What We Can Know, page 27
Two days after the funeral, there was a development that in my haunted state seemed like an extension of my punishment. In his sleep Percy crapped copiously in his bed. Cleaning him up and sorting out the bedding took more than half the night. By 4 a.m. he was determined to be up and dressed and eating a cooked breakfast. He wanted to phone someone, though he was not sure who. He insisted on going out for a walk. He wanted all three at once and was distressed in his confusion. After that, his sleep routines went to pieces and mine, already fragile, went with them. Gradually, a new pattern set in. He was asleep by seven or eight in the evening, then awake and ready to be up and dressed between two and three in the night. On one occasion, I was about to get up with him, then fell asleep to be woken later by the police bringing him home. Another time, local search and rescue volunteers brought him back. With two or three hours’ sleep a night, I entered a dream state in which it was sometimes an effort to grasp what was real. Hallucinated objects, people and landscapes drifted on the edge of vision. Snatches of dreams invaded my waking experience. My heart often skipped a beat, then landed with a thump that made me clutch at my chest. I could be on my feet, sleeping for seconds at a time. It was easier for me to give in to every demand Percy made. When he shook me awake at 3 a.m. to tell me that he wanted to go out for a walk, it was less stressful to get up and go with him and avoid making tea at 5 a.m. for the search and rescue team.
It was foolish of me to resume emails to Francis, bleak descriptions that were also self-pitying complaints, pleas for help, expressions of despair. His replies were loving. At least we were back in touch. When he asked me to book an appointment at a particular private care home twenty miles away, I assumed he had come into some money, and I complied. I could not ask Rachel for help because she was undergoing radical surgery. I sent her fruit and flowers and goodwill messages. It was not clear to me if Percy was finally descending from his plateau and was in free fall, or if this was a temporary dip in a level terrain. None of it mattered. All I needed to do was keep going. Certain everyday duties helped. We still went out together to the shops. The kitchen had to be tidied, the cooking and laundry seen to. I thought I could fall in with Percy’s new sleep pattern. But by the early evening I was jaggedly alert, beyond sleep, incapable of anything apart from writing to Francis again.
I could not recall how long this ghostly period lasted. In memory it squatted across months, and this is where the journals have helped. There were few entries, but the dates are clear. It was forty-three days. The differences blurred between an intention and the memory of a completed act, between imagining and knowing, hoping and having, and finally, I suppose, between right and wrong. The date for the care-home visit came, but Percy refused to go near ‘another hotel’. I did not have the strength of purpose to persuade or force him. I phoned the place to apologise and the kindly voice of the receptionist made me tearful. When I told Francis that we had missed the appointment, he did not seem to care.
A week later, at around ten in the evening, I was in the kitchen, sitting at the hinged Formica-topped table I kept there for tea and coffee equipment. Percy was asleep. I had been upstairs half an hour before to check on him. I was not reading or even thinking. I was in my customary daze, too hot in the head to go to bed, too worn out to write another email or start on the dishes and pans piled by the sink. If I had heard the back garden gate opening, I would not have stirred. My indifference was profound. But when I heard tapping on a pane of the French windows, I was startled and turned and saw in the dark the faint sketch of a face. When I let Francis in, we did not embrace. He was wearing leather gloves and a black wide-brimmed hat I had never seen before. He looked unwell. There was a hint of blueish green about his pallor. Perhaps he hadn’t shaved. He was carrying a cloth shoulder bag. It was odd, but I was not surprised to see him.
I said stupidly, ‘What are you doing?’
‘Where is he?’
‘Asleep. Where are you going?’
‘I want you to stay here.’
