Learning by Heart (5 page)

He turned back and examined her face closely. She had never heard anyone talk like that. Certainly never heard anyone swear like that. She wasn’t at all sure that she should listen. But she was listening.

‘They all have one thing in common,’ Bisley told her. ‘They’ve sat down and produced something. They’ve scoured what passes for their soul. And some of what they write is mediocre. Some are convinced they’re a literary genius when they couldn’t write a coherent laundry list. And some of what they produce is so bad that the best thing to do with it is light a bloody big fire.’ He scratched his neck. ‘Of which the vast proportion is sent to plague
me
, God help me,’ he muttered. ‘But some of it …’

He looked for some point of contact, of understanding, in her expression. ‘Sit,’ he said. He went to another shelf, took down a thin volume and put it in front of her. ‘Wordsworth,’ he said.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘The Lakes.’

‘Ah,’ he answered, smiling. ‘The great Lakes poet. Correct. Thank God. You’ve read something.’

‘I …’ She paused, then opted for honesty. ‘We had a holiday in Grasmere,’ she said.

He slapped a hand theatrically to his forehead. ‘And bought the tea-cloth with the daffodil rhyme on it?’ he asked. ‘Oh, Jesus.’ A grin escaped him. He went to the first anthology, leafed through it and slammed it down in front of her. ‘Walter Savage Landor,’ he said. ‘An author. A poet. Read it to me.’

She looked at the poem on the page, a four-line verse. ‘I’m not very good at reading poetry,’ she told him.

‘I’m astonished,’ he retorted drily. ‘Read it.’

‘“I strove with none, for none was worth my strife,”’ she began.

‘Speak up.’

‘
I strove with none, for none was worth my strife;

Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art;

I warmed my hands before the fire of life;

It sinks, and I am ready to depart
.’

There was silence in the room. Distantly, very distantly, as if London had moved away a little, Cora heard the trains and the traffic, the passing of feet in the street below.

Bisley gazed at her for some seconds, as if registering her for the first time. ‘You are rather a sweet girl,’ he observed, without passion. ‘Yes, rather a sweet girl. One rarely sees true innocence. And do you know? I believe that you are that. An innocent.’

Cora didn’t know whether to take this as an insult or a compliment. ‘I’m not a child,’ she told him.

He nodded. ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘But you are one of Nature’s nice ones, I think.’ He smiled. ‘Poor little sheep,’ he added. ‘Why don’t you go back to deepest Dorset before you’re eaten up by all these bastards?’

She bridled a little at the implication that she was too weak to stand up to London. ‘I’m perfectly fine,’ she said. ‘I want to stay here.’

He gazed at her for another second, then held out his arm. It was a gesture that told her to go through the door and back downstairs. As she got up and walked over to him, he said, ‘You’ll come up here every day for an hour. You’ll read these books.’

‘All right,’ she murmured. ‘If you say so.’ Privately, she wondered if he was slightly mad.

He let her walk down the flight of narrow stairs. When she paused at the bottom, he was looking down at her, stuffing the key into his waistcoat pocket and searching in the other for his cigarettes.

‘We’re going to warm your hands, Cora,’ he muttered. ‘If you insist upon being part of this roaring bloody beast called society, we’re going to expand that shrivelled brain of yours, if it kills us both in the process.’

On the tube home, she decided that Bisley was eccentric. She rather disapproved of his talk of warming her hands at the fire of life. All his talk of writing. Certainly she agreed with him that writers were a mixed and uncertain lot. She had seen the people who came to the house: scruffy or strange, or both. One this week had looked like a bank clerk, very proper, quiet and neat; and yet the first two chapters of his novel, which she had been obliged to retype, were absolutely obscene.

And look at Bisley.

When had he warmed his hands at the fire of life? He didn’t have a family that she knew of. No one he ever mentioned, anyway. He didn’t seem to have any close friends. He didn’t write: he simply repackaged what other people wrote, and talked about it as if he’d breathed a spark into it. And that was his life. That was what she was supposed to warm her hands in front of, a life like that.

Bisley wouldn’t know life if it jumped up and bit him, she thought, with all the vast experience of her nineteen years. She got up and waited for the tube doors to open.

