What We Can Know, page 3
Certain lines ran through my thoughts like old-fashioned ticker tape. Then a voice was reading them in the light tenor of a young man, my younger self. If I didn’t feel young, I could at least remember how it once felt.
Again, he played with the idea of publishing. Vivien would not object. But the intimacy and weight of the gift would be reduced.
His mad scheme was also bold. The Corona was addressed to her, profoundly addressed. He must remain true to his original plan, and so in a burst of self-praise, he indulged some thrilled contemplation of his achievement, of how its 210 lines had not been cramped by the demands of the form but had kept instead
a warm conversational tone, also lyrical, wise, also loving, also playful. It loves the natural world more than I do. Good on flow of passing time, on nature, on murder of what she loves. Rhymes unforced. Rhythm, like melody by Purcell, nicely sprung against iambic ground.
He thought it was too good not to escape into the public realm one day. But he did not need to be the one to set it free, and there was no hurry.
He stood by the bedroom window drying his shivering body. Coming up the valley, partly hidden among the trees, was an old Renault with running boards, a car that always reminded him of Chicago gangster movies. Somewhere for a thug to stand with a machine gun. He glimpsed a white shirt-sleeved elbow protruding through the driver’s open window. The car was moving slowly, barely ten miles per hour. Tony Spufford, a professor of botany, and John Bale, a vet, were taking in the valley’s glorious russet light. They would surely love this poem. They would not understand it. But Vivien would.
He dressed quickly, took the rolled-up vellum from his desk and went into the sitting room. Vivien had gone back into the garden with Mary. Graham wasn’t in sight. Francis watched through the sliding doors as the novelist stooped to examine the raised beds. At the sound of a voice calling, the two women turned to greet Tony and John. They all knew each other from their north Oxford years. Francis came away. He felt comfortable in his thoughts and would rather have done without company, even if it included old friends. But soon it would be six and time for a drink. Then he would feel differently. His arthritic right hand would not allow him to work a corkscrew, but with his thumbs he could ease the stopper off a bottle of gin, he could get out the flask, ice, lemon and tonic and fill the flask. He went into the dining room and slipped the scroll behind the mantel clock. We know from digital photographs that its faded yellow dial was supported by two cherubs. The pouting smile of one was distorted into a toothless grimace of pain by a crack in the polished wood. It had been like that for thirty years, while its companion had remained cheerful.
Fifteen minutes later they were in the kitchen except for Mary and Graham who were in their room. Those with good hearing may have heard raised voices. Vivien drained the parboiled potatoes and put the quail in the oven on a low heat. Tony and John were watching Francis’s method with their drinks. He had filled a two-litre vacuum flask with ice, one part gin and two parts cold tonic. He added lemon chunks to four of the ten tumblers lined up and poured. Plenty left for a second round and for the visitors yet to arrive. They were about to lift their glasses to Vivien when the G-and-Ms appeared, flushed and in need of a drink. They all lifted their glasses in a birthday toast. It was a strong mix, they agreed, and you could taste the herb-infused gin. When someone asked John Bale how his practice was doing, he told a story about an operation he had performed that morning on a little girl’s tortoise. It was suffering from a stomach blockage. In the theatre he turned the creature on its back and held it steady.
‘I was about to give the Saffan anaesthetic when the fellow brought his old head slowly out of his shell and gave me this long look. We stared at each other. You know, he looked so intelligent. Like ET. A million years old. He seemed to be saying, Am I about to die? Do you really know what you’re doing? And I actually began to wonder if I did. I gave the injection and these leathery lids rolled down over his eyes. First incision, then it was straightforward. You know, the inside of a tortoise is a thing of beauty.’
According to Mary Sheldrake’s journal, Francis invoked Larkin. ‘The tortoise was right. “The anaesthetic from which none come round.”’
‘The girl came with her dad after school to see the dozy patient in his cage. She cradled him in her arms and cried for joy. Just eight years old. Quite a scene.’
This detail caused Vivien to turn away to spread olive oil, salt and pepper over the potatoes.
