Is This the Way You Said?

by Adam Thorpe

  Frank Taylor had stopped talking. He was looking at Rob. So were the girls. Frank must have asked him what he thought. Rob had crumbs in his beard.

  ‘I like Russian shorts,’ he said.

  The girls – his wife and her two old school chums – glanced at each other and then started snorting into their hands, shoulders quivering and shaking, tears welling in their eyes. Frank was chortling, too. Silvio Rocchetti was looking over at them and smiling, as if he knew why they were finding Rob Barlow funny. Rob felt his deep and resonant inner mind rising up in a great swell of rage. He had part of the turkey roll in his hand. He raised his hand and hurled the bread at his wife. The bread bounced off her chest and the turkey slice flew out. People were looking, there was a kind of hush around them. The shouting, swearing voice was his own, as if he could hear only the after echo. He rose from the table and shoved his way through the musicians and singers crowding the room until he found the concert hall’s fire exit door and burst out into the cool night air. He didn’t have his stick caddy with him. He’d left it behind on the table in the green room. He was glad. For once, he was glad. He started walking up the road behind the hall and he kept on walking. He walked until he was in an area he didn’t know, with strange houses and unknown streets. His breath showed on the damp air and he didn’t have his coat, but he was exhilarated. He kept on walking, swinging his arms and walking. It was ten minutes into the second half of the Messiah and Rob Barlow was walking away, further and further away, exhilarated by his madness. He tore off his black bow tie and threw it from him. All his life he had been where he had to be, he had attended and been punctual and had beaten out the precise note at the precise moment at the precise pitch. The whole glorious edifice of the Messiah was crumbling behind him, cracking and leaning forward and falling like a building in a bomb raid. His two drums silent amidst the consternation. Silent on stage under their head protectors and leatherette covers, like two pools. His drums silent. Silent the tympani. Silent even where they sounded out in the solo, singing deeply in his mind’s ear as he kept on walking through the hammering of his real heart, his membrane of ordinary flesh. Silent the tympani. Silent.

  At last they would know him. At last they would know who he really was, in the roar of their consternation.

  KARAOKE

  He first came across William Pool in a pub.

  It was a dark, sleety evening in Redditch. He had given a reading in the local bookshop. At least, he would have given a reading, but he and the poetry festival organiser and the grumpy bookshop owner had sat there until half an hour’s grace had been granted and no one had turned up. There wasn’t even a man in a bobble hat.

  ‘Can’t understand it,’ said Gail the festival organiser, whose earrings were copper fish. ‘We normally have at least thirty people.’

  ‘It was advertised, was it?’ said Greg.

  He hadn’t seen a single indication, anywhere in Redditch, that Gregory Jones and Tabitha Leary were reading tonight until he’d arrived at the bookshop, where there was a notice in the window the size of a flyer. Tabitha Leary had gone down with flu, apparently, but no one would have known that, would they? (He had been looking forward to meeting Tabitha Leary, after a glance at her jacket photo – though these were often ten years out of date.)

  ‘It was very well advertised,’ said the bookshop owner, scowling at him.

  It was always the writer’s fault, Greg knew that. A yellowed clipping on the wall, headlined ‘Paul’s Passionate for Poetry, Alright’, showed the bookshop owner, youthful and grinning, in front of the window, clutching Heaney’s Station Island.

  ‘I’m obviously not Heaney,’ said Greg.

  ‘Oh, they’ll come to anything, usually,’ said Gail the festival organiser. ‘They’re often quite lonely people.’

  ‘As long as there’s some booze after,’ muttered the bookshop owner.

  ‘Talking of which, let’s go and sink our sorrows in a pint of local ale,’ said Greg, who was shamming nonchalance and good cheer.

  The bookshop owner had to deal with stock and the festival organiser had another date. Her copper fish jittered along to her apology. To Greg’s annoyance, she left the bookshop clutching a bottle of wine. He was abandoned to the pub opposite, which was housed in a long newish concrete development squeezed out like toothpaste to the end of the street.

  ‘This is all material,’ he thought to himself; ‘I must not succumb to Verzweiflung existentiell.’ For some reason, speaking in German always made him feel better. One day he would learn the language.