After three months, she went home to Sherborne for the weekend. It was June, the first time she had been back, and some friends of her parents were having a party to celebrate their silver wedding. There was a blessing in the abbey, and tea afterwards in a marquee.

As she sat in the abbey, Cora realized how soothing it was, listening to the choir and the service, looking at the well-known faces. These people were polite and well meaning; they were kind. No one boasted; in fact, in the kind of society that Cora’s parents moved in, boasting was considered one of the deadliest sins. Even if one was accomplished, it was terribly bad form to mention it.

She looked sideways at the profiles across the aisle. She wondered what they would make of Bisley, what they would say if they read some of what she typed for him. She could imagine her father frowning at the things she read in the attic room. She blushed beneath her fashionable hat, and clasped her hands in her lap.

Wilt thou go with me, sweet maid, say, maiden, wilt thou go with me
? whispered John Clare, in Cora’s mind. She had been reading him yesterday, while below Bisley cursed on the phone.
Through the valley depths of shade and night …

The hymn began to play. She stood up next to her parents and lowered her gaze to the book.

The lips that kissed whispering I knew not what of wild and sweet:
Tennyson.

Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
That week Bisley had made her read Matthew Arnold for a whole day. She felt she was being invaded by the lines, by their insistence. Sometimes she loathed their intensity. Sometimes – especially lately – she found them murmuring to her when she did not want to hear them. Matthew Arnold – oh, God, she hated that name! Bisley went on about him, like a dog growling over a toy.

‘Do you know what he was, Cora?’ he had asked. ‘An educationalist. He wanted the spread of culture. Of culture, Cora!’ He had lowered his face almost to hers, grinning. ‘People like you, Cora. Ignoramuses like you.’

It was a joke. She knew that. But she couldn’t get the wretched voice out of her mind.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air
…

‘Do you know what he wanted most of all, Cora? “Something to snatch from dull oblivion”. That’s what he wanted.’ And Bisley had prodded the open page. ‘“From dull oblivion”. You know what he called men? Do you know how he described their lives? “Striving blindly, achieving nothing … no one asks who or what they have been.”’ And he smiled at her, as if she were part of the human race that would vanish into nothing, having run about blindly all her life.

She glanced at her father. Was he one of Arnold and Bisley’s blind men, she wondered. Was that how they would describe him? Her father saw her look and winked at her. Well, she thought, suddenly passionate, they were wrong. This flood of self-conscious feeling was wrong. The world turned on small, quiet loyalties and understandings. No one ever cured anything by standing on a mountaintop declaring their misery. She smiled back at her father, deliberately pushing away the thought of Bisley’s poets; the hymn, of which she hadn’t sung a word, came to an end.

After the service, out in the sun, the Abbey Green was packed. The colours of the summer clothes were almost too bright after the gloom inside.

As they stood in the sunlight, her mother touched her arm. ‘That’s the man I told you about,’ she whispered, and pointed to a figure coming across the green.

When Cora had got home the night before, her parents had been recounting a story of how a stranger had come to their door and said he was buying the derelict buildings in the fields at the top of Marchbank Row, a lane that ran parallel with the back of their long garden, and the fringe of trees at the bottom.

Marchbank Row was the narrowest of lanes, unsurfaced, and was rapidly deteriorating; hundreds of years ago it had formed a packhorse track that ran for miles above the valley, all the way from Petherton to Shaftesbury; now, other farms and properties had encroached on it and obliterated it in places, and it was only for a few hundred yards here and there that it remained, a narrow, muddy echo of its past.

‘We told him we were glad someone was taking them on,’ her mother had continued, referring to the broken-down buildings on the other side of Marchbank Row, behind the vastly overgrown hawthorn hedges. Since the previous owner had died, an old man in his nineties, the fields had run almost to ruin, thick with nettles and ragwort. ‘But you’ll never believe the most peculiar thing,’ her mother said. ‘He’s going to live in them.’

‘Live where?’ Cora had asked, confused.

‘In the sheds!’

Cora laughed. ‘But there’s no water,’ she said, ‘no heating or light, no electricity. The roofs are coming down.’

‘Nevertheless,’ her mother had replied, ‘that’s what he’s going to do.’