The exchanges were recorded or invented by Vivien and Mary. Tony said, ‘Until I met John, I didn’t know they did surgery on reptiles. A while ago he did a snake with a broken back.’
‘Grass snake, crushed spine. But she came through.’
After John had told how he had operated on the snake, Francis said, ‘Who’d like another drink?’
‘A few years back,’ John Bale said, ‘this old-school vet in Buffalo, New York told me that tortoises don’t feel pain. He’d pop his patient in the fridge the night before to make it sleepy and then set to.’
When Francis reached for the flask, Graham was the first to hold out his glass. He said, ‘If you’re an animal in our world you’re better off with fur and big eyes.’
‘Doesn’t stop us slaughtering sheep.’
They heard a car pulling up outside and in the kitchen there was a sense of relief. Tortoise injection, crushed snake and slaughter had lowered the festive atmosphere. Mary could not dispel an image of John bent over his scalpel, slicing into a bleeding snake with extruding innards. Tyre marks on the patterned skin! She thought she would not be able to eat. Quietly, she asked for water.
Vivien suspected that something was upsetting Graham and Mary. Their voices were constricted or flat.
Together the company took their drinks outside to greet the Kitcheners, Harry and Jane, sister of Francis. They were both well built and tall. It was quite something, to watch them emerge from their car, unfolding themselves into the dusk and stretching their arms. Harold T. Kitchener was also a poet, not much read, for his work was difficult, with frequent allusions to Italian Renaissance painting and sculpture and Hindu gods. He was also Blundy’s editor at one of the grand publishing houses and had become a fierce arbiter of contemporary poetry and a champion of his brother-in-law’s work, about which he had written two books. Whether their friendship was independent of that fact or because of it was discussed among a younger generation of poets. But it hardly mattered. Where the Blundy oeuvre was concerned, Blundy shared Harry’s high regard. Harry had agreed after much discussion to be his brother-in-law’s biographer, but had recently changed his mind for reasons unknown, and had not yet told Francis. Now the two men embraced, then Jane, a professional potter, took her turn, and when all the hugging was done – there were no strangers here – they went inside and Francis poured the welcoming drinks. The Kitcheners had some catching up to do, and there was still plenty for the last couple, who had been delayed because their baby would not settle.
The sun was down. With a clear sky, the temperature, so the records show, dropped within the hour to eleven degrees. My sources for the evening stretch across the entire company and are collated here. Email and social media traffic are held centrally these days, and easily accessed by those who work for an institution. Where necessary, I have added a few touches, but always within the bounds of the highly probable.
Vivien was on her way across the room to the fireplace but was intercepted by John and Tony, who were concerned by how much she took on and liked to tease her about it. While they got the fire going and brought in more logs from the shed outside, she went back to the kitchen to make a salad. Jane and Mary insisted on helping. As always, she resisted, then allowed them to lay the table. Francis, Graham and Harry, vaguely aware of work going on around them, protected their conversation by moving further away. Two years before, Sir ‘Jimmy’ Savile, a radio and TV personality, friend to the young and disadvantaged, supporter of charities, close to certain of the royals and the former prime minister, Mrs Thatcher, and knighted by the queen, had been revealed as a monster, a rapist, a serial abuser of children, even very ill children. There were rumours of necrophilia. A TV documentary had been repeated recently. A few months before, the Secretary of State for Health had given an apology in Parliament to those who had suffered abuse as children while staying in state-run hospitals and care homes.
Harry said, ‘Do you remember people saying, “I always knew he was a wrong’un. I always thought there was something fishy about that bastard”? But where were they, when we needed them?’
‘Savile hid in plain sight,’ Graham said. ‘Came on as a grotesque. Then look.’
Francis took their empty glasses. ‘Another one? Can it be true? How could he have sex with corpses in a morgue undetected?’
‘Friends in low places.’
