What We Can Know, page 29
Last week, Peter sourced a stainless-steel airtight case which he’ll bring to the Bodleian the day after I’ve arrived, and that too will be lined with various chemicals. When all is ready and the case has been sealed, we’ll set off in his car to the Barn. The tenants have already received their six-month notice and the place will be empty. I’ll record a map reference for the dairy and disguise it somehow in my journal, which will be my last. Peter will dig the hole while I show an estate agent round the Barn and dairy. If he asks, I’ll tell him we are burying our old Pomeranian, fresh out of the freezer. Once Peter has filled in the hole, we’ll pour the ashes over the bare earth then linger there a while to recall a few things we loved about Percy. I’ll read a consolatory poem by James Fenton which encourages the living to make friends with the dead. The site will grow over quickly – nettles like disturbed ground – and the property will go on the market. The proceeds will buy a new kiln for Jane and together with Francis’s occasional royalties should certainly see us both to our ends. I like to run through all these arrangements last thing at night. They ease me into sleep.
*
Time and distance have obscured my memory of the order of events after Amorgos, a time of arrangements and upheavals. I had to consult my journal entries to be reminded that I cleared the Headington house of junk, mostly mine, and the place went on sale. I had no money to smarten it up and I did not want to ask Francis. I took them personally, the negative comments of viewers. The garden was a mess, Percy’s shed blocked daylight from the ground floor, the heating system was worn out, the stairs were too steep. I dropped my price. About the same time, the university offered me my job back, but I was no longer interested. I wanted another life. My college, taking pity on a bereaved colleague, found me some part-time hours. I taught seventeenth-century poetry on Mondays and Victorian novels on Thursdays. The Barn was not as ready as Francis had thought. There were drainage and septic-tank problems that required the builders to come back and take up the floor. After many years, my John Clare book went into a second printing. That encouraged me to take out the Aikenhead notes. At the end of that year Francis and I were quietly married in Oxford Town Hall. I invited Rachel, Francis invited Jane and Harry – he was surprisingly relaxed about the wedding. The five of us had dinner out at Raymond Blanc’s restaurant in Great Milton. I have no memory of the occasion. Jane tells me that it was merry, and she remembers being relieved that Francis paid.
We had been married four months before I moved to the Barn and took possession of the dairy. Francis was determined that we should merge our book collections. It was a kindly ambition for total union, but I had my doubts. If life became intolerable, I thought, I might have to run for it. (Sure enough, twelve years later, after Francis died, separating my books from his to take to the little cottage in Scotland was a huge and dull task. I had to pay a graduate student to help me.) The idyll Francis and I had often imagined evaded us. The day I arrived in the removal van, it was raining hard and continued to rain for weeks. The wettest May on record. When I said carelessly that climate change was to blame, Francis set off on one of his fugues and a row followed, partly settled by a bottle of wine. The rain exposed several leaks in the Barn’s new roof. Francis spent time shouting down the phone at stolid Vicenc, who was on a new job seventy miles away and insisted that the ‘snagging’ period had ended long ago. The architect backed him up. A vile mood settled on Francis which caused me to retreat to the dairy. What a gift that place was. I had to love him for that. It didn’t leak.
But now, with hours to myself and abundant silence, recent and distant events swarmed through my thoughts. They brought me to a state of paralysis. I used to sit and stare across the oak desk at my beautiful studio, listening to the haunting note the wind sometimes made as it swept round a corner of the Barn. My thoughts would be empty, or the past crowded in. Snatches of Victorian novels were in the mix along with my own tutorial voice from recent teaching, unnaturally emphatic, a sing-song of fake kindness with which I tried to protect a dim or lazy student. I had leisure now to make myself tense with old sorrow. When Percy loomed, healthy or sick, or face down in the hall, the source of two rivers of blood, I would leave the desk and lie on the bed. Once, after I had propped up her blue teddy on a shelf, Diana arrived with an infant shriek and her brother Christopher was there, on the platform, understanding nothing. Then the other horror again, Francis in black hat and shoulder bag tapping at my window.
