What We Can Know, page 28
Now we were sharing a room, but there were twin beds, at least, narrow and hard. Above mine was a little black scorpion halfway up the wall. I wanted it eased into a tooth mug and put out the window. Francis hit it hard with the heel of his shoe, leaving a yellow stain where it had clung. It fell on my pillow. I brushed it off and turned the pillow over. Then I got ready for bed at speed, pulled the sheet over my head and pretended to be asleep, ignoring Francis when he asked sweetly if I was OK.
When I woke, my mood had not improved. The bedroom was oppressively bright, and Francis was not in his bed. I heard his voice in the garden below our open window. I was dressed and sitting on a stool adjusting a sandal when he appeared, energetic and loud, and began to tell me how he had arranged for our breakfast to be in the perfect spot in the shade of an orange tree. It was ready now. Then he caught my look.
‘What’s up?’
I had already decided to let him have it. No more evasion, but I wanted to sound airily sardonic. ‘I’m fine. Just finding it a trifle awkward sharing a room with the man who killed my husband.’
‘What?’ He spat the word out, then did it again, even louder. ‘What?’ He couldn’t help himself, he glanced towards the window. I think I did too. We could hear guests at breakfast in the garden. They could hear us. He crossed the room quickly and slammed it shut. Now we were sealed in and ready.
He stood facing me, arms crossed. ‘I can’t believe you mean that.’
‘You’re planning on spending this time not talking about it. Too bad. You’re going to have to face it.’
He pulled up a painted wooden chair and sat down. His pretence of calm did not fool me. He said, ‘Fine. Let’s talk. About your responsibilities too. Or should we leave them out?’
‘Francis, you came to my place without warning. You didn’t speak to me. You just went for him.’
He was gazing at me in feigned wonder. ‘You’ve really persuaded yourself, haven’t you.’
‘What was I supposed to do? Wrestle you to the ground?’
‘My God. You are weak.’
‘You mean I don’t murder people.’
He laughed. ‘No. You get me to do it.’
At this point we spoke at once. I was enraged by his lie. ‘What fucking nonsense. How dare you.’ And keeping up his appearance of composure, and surely struggling not to swear like me, he said something like, ‘Do you want me to spell it out for you, what you did?’
‘You acted on your own. You know it.’
‘Do you want to see the proof?’
‘What?’
‘Let me speak. Then I’ll listen, I promise. I put it to you in the car. You knew what I meant. Don’t deny it. You didn’t answer. Fine. Then what? You’re sending me ten emails a day. He shat himself, he keeps me awake all night, I can’t cope, I’m losing my mind. I hate him. He’s sucking the life out of me. But I’m never ever putting him in a home. You told me that a thousand times. After what I said in the car, your meaning was clear. Why else write to tell me that you wished he was dead? Or that he was “already” dead? Remember? I said we had to act and here you were, agreeing with me. I said you needn’t be involved and on the night you weren’t. I did the hard bit and you didn’t make a sound. So now, instead of cleaning up his shit on your own and waiting years for him to die, here you are on a beautiful island. But there’s a price for that, Vivien. It’s simple. We’re in this together.’
He sat back, resting his hands on his knees, staring at me solemnly, waiting for me to speak. I had to be careful. He was a clever man and he could twist lies into truth. But he had aimed at the centre of my guilt. I should have done more to stop him. I felt sick, my heart was thudding, but I was determined to match his show of calm. At the same time, I wondered if I was going through the motions and whether my heart was really in this argument any longer. Logic could take us in another direction.
‘I never asked you to come round to my place with a hammer. Oh yes, I was going through a very hard time looking after him. That’s every carer’s experience with Alzheimer’s. What you said in the car and what you did next were your choices. All yours. He was an inconvenience and you killed him. You couldn’t understand how I could love him. To make out you were only doing what you were told is desperate, it’s pathetic. And you call me weak! You murdered him, Francis. You bashed in his brains! You, not me. If I hadn’t met you, he’d still be alive.’
I had worked myself up to shouting and I felt a curious elation.
Francis was impassive. ‘If Percy hadn’t met you, he’d still be alive. But look, let’s not waste time. Anyone could ask you why you didn’t go to the police right at the start, why you let me in, why you told me where he was, why you didn’t try to stop me when I went upstairs, why you didn’t call the police when it was done. Forget all that. Let’s agree to differ, or even say for the sake of argument that you’re entirely innocent and I’m the monster. What matters is this. If I go down, so do you. Sorry, but I thought we might have a conversation like this. I kept your emails. They don’t look good. To repeat – we’re in this together.’
