and dressed quickly but took longer than usual over her make-up, trying to repair the strains of the night before and a dream-riddled sleep. She had allowed plenty of time but heard no hint of her daughters stirring. What she did hear, however, was the sound of the wind rousing itself into life and when she looked out again saw it shivering the top leaves of the hedge. She went out to the landing, standing still to listen for signs of life from her daughters’ bedroom, but there was nothing and only the knowledge that they had both said they were used to getting up early in London, and that they were setting their alarms, prevented her from thinking of them once more as sleepy-headed teenagers who needed to be wakened by an urgent knock on their door.

  Going downstairs the first thing she looked for was the urn as if it might have been secreted away during the night. But it still squatted on the same empty shelf. She didn’t want to have to touch it but knew there could be no other way. Then as she filled the kettle she heard one of her daughter’s phone alarm ringing and while she waited for the water to boil she opened the front door and took stock of the morning. It was clear and bright and the wind although wakening a little was not gusting in any great strength. She couldn’t tell whether the tide was going in or out. She returned to the kitchen but despite her intention couldn’t make herself eat anything and instead drank coffee while sitting at the kitchen table as up above her unfolded the first sounds of activity.

  On this morning with the snow-capped mountains in the distance, a young woman whose face she couldn’t remember had brought her breakfast and she had tried to eat what she could. The journey to the village followed narrow corkscrewing roads that wound precariously around the mountains, and if again and again they edged closer to the vast drop, what did it matter when she was already falling, finally snatched by that wave that others called grief? She comforted herself with the knowledge of how in a short time she would walk to the end of the stone pier that reached itself into the sea and tell her son that she hadn’t drowned but had finally come to bring him home.

  Anna appeared, bleary-eyed but dressed more formally than the clothes she had travelled in, and kissed her lightly on the side of her head as she said good morning.

  ‘If you like, I’ll do the music,’ she offered. ‘I’ll practise before we go to do it for real.’

  Francesca too was soberly dressed. In her hand she held what looked like a white wreath.

  ‘I made it with the chrysanthemums and a wire coat hanger. What do you think?’

  ‘It’s very nice, Francesca,’ she told her but worried whether her daughter would be able to do this thing without getting upset again.

  ‘I thought we would drop it into the sea with the ashes.’

  They wanted nothing more for breakfast than the toast and tea she made for them and when they enquired whether she was having something she said she’d already eaten. Anna went into the front room to try the tape.

  ‘Will you be all right, Francesca? It’ll all be over very quickly and then you’ll be on your way home.’

  ‘I’ll be fine if you are. But it doesn’t seem fair that we have to go through what feels like a second funeral.’

  ‘I know but when we do this it’s over for ever. And you’ll be back home making your beautiful dresses.’

  As Francesca nodded they heard Anna swearing loudly and going to see the cause they found her looking with dismay at the cassette player.

  ‘It’s eaten the tape. I only pressed play and it’s eaten the tape,’ she said, trying carefully to eject it, but already they could see that the tape was spooling around the heads. Despite her efforts delicately to tease it out it was clear that it was caught tightly.

  ‘Oh, Anna,’ Francesca said, pressing her hands together in front of her face as if she was about to pray for a miracle.

  ‘It wasn’t my fault. I don’t know what’s more ancient – the tape or the player. If we can get it out maybe we can rewind it.’

  Anna carried it over to the light of the window and setting it down on the table started to ease it out again but when she met resistance her impatient tug resulted only in the tape emerging with a broken tail. She looked at them, slowly shook her head in disbelief, then said, ‘Sorry, Don.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault, it wasn’t anyone’s fault,’ she told her daughters.

  ‘You’d think a journalist would be good with this sort of machine,’ Anna said as she held up the cassette with its broken spool of tape.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault, Anna,’ Francesca said.

  ‘We’ll do it without the music,’ Anna said. ‘No one gets everything they want in life and perhaps death’s no different.’

  ‘Don will be rolling his eyes and making that snorting noise,’ Francesca said. ‘It’s not as if we can sing it.’

  ‘We’ve saved him from a cliché,’ Anna said, throwing the tape on the table. ‘He should be grateful. Let’s do this thing, Mum.’

  She nodded and each of them put on their coats. Even if she had wanted there was no way back, so going to the bookcase she carefully lifted the urn and when Francesca offered to carry it she told her it was better if it stayed with her. There was a moment’s delay as Francesca went back upstairs to get her scarf and as they waited just inside the open front door Anna whispered, ‘Sorry,’ but she told her that it didn’t matter, that everything would be all right.