They laughed mournfully and at that moment there was a crash and a cry from Jane of ‘Fuck!’ across the kitchen. Mary had let slip from her wet hands a large salad bowl, one that Jane had thrown and painted ten years ago as a wedding present for her brother and Vivien. It had smashed and scattered across the flagstones. Now she and Mary were stooping to gather up the bits. Vivien was trying to soothe them both.
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘But that was bloody stupid. I’m so sorry. So sorry!’
‘Really, it’s OK.’
Jane said, ‘I can do them another.’
‘I’m so ashamed!’
‘Mary, it’s OK.’
When the larger pieces were on a newspaper in piles and Tony had finished with a brush and dustpan, Vivien and Jane embraced Mary, Savile was set aside, and all was well again as they drifted towards the fire.
5
At the Bodleian I sometimes wonder if I’m suffering some mild form of dementia. If I look up from my papers and peep over the carrel’s partition at the room and its silent scholars, I can believe that I’m in a dream, and that my waking reality is within the pages in my hands, that I’m at the Barn with these friends gathering for an evening to celebrate Vivien and hear a new Francis Blundy poem. I could have been there. I am there. I know all that they knew – and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths. That they are both vivid and absent is painful. They can move me and touch me, but I cannot touch them. Sustained historical research is a dance with strangers I have come to love, and there are still two guests to arrive.
The baby, whose name was Todd, was eight months old and would not stop crying. He was being walked up and down the sitting room by his father, Chris Gage. The fifteen-year-old babysitter, Jess, watched from the sofa. She had three younger siblings by her mother’s second marriage and believed that she knew what to do, but that it would be impolite to say so. Todd’s mother, Harriet, hurried in with a bottle of pink viscous fluid and a plastic spoon. There were murmured commands and a tussle around the baby’s wide-open mouth as the screams grew louder. In the cramped living room of a small terraced house on Observatory Street, Oxford, the sound was overwhelming. The parents were distraught. Todd was their first child and their feelings of love for him were unexpectedly disorienting. Awareness of their incompetence and helplessness on display before a young stranger had a numbing effect. They stood irresolutely in the centre of the room, somehow holding the baby between them, and looked wounded as Todd reached for his highest note yet. This was to be their first night out together since the birth. Clearly, too soon.
At last Jess stood and raised her voice to offer to take a turn. They handed Todd across. Softly singing a nursery song in what sounded like fluent French, the babysitter walked out of the room, and slowly up the stairs, then down, pausing halfway, then up and, after five minutes, down again, this time empty-handed. There was silence. She had put Todd in his cot.
‘On his back?’ both parents said quickly.
Fifteen minutes later, Chris and Harriet were in their car, heading north out of town. They would only be an hour late, they kept telling each other.
‘So don’t race,’ Harriet said.
They silently contemplated a collision and the course of Todd’s orphaned life. Chris was thirty years old. He and those like him – this is from Vivien’s journal – had recently come to the attention of sociologists for defying the usual categories and representing an interesting shift within the general population: reasonably well educated, but not to the heights, no fixed careers, placed quality of life above income, shifted jobs often, were not officially classified as skilled, read books and watched art-house movies sometimes, followed music trends, travelled well, were socially tolerant, not politically engaged, rarely voted, used drugs without giving them much thought, had little in the way of savings, enjoyed wide friendships. Chris left school at sixteen, had talked his way into agricultural college and left after a year. During the next six years he worked in a warehouse, was an assistant stage manager in a rep theatre, worked in a local-authority call centre, then in a racing-bike shop, then trained to be a men’s hairdresser and worked in one of the new-wave barbers around Bloomsbury and Farringdon – industrial light fittings, white-tiled walls, bare floorboards, cutting-edge piped music. Two years later he moved on. He was good with his hands and worked for a friend who set up a shopfitting concern. After marrying Harriet, his girlfriend from schooldays, and they had moved to Oxford, into the house that Harriet’s estate-agent parents had found for them, Chris built or fixed things for people, arranged things, delivered things, was a good carpenter, could bring in the right people, and was generally known around north and east Oxford and Jericho as a capable guy you could trust.
