The Poets' Wives (28 page)

If equally unenthusiastic, Francesca had been more readily compliant to the request. She had been the daughter who was most upset at the funeral and she had held her mother’s hand throughout the service, in what felt like not so much an attempt to offer comfort but a need to receive it. At the graveside she had gone to pieces as she dropped her rose into the open grave, shuddering so much that for a second it looked as if she might topple forward. Strange to see such outpouring of emotion for a father who had so often withheld his blessing from her. ‘Let him go, Francesca,’ she had whispered to her. ‘Let him go.’ Let a father go who had teased her constantly and with what sometimes felt like barbs about a career and a small business she had started in London, designing and making wedding dresses and hats for the city’s wealthy. Perhaps he deemed it an unworthy occupation for a daughter of his. ‘Coating debutantes in icing sugar’ was how he had described it, smirking at his own wit and giving no credit for all the hard slog and commitment she had invested in it over the years, building it up from nothing after she had finished her art college degree. Now she was trying like everyone else to ride out the recession and never once had she asked for, or had they been able to give her, any form of financial support.

At least with Anna, even though he espoused to despise the popular press – ‘carrion crows pecking over the living and the dead’ was how he liked to characterise it – there had been a begrudging respect for a profession involving words. The one thing that irritated Anna, however, was his occasional and completely erroneous hint that being his daughter must have advantaged her and advanced her career. Whereas Francesca was never fully able to protect her own vulnerability, Anna as she grew up welcomed the jousting and often gave as good as she got. As a teenager she had sussed out her father’s shining lights and then enjoyed sniping at them and comparing them unfavourably to others she knew he looked down upon or resented. Sometimes in passing she would quote stanzas at him from inane pop songs and then proclaim, ‘That’s real poetry.’

So why was it that Anna had stood stony-faced at the graveside while Francesca had cried like a child? She poured herself another glass of wine and the light from the fire suffused it as she turned it slowly in her hand. Was it that Francesca realised that now she would never receive the father’s approval she had secretly longed for? They had never been a family that went in for ostentatious or revelatory expressions of emotion and if it was possible these had diminished even further after the death of Rory. She knew if she were to think now of Rory everything would fall apart more than it already had and she had to get over this final hurdle so she stood up and walked to the window but the glass gave her nothing except her own vague reflection. Behind her the fire sparked and in the still-unlit room a frantic flurry of shadow flames stuttered against the white walls. Suddenly she felt confined and wanted the freedom of the night so draining the last of the wine she rested the glass on his desk, set the fireguard in place and putting on her coat walked across the road and took the narrow path through the dunes.

The razor-edged grass fawned up round her legs but she knew better than to touch it having discovered as a child its power to cut. In the new holiday apartment block that nestled beside the golf course there was only one lit window. She had signed the petition objecting to its planning approval. He too had fumed at the proposal, even broken his lifelong resistance to signing petitions – he hadn’t even signed the one about the war in Iraq, or the cuts to arts funding. Perhaps he had been swayed by the naïve belief of the organisers that his name on their petition would carry weight with the planners, perhaps even believed it himself, then fumed even more when it proved an illusion. She didn’t mind the apartments that were generally only occupied at weekends or during the holiday periods, believing that they brought a renewed sense of life to the place with children wearing wetsuits in the summer sea and the smell of barbecues. The extra income helped the few local shops and everyone seemed able to rub along without any problems. And the recession had occurred at the right time in the sense that it was unlikely that developers would now move in wholesale as they had done in other places on the coast and apartment it out of recognition.