‘I give him two months,’ her father said, over the top of his newspaper.

And now the same man was walking towards them. Cora inspected him closely. He was tall and thin, with sandy hair. He was wearing work-clothes – painter’s dungarees, a frayed shirt. He walked up to Cora’s father and held out his hand; she saw her father hesitate for a second before he took it.

The man saw it too. ‘I’m afraid I’m very dusty,’ he said. ‘I’ve been loading stone into the lorry.’ He nodded down the hill, to where an open pick-up was parked. He glanced at Cora, but did not smile or introduce himself. ‘I was wondering if you would object to my opening a gap in the hedge to take the deliveries through.’

‘Deliveries?’ Cora’s mother asked.

‘Well, the stone,’ the man said, ‘and timber. And there would be some machinery next week to dig drainage.’

‘You’re digging a drain?’ Cora’s father asked.

‘Across the field to join the mains on New Drove.’

‘I see,’ her father observed.

‘I hope not to cause too much disruption,’ the man added. ‘I don’t want to disturb you.’

Cora was listening to his voice, which had a northern accent: Yorkshire, perhaps. ‘Where are you from?’ she asked.

Her father laughed. ‘You must excuse my daughter,’ he said. ‘Since she’s been working in London she’s become very forthright.’

‘I have not,’ she objected.

‘Oh, goodness,’ her mother murmured. ‘I never saw one person change so much.’

‘But I’ve not changed at all!’

The man held out his hand to her. ‘Richard Ward,’ he said. ‘I come from a place called Rannerdale, in Cumberland.’

‘Army fellow, I hear,’ said Cora’s father.

‘Not for some years now.’

‘No, of course,’ Cora’s father said. Ward’s tone had been almost curt. But, then, the war had been over for fourteen years, and plenty of men wanted to forget it.

Cora took his hand, and felt the smooth silicate of the stone on his skin. She guessed his age at forty. He had, she noticed, a scar – if that was what it was, a fine line – that ran round one side of his neck like a red thread.

His fingers closed round hers. He had lowered his head, and was looking at her, frowning a little.

‘My name is Cora,’ she told him.

Three

She spent that spring, the last spring of the 1950s, in London; March was unseasonably warm, warmer still in Bisley’s attic at the top of the house, where the air barely circulated even though she opened all the skylights.

Day after day she carried on reading as a dogged duty, resisting everything she read, and particularly the siren calls to indulge her heart and get – as she put it to herself in what was probably her mother’s whispered voice –
carried away
. Whenever Bisley asked her, she would tell him the facts about a poet; she used a biographical dictionary, and found that she could easily remember all kinds of things about the writers.

In one of his fits of pique, Bisley came close to banning the dictionary. ‘You’re like a bloody parrot,’ he told her, after she had been reading Blake. He had sighed deeply. It had been a bad week for him. He had lost one of his authors to a rival – one of what he called the wide boys coming into London: younger men. Younger men who had some idea of business that didn’t rely on an old boys’ network. Younger men who refused to follow rules and poached clients. ‘London’s changing,’ he had muttered, all week. He was used to doing business in the Wig and Pen, a gentleman’s club, not in the pubs or on the streets.

But the usual mild insults no longer bothered Cora. She had begun to feel affection for him. One day she had unearthed a few photographs of Bisley from a box of dusty manuscripts, and she had seen a handsome version of his present self: a smiling, relaxed man, arm in arm with a woman whom, when she asked, he would not name.

Sometimes – very occasionally – he would be reading poetry himself when she got there in the morning, and he would recite to her, remembering whole passages by heart. It was at these rare moments that she saw someone other than the sarcastic, bombastic man he showed to the world.

She adjusted to his comments. He was spiky, he was rude, but, she realized, he was passionate about what he did and knew. And even if she couldn’t share his enthusiasm, she respected it. Now she bore his brief, wordy rages with a kind of humour. They had ceased to embarrass her.

She had been standing in the downstairs room when he made the comment about her parroting Blake’s biographical details. It had been a slow day. There was nothing much for her to do. The warmth made the place smell fustier than ever. Smoke almost choked her as the day wore on. She had brought the volume of Blake down and had been reading it at her tiny desk.