Now that he knew where she lived he found himself, most days, walking past her door on the way down to the river. He never saw her. One day, though, when his mind was elsewhere, he caught sight of her on the towpath ahead of him, walking in the direction of Hammersmith Bridge. He fell into step behind her and so they proceeded. As they were passing the Harrods Depository she suddenly stopped and turned. He too stopped, not more than twenty feet away from her, and they looked at each other. Holding his gaze, she very slowly shook her head. He turned quickly then and started to hurry back in the direction he had come. And though he occasionally caught sight of her again in the street and shops of Putney he never again tried to follow or speak to her.
He lived his life in a dream, his wife – his second wife – would say. He did not have a firm grasp of reality.
Every young man is allowed to dream, he would respond.
Only if he can wake up.
You don’t think I woke up?
Not till half your life was over.
Half my life?
At least.
Perhaps.
Perhaps, perhaps, she would say, mocking him. All he can say is perhaps.
The first time he visited the marché des puces at the Porte de Clignancourt he bought a silver soup-ladle. He had no need of a soup-ladle since he never cooked for himself, but this particular spoon had taken his fancy and for the first time in his life he found himself bargaining with the storekeeper, something he had never felt the least inclination to do, perhaps because he sensed that he would not be very good at it, that he lacked conviction in such situations. But something drove him that day when the man named his price to offer him a tenth of what he asked. The man laughed, then to his surprise offered him the spoon for half the price he had initially mentioned. Eventually they agreed on a sum just short of half that and the man wrapped up the spoon in tissue paper, seemingly greatly satisfied, and they shook hands on it. Back in the flat he put it on a shelf where he would sometimes take it down to polish it and was always pleased to see it.
Everything he did he did assiduously, his wife – his second wife – would say. He has always done everything assiduously.
It was the combination of surprising detail and general reflection he found so satisfying in du Bellay, as in the opening of the fifty-sixth sonnet of the Regrets.
Baïf, qui, comme moy, prouves l’adversité,
Il n’est pas tousjours bon de combatre l’orage,
Il faut caler la voile, et de peur du naufrage,
Ceder à la fureur de Neptune irrité.
Baïf, he who (like me) has experienced adversity,
Knows it’s rarely wise to fight against the storm:
Better lower the sail and, for fear of shipwreck,
Give way to the fury of an angry sea.
‘It’s rarely wise’ fails of course to capture the delightful understatement of ‘il n’est tousjours bon’, but ‘it’s not always wise’ seemed too plonking to him. As for ‘angry sea’, it certainly did not do justice to ‘Neptune irrité’, but ‘angry Neptune’ was hardly an option. And so it went. It seemed to him that, whatever mood he was in, there would be a poem in the Regrets to reflect it. He loved the solid, almost stolid building blocks of these poems, their foursquare occupation of the space, their total lack of sentimentality or whimsy. My life felt so insubstantial at the time, he would say, it was a blessing to find these sturdy, no-nonsense poems, which nevertheless resonated with a mysterious power. I clung to them as a drowning man to a raft.
Mysterious power, she would mock. Mysterious power. He was always looking for saviours in his life.
That’s true, he would say. Perhaps I have that propensity.
When I first met him, she would say, I hardly understood what he was saying, he used so many funny words.
I told you, he would say. I told you I was an old-fashioned person.
He never went out without his hat.
Yes, always with my hat.
Summer or winter, always with his hat.
I felt naked without it.
You wished to insulate yourself against the world.
Perhaps I did.
Perhaps, she would say. He thinks that by saying perhaps he can protect himself against reality.
We all try to protect ourselves against reality.
But some more than others.
Some more than others, he admitted.
Friends who had known him in the old days were amazed at his new-found calm, at the way he would accept criticism of himself and shrug it off, and they attributed it all to his wife and to the sense of calm and peace that seemed to follow wherever she went.
Sometimes, when he met his wife – his first wife – at the Putney Bridge underground station, they would not cross the footbridge but turn instead towards Putney Bridge and take the passage under the road to reach the riverside gardens which led past the old palace of the Bishops of London and on to Craven Cottage, the Fulham football ground, and so via a maze of small empty streets behind the river to Hammersmith Bridge and then back along the south bank of the river, where the towpath was continuous. If the weather was particularly fine they would go into the garden of the Bishop’s Palace, with its walled inner garden and, hidden from the general view, one of the most magical trees he had ever seen, a sixty-yard wisteria that enclosed what had once been a vibrant kitchen and herb garden, though now it consisted only of a sorry array of overgrown lots and broken greenhouses through which the weeds grew, unchecked.
When the wisteria was in flower, he said, and it flowered twice a year, its strange unearthly beauty, more grey than blue, but a vibrant grey, if that can be imagined, a subtle, everchanging grey, always made him want to cry, though whether for joy or sorrow he could not tell. They would take their fill of it and then lie on the grass beyond, under the neglected apple trees, and look up at the bright blue sky through the orange and white blossom or the little hard red apples just visible through the leaves.
There is a kind of sorrow in solitude, he would say. The sweetness and the sadness are conjoined. And Monteverdi is the artist of that mood. It is, he would say, the mood of our times, for however close we are to another human being we always know, deep down, that we are alone.
They could often be seen driving out on excursions to the Brecon Beacons or even to the beaches of South Wales, she at the wheel and he, animated as ever, in the seat beside her.
He talks and I listen, she would say. Every relationship, if it is successful, has to have in it one person who talks and one who listens.
Don’t I listen? he would ask.
Not always.
That’s true, he would concede.
He liked to stand at the large plate-glass window and look out across the valley while she busied herself in the kitchen. She knew the dishes he liked and what it was that agreed and did not agree with his delicate stomach. I look after him all right, she would say.
You do.
You see? she would say. For once he agrees with me.
I invariably agree with you.
It’s his use of words like that, she would say, that first drew me to him. I had never met anyone who used so many long words.
They seem natural to me.
That’s what I mean, she would say.
Sometimes, as he made his way to Putney Bridge Station to wait for her to arrive, he did not know whether he would come forward to greet her when she appeared or conceal himself behind the newspaper kiosk. And he did not know either why he concealed himself when he did and then followed her as if she was a stranger until she walked up the steps of the Victorian villa in which they had their flat, searched in her bag, produced the keys, fitted one into the lock, opened the door and then closed it again behind her, without a backward glance, as if shutting him out of her life forever:
Torn’a l’ombre di morte,
Infelice Euridice,
Né piu sperar di riveder le stele,
Ch’ omai fia sordo a prieghi tuoi
l’Inferno.
Return to the shadows of death,
Unhappy Eurydice,
And hope no more to see the stars again,
For henceforth Hades is deaf to your prayers.
The speed with which she sank was the thing that most surprised him. He had expected her to splash out, to try and swim, even if, for some reason, it proved difficult. But there was only the splash and then nothing. He stared at the water in bafflement, waiting for her to surface, but there was nothing. It was as if some force was there, deep in the river, waiting to drag her down.
What did you do then? they asked at the police station when he reported it.
I sat down, he said.
You sat down?
Yes.
What do you mean, you sat down?
I sat down and waited for her to reappear.
You didn’t think of jumping in after her?
No, he said.
Why not?
I don’t know.
Try to remember, they said.
I told you, he said after a while. I thought she would reappear.
But when she didn’t?
I didn’t know where she was.
What do you mean you didn’t know where she was?
I didn’t know where to jump in. She might have swum under water. Or the current might have carried her.
So what did you do?
I came here.
He waited.
Have you sent a team to find her? he asked after a while.
Yes, they said.
She may have got her leg caught in something.
But then why didn’t you jump in?
I don’t know.
Do you want to call a lawyer? they asked him.
What for? he said.
To advise you.
I don’t need anyone to advise me, he said. I need to get her out.
Unbelievable, his wife – his second wife – would say, when he recounted this in the large living room of their converted farmhouse in the Black Mountains above Abergavenny. To lose your wife and then be treated as a suspect by the police. Unbelievable.
They were only doing their duty.
Their first duty was to try and save her.
That is what happens in such cases, he would say. I understood their point of view.
You were in shock, she would say. Or you would never have answered their questions.
Sometimes, after lunch, his wife – his second wife – would put a jazz record on the gramophone and then she and Wilfred would dance while he and Mabel looked on, or he gazed out of the window at the glorious view spread out before him. Come on, Mabel, Wilfred would say, have a go, both of you. I am not the dancing type, she would respond, while he pretended not to hear.
What he liked about du Bellay’s Regrets was that the poems were not addressed to a single mistress, as were those of so many of his contemporaries, infatuated more by Petrarch than by any individual woman, but to the many real friends he had left behind in France when, in 1553, he was ordered to follow his cousin, the cardinal Jean du Bellay, to Rome. And yet these poems – and there is no hint of any homosexual liaison – are as passionate and intense as any by Scève or Ronsard – more so for sounding so natural and unforced. Take sonnet forty-one, he would say.
N’estant de mes ennuis la fortune assouvie,
A fin que je devinsse à moy-mesme odieux,
M’osta de mes amis celuy que j’aymois mieux,
Et sans qui je n’avois de vivre nulle envie.
Donc l’eternelle nuict a ta clarté ravie,
Et je ne t’ay suivy parmy ces obscurs lieux?
Toy, qui m’as plus aymé que ta vie et tes yeux,
Toy, que j’ay plus aymé que mes yeux et may vie.
The rather conventional first stanza suddenly gives way to something utterly different, a tragedy and a lament which would not be out of place in Orfeo.
Not satisfied with the blows she had dealt me,
And determined to render me hateful to myself,
Fortune took away the friend I loved the most,
Making me lose the very will to live.
Thus eternal night has robbed you of the light,
Yet I failed to follow you to those dark regions?
You who loved me more than your life and your eyes,
You, whom I loved more than my eyes and my life.
You ask, he would say, where is the rhyme and where is the rhythm, the English equivalent of the subtle French alexandrine? And I have to confess that it is not there. I had by then long given up trying to translate poetry into poetry. For my own sake I found rough English equivalents, but what could I do, in twentieth-century English, with the weight of moymesme, of aymois, of nuict and parmy, not to speak of the unforced rhymes of assouvie, envie, ravie and vie, or odieux, mieux, lieux and yeux? Rather than rail against the poverty of my vocabulary and powers of invention, rather than spend sleepless nights turning over a quatrain until I could hear the rumble of the city beginning to come to life, I preferred simply to read these poems and even learn them by heart.
But it’s true, he would say, that some of the excitement went out of my reading when I gave up my self-imposed task, and I felt as well that, however hard I read them, I did not enter their very being in the way I felt I had when I was actively engaged in the task of translation.
Though they searched the smouldering ruins the police found no clue as to the cause of the conflagration. There was no reason to consider arson, though some holiday homes had been targeted by Welsh nationalists in the past. But those tended to belong to people who used them only occasionally, whereas they had been living in the converted farmhouse ever since they had bought it. Did anyone have a grudge against them? they were asked, but they could think of no one. On the contrary, not only were they popular with their friends, they were well liked in the town, where they were always ready to banter with the butcher or commiserate with the supermarket checkout girls. Friends and acquaintances would stop them in the street for a chat or stand looking on with a smile as they took up the middle of the pavement, engaged in animated discussion and oblivious of what was going on around them.
He was a man of regular habits. Once he had found a restaurant to his taste he stayed faithful to it. He was happy to eat whatever was put in front of him but he was always pleased when there was vegetable soup to begin with and crème caramel to end. Though he was not averse to meat he had asked to be spared the tripe and brains that were sometimes on offer, and he particularly enjoyed the fish that was regularly served on Fridays. He abhorred milk in his coffee and rarely drank more than a single glass of white wine with his meal.
His stomach was his Achilles heel, his wife – his second wife – would interrupt.
I like to feel well, he would respond. That is more important to me than eating even the most succulent repast.
You do. And I make sure you always do, she would say.
As he sat on his favourite bench in the Cimetière de Montparnasse he often recalled the day when he and his wife – his first wife – had first stumbled upon the mysterious lost and overgrown cemetery on Putney Heath, on the way to Barnes. Unlike the well-laid-out cemeteries of Paris and indeed of France as a whole, neatly walled and with all the tombstones set in orderly rows, this one seemed to have no clear boundaries and the tombstones appeared to grow like the trees in whose midst they appeared, randomly and without logic. Many of the statues had been vandalised over the ages and there were a great many decapitated angels. Originally perhaps there had been some attempt at order and symmetry, for somewhere near the centre a space had been cleared and a memorial to a certain William Hedgeman, in the form of a large cross standing on an inscribed plinth, had been erected. But three of the four paths leading to it from the sides had lost all semblance of straightness, the way been blocked by fallen trees and more gravestones, overgrown now by creepers and moss. Many of those buried in this mysterious place appeared to be Dutch, according to the names and
the inscriptions on the gravestones, though why he had no idea, and no one seemed to have been buried there after 1940. He was pleased though to find the grave of Francis Palgrave (1824– 1897), the editor of the much-loved Victorian poetry anthology Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, resident of Twickenham and one-time Professor of Poetry at Oxford, as well as that of Ebenezer Cobb Morley (1831–1924), regarded, said the inscription, as the father of modern football, and of Julia Martha Thomas (d. 1879), described simply and suggestively as ‘murder victim’. She was in fact, he discovered in the local library, the victim of one of the most famous murders of the Victorian era, killed in a fight with her Irish servant, who then cut off her head and sliced up her body, boiling the dismembered parts before burying some of them and throwing the rest in the river. For some reason, perhaps in order to sell the furniture, she impersonated her mistress for several weeks before being rumbled and fleeing to Ireland where the police found her and brought her back to England to stand trial at the Old Bayley. The head of her victim, though, was not found until 1952, when workmen enlarging the house of the naturalist David Attenborough unearthed it. How many other secrets lie buried under our cities, parks and heaths, he wondered?
A road went through Putney Heath just beyond the cemetery and what seemed to be municipal tennis courts had at some point been laid close to it. As one crept through the trees, parting the undergrowth to see what lay beneath, one could hear the smack of ball against racket and the cheerful shouts of the players. That was the world of the living.
They had been walking across the Heath one Saturday morning on their way to the pub in Barnes where, on weekends, they occasionally liked to eat, when they had come across the cemetery. They must have passed within yards of it on numerous previous occasions without stumbling upon it, and even after many visits there was always the sense of suddenly and unexpectedly entering a lost world.
You see? his wife – his second wife – would say when he came to this point in his story. At heart he is a romantic.
The Cemetery in Barnes Page 7