As she stumbled a little on the downward path to the beach it was the breeze off the sea that was keen against her face as it tousled her hair and for a second she thought of returning to the heat of the fire but then remembered how confined she had felt and strode out briskly along the length of the beach. The tide was slowly going out and she walked where the reclaimed sand sheened and stretched cleanly ahead of her. It suddenly struck her that perhaps she should have checked the tides. Would it be incoming or outgoing when the moment came? And did it matter? She thought of
David Copperfield
and the death of Barkis and how Mr Peggotty tells David that people can’t die along the coast ‘except when the tide’s pretty nigh out’. Would there be an early-morning tide to take his ashes out? She told herself that it didn’t matter, that despite the time he spent in the cottage, despite his description of himself as a beachcomber, he was a city person. She looked again for the green light but it had disappeared and in the dropping light the horizon smeared into a blurred bevel of charcoal. Her daughters would come in the morning and she was glad because already she understood that there was a price to be paid for what she had earlier felt as lightness but which had now slowly edged into an awareness that she was alone. Whatever loneliness she had experienced in her forty-year marriage had been one that ebbed and flowed in her head and ultimately always faded away when faced with the requirements of daily living. Now there seemed no escape from its reality and although she told herself that being alone wasn’t the same as loneliness she was unable to distinguish any difference between the two states as her feet suddenly sank a little into softer sand.

Was it foolish nostalgia, a selective amnesia, that now made her think of their early days when what existed between them seemed like a force of nature, when he had blown into her life with all the strength of instinct and impulse that rendered every practical consideration inconsequential? He cared nothing for the things she had been told it was important to believe in, and because she hadn’t ever known why exactly she too should believe in them, they had been swept away in the flood of what she could give no other name to than passion. Despite the cold that peppered her cheekbones and made her pull the collar of her coat higher she warmed with the heat of the memory. Five years younger than him and with only the thinnest knowledge of books or poetry, it seemed like an adventure that life had never given her and might not ever give again. And yes he did woo her with words, whispering them in her ear like the sea’s soft lace that now frilled and lightly enticed the shore. He had taken all of her – no, that wasn’t true – she had given all of herself with not so much as a glance backwards or forwards but desperate only to exist in the moment where it seemed that there resided everything that she could ever need. And yes she was there in some of the earliest poems, unnamed but woven in the weft and warp of the words. If there wasn’t a single one dedicated formally to her she knew she was part of some, even if it was only because she had stood in the shadow of the described experience.

A long time ago. A lifetime away. A time when he knew how to be light and funny, skilled in impersonation and accents, a lover of a late-night drink and a well-told joke. What had blunted that? What had stopped the whispered words in those closest moments that spoke as often as not of the sun, the moon and the stars? Perhaps it was her fault. Perhaps in the end she could never be enough to satisfy whatever need it was that rendered him distant, making him drift slowly away into some other orbit that she could only barely glimpse and never explore. Even when he came back to her it was never the same, and never was there that sweet tumble of mysterious and only half-understood words that he had used to woo her. She thought of Desdemona and the greed with which she devoured Othello’s tales then swept it aside with the knowledge that whatever emotions she had once stirred in her word-spinning lover, none had ever achieved the intensity of jealousy.

They never collided in anger; he never humiliated her in public or criticised her. Perhaps he didn’t need to. Instead there was just a slow release like clasped hands gradually slipping the tightness of their grip and then both of them falling slowly backwards into the separate pathways of their lives.

A man was fishing on the rocks at the end of the pier, his casting arm flung out over the sea but the line invisible in the dusk. She would walk along the stone pier that was girdled on both sides by protective rocks and speak to him. Ask him if he had caught anything. She’d ask him if it was her fault for not being enough. If she should have built her own life and tried to find someone who would love her for what she was and only ever use words that were true and which would endure longer than it took a flurry of passion to spend itself. There had been someone else – just the one and lasting no more than a few months. Almost twenty years ago a work colleague looking for comfort on the back of his divorce and afterwards nothing but a daily embarrassment until he had applied for a transfer. If anything she was glad when he’d made his escape, knew she had done it merely as a sad little kickback against her husband’s latest indiscretion but it had only made things worse, when despite her hints and willingness to avow confessional remorse, she had faltered into silence against the bulwark of his indifference.