Still Vivien: Harriet was more mainstream. English degree from the University of Newcastle, a spell for a local newspaper there, then freelance in London, eventually writing profiles for magazines. She was known for dependability rather than brilliance. Francis Blundy had a reputation for being foul to journalists. Three writers had turned down a profile commission for a magazine called Vanity Fair before a desperate editor approached Harriet. No one knew that the poet was going through a period of self-doubt and was anxious about his standing and, untypically, keen to be liked by the young woman who arrived at the Barn with flowers and a box of chocolates.
She was intelligent and beautiful, she talked sensibly about his work. Afterwards, Vivien walked her round the garden and liked her too. Harriet’s article cast Francis Blundy as the rugged genius whose flinty exterior concealed a kindly heart, and as a profoundly sensitive, humorous and knowing figure now working at the unmatched heights of his art. The poet was content. Harriet and Chris were invited to lunch and it went well. But Francis couldn’t quite place or understand the young man and his mild cockney accent. Seemed a bit dim and had never read a book. Only after Chris had repaired the Barn’s leaking roof, increased the internet download speed, updated the poet’s ancient computer and introduced him to an excellent physiotherapist willing to drive out from Oxford was he accepted. Vivien took to the couple. When Chris expressed an interest in physics, she arranged for the Gages to come to dinner with nephew Peter. She later became close to Harriet once she was pregnant. A daughter at last, a grandchild-substitute in prospect. The Gages asked the Blundys to be Todd’s godparents.
Harriet and Chris were familiar enough at the Barn to let themselves in without knocking. As they entered the sitting room, the company stood. The gin and tonics were a memory now. Three empty wine bottles clustered on a nearby table. When the embraces were done – the couple was known to all – Vivien asked Harriet how it was going with poor Todd. Harriet answered that he was neither dead nor awake and everyone laughed agreeably and made space around the fire.
The subject was climate change, the mild term by which it was still known. That again. It was a major theme for Francis, and Harriet had tactfully excluded his opinions from her profile. He was, as someone had once said, a nuanced denier, but if opposed, a denier to his core. He had the knack in argument of making dissenting opinions appear like personal hostility. Most of his friends disagreed with him, and a few social occasions had been marred by raised voices. Now, when the issue came up, they tended to let him run on until the subject could be changed. They believed that the views of a poet made no difference to the earth’s fate and it was never worth making old Blundy furious. He derived his analysis from the press – a former solicitor turned columnist, an Australian poet and critic, an ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer.
What was animating Francis now was a radio item that morning about a leak from the UN’s intergovernmental panel. Its report was not due yet, but someone highly placed had divulged that alarm was spreading among the hundreds of contributing climate scientists. The community of nations was heading in the wrong direction at increasing speed. Here came the stultifying incantation: floods, droughts, typhoons and hurricanes, forest fires – increase in frequency noted; measurements across diverse scientific disciplines had confirmed accelerating ocean acidification, polar ice melt, glacier retreat, sea-level rises, land surface temperatures pushing upwards. Colossal migration, pandemics, resource wars and species extinction predicted – and so it went on. Francis was angrily unimpressed. Usefully, Harriet had transcribed her entire interview tape and kept the file. We can assume he made the same points that evening.
Interesting to note that in the mid-2030s, ‘the Derangement’, respectfully capitalised, came into general usage as shorthand for the usual list of global heating’s consequences – a litany that wearied activists and sceptics alike. The term suggested not only madness but the vengeful fury of weather systems. There was also a hint at collective responsibility for our innate cognitive bias in favour of short-term comfort over long-term benefits. Humanity itself was deranged. The term did not stretch to include the related Metaphysical Gloom – the collapse of belief in a future, or more specifically, the fading of a belief in progress.
Blundy pressed on as the young couple found their seats and were given a drink. It was obvious to any fool that this was a gravy train. Hundreds of left-leaning so-called scientists and their bureaucratic masters needed to keep frightening us to maintain a flow of lucrative funding. Naturally, they skewed their data. For example, the ocean was not rising to envelop Tuvalu. The geology was clear. Tuvalu was sinking!