For distraction, I made changes to the room, shifting a vase, fiddling with the coffee machine, polishing a polished wooden surface. My old compulsion to domestic order. But I conjured another persona for myself, a spoiled rich brat, feather-bedded and stifled by comfort, nothing to struggle for, lethargic among the soft furnishings, talentless. And Francis? Having murdered my husband to have me to himself, he was in his study fourteen, sometimes sixteen hours a day, writing essays on four American poets, Jarrell, Lowell, Hecht and Schwartz. All men. Who cared? I would have written on four women, if only I’d had the energy and purpose. Francis’s absence, his distraction when he emerged for meals, should have been my liberation into work. But that middle-aged brat could easily persuade herself she had been seduced, betrayed and deserted, like a pallid heroine in a Richardson novel.
It cannot have been so bad. My journal, as opposed to my memory, says we talked late at night, we had sex, I cooked some ambitious meals. When he was oppressed by work, I helped him with his correspondence. The following summer I began to explore the immediate countryside, usually alone, sometimes with Rachel or Peter, by then a gangly adolescent with a passion for maths and physics. When I walked alone, I longed for Percy. I missed his constant affection and curiosity about plants and creatures. Whenever I saw something interesting, I spoke to him in my thoughts about it. There were occasions when I glanced around to make sure no one could see or hear me, and I would sit on the grass and cry.
That first year at the Barn I was teaching courses at a summer school in Oxford for American students. Their enthusiasm bucked me up and in the autumn I finally made a start on the Aikenhead book. In a long opening section, I surveyed the intellectual and religious currents of the late seventeenth century. That meant spending time in London at the Royal Society, the Wellcome Trust Library and the British Library, and in Oxford at the Bodleian. I used to overnight at Rachel’s and did my best to get along with her husband, Michael. He seemed to disapprove of me on principle, but what that principle was, I never dared to ask. I noticed now that each time I came home, I loved the Barn a little more. It was glorious to be back. By then we had a small milieu who also loved the place. Jane and Harry, obviously. John and Tony, vet and a botanist, a gay couple. The novelist Mary Sheldrake and her rakish husband, Graham. Later, a young journalist, Harriet Gage, who wrote an approving profile of Francis, and Harriet’s husband Chris, who became useful around the Barn. There were many others, but this was our core, pleasingly diverse and helpful whenever they stayed the night, cooking, washing up and sorting out the bed linen.
The Gages’ appearance in our lives led to a trivial incident that has never left me and had some consequences for my private life. It concerned an adverb. After the Feasting fuss and Francis’s new fame had faded and a year had passed, he began to suffer from status anxiety. He was forgotten in the general memory, as poets usually are. When his publisher was approached by Vanity Fair for a profile, Francis, who did not get on well with journalists, agreed, to everyone’s surprise, especially mine. To Harriet, he was determined to be pleasant when she came out one afternoon, but he could not conceal his scepticism. He denied this, but he instinctively doubted the intellectual reach of anyone who had not been to Oxford, though he respected Cambridge scientists. Harriet was a graduate of Newcastle University. She knew his work, apparently quoted from it at the right moments and asked no foolish questions. She was also beautiful and charmingly kitted out from charity shops. If he had tender thoughts about her, she was well beyond his reach. Her manner was pleasantly professional and she told me on a later visit that she loved her husband. By the time she left, after a two-hour session with Francis and a stroll round the garden with me, he had softened towards her. He softened further when the interview came out. She gave him everything – ‘the first among equals’, ‘the voice the nation barely deserved’, ‘the deepest delver into our flawed but redeemable nature’ and then, in the final line, the ‘g’ word: ‘the uncontested genius of Francis Blundy’. The photographer also served him well, despite the poet’s rudeness to him and impatience. Francis was on the magazine cover, full-bleed, softly backlit in late-afternoon light, standing against a background of the valley and its stream, the solitary genius, conveying by creased brow limited forgiveness for humankind. He read the article several times and wanted to invite Harriet to lunch.
A month later, she came with her husband, Chris, and here was another social obstacle for Francis. He was relaxed giving instructions to workmen and shopkeepers, but he was uneasy when he had to be on the level with people without formal education. He did not know what terms of reference he should be using. Or it was simply contempt, or a little of both. Certain modes of pronunciation and common solecisms pained him. He could not believe in the intelligence of someone who pronounced glottal ‘t’s, or used a ‘was’ for a ‘were’.