  The morning air was sharp but already a strengthening sun was beginning its work. Over the headland of Donegal clouds buckling with their own weight smudged the ridge of higher ground – it would be where the rain would come from later in the day – but above them the sky was patched with blue and the light, glassy and sharp-edged, already mirrored the sea into reflected life. They took the path through the dunes and she gripped the urn tightly despite its coldness, her greatest fear of dropping it a companion to her every step.

  They walked in single file along the narrow path and when it broke on to the beach and they slithered down a slight slope into the soft sand she could see that it was completely empty. The stone pier stretching into the sea had never seemed so far away. She couldn’t tell whether the tide was still going out or coming in. The lower half of the beach shimmered and was dressed in a transfer of mottled sky. They headed closer to the sea glad to be out of the softer sand. Four seabirds stood motionless on spindle legs as if anchored, their white breasts glinting in the light. A solitary bird bobbed further out, its orange beak bright against the blackness of the water. As they walked none of them spoke, little lisping spurts of white christening each of their steps.

  On this part of the beach the waves rose lightly but as her eyes carried towards the pier where the stronger currents often encouraged surfers, she could see already that they were stirred into a stronger motion. The three of them walked steadily on, her daughters slightly behind her and everything pressed against her with its own intensity, and she wondered if it was the presence of death that so heightened the awareness of life. Now her eyes picked out the cappuccino-coloured foam that splurged at intervals on the wet sand, the spiral coils of sandworms, and when she looked up at the sky saw the fragility of its faltering shifts of blue.

  She paused to ask them if they were all right and when they told her they were she nodded and headed on again. The beach stretched out before them, sea-washed and striated in wavy patterns as if hundreds of snakes had wriggled over its pliant surface. Some birds skittered into directionless, haphazard flight before wheeling away in tight formation. She wanted her children beside her but it felt as if something held them back and so they followed a step behind like a procession. Perhaps the urn cowed them. If that was true then soon they would be released. Soon they would all be released.

  She could see the stone pier clearly now, its protective ramparts of rocks sea-splashed but stoutly resisting the
waves’ angry insistence when their slick black underbellies ripped in a furious flurry of foam. Further out the unfurling, curving runnels broke white, each one back-combed with spray. She wanted her daughters to take the comfort of each other but couldn’t think of what she should say to encourage it so with her breathing a little heavy simply offered, ‘We’re almost there now.’ There was no response and so still gripping the urn in front of her in both hands like a chalice she led them on to where they had to step up from the sand.

  After its softness the pier felt solid under her feet despite its pitted, uneven surface and regardless of the fact that some of the bigger pockmarks held the trapped splash of the sea. They passed the rusted relic of a warning light. She tried not to look to either side of the pier but kept her eyes steadfastly on its end where from this distance it appeared to stretch into the very heart of the ocean. When she glanced questioningly to her daughters they nodded to say they were all right and then they were almost there, almost at the very end. Stopping just short of where it met the sea, she set the urn down on the ground, carefully seeking out a spot where it secured a balance. She hugged each of them tightly before saying, ‘Anna, Francesca, this is something I’d like to do by myself. Will you let me?’ They looked at each other and then, in turn nodded and Francesca hugged her again, the white flowers pressed between their embrace. She thanked them, then lifting the urn took the final few steps towards the edge and knelt down at it, the cold points of the stone pressing against her knees. Glancing back towards the beach she saw it burnished with light and into that momentary bright grasp of life stepped all those who were now part of her – her two children, Jiao, the two young women in the riad, the man who stood fishing at this very place, John and Gillian, the bride whose wedding dress was a shroud. All of these and more and then she took the lid off the urn and placed it on the ground beside her.

  He tries once more to embrace his son but it’s too late and so three times he’s left grasping only air, weightless as the wind, as light as the flight of sleep. And his journey has already begun because she’s sent him spinning to the Underworld, spilled on the pyre of ash, stretched and hung out empty, drying in the wind. So it is only his words she now gives back to the world, emptying their ash to the freedom of the air and the shifting motion of the whelming sea. They puff up like smoke, threatening for a second to engulf her, but then slowly fall, before drifting away and seeping into the slick of the swell. Nothing can snatch her now. And then as she lifts herself up her children come and stand beside her, rest their hands on her shoulders, and Francesca drops the white flowers into the water. The tide is going out, the final unfathomable wave of mystery – in that at least he was right. She smiles at them both and hopes as they stare at the sea that they too can see her son shaking off his father’s dark vestments of death, his eyes full again of the future’s light. She stretches out her hand, not in what they must think is a farewell, but in a greeting to her lost child who’s coming home from the earth’s distant places and is even now forming about her, reclaimed at last, she silently tells them, not by the drifting ash of words splayed out on the water below, but by the constancy of her love.