Again, he played with the idea of publishing. Vivien would not object. But the intimacy and weight of the gift would be reduced.
His mad scheme was also bold. The Corona was addressed to her, profoundly addressed. He must remain true to his original plan, and so in a burst of self-praise, he indulged some thrilled contemplation of his achievement, of how its 210 lines had not been cramped by the demands of the form but had kept instead
a warm conversational tone, also lyrical, wise, also loving, also playful. It loves the natural world more than I do. Good on flow of passing time, on nature, on murder of what she loves. Rhymes unforced. Rhythm, like melody by Purcell, nicely sprung against iambic ground.
He thought it was too good not to escape into the public realm one day. But he did not need to be the one to set it free, and there was no hurry.
He stood by the bedroom window drying his shivering body. Coming up the valley, partly hidden among the trees, was an old Renault with running boards, a car that always reminded him of Chicago gangster movies. Somewhere for a thug to stand with a machine gun. He glimpsed a white shirt-sleeved elbow protruding through the driver’s open window. The car was moving slowly, barely ten miles per hour. Tony Spufford, a professor of botany, and John Bale, a vet, were taking in the valley’s glorious russet light. They would surely love this poem. They would not understand it. But Vivien would.
He dressed quickly, took the rolled-up vellum from his desk and went into the sitting room. Vivien had gone back into the garden with Mary. Graham wasn’t in sight. Francis watched through the sliding doors as the novelist stooped to examine the raised beds. At the sound of a voice calling, the two women turned to greet Tony and John. They all knew each other from their north Oxford years. Francis came away. He felt comfortable in his thoughts and would rather have done without company, even if it included old friends. But soon it would be six and time for a drink. Then he would feel differently. His arthritic right hand would not allow him to work a corkscrew, but with his thumbs he could ease the stopper off a bottle of gin, he could get out the flask, ice, lemon and tonic and fill the flask. He went into the dining room and slipped the scroll behind the mantel clock. We know from digital photographs that its faded yellow dial was supported by two cherubs. The pouting smile of one was distorted into a toothless grimace of pain by a crack in the polished wood. It had been like that for thirty years, while its companion had remained cheerful.
Fifteen minutes later they were in the kitchen except for Mary and Graham who were in their room. Those with good hearing may have heard raised voices. Vivien drained the parboiled potatoes and put the quail in the oven on a low heat. Tony and John were watching Francis’s method with their drinks. He had filled a two-litre vacuum flask with ice, one part gin and two parts cold tonic. He added lemon chunks to four of the ten tumblers lined up and poured. Plenty left for a second round and for the visitors yet to arrive. They were about to lift their glasses to Vivien when the G-and-Ms appeared, flushed and in need of a drink. They all lifted their glasses in a birthday toast. It was a strong mix, they agreed, and you could taste the herb-infused gin. When someone asked John Bale how his practice was doing, he told a story about an operation he had performed that morning on a little girl’s tortoise. It was suffering from a stomach blockage. In the theatre he turned the creature on its back and held it steady.
‘I was about to give the Saffan anaesthetic when the fellow brought his old head slowly out of his shell and gave me this long look. We stared at each other. You know, he looked so intelligent. Like ET. A million years old. He seemed to be saying, Am I about to die? Do you really know what you’re doing? And I actually began to wonder if I did. I gave the injection and these leathery lids rolled down over his eyes. First incision, then it was straightforward. You know, the inside of a tortoise is a thing of beauty.’
According to Mary Sheldrake’s journal, Francis invoked Larkin. ‘The tortoise was right. “The anaesthetic from which none come round.”’
‘The girl came with her dad after school to see the dozy patient in his cage. She cradled him in her arms and cried for joy. Just eight years old. Quite a scene.’
This detail caused Vivien to turn away to spread olive oil, salt and pepper over the potatoes.
