reading

What matters most: marriage or friendship? fidelity or art? the wishes of the living or the talents of the dead?

Matt Holmes finds himself considering these questions sooner than anticipated when his friend, the poet Robert Pope, dies unexpectedly. Rob had invited Matt to become his literary executor at their annual boozy lunch, pointing out that, at age sixty, he was likely to be around for some time yet. And Matt, having played devotee and apprentice to ‘the bow-tie poet’ for so long, hadn’t the heart (or the gumption) to deny him.

Now, after a frosty welcome from his widow, Matt sits at Rob’s rosewood desk and ponders his friend’s motives. He has never understood Rob’s conventional life with Jill, who seems to have no interest in her late husband’s work. But he soon finds himself in an ethical minefield, making shocking and scabrous discoveries that overturn everything he thought he knew about his friend. As Jill gets to work in the back garden, Matt is forced to weigh up the merits of art and truth. Should he conceal what he has found or share it? After all, it’s not just Rob’s reputation that could be transformed forever…

Bestselling poet and novelist Blake Morrison creates a biting portrait of competitive male friendship, sexual obsession and the fragile transactions of married life. The Executor innovatively interweaves poetry and prose to form a gripping literary detective story.

About the Author

Born in Skipton, Yorkshire, Blake Morrison is the author of the bestselling memoirs And When Did You Last See Your Father? (winner of the J.R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography and the Esquire Award for Non-Fiction) and Things My Mother Never Told Me (‘the must-read book of the year’ – Tony Parsons). He also wrote a study of the disturbing child murder, the Bulger case, As If. His acclaimed recent novels include South of the River and The Last Weekend. He is also a poet, critic, journalist and librettist, and Professor of Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths University. He lives in South London.

It is commonly supposed that the uniformity of a studious life affords no matter for narration: but the truth is that of the most studious life a great part passes without study. An author partakes of the common condition of humanity; he is born and married like another man; he has hopes and fears, expectations and disappointments, griefs and joys, and friends and enemies, like a courtier or a statesman; nor can I conceive why his affairs should not excite curiosity as much as the whisper of a drawing room, or the factions of a camp.

Samuel Johnson, The Idler (29 March 1760)

I care not though I were to live but one day and one night if only my fame and deeds live after me.

Cúchulainn

We were eating at Archie’s in Soho, a restaurant that’s more like a club, very intimate, an upper room with a dozen tables and a small bar with high stools. The floorboards stretch from one end of the room to the other, and we were sitting near the door to the kitchen: every time one of the waiters walked past, the table wobbled. During our mains I’d slipped a table mat under one leg, without success. There was no way round it. We were on shaky ground.

‘Friend’ was true. But our contact had dwindled to an annual lunch and occasional emails. The lunch was always timed for late November – just far ahead enough of Christmas to avoid groups of office workers wearing party hats and eating turkey. And the emails we exchanged were jokey, not like the serious stuff today.

‘Except those with bad genes. Even if I add five years to his, my prospects aren’t good.’

I knew that. Both our birthdays fell in May, his fourteen years before mine. But I didn’t want him thinking of me as an acolyte. Christ, I hadn’t even read his last collection.

‘I’m surprised you think I’m qualified,’ I said. If I was going to do this, I deserved to hear him spell it out.

‘My parents are dead, my sister doesn’t count, and no one from school has ever read me.’

Fine is how Jill always was, or how he always said she was: steady, loyal, more mindful of his needs than of her own. Or perhaps none of those things, just not a subject for discussion.

‘No need to decide now, if you want to think about it. There won’t be much you’ve not seen. The last collection cleaned me out.’

And he didn’t. There was a boyish glint in his eye. I’d never quite understood what it signified – irony, mischief, an appreciation of life’s little absurdities – but it shone as brightly as ever. His hair, despite a few grey hints, was exuberant: the Frizzy Guy I’d heard him being called in Brandon the year I’d gone there to study, or rather to write. I’d envied him then – for his knowledge, his energy, his independence. Despite his gloominess, I envied him still.

‘OK, I’m not old, but I’m realistic. I peaked in my forties and now I’m past it. The reviewers of my last book said as much. Including the one on your pages.’

‘I’m not complaining. He made some good points. Fuck, I agreed with him. That’s the problem. Thanks, and could we have the bill, please?’