There was a green light blinking again. She thought of Gatsby standing in supplication to the light at the end of Daisy’s pier. That was one thing for which she should be grateful – her self-education, her diligent pursuit of books. And if that too had failed to make her worthy then at least it had bestowed a pleasure and a critical knowledge that she could use. So in time she was able to recognise the weaker of his poems, the ones that were space fillers, the ones she knew without being told were what he labelled as ‘confetti’ and those that deserved the praise. The poems that were truest worried her most because she couldn’t bring herself to understand how such perfect truth could spring from someone who was so frequently false. These she found threatening in that they seemed able to rise up above her and shadow her, almost taunting her with their complete detachment from the life the world assumed they shared.

She looked back to the shore where the sea-facing houses had their uncurtained windows lit. No need to draw them perhaps when all that peered in was the sea. A bird teased and skimmed itself across the water, its wings almost touching the springing snare of the waves. Her feet crunched an unseen shell. Once she had tried to write her own poems, hiding them scrupulously from his gaze before her fear of his discovering them and imagining the scorn of his laughter made her destroy them, cutting each into the tiniest fragments as if they were love letters that if discovered might destroy her life. It made her hope that on the morning after next when she would gather with her daughters in this very place that the wind would have died away and the tide would be outgoing, taking the final remnants of his being far out to distant seas.

She wanted Rory to be there. Her only son, sweet as love in her memory. She wanted him somehow to come back to her through the years. Her feet stumbled in a wedge of soft sand and when she momentarily stretched out her hands it felt as if her body was reaching to pull him back from the grasp of death.

She could never forgive Don for Rory because he alone had been allowed to reclaim her son. Reclaimed him in the eight sonnets he had written about their lost child with his supposed heartbreak preserved forever in the eyes of the world. And so even in grief he had made her subservient and what she suffered in the most terrible pain she had ever known had found no voice or release, every last corrosive drop of it gnawing away at her over the years as again and again readers of the poems offered him their sympathy. A sympathy he had never shared, in the same way he had never sought to shoulder or try to salve any of what she had endured. And in not a single poem was the love with which she had brought her son into the world and given him every one of his twenty-seven years. So the loss and grief was all his father’s, a father who through his son’s life had never been anything but disinterested and remote, in later years even that being replaced by a growing sense of frustration at his supposed lack of career.

She reached out to her child now and pulled him from the shades into the fragmenting light of her memory so that for a second as she bowed her head lower against the wind, he was there with her because she made herself believe that love was always stronger than words, and it was the force of her love alone that caused him now to form silently about her. Her son who loved mountains and high places, whose restless adventurous spirit made him travel to worlds she could only dream of and who sent her postcards with his flowing excited writing that always told her not to worry. And he’s there now as if made of grains of light with his eyes washed clean of death by the soft shuck of the sea’s caress and he flows around her and when she asks him if he’s all right he rests his arm on her shoulder the way he always did and he’s telling her not to worry, that everything’s all right and that he’s coming home soon. He’s coming home soon and the words repeat like a whisper to which she holds tightly. That’s good, she says, and tells him she’ll air his room and stock up the fridge because he’s always a little thinner when he comes home. Once, after a longer climbing trip, he’d looked like a bag of bones and when he’d put on the fresh clothes from his drawer they’d hung so loosely on him that he looked like a man wearing someone else’s things. She tries to see what he’s wearing now but as the serried waves suddenly break white and the man fishing casts his arm towards the sea he’s already slipping away again. She calls his name aloud but it’s as if that too is borne away by the wind and the ceaseless ebb of the sea so all that flows around her now are the night’s currents and she wants to shout that the borrowed clothes of death he wears belong to someone else. To someone else. To his father. She’ll give them back to her husband, a man of whom the world thinks highly. She’ll dress him in them freely and unconditionally but just let them have her son a little longer.