Before Francis reached his concluding proposal of blackmail, I had begun to think and feel differently. I had known for months that we were roped together. A clean break would be problematic, assuming I wanted it. If I did, I should not have been on holiday with him. If he had a hold over me, then I had one over him. Also, I was no longer young, I had no money, my career had collapsed, the thought of resuming life in Headington was hateful to me. A studio and an oak writing desk were waiting, so was my book about Aikenhead. Beyond the dairy lay open spaces. I recalled my notion of the day before: ruthless insistence on my share of the world’s pleasures. Francis had the glow of talent and fame about him and a million dollars from his American benefactors. In the longer term, he was likely to predecease me. The Barn would be mine. But these enticements were tributaries to a darker stream of thought. There was an element of my own personality I had only discovered late in life, thanks to Harry Kitchener’s duplicity. My bitterness over Percy might persist. I might need, well, if not revenge … just then I did not know what I might need.
I smiled at Francis and stood, hesitated a moment, then went across the room to the window and opened it wide. Leaning out into the warmth, I saw it straight away in the spangled shade of an orange tree already heavy with fruit, our green table bearing a pot of coffee, thick-sliced bread, early figs, yoghurt and honey in earthenware bowls. Across the garden the cicadas were starting up their hypnotic buzz and a waiter was coming with a cloth to protect our delayed breakfast from the birds. I turned to look back into the room. Francis was watching me with interest.
Resuming the conversation, I said, ‘Well, in that case we had better get married.’
*
In September 2007 Francis published his twelfth book, Feasting. Turnbull’s threw a party for him at the Wallace Collection, Marylebone. Harry, as editor, gave an amusing speech. After our four-month resumption during those dark days of bereavement, he and I were getting along nicely. The launch was a grand affair, unusual by the standards of poetry publishing – eighty guests, champagne, a jazz quintet, a sit-down dinner presented by the River Cafe. Feasting included the cycle of love poems that Francis wrote after our Islington idyll. One of those, funny, lyrical and erotic, found its way into a movie, a romantic comedy, one of the big hits of the autumn season. Beautifully read by Francis for a voiceover during a love scene on a train, it caught the public mood. Tens of thousands, who had never bought a volume of poetry and especially not a hardback, picked up a copy in cinema foyers across the country and propelled the book onto the bestseller lists, among the murder and SAS novels. Francis was in a strange state, torn between exhilaration at this new form of celebrity and contempt for his new readers who had never heard of him and would soon forget him. But the serious press gave him the best notices he’d ever had. Looking back, I would say that Feasting was the peak of his career.
I was in a strange state too. This suddenly famous poem and the others in the cycle were about me. I knew the sequence from the typed pages Francis gave me as soon as he had finished. Eighteen months later, I was shocked to see in the bound proof that I was named and surnamed as the dedicatee in italics above the first of the nine poems. My body and my ‘inward’ temperament were also named. A mole on my thigh was itemised, and the rising notes of my ‘lyrical’ laughter, and what he called my ‘tasty lisp’, which I never knew I had. When I asked if it was a typo for ‘lips’ Francis smiled forgivingly. So it was me, it was him and me in our most private of moments, sliced open and pinned wide for public inspection, like a dissected frog in my long-ago school biology lessons. I did not complain, and later I was glad I hadn’t, for this was a vanishing process. It was me when I saw the proof, then me and not me when I saw my first finished copy, until finally, diluted and disseminated in multiple thousands of printed versions of myself, I faded into the typeface, and it was no longer me at all. What remained was not even a woman but a poetic convention, the shadow of a woman on the cave walls of a man’s imagination. The cycle became well known to readers of contemporary poetry and later was ravishingly set for tenor and string orchestra by Michael Berkeley. Francis and I were at the world premiere at the Maltings, Aldeburgh. We were both in tears. That was the night we were at our closest.
There exists an unregarded entanglement of memory and physical distance. Looking back at the so-called ‘Second Immortal Dinner’ from the remoteness of north-west Scotland, the images and sequence of events leading up to it are blurred not only by time but also by 500 miles. From up here, what happened down there years ago matters less. Jane finds the same. Our detachment has allowed us to tell each other almost everything. I have told her about my affair with her husband, Harry, now deceased. She has told me of her loathing for my husband, her brother, Francis, now deceased. We have tramped the wilderness of the Rough Bounds and talked of little else. We are both fit for our age, still good for fifteen miles. We have approved of each other’s plans. Harry’s archive has been moved to Fort William, where there is an annexe of the University of the Highlands and Islands. So far, no one has been to look at his papers. She has wanted my help, over time and successive visits, to smuggle his papers out and replace them with blank sheets or any old typed or handwritten pages we can find. I feel ashamed of my part in this, but I promised to be of use, and I understand her need to protect the family’s privacy. Harry made a fool of her over many years and neglected his children – with some assistance from me. We’ve made eight visits between us in two years. We have reader’s tickets to the archive, which is run to the highest standards. We fit our larceny expeditions around occasional shopping trips to Fort William. Our methods have become refined. Inconsequential stuff of Harry’s is left at the top of the piles in the document boxes. Trash is smuggled in lower down. The stuff of interest is smuggled out. We go to the library separately, months apart. The archivist there is friendly towards us and doesn’t know we are connected. Sometimes I have seen through the kitchen window Jane standing at the bottom of the garden in contemplation of the bonfire, the funeral pyre, she is tending. She needs to be alone.
I have told her that in a month or so, the curtain will come down on this book. It will terminate at a moment six years ago, in the Barn’s dairy late at night, October 2014, with me, a glass of water in my hand, warming myself in front of the log-burning stove. Jane has been supportive of the project. I’ve read to her the parts of my memoir that do not intimately concern Harry or the details of Percy’s death. Is it, she asked me on two occasions, a novel? Each time, I shrugged.
I’ve explained to her a decision I’ve taken that’s eccentric, even ludicrous. To my relief she has been sympathetic. ‘We’re allowed to be eccentric,’ she assured me, ‘I’m afraid we’ve reached that age!’ It had started two years before, when I was thinking again about Percy’s ashes, which I’ve yet to scatter. Headington was not right, nor was north Oxford. I was favouring a place on one of our big walks, perhaps along the banks of the River Evenlode where we often saw kingfishers. Then I thought of the Barn itself, in the garden, near the dairy. He would have loved that protected valley and its stream. He deserved to be there. Francis would have objected, and that may have lent some appeal to the project. Out of that idea grew the thought, or the reverie, of sending Percy’s Guarneri violin into the future with an explanatory page or two describing its maker and how he would have wanted the instrument to end up one day in the possession of a fine professional player.
When I described these vague fantasies in a phone call to Peter, he was immediately interested, for he’d adored his uncle. We started talking about ‘time capsules’, popular at the time with primary-school teachers and their pupils. As a physicist, Peter wanted to tell me about the Voyager satellites, one of which crossed the outer boundaries of the solar system after many years, ‘golden’ records attached to its sides with recordings of music and voices from around the planet. Peter became deeply engaged in my violin proposal. I told him that I sensed his eleven-year-old self bubbling up. He was amused, but he was also serious, and before I knew it, he had been in touch with the Bodleian about preservation methods. That was when I began reviewing the options for this document. Leaving it with Turnbull’s or any other publisher with a thirty-year embargo was a risk. Once I am out of the way and new editors come in, curiosity would overwhelm contractual undertakings given to a forgotten elderly lady. Same was true for the Bodleian once the present leadership have retired. The Francis Blundy story is, for scholars at least, too interesting. I could deposit these pages with a legal firm, but I can never forget Thomas Hardy’s will. He wanted to be buried in the rural backwater of Stinsford in the grave of his beloved Emma. But after he died, his body was torn open so that his heart could remain with her, while his ashes went to Westminster Abbey. Perhaps I was getting crusty as I approached my sixtieth birthday, but I trusted no one.
Then, I thought, why not put these pages in with Percy’s violin, bury them deep and leave them to fate? If my efforts here are discovered while I’m still alive, I’ll take what’s coming to me. It could even be a relief. It was mere fantasy, but once I had told Peter, the matter slipped out of my control. He came to Glenuig to stay for a few days. He was persuasive, irresistible. When he left, he took with him the ashes and the violin. I told him the size of paper I’m using and the likely thickness of the document but, of course, I couldn’t tell him what was in it.
There have been times when I’ve wondered if this burial business is plain foolish. It’s an old-fashioned boy’s adventure. Treasure Island! There’s also a shadow of sadness across it. It took me too long to realise that I had done this before, long ago, when I went with Rachel and my housemates on a stormy day in June and tried to bury little Diana’s blue teddy in Spa Fields. This second burial might be more successful. Whatever it is, it’s too late to call it back now. The kindly conservator at the Bodleian, Geraldine Smythe, has been in touch several times and she has told me that her department is enthusiastic and ready for me. Thanks to her, I’ve already taken delivery of a ream of handmade cotton-based paper from Ruscombe Paper Mill.
When I’ve finished and made my corrections, I’ll start printing. Double-sided please, Peter says, and single-spaced. This cotton paper, I’m told, will outlast any modern equivalent in which the cellulose from wood pulp rapidly degrades. Now I have come this far and have accepted the inevitable, I enjoy thinking about our plans. Jane will drive me to the railway stop at Lochailort to catch the local train to Fort William where I’ll pick up the night train to Euston, then onwards from Paddington to Oxford. The Bodleian’s Librarian, the distinguished and genial Richard Ovenden, will be waiting for me in his office with lunchtime sandwiches and a glass of wine. There is bound to be much talk of Scotland. I will return to him my twelve journals which will go back into the Blundy archive. Afterwards, he will pass me on to Geraldine Smythe and I’ll hand over this document for the preservation treatment. She asked me on the phone how long I expected the items to be in the ground. I told her possibly as much as thirty years. She is taking no chances and has chosen oxygen-free storage. As she has explained, my items will be placed in an airtight container. The air will be pumped out to provide an environment hostile to all life forms. A secondary container will contain silica gels to create a microclimate and keep the humidity low.