  The pub was part of a chain: This is a Falstaff Inn said a discreet sign. The look was, naturally enough, Elizabethan. There were gnarled beams and knotty nooks, slightly more persuasive than their equivalent in California, but somehow more troubling. Old hardback books filled the niches – a job lot from the chain’s decor warehouse, he presumed. Instead of taking notes for a poem of which the first two lines (‘It doesn’t matter much in Redditch/what sanctuary you seek, it is all the same’) had jumped on him while he was ordering his pint at the bar, but which had stayed doggedly discontinued, he browsed through the niche behind his head. It was like turning over bodies in a catacomb. Forgotten pre-war thrillers about murders and cricket in that lovely Penguin green, which he felt like nicking, but didn’t, were secreted among truly pointless volumes: Legends of the Cornish Saints; Tap Dancing Made Easy; Annual Report of the Chrysanthemum Society 1952; My Days With the Water Board.

  The last book in the row was warped.

  He took it down with the same air of amused futility as he had the others. Or rather, he prised it off, as it was stuck to the shelf on a film of spilt beer.

  The title was in Latin.

  In fact, the whole book was in Latin, all five hundred-odd pages, and mottled with damp. It was precisely a hundred years old, published in 1899. A Victorian child had coloured in the portrait of the author, one William Pool, on the frontispiece, turning his huge whiskers blue and his long hair green, though some nursery tantrum had obscured his mouth and chin in wild streaks of crimson.

  Greg was about to put the tome back, having dismissed it as some kind of mind-grinding ecclesiastical work, when his attention was drawn to the book’s first words. Above the opening Latin sentence was its translation in English, done by a neat hand in pencil, spilling into the margin. The sentence read thus:

  The desire for love is no more than a kind of neurasthenia . . . though very good to me, like flowers.

  There were no further translations. He checked throughout the book, releasing its odour of mould, of pipe smoke and leadfoot labradors in gloomy, beeswaxed studies looking out onto laurel in vanished counties. Nothing. He wished, not for the first time, that he’d paid more attention during his seven years of school Latin: the text hovered just out of reach, maddeningly intangible. He had, however, established that it was a novel – for it said so, in English, on the title page. And the first sentence intrigued Greg. It more than intrigued him: it had him hooked.

  The desire for love is no more than a kind of neurasthenia . . .though very good to me, like flowers.

  For there was something odd about the sentence, something slightly ‘off’. Teasing, perhaps. The kind of sentence that flows through your head as you wake up. Greg looked again at the author’s portrait, a rather crude lithograph taken from an original painting. If that one sentence recalled the prints and paintings of an Aubrey Beardsley, effete and unworldly, its author did not: gruff, jowly, the sensuous lips at odds with the lean nose and suspicious eyes, William Pool was a man to be reckoned with.

  Greg reckoned that only Oxbridge dons, Eton schoolmasters and conservative ecclesiastics wrote in Latin at the end of the nineteenth century – and mostly light verse for High Table. Was William Pool one of these? He doubted it: behind the coloured scribbles the man did not look comfortable enough. The lighting in the pub was complicated, throwing strange coloured shadows over the furred paper, over the defiant face. It almost seemed to move, to
be moving its mouth; certainly by Greg’s third pint it was.

  The desire for love is no more than a kind of neurasthenia . . . though very good to me, like flowers.

  Then the karaoke evening got going, with ‘Talkin’ Bout a Revolution’ shrieked forth by a plump, white-faced woman in a flowery dress. Greg returned William Pool to his niche under a smuggling poster and fled through the nightmare flashes of a stroboscope to catch the train home, feeling hungry and drunk and pointless.

  But he did not forget Pool. He had scribbled down that first sentence on a beer mat, and the words haunted him.

  An advanced search on the web came up with nothing. He scoured the major London libraries for information about the man: nothing. There wasn’t even a copy of Pool’s book, not anywhere. He wished he’d nicked it from the pub, now. He phoned Alastair MacGregor, his brother-in-law. Alastair was a classical scholar teaching at Royal Holloway. Greg wondered if the sentence merely reflected the fin de siècle manner of the translator. Foolishly, he had not recorded the original Latin.