It should have been obvious where he was going and what he was about to do. I was in a state of stupefaction, of vegetative slowness. More than half a minute passed before I moved. I tried to hurry but my legs were heavy and wouldn’t respond. It was as if I was wading thigh-deep in treacle. I would have had a hard time explaining myself. If my mind was such a blank, why had I stood up, why was I trying to hurry? Something was about to happen that I knew I had to prevent. No one would believe that I knew and, simultaneously, did not know, or preferred not to. Logic dissolved. I got myself out of the kitchen and as I was going along the passageway towards the stairs I heard voices. Francis was saying something to Percy, who called out my name, though not in an anxious way. As I reached the foot of the stairs, Percy was coming down them, head first, arms outstretched towards me, his mouth open in silent terror as he hurtled down the straight run. Instinctively, I leaped out of his way when I should have tried to catch him. I heard his head strike the floor and he slumped face down on the tiles. Francis hurried down behind him. Before I could move or speak, he was kneeling by Percy’s head and I thought he was coming to his aid. Did I really think that? He pulled from his shoulder bag not a first-aid kit but a squat hammer, a short-handled metal mallet. And I dared to be surprised. He grabbed a handful of hair and jerked Percy’s head up. I shouted Francis’s name, but I didn’t move. He brought the mallet down hard onto or into Percy’s forehead. It was a deep muffled thump, but edged with a finer sound, a filigree of delicate rupture.
What should I have done? Locked the front door and kitchen French windows, called the police, kept Francis in the house until they arrived? Nothing crossed my mind. Not even the fact that I would be seen to be implicated and was trapped. I could only watch. Francis eased the mallet into a black plastic sack and shoved it in the bag. He bent over Percy, turning his face down in the puddle of blood that was now spreading fast in two long fingers. Francis stood with difficulty, stepped over the blood and came in front of me. He was shaking.
‘He’s dead. Listen. Vivien, are you listening? Look at me. You’re to delete all my emails, to me, from me, yes? And from any back-up you have. You’ve also got my letters. Destroy them. Are you listening? Don’t contact me. Give me five minutes, then phone an ambulance. Not the police. Have you got all that? Bolt the back gate and lock the kitchen door. Remember, it’s going to be all right.’
He did not look as if he believed that, and he did not wait for a response. He went towards the kitchen. Something smashed on the floor. He had collided with the table and knocked over a plate. I heard the French windows open and close. I remained standing there, ten feet from where poor Percy lay. I should have gone to him, but I was a coward and did not dare, in case he was really dead. In case he was still alive. All I could think of was how I, dim subordinate, was supposed to know when five minutes were up. When were we counting from? I could make no sense of my wristwatch, which seemed to be upside down. I waited, staring at Percy on the floor, hoping to see him move, dreading that he might, trying to remember the other instructions Francis had given me. When I looked at my watch again, I thought the hands had gone backwards.
*
We did not communicate for seven months. My agony – the horror, self-loathing and despair, the crying in front of my sister, sympathetic friends and strangers – were taken by all, policemen, medics and a local journalist included, as the pitiful grief they would expect of the bereaved. No need to pretend. I hid and wept and lost weight in plain sight and was taken for the virtuous widow, the devoted wife who had given away everything, career, society, comfort for the care of her tragically afflicted husband. Some of which was true and that is where I crouched, behind the boulder of my apparent goodness. No one needed to know that what had paralysed me on the night was my disgusting ambivalence. I loved Percy and wanted him alive, and I had seen paradise in a green valley and wanted to escape the drudgery to be there with my lover. But that was not quite right. I loved Francis and the green valley, but I would never have murdered for them. My affair with him was an open secret, known to a few colleagues and, of course, to Harry Kitchener. No one thought it was relevant. No one came to the house to examine my computer and find buried in the software the traces of deleted emails to and from a famous poet. No crafty cop came to poke about in the fireplace for the black remains of Francis Blundy’s letters.
Tipping forwards and falling down the stairs was a common cause of death. The elderly as well as drug-addled pop stars and drunks were at it daily. An Alzheimer’s case, medically observed and noted with compromised motor skills, merely joined the queue on any first-floor landing, as though among jostling kids at the top of a playground slide. The examining pathologist in the basement of the John Radcliffe Hospital knew before he reached for his whining craniotome that the deceased’s head injuries were commensurate with a heavy man tripping and, under gravity’s pitiless law, colliding with uneven floor tiles. As for the sickening precautions Francis took, the wide-brimmed hat to fool a CCTV camera, gloves to mask his fingerprints, his car parked two miles away outside a busy fish and chip shop, a mallet brought along in case Percy was still alive after he was thrown down the stairs, the same mallet tossed into the brown Cherwell River near the Vicky Arms, a recorded intention to place Percy in a good care home – all of it, self-dramatising nonsense. No one came looking. No one cared. The official verdict of death by misadventure was no surprise. I along with the health visitor were mildly reprimanded in court by the coroner – the second in my life – for not acting sooner to make a downstairs bedroom for Percy. Future carers take note.
I was free to writhe in self-disgust. There was nothing I could do in my torment that did not evoke sympathy and kindness in those around me. When I was alone, without that comfort, I became mad. The nights were the worst, forcing me onto an obsessive narrow track down which I ran to escape blame: Francis said we had to act. I said no, not with my lips but with my heart. My silence as I got out of his car and fled to the house was my no. He said we had to act, but I did not act. I made no plans. That was my no. I did not put a hammer in a cloth bag and step out into the night. I would never have harmed Percy. I cared for him, I loved him, gave up my life, cut up his food, took him to the doctor’s and made notes, tuned his TV, made his bedtimes fun, sang songs with him, changed his sheets, cleaned his shed, kept him from the care home and the bingo afternoons. In the dark I perfected my lists and my innocence and always arrived at the same question – when would I ever rest? In my delirium the answer was plain. Blundy, like Shakespeare’s Glamis, had murdered sleep.
My sister was so kind to me. We spoke every day and she came to stay for a week to help clear the house of Percy’s possessions, his shirts and shoes and luthier tools. I thought it would help me and it didn’t. Three months passed. I would never have guessed that continuing grief and self-hatred would force on me such a craving for sex. Widow’s Fire, it’s called. I came to resemble an ocean-floor mollusc of soft interior, open wide to every drifting titbit. There were some humiliating episodes before I landed back with Harry. By then, Francis had gone to Princeton to fill in for an ailing poet. Harry had turned up one early evening with a bottle of wine and a decent intent to commiserate. He was genuinely surprised by my needs, but he was a man of the world, and his willingness and emotional distance were what I needed. In the dance-like formality of a sexual embrace, I found brief respite from myself. We did not dwell on past hostilities, his callous rejection of me, my studied revenge. Some problems are best solved by moving on. I didn’t ask him about his current lover. I didn’t care. We resumed our pleasant banter – gossip and books, though I had not read much and mostly listened, or pretended to. He came once or twice a week. As soon as he was gone, I would forget about him and go back on my narrow track.
Grief is a dream-state. The linear markers of ordinary time and daily obligations are wrenched apart. All significant ties lead to the recent past, to a sudden absence and to a struggle with what could or should have been. There’s a sameness to the days which accelerates their passing, and a sameness in the pattern of memories that makes them unbearable even as they must be visited again and again. That was my condition as I was passively borne along through a Christmas and an extended winter and a cold spring.
Finally, the poet phoned. He was calling from Holland, his teaching duties in the States were over and he suggested a holiday together in Greece. He named an island and I, walled up in my indifference, tonelessly agreed to meeting him on a quayside in Piraeus, by or on the boat that would take us to the island of Amorgos.
It took me many hours to find my passport. To me, Greece was merely a word, an agreement and a meeting point. I had been a few times and loved it, but those visits were not on my mind. I was not capable of anticipating pleasure. My object was to find out if I could bear to be in the company of Francis Blundy. Harry, with his usual grip on double standards, was irritated when I told him. That meant nothing to me and I refused to engage with him. But I could have just as easily stayed at home. If Francis had phoned to cancel, I would not have cared.