Chris was a tall fellow, slender and strong-looking. Very agreeable, I thought. He had not said much at lunch, so I brought him into the conversation and asked him about his work. He was explaining how he sometimes helped out at a children’s theatre, which hopefully would be getting some lottery money. Francis could stand it no more.
‘Chris, I beg you. In this household, never say “hopefully”.’
The young man looked from Francis to Harriet, then back to Francis. ‘What was that?’
Two glottals in three words would not have helped.
‘Hopefully,’ Francis explained. ‘It’s not a word. You’re murdering the language. Don’t say it.’
Chris shook his head and continued telling me about his work. When the couple had left, I confronted Francis and told him he had been unpleasant and boorish.
He said, ‘What’s that girl doing with him? He’s a fucking moron.’
‘Nonsense.’
‘Then he shouldn’t talk like one.’
I also kept a close account of the next evening the Gages came to see us. It was six weeks later and this time we had Harry and Jane, and it was supper. It was a warm evening and we had been sitting out in the garden drinking. At table indoors the conversation turned to the aftermath of the Great Recession. In reply to a question from Harry, Chris Gage said that, hopefully, business would be picking up in the line of work he had been doing lately, which was marquee tents for weddings.
Francis cut in, genuinely irritated. ‘Hopefully again. Drives me mad. Chris, do the right thing. Cast it out.’
There was sudden silence. Chris put down his knife and fork, sat back and folded his arms. He spoke in grave terms, and I suspected that he had used the forbidden word deliberately and had done some work on it. ‘I wasn’t using the word as an adverb to mean “in a hopeful manner”, you know, qualifying the nearest verb. It’s a sentence adverb, Mr Blundy, it refers to the speaker’s attitude, my attitude and—’
‘Thanks, Chris. I don’t need a lesson from you in sentence adverbs.’
‘I think you do.’
The silence tightened. For once, Francis was too amazed to speak.
I had the impression that Chris was hamming up his soft cockney. Every ‘th’ was an ‘f’, all ‘t’s emphatically glottal.
He repeated, ‘I think you do. If you throw out poor old hopefully, to be consistent you’ll have to throw out a lot of other sentence adverbs doing the same work. If I say, seriously, you’re wrong, I’m not talking about the way you’re wrong. I’m talking about the way I’m telling you this. And if I say, frankly, I don’t like being talked down to, I mean I’m being frank. Admittedly – that is, I admit – this is your house, but please don’t tell me how to speak. Bluntly, it’s rude. So, if you’ll get off my back, Mr Blundy, then hopefully we’ll get along, which means not only that I hope we will, but I’m making a hopeful prediction.’
At this point, things could have gone very wrong. I had seen Francis spiral into a rage at far less, but Harry intruded with a loud bark of a laugh. ‘Francis. You are screwed.’
And so, the tension began to ease and my husband had the good sense to concede – there was no sensible alternative – and join the laughter that was gathering round the table. He said to Chris, ‘You make a good case and, surely, I owe you an apology.’
Chris leaned towards Francis and they clinked glasses, and from that time on, now it was clear that Chris was not to be pushed around, they got along well. Over time, he came out to solve many of the Barn’s problems. He fixed the leaks on the roof, sorted out the septic tank and arranged the quadrupling of our computers’ download speeds. Later, during that same evening, Jane asked Chris how he came to know so much about grammar.
‘I don’t know a thing. First time Francis jumped down my throat, I looked on Harriet’s shelves. She pointed me towards Burchfield’s Fowler and a bloke called Pinker. Seems like some ignorant snob years back picked on hopefully, and a mob of so-called educated speakers got intimidated and joined in and scared each other into never using the word and crapping on anyone who did. Pathetic!’