  ‘What a pity,’ Alastair said. ‘Between us we might have discovered the English Proust. What was the title?’

  ‘Animula Vagula Blandula. Sounds like an internal disease.’

  ‘Far from it. That’s Hadrian, his last poem, written on his death-bed. Great emperor, hopeless poet. Except for the very last one. Little vague . . . no, Little fleeting flattering . . . no, Little fleeting soft-flattering soul, the guest and comrade of my body, into what regions . . .’

  So the title was Little Fleeting Soft-Flattering Soul? That wouldn’t have got the Booker, Greg thought. And it sounded ominously religious.

  A friend who was an antiquarian books dealer had never heard of William Pool, but made appropriate enquiries. Waiting for the information was worse than waiting for reviews: Greg knew from the outset that there would be none. He sat at home in Kentish Town and watched some terrible TV full of D-list celebrities, imagining William Pool sitting among them and glowering. His eczema came back again and his tiny flat smelt of hydrocortisone cream. His foreign students at the language school grew more and more foreign, somehow, and the awful woman that ran it grew even nosier.

  ‘What’s this thousand-yard stare?’ she asked, blowing smoke in his face. ‘True love thwarted, is it?’

  After a few months, during which he found at least thirty William Pools in the Somerset House archives (none of them helpful), he gave up. The true William Pool had vanished from the earth.

  The only thing to do was to go back to Redditch.

  He did so. It was still sleeting, and in exactly the same manner, as if it had sleeted continually for the past year. Verzweiflung existentiell, he murmured. The pub was empty but unchanged, except for a lottery kiosk placed just where he had sat the first time. The niche was hidden behind a poster of a grinning girl in a bikini, a lottery ticket tucked between her grapefruit breasts. The bartender – Azim, if the badge on his lapel was telling the truth – asked Greg how many tickets he wanted.

  ‘Are there still books behind that poster?’

  ‘Eh?’

  The background music was in the foreground. He had to shout.

  ‘Books. You know, those weird things you handled at school.’

  ‘Oh, right. Dunno. Hey, Steve, bloke here wants to know about books.’

  ‘You mean the bookshop, sir? Over the road? Next to Thomas Cook’s? They’ve got a great offer on golfing holidays,’ he added, winking at Azim.

  ‘Well, the last time I was here, I found this really great book, where the poster now is. I think it might still be there along with other stuff about nasturtiums and so on.’

  ‘Nasturtiums?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter, forget the nasturtiums. It was this other book I was wanting.’

  Azim and Steve peered at Greg as if he was alien, talking in an alien language. It was at moments like these that Greg fleetingly recognised that he was, in fact, from another galaxy.

  ‘A book,’ said Azim.

  ‘Yeah. Just a book.’

  ‘Called?’

  ‘Oh, right. That would have been useful. Its title was Animula Vagula Blandula.’

  ‘Chinese, is it?’

  ‘Sounds a bit impolite to me,’ said Steve, making a rude gesture with the neck of a Smirnoff bottle.

  Greg smiled gamely with the lads. He had planned, of course, to walk out with the book. To steal it. This would now be difficult.

  Azim unsellotaped the poster and the girl crackled down on top of him. The niche was empty, except for a spider and its web and an empty bottle of Thai beer.

  ‘Whoops, management won’t like that,’ said Azim, removing the bottle. ‘No books, though.’

  ‘Who put up the poster? Who removed the books?’

  Greg’s hands were trembling.

  ‘Dunno, I’m only on temporary,’ said Azim. He waved his hand at the other niches. ‘Those look like books.’

  Greg helped him put the girl back up and then leafed through every book in the pub, as if William Pool might have been camouflaged within. The books were mostly novels, by people with names that no longer existed: Herbert, Phyllis, Edgar, Winifred. Novels that go on being squeezed out like toothpaste to the end of time – or the end of humanity, at least. Steve and Azim eyed him suspiciously. He got to the last book, sighed, and looked so sad they offered him a half-pint of Foster’s on the house.