The waiter’s arrival distracted him and allowed me to change the subject. I still remembered some of the adjectives the review had used – ‘tired’, ‘hollow’, ‘pompous’, ‘antiquated’, ‘devoid of life and conviction’. I’d felt bad when we ran the piece, all the more so because Leonie had consulted me before sending the book out – was Marcus Downe the right reviewer? Why not? I’d said, half distracted by a picture caption I was writing, but not so distracted that I couldn’t foresee the possible outcome. At least Marcus’s reviews were long and prominently displayed – that would be my defence if Rob brought it up again, along with the argument (diametrically opposed) that book reviews don’t count for much these days. But reviews mattered to Rob, and it was no use pretending that to allocate 1,500 words to his new collection was a mark of respect when 1,200 of those words were devoted to demolishing him. I’d sent a warning email the day before the piece appeared; he didn’t reply. That was six months ago. When he finally got in touch to suggest lunch (‘the annual ritual’, as he called it), I wondered if his purpose was to berate me. Well, I was right that he had an agenda. But not the one I’d been expecting. Far from banishing me to the wilderness, he wanted to anoint me as his disciple.

‘Get a move on then. That’s a lot of dependants. You don’t want to leave them in the shit.’

He didn’t offer congratulations and I didn’t tell him that we knew it was a girl. The subject of children, like the subject of Jill, was one we usually skirted round. I can’t recall him expressing a particular aversion to kids when we first met, in Brandon, no more so than was average for a determinedly single man, for whom the prospect of getting a woman pregnant was a routine terror, not to be assuaged by her whispering Don’t bother, I hate the feel of those things, I’m on the pill. When he returned to England and married Jill in his early forties (the registry office ceremony taking place on the day his second collection came out), I wondered if they might have children; she was younger than him, after all. But nothing happened. And went on not happening. A fertility problem? Or a decision jointly arrived at that a life without children suited them best, what with her career in the charity sector and his as a poet needing solitude? We never talked about it, but the latter seemed more likely, given how at ease with his life he seemed and how incurious about my kids, to the point of never remembering their gender or names. There are people who say they don’t have dogs because they lack the time to look after them properly. I could imagine Rob making a similar case against kids, and Jill – loyal, selfless Jill – going along with it, whatever her true feelings.

‘I’m serious, Matt. It’s irresponsible otherwise. I hope you’ve taken out life insurance too. You never know. That’s why I’m asking if you’ll –’

‘What, get it all out there – the unpublished stories, the abandoned novels, the letters and diaries?’

‘Don’t be an idiot, Rob. No one gives a toss about my work. There’s nothing to give a toss about.’

‘If you say so,’ he said, signalling a reminder to the waiter: where the fuck was our bill? It was touching if he really believed that despite my having a ten-to-six, five-day-a-week job to do, two small children to bring up, and an elderly parent to visit as often as could be managed, I still had the time and energy to write something worthwhile.

‘My turn,’ he said, as always, when the bill finally arrived, and ‘Give it here, the paper will cover it,’ I replied, as always, laying my credit card on the plate without even looking at the amount. In the early days, the paper had covered our lunches. Newspapers were more affluent then, and expense claims less closely monitored. Besides, Rob was a name, and wrote the odd review for us, so treating him to lunch seemed appropriate, all the more so since I received a monthly salary, and he, for all his renown, was a freelance writer, what’s worse a poet, dependent for his living on the money he scraped together from readings, talks, bits of teaching and occasional book reviews. We never talked about it (pride would have prevented him from pleading penury), but these days he probably earned less than ever. If he’d known it was me paying, not the paper, he’d have felt humiliated. But I doubt it occurred to him. The fact that our circulation was in freefall, that twenty-odd members of staff had just been laid off, and that those of us remaining had been forced to take a salary cut – none of this would have reached his ears, or his eyrie, despite it being widely reported, or if it had, would not have struck him as having any connection with our lunch.

‘You must write something for us,’ I said, punching in the code for my credit card, as the waiter stood there with a smile he probably hoped would bring a tip, despite the 12.5 per cent service charge already added to the bill.

‘Rubbish. There’s a team who monitor page traffic. OK, it’s not like we’re the news pages, but people do read reviews.’

‘The online stuff, maybe – for the comments by groupies or trolls. At least your guy had some discrimination.’

‘The one who pissed on my book. He meant what he said and he put his name to it. Fair enough.’

‘It’s the assassins hiding behind pseudonyms I object to. They stick the knife in, then disappear into the night. That’s why I avoid the Internet. It’s a haven for cowards and thugs.’

I took the receipt from the waiter and stuck it in my wallet. Had he been listening? Did he realise Rob was a well-known poet? Or did he see him as just another grumpy old man? Even I felt embarrassed hearing him bang on.

‘I had my moment. No one wants to hear poems by white, middle-aged, middle-class Englishmen any more. We’re dinosaurs. Doