My father comes by the house from time to time and I’m overjoyed. Sometimes he brings her smoothies from his favourite place on Judd Street. He has a weakness for these glutinous confections that are supposed to extend his life. I don’t know why he visits us, for he always leaves in mists of sadness. Various of my conjectures have proved wrong in the past, but I’ve listened carefully and for now I’m assuming the following: that he knows nothing of Claude, remains moonishly in love with my mother, hopes to be back with her one day soon, still believes in the story she has given him that the separation is to give them each ‘time and space to grow’ and renew their bonds. That he is a poet without recognition and yet he persists. That he owns and runs an impoverished publishing house and has seen into print the first collections of successful poets, household names, and even one Nobel laureate. When their reputations swell, they move away like grown children to larger houses. That he accepts the disloyalty of poets as a fact of life and, like a saint, delights in the plaudits that vindicate the Cairncross Press. That he’s saddened rather than embittered by his own failure in verse. He once read aloud to Trudy and me a dismissive review of his poetry. It said that his work was outdated, stiffly formal, too ‘beautiful’. But he lives by poetry, still recites it to my mother, teaches it, reviews it, conspires in the advancement of younger poets, sits on prize committees, promotes poetry in schools, writes essays on poetry for small magazines, has talked about it on the radio. Trudy and I heard him once in the small hours. He has less money than Trudy and far less than Claude. He knows by heart a thousand poems.
This is my collection of facts and postulates. Hunched over them like a patient philatelist, I’ve added some recent items to my set. He suffers from a skin complaint, psoriasis, which has rendered his hands scaly, hard and red. Trudy hates the look and feel of them and tells him he should wear gloves. He refuses. He has a six-month lease on three mean rooms in Shoreditch, is in debt, is overweight and should exercise more. Just yesterday I acquired – still with the stamps – a Penny Black: the house my mother lives in and I in her, the house where Claude visits nightly, is a Georgian pile on boastful Hamilton Terrace and was my father’s childhood home. In his late twenties, just as he was growing his first beard, and not long after he married my mother, he inherited the family mansion. His dear mother was long dead. All the sources agree, the house is filthy. Only clichés serve it well: peeling, crumbling, dilapidated. Frost has sometimes glazed and stiffened the curtains in winter; in heavy rains the drains, like dependable banks, return their deposit with interest; in summer, like bad banks, they stink. But look, here in my tweezers is the rarest piece of all, the British Guiana: even in such a rotten state, these six thousand aching square feet will buy you seven million pounds.
Most men, most people, would never permit a spouse to eject them from under their childhood eaves. John Cairncross is different. Here are my reasonable inferences. Born under an obliging star, eager to please, too kind, too earnest, he has nothing of the ambitious poet’s quiet greed. He really believes that to write a poem in praise of my mother (her eyes, her hair, her lips) and come by to read it aloud will soften her, make him welcome in his own house. But she knows that her eyes are nothing ‘like the Galway turf’, by which he intended ‘very green’, and since she has no Irish blood, the line is anaemic. Whenever she and I listen, I sense in her slowing heart a retinal crust of boredom that blinds her to the pathos of the scene – a large, large-hearted man pleading his cause without hope, in the unmodish form of a sonnet.
A thousand may be hyperbole. Many of the poems my father knows are long, like those famed creations of bank employees The Cremation of Sam McGee and The Waste Land. Trudy continues to tolerate the occasional recitation. For her, a monologue is better than an exchange, preferable to another turn round the unweeded garden of their marriage. Perhaps she indulges him out of guilt, what little remains. My father speaking poetry to her was once, apparently, a ritual of their love. Strange, that she can’t bear to tell him what he must suspect, what she’s bound to reveal. That she no longer loves him. That she has a lover.
On the radio today, a woman recounted hitting a dog, a golden retriever, with her car on a lonely road at night. She crouched in her headlights by its side, holding the dying creature’s paw through its spasms of frightful pain. Large brown forgiving eyes stared into hers all the while. She took in her free hand a rock and dashed it several times against the poor dog’s skull. To dispatch John Cairncross would take only one blow, one coup de vérité. Instead, as he begins to recite, Trudy will assume her bland, listening look. I, however, attend closely.
We generally go to his poetry library on the first floor. A mantelpiece clock with rackety balance wheel makes the only sound as he takes his usual chair. Here, in the presence of a poet, I permit my conjectures to flourish. If my father looks towards the ceiling to compose his thoughts, he’ll see deterioration in the Adam-style designs. Damage has spread plaster dust like icing sugar across the spines of famous books. My mother wipes her chair with her hand before she sits. Without flourish, my father draws breath and begins. He recites fluently, with feeling. Most of the modern poems leave me cold. Too much about the self, too glassily cool with regard to others, too many gripes in too short a line. But as warm as the embrace of brothers are John Keats and Wilfred Owen. I feel their breath upon my lips. Their kiss. Who would not wish to have written Candied apple, quince, and plum and gourd, or The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall?
I picture her from across the library through his adoring eyes. She sits within a big leather armchair that dates from Freud’s Vienna. Her lithe bare legs are partly, prettily tucked beneath her. One elbow is bent against the arm rest to support her drooping head, the fingers of her free hand drum lightly on her ankle. The late afternoon is hot, the windows are open, the traffic of St John’s Wood pleasantly hums. Her expression is pensive, her lower lip looks heavy. She moistens it with a spotless tongue. A few blonde ringlets lie damply on her neck. Her cotton dress, loosely cut to contain me, is pale green, paler than her eyes. The steady work of pregnancy goes on and she is weary, agreeably so. John Cairncross sees the summer’s flush on her cheeks, the lovely line of neck and shoulder and swollen breasts, the hopeful knoll that is me, the sunless pallor of her calves, the unwrinkled sole of one exposed foot, its line of diminishing, innocent toes like children in a family photo. Everything about her, he thinks, brought to perfection by her condition.
He can’t see that she’s waiting for him to leave. That it’s perverse of her to insist on him living elsewhere, in this, our third trimester. Can he really be so complicit in his annihilation? Such a big fellow, six foot three I’ve heard, a giant with thick black hair on mighty arms, a giant fool to believe it’s wise to grant his wife the ‘space’ she says she needs. Space! She should come in here, where lately I can barely crook a finger. In my mother’s usage, space, her need for it, is a misshapen metaphor, if not a synonym. For being selfish, devious, cruel. But wait, I love her, she’s my divinity and I need her. I take it back! I spoke in anguish. I’m as deluded as my father. And it’s true. Her beauty and remoteness and resolve are one.
Above her, as I see it, the library’s decomposing ceiling releases a sudden cloud of spinning particles that glimmer as they drift across a bar of sunlight. And how she glimmers against the cracked brown leather of the chair where Hitler or Trotsky or Stalin might have sprawled in their Viennese days, when they were but embryos of their future selves. I concede. I’m hers. If she commanded it, I too would go to Shoreditch, and nurse myself in exile. No need for an umbilical cord. My father and I are joined in hopeless love.