The exchanges were recorded or invented by Vivien and Mary. Tony said, ‘Until I met John, I didn’t know they did surgery on reptiles. A while ago he did a snake with a broken back.’
‘Grass snake, crushed spine. But she came through.’
After John had told how he had operated on the snake, Francis said, ‘Who’d like another drink?’
‘A few years back,’ John Bale said, ‘this old-school vet in Buffalo, New York told me that tortoises don’t feel pain. He’d pop his patient in the fridge the night before to make it sleepy and then set to.’
When Francis reached for the flask, Graham was the first to hold out his glass. He said, ‘If you’re an animal in our world you’re better off with fur and big eyes.’
‘Doesn’t stop us slaughtering sheep.’
They heard a car pulling up outside and in the kitchen there was a sense of relief. Tortoise injection, crushed snake and slaughter had lowered the festive atmosphere. Mary could not dispel an image of John bent over his scalpel, slicing into a bleeding snake with extruding innards. Tyre marks on the patterned skin! She thought she would not be able to eat. Quietly, she asked for water.
Vivien suspected that something was upsetting Graham and Mary. Their voices were constricted or flat.
Together the company took their drinks outside to greet the Kitcheners, Harry and Jane, sister of Francis. They were both well built and tall. It was quite something, to watch them emerge from their car, unfolding themselves into the dusk and stretching their arms. Harold T. Kitchener was also a poet, not much read, for his work was difficult, with frequent allusions to Italian Renaissance painting and sculpture and Hindu gods. He was also Blundy’s editor at one of the grand publishing houses and had become a fierce arbiter of contemporary poetry and a champion of his brother-in-law’s work, about which he had written two books. Whether their friendship was independent of that fact or because of it was discussed among a younger generation of poets. But it hardly mattered. Where the Blundy oeuvre was concerned, Blundy shared Harry’s high regard. Harry had agreed after much discussion to be his brother-in-law’s biographer, but had recently changed his mind for reasons unknown, and had not yet told Francis. Now the two men embraced, then Jane, a professional potter, took her turn, and when all the hugging was done – there were no strangers here – they went inside and Francis poured the welcoming drinks. The Kitcheners had some catching up to do, and there was still plenty for the last couple, who had been delayed because their baby would not settle.
The sun was down. With a clear sky, the temperature, so the records show, dropped within the hour to eleven degrees. My sources for the evening stretch across the entire company and are collated here. Email and social media traffic are held centrally these days, and easily accessed by those who work for an institution. Where necessary, I have added a few touches, but always within the bounds of the highly probable.
Vivien was on her way across the room to the fireplace but was intercepted by John and Tony, who were concerned by how much she took on and liked to tease her about it. While they got the fire going and brought in more logs from the shed outside, she went back to the kitchen to make a salad. Jane and Mary insisted on helping. As always, she resisted, then allowed them to lay the table. Francis, Graham and Harry, vaguely aware of work going on around them, protected their conversation by moving further away. Two years before, Sir ‘Jimmy’ Savile, a radio and TV personality, friend to the young and disadvantaged, supporter of charities, close to certain of the royals and the former prime minister, Mrs Thatcher, and knighted by the queen, had been revealed as a monster, a rapist, a serial abuser of children, even very ill children. There were rumours of necrophilia. A TV documentary had been repeated recently. A few months before, the Secretary of State for Health had given an apology in Parliament to those who had suffered abuse as children while staying in state-run hospitals and care homes.
Harry said, ‘Do you remember people saying, “I always knew he was a wrong’un. I always thought there was something fishy about that bastard”? But where were they, when we needed them?’
‘Savile hid in plain sight,’ Graham said. ‘Came on as a grotesque. Then look.’
Francis took their empty glasses. ‘Another one? Can it be true? How could he have sex with corpses in a morgue undetected?’
‘Friends in low places.’
They laughed mournfully and at that moment there was a crash and a cry from Jane of ‘Fuck!’ across the kitchen. Mary had let slip from her wet hands a large salad bowl, one that Jane had thrown and painted ten years ago as a wedding present for her brother and Vivien. It had smashed and scattered across the flagstones. Now she and Mary were stooping to gather up the bits. Vivien was trying to soothe them both.
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘But that was bloody stupid. I’m so sorry. So sorry!’
‘Really, it’s OK.’
Jane said, ‘I can do them another.’
‘I’m so ashamed!’
‘Mary, it’s OK.’
When the larger pieces were on a newspaper in piles and Tony had finished with a brush and dustpan, Vivien and Jane embraced Mary, Savile was set aside, and all was well again as they drifted towards the fire.
5
At the Bodleian I sometimes wonder if I’m suffering some mild form of dementia. If I look up from my papers and peep over the carrel’s partition at the room and its silent scholars, I can believe that I’m in a dream, and that my waking reality is within the pages in my hands, that I’m at the Barn with these friends gathering for an evening to celebrate Vivien and hear a new Francis Blundy poem. I could have been there. I am there. I know all that they knew – and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths. That they are both vivid and absent is painful. They can move me and touch me, but I cannot touch them. Sustained historical research is a dance with strangers I have come to love, and there are still two guests to arrive.
The baby, whose name was Todd, was eight months old and would not stop crying. He was being walked up and down the sitting room by his father, Chris Gage. The fifteen-year-old babysitter, Jess, watched from the sofa. She had three younger siblings by her mother’s second marriage and believed that she knew what to do, but that it would be impolite to say so. Todd’s mother, Harriet, hurried in with a bottle of pink viscous fluid and a plastic spoon. There were murmured commands and a tussle around the baby’s wide-open mouth as the screams grew louder. In the cramped living room of a small terraced house on Observatory Street, Oxford, the sound was overwhelming. The parents were distraught. Todd was their first child and their feelings of love for him were unexpectedly disorienting. Awareness of their incompetence and helplessness on display before a young stranger had a numbing effect. They stood irresolutely in the centre of the room, somehow holding the baby between them, and looked wounded as Todd reached for his highest note yet. This was to be their first night out together since the birth. Clearly, too soon.
At last Jess stood and raised her voice to offer to take a turn. They handed Todd across. Softly singing a nursery song in what sounded like fluent French, the babysitter walked out of the room, and slowly up the stairs, then down, pausing halfway, then up and, after five minutes, down again, this time empty-handed. There was silence. She had put Todd in his cot.
‘On his back?’ both parents said quickly.
Fifteen minutes later, Chris and Harriet were in their car, heading north out of town. They would only be an hour late, they kept telling each other.
‘So don’t race,’ Harriet said.
They silently contemplated a collision and the course of Todd’s orphaned life. Chris was thirty years old. He and those like him – this is from Vivien’s journal – had recently come to the attention of sociologists for defying the usual categories and representing an interesting shift within the general population: reasonably well educated, but not to the heights, no fixed careers, placed quality of life above income, shifted jobs often, were not officially classified as skilled, read books and watched art-house movies sometimes, followed music trends, travelled well, were socially tolerant, not politically engaged, rarely voted, used drugs without giving them much thought, had little in the way of savings, enjoyed wide friendships. Chris left school at sixteen, had talked his way into agricultural college and left after a year. During the next six years he worked in a warehouse, was an assistant stage manager in a rep theatre, worked in a local-authority call centre, then in a racing-bike shop, then trained to be a men’s hairdresser and worked in one of the new-wave barbers around Bloomsbury and Farringdon – industrial light fittings, white-tiled walls, bare floorboards, cutting-edge piped music. Two years later he moved on. He was good with his hands and worked for a friend who set up a shopfitting concern. After marrying Harriet, his girlfriend from schooldays, and they had moved to Oxford, into the house that Harriet’s estate-agent parents had found for them, Chris built or fixed things for people, arranged things, delivered things, was a good carpenter, could bring in the right people, and was generally known around north and east Oxford and Jericho as a capable guy you could trust.
Still Vivien: Harriet was more mainstream. English degree from the University of Newcastle, a spell for a local newspaper there, then freelance in London, eventually writing profiles for magazines. She was known for dependability rather than brilliance. Francis Blundy had a reputation for being foul to journalists. Three writers had turned down a profile commission for a magazine called Vanity Fair before a desperate editor approached Harriet. No one knew that the poet was going through a period of self-doubt and was anxious about his standing and, untypically, keen to be liked by the young woman who arrived at the Barn with flowers and a box of chocolates.
She was intelligent and beautiful, she talked sensibly about his work. Afterwards, Vivien walked her round the garden and liked her too. Harriet’s article cast Francis Blundy as the rugged genius whose flinty exterior concealed a kindly heart, and as a profoundly sensitive, humorous and knowing figure now working at the unmatched heights of his art. The poet was content. Harriet and Chris were invited to lunch and it went well. But Francis couldn’t quite place or understand the young man and his mild cockney accent. Seemed a bit dim and had never read a book. Only after Chris had repaired the Barn’s leaking roof, increased the internet download speed, updated the poet’s ancient computer and introduced him to an excellent physiotherapist willing to drive out from Oxford was he accepted. Vivien took to the couple. When Chris expressed an interest in physics, she arranged for the Gages to come to dinner with nephew Peter. She later became close to Harriet once she was pregnant. A daughter at last, a grandchild-substitute in prospect. The Gages asked the Blundys to be Todd’s godparents.
Harriet and Chris were familiar enough at the Barn to let themselves in without knocking. As they entered the sitting room, the company stood. The gin and tonics were a memory now. Three empty wine bottles clustered on a nearby table. When the embraces were done – the couple was known to all – Vivien asked Harriet how it was going with poor Todd. Harriet answered that he was neither dead nor awake and everyone laughed agreeably and made space around the fire.
The subject was climate change, the mild term by which it was still known. That again. It was a major theme for Francis, and Harriet had tactfully excluded his opinions from her profile. He was, as someone had once said, a nuanced denier, but if opposed, a denier to his core. He had the knack in argument of making dissenting opinions appear like personal hostility. Most of his friends disagreed with him, and a few social occasions had been marred by raised voices. Now, when the issue came up, they tended to let him run on until the subject could be changed. They believed that the views of a poet made no difference to the earth’s fate and it was never worth making old Blundy furious. He derived his analysis from the press – a former solicitor turned columnist, an Australian poet and critic, an ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer.
What was animating Francis now was a radio item that morning about a leak from the UN’s intergovernmental panel. Its report was not due yet, but someone highly placed had divulged that alarm was spreading among the hundreds of contributing climate scientists. The community of nations was heading in the wrong direction at increasing speed. Here came the stultifying incantation: floods, droughts, typhoons and hurricanes, forest fires – increase in frequency noted; measurements across diverse scientific disciplines had confirmed accelerating ocean acidification, polar ice melt, glacier retreat, sea-level rises, land surface temperatures pushing upwards. Colossal migration, pandemics, resource wars and species extinction predicted – and so it went on. Francis was angrily unimpressed. Usefully, Harriet had transcribed her entire interview tape and kept the file. We can assume he made the same points that evening.
Interesting to note that in the mid-2030s, ‘the Derangement’, respectfully capitalised, came into general usage as shorthand for the usual list of global heating’s consequences – a litany that wearied activists and sceptics alike. The term suggested not only madness but the vengeful fury of weather systems. There was also a hint at collective responsibility for our innate cognitive bias in favour of short-term comfort over long-term benefits. Humanity itself was deranged. The term did not stretch to include the related Metaphysical Gloom – the collapse of belief in a future, or more specifically, the fading of a belief in progress.
Blundy pressed on as the young couple found their seats and were given a drink. It was obvious to any fool that this was a gravy train. Hundreds of left-leaning so-called scientists and their bureaucratic masters needed to keep frightening us to maintain a flow of lucrative funding. Naturally, they skewed their data. For example, the ocean was not rising to envelop Tuvalu. The geology was clear. Tuvalu was sinking!