*
I had underestimated Greece. As I wheeled my luggage from my taxi along the quay to the boat, the warmth, the din and excitement of the early season’s tourist crowd, the glint between the docked ferries of a flat blue sea and a whiff from somewhere of fish frying in olive oil stirred in me a self I had forgotten. To be elsewhere! It was not true that travel was a false god and that you took your troubles with you and nothing could change. There was the unimaginable and unforeseen thrill of being away, of renewal, and remembering that the world was huge and various, and you and your concerns were small. I fairly bounced up the gangway. Francis was waiting for me at the top. We embraced lightly. He looked calm and well – and taller. Conceivably, I had shrunk. I learned from him in our first thirty minutes that the boat journey would take eight hours and he had tactfully booked single occupancy of two first-class double cabins; that an American arts foundation had given him a large sum of money in recognition of a lifetime’s achievement; that the Barn and dairy were finished to the highest quality, the books were in order on the shelves, spices and wine in their racks, sheets piled in the walk-in linen cupboard and the garden soon to flourish; that he had yet to spend a night there, and everyone who saw the place was amazed. I made no response, but I watched him closely as he spoke and could not suppress or deny a faint beginning of my old feelings for him. As we walked up and down the deck, or stopped to watch passengers boarding, I delighted in the afternoon sun on my bare arms and felt capable, given life’s brevity, of ruthless insistence on my small share of the world’s pleasures. I had suffered and I was owed. I was giddy with the thought that I could take what I wanted, on my own terms. No one was watching but Francis, and he was complicit and treacherous too. Far-off England was the cold locus of ungenerous morals and disapproval, and Oxford was its damp heartland from which I had been sprung. The boat was leaving. As we stood in the stern, leaning on the taffrail, looking out towards open sea with the sun and a warm breeze on our faces, I felt so exhilarated that I did what I had told myself I would not do, or not yet. I put my hand on his. He took it, we interlinked our fingers and we kissed.
In the dining room that evening we ate a lukewarm stew of lamb and okra. The red wine, almost black, had a sharp invigorating taste. Francis thought it was how the ancient Greeks and Romans liked it. In all that we talked about – Iraq, Rachel’s illness, American universities, Oxford’s expansion, British versus American poetry, Peter’s brilliant school reports – we did not go near Percy’s death and its aftermath. We did not even collude to avoid it. The conversation flowed past it. The matter – the murder – was buried. The many months I had passed in mourning I forgot in the excitement of a sea voyage. Francis wanted to talk about the Barn and was assuming that our life together there was assured. He had bought for the dairy an eighteenth-century oak writing desk and was certain I would love working on it. He showed me a picture on his phone. A kitchen designer based in Suffolk had built for the Barn a huge kitchen island out of elm. It reminded Francis that the housekeeper’s husband had planted on the garden’s boundary two elms immune to disease. And so, without acknowledging what we were doing, we sealed Percy in his tomb, or so we thought. The last time Francis and I had seen each other, he had a bag on his shoulder in which was concealed a mallet smeared with blood. A corpse was on the floor. With what ease we conspired not to return there. What an achievement.
It could not last. Later, we kissed goodnight and without discussion went to our adjacent rooms. As I saw it, we were not ready to resume our affair because we knew how monstrous our evasions had been. Soothed by gentle motion and the drone of the ship’s engines, I was asleep in minutes for the first time in months. I woke from a dreamless sleep in the middle of the night. Only when I heard a car’s horn and a shout did I realise that the ferry had docked. We had arrived at the port of Aegiali in the early hours of the morning. As we came down the gangway in the pre-dawn gloom, we found that the hotel had sent a man with donkey and cart to take our suitcases and those of four other guests. It was a gimmick to please the tourists, I guessed, but it worked some magic on me as we walked uphill behind the cart through silent narrow alleys. There was a widening along the way, a tiny plaza with a pollarded plane tree by a whitewashed church. Here the carter stopped to chat with a very elderly man, possibly his father. The guests were obliged to wait. In that southern European way, our man, oblivious to time, seemed to forget about us. I was right behind the cart. Francis was several paces back, talking animatedly to the others. He had read up on Amorgos and knew it all, the poetry of Nikos Gatsos which he quoted, the geology, microclimate, mythology, and the local politics of building the road that connected Aegiali with the other port, Katapola, at one end of this thin island with, as Francis explained, a fishtail-shaped coast. His listeners obliged with questions. He answered with casual authority, as if he had lived his entire life here. I did not know how he could have absorbed so much from a couple of guidebooks, and why was he so determined to impress. Or why – this was a measure of my irritable state – he was not talking to me. The joy of elsewhere fell away. I was hot from the walk, thirsty, annoyed at being made to wait, impatient to be asleep again before the sun was up. At last, the fellow called to his donkey and the cart rolled forwards. Francis talked all the way up to the hotel. I tried hard not to listen.