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ said Steve. ‘What about this?’

  He bobbed down behind the bar’s counter and emerged with something Greg instantly recognised.

  ‘That’s it!’ Greg all but shrieked. ‘That’s the one!’

  It was even more warped and covered in a crazed Venn diagram of beer-rings – but it was Little Fleeting Soft-Flattering Soul, alright.

  ‘Stopped the glass-washer rattling,’ Steve explained. ‘Just the right width.’

  ‘Can I borrow it? No, I’ll buy it. How much?’

  Steve looked at Greg with tiny eyes full of sterling.

  ‘Management property. Genuine antique. Let’s see now . . .’

  Greg was saved by the arrival of the chilled-food lorry from Northampton. While Azim and Steve were distracted by rustling envelopes of Home-Cooked Shepherd’s Pie, Greg sneaked out – with William Pool under his coat.

  Within hours he was back home and on the phone to Alastair. Alastair would do the literal translation, Greg would turn it into decent prose. They would find a publisher and share the royalties. Greg left the book with Alastair and spent a restless week, teaching his foreign students distractedly, without conviction. Greg’s ex-partner, Stephanie, phoned to tell him she was engaged – to the Bolivian actor for whom she had walked out on Greg last year. Greg actually didn’t care. A week earlier and he would have wept. Love’s sorrow and the greats of English literature no longer seemed to matter.

  On Friday an envelope arrived: the first shortish chapter had been done.

  Even through Alastair’s flat, unworked prose, the chapter made Greg want to run out into the Kentish Town morning and shout very loudly. Instead, he made himself a large coffee and got straight down to work on Alastair’s literal translation, trying to come to terms with the enormity of his find. Here was a novel written by an Englishman seemingly soaked in the poetry of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé: the lucid daring, the bizarre imagery, the profane anti-social defiance, the clinical rage, the fevered calm. All this some thirty years before the French avant-garde made it over the Channel in the form of Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence! The language itself reminded Greg of none other than Samuel Beckett – many decades later. Although the novel was set in Tamworth and narrated by a fancy-goods salesman called Oswald Pock on his death-bed – thus the title from Hadrian’s poem – the atmosphere was the surgical nihilism, the desperate dark comedy, of Waiting for Godot or Endgame. And in the process of converting it into ringing English prose, Greg felt a sense of destiny, of a circle completing itself: the novel had been written in Latin, as Beckett’s pl
ays had been written in French, precisely in anticipation of this conversion into English. An English unsullied, purified, shorn of its sensuous accretions, somehow distanced from its soiled roots, objectified and therefore able to regard itself freshly. The dry flower of a dead language swelling into life at his touch, more beautiful than the compromised speech of its – or our – present.

  Above all, the Victorian constructions of every Victorian novel had vanished: the language was for all time, as modern as he might make it. A language that thought, connecting in limber leaps as it moved through the episodic and quite banal events of the life of a fancy-goods salesman in the English Midlands. And there were passages that sent a shudder through Greg, as if Pool had anticipated everything:

  The land seemed dead to him. The very soil of England seemed dead. Poisoned, and by its own people. Was it because he was old that the sky above the fields seemed silent? He asked Charlotte about this, but she only scoffed and said he was deaf. He did not think he was deaf. Barbarous speech lay in the folds of the months and the years. The lilies, the larks, the very waters themselves would be violated and the ancient towns laid waste from within. Charlotte cupped her full breasts and allowed Oswald to kiss them, once, twice, three times. England’s breasts would be withered soon, he knew. The invisible oxen would draw barbarian wagons across strange bridges with the trains flowing beneath, and children would be the ransom of the world.

  ‘It’s a very clever collage,’ said Alastair, a few days later. They had met up in the courtyard of Somerset House to compare notes. Greg had felt that the magnificence of the classical courtyard and its modernist, state-of-the-art fountains would be a suitable place to discuss Pool. They ordered tea and cakes. The tea came in paper mugs. It was windy, despite the bright sun, and the paper mugs blew off and the pages went wild. ‘Yes, a very skilful scissors-and-paste job.’

  ‘Er, what on earth do you mean, Alastair?’