  Author’s Note

  In creating a fictional portrayal of Catherine Blake I am indebted to many books but principally to Alexander Gilchrist’s The Life of William Blake, The Letters of William Blake, edited by Geoffrey Keynes, and Peter Ackroyd’s Blake, for furnishing all the known facts about Catherine’s life.

  The part of the novel dealing with Nadezhda Mandelstam was inspired by her own accounts of her life, Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned. In some parts of my novel I have stayed deliberately close to her remarkable story, in others I have imagined. In both cases my aim was to honour her life of witness. Hope Against Hope remains one of the twentieth century’s greatest records of the struggle of the individual against totalitarianism, and an enduring testimony to the capacity of literature and language to survive the silence some sought to impose on them.

  Ireland is an island overflowing with poets but all the characters who appear in the final part of the novel are entirely products of the imagination and not intended to resemble anyone either living or dead.

  Finally I acknowledge the generous support of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the National Lottery for a Major Individual Artist Award.

  A Note on the Author

  David Park has written nine books including The Big Snow, Swallowing the Sun, The Truth Commissioner and, most recently, The Light of Amsterdam. He has won the Authors’ Club First Novel Award, the Bass Ireland Arts Award for Literature, the Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize, the American Ireland Fund Literary Award and the University of Ulster’s McCrea Literary Award, three times. He has received a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and been shortlisted for the Irish Novel of the Year Award three times. He lives in County Down, Northern Ireland.

  Also available by David Park

  The Big Snow

  The Truth Commissioner

  The Light of Amsterdam

  MORE ACCLAIMED FICTION FROM DAVID PARK

  The Light of Amsterdam

  “Poetic, hopeful.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

  “A humane and touching read.” —Library Journal

  “Woven together with warmth, compassion and great skill.” —The Times

  “Quietly moving . . . [yet] surprisingly funny, too . . . [Park’s] many readers will return from Amsterdam subtly changed.” —The Boston Globe

  “[Park] carries the reader into the intimate places of his characters’ minds . . . Unique insights quiver into life.” —The Guardian

  Available everywhere in paperback and as an e-book.

  ISBN: 978-1-62040-070-8

  eISBN: 978-1-60819-758-3

  The Truth Commissioner

  Shortlisted for the Irish Novel of the Year

  A BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime

  In a society trying to heal the scars of the past with the salve of truth and reconciliation, four men’s lives become linked in a way they could never have imagined. Henry Stanfield, the newly arrived Truth Commissioner, Francis Gilroy, recently appointed government minister, retired detective James Fenton and father-to-be Danny share a secret from their past that threatens to destroy the lives they have painstakingly built in the present.

  ‘Edgy and compelling … yields moments of heart-shivering beauty … a magnificent and important book’

  Joseph O’Connor, Guardian

  ‘A fine, crafted novel, but it is also an important book … He sets out to examine what it means to be alive – and does so in fictions that are subtle, understated, not without a hint of menace and always courageous’

  Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

  ‘We’re reminded that with writers like David Park, the novel can itself be a kind of truth commission’

  New York Times

  Available in hardcover and as an e-book

  ISBN: 978-59691-456-8

  eISBN: 978-1-59691-873-3

  The Big Snow

  Winner of the Belfast Arts Award for Literature

  Belfast, 1963: unprecedented snowfall smothers and muffles the city and its inhabitants. In a house with windows flung defiantly open, a wife dies before her husband can make his confession. Elsewhere, an old woman searches desperately for a wedding dress in her dream of love. And in the very heart of the city, the purity of snow is tainted by the murder of a girl and as one man begins to unravel the dark secrets of the city, he knows he is in a race against time to find the murderer before the snow melts. With insight and compassion David Park peers into the souls of these ordinary people battling their secrets and desires.

  ‘A writer of startling grace and integrity … Park’s characters burn like the candles they light against [the dark], shivering but bright’

  Daily Telegraph

  ‘Bewitching … If you liked Ian McEwan’s Atonement, you will adore this’

  Daily Mail

&n
bsp; ‘Luminously written … intense and extraordinarily compelling’

  The Times

  Available now in paperback.

  ISBN: 978-1-58234-293-1

  Copyright © 2014 by David Park

  Illustrations © by Colin Watson

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