Soon after the adverbial supper, Francis left for New York to give a reading at the Y. I didn’t want to go. Chris came out to do some work on a fence. On the first day, just as he was leaving, I offered him tea and cake in the dairy. He was cheerful company and we had a good time. It was my idea to take him into the bedroom. He kept saying, ‘Are you sure about this?’ I was sure. Perhaps he was a stand-in for Thomas Aikenhead. For an adult, Chris had astonishing childlike eyelashes, long and dark. Naked, he was a delightful surprise. I’d forgotten what young bodies were like. My lovers had aged with or ahead of me. One gets used to the cushioning blubber around older men’s bellies. Long ago, when men’s stomachs were taut, I didn’t stop to think it was because they were young. It was simply the human form.
The fencing work took longer than Chris had expected. On the fifth day, I told him this was our last. Francis would soon be back. Chris nodded and smiled, and when he was about to leave he kissed me on the cheek and said simply, ‘Thank you,’ and I squeezed his arm and said, ‘Thank you.’ It was the cleanest ending to a brief affair I’d ever known. But it started something and soon I was restless. The dairy, I now understood, was the perfect place. Three weeks later, Francis went to a literary festival in Jamaica. Once he had phoned to report he had landed safely, I thought I would invite Harry out for supper. I don’t know what he told Jane, but the evening went well, and I soothed my conscience with the certainty that Francis would be seizing his own pleasures in the Caribbean.
Harry and I settled into an opportunistic routine. Whenever Francis was away, and once I was sure he was at his destination, Harry would come out to our place. We still took trouble to bolt ourselves in the dairy against an unexpected return and leave open the back door for a quick escape. Harry always parked a ten-minute walk away. By this time he was in his late fifties, but as a lover he was unchanged, adept and considerate, and as detached as ever. It was, of course, pleasing that he still found me attractive. He was in discussions about writing Francis’s biography and for reasons I cannot justify, this added spice to our renewed affair. I liked to tease Harry about it. Would he write about us, would we have a whole chapter to ourselves? We snatched our times together, just as we always had, and perhaps this was the only way we could flourish. We managed several years, until he became ill. The only tense moments between us came after my birthday dinner. By then matters had deteriorated between Francis and me and I was travelling to Oxford to see Harry at his old Summertown flat. I told everyone, including my journal, that I was visiting nephew Peter in London. During that time, Harry was wild about the Corona and wanted me to let him see it. He was Francis’s editor and it was a reasonable request. He kept on at me. I refused many times and finally wrote him a terse letter. It went something like, ‘I’ve made arrangements. I don’t want to talk about it, and I don’t want you to ask me ever again.’ That note must have gone onto Jane’s bonfire.
*
As of two weeks ago, the Kitchener archive at the University of the Highlands and Islands contains only junk, including playbills, obituary notices of friends, menus from black-tie book-prize feasts and letters from conveyancing solicitors. Deeper down in the boxes are pages we pulled from wastepaper baskets, anonymised and with dates scored out. There are twenty-seven boxes in the archive and it would take a scholar two or three weeks to establish that there is nothing useful there. In his lifetime Harry had no reputation in Scotland, but one day, Blundy scholars will take an interest. I was sorry for Harry’s memory, for he and I had some good times. But Jane was determined to obliterate him. There must have been references to me that she saw before they went on the bonfire. I was amazed that she bore me no grudge. When I asked, she insisted that women could never resist Harry. By the weak logic of the lovelorn or from a wish to avoid conflict with me, she blamed only him. I said nothing. We remain happy companions in the safe confines of the unsaid. After she found an unusual vein of clay in a hill above Smirisary, her vases, teapots and dinner plates have found a fair distribution on the Ardnamurchan peninsula.
She works in a lean-to shed at the back of the house. I like to take my morning coffee and watch her throw a pot and cradle it as it spins in her tender wet hands. She adopts an intent maternal gaze as she wills the clay into shape. But from the kitchen I sometimes hear a howl of fury as the kiln lets her down again. On our long walks we talk about our departed husbands and what our marriages tell us about ourselves. Over many years, Jane threw Harry out three times, then missed him and took him back, even when she knew he would not keep his promises. Finally, she put up with the affairs for the sake of the children and the marriage. She loved him and thought she could not live without him. After he died, she found she could, most pleasurably, and that was when her retrospective anger took hold. She had brought up the children alone, ran the household, worked long hours into the night in her studio, while Harry lived the carefree life of a single man. ‘He barely knew the names of his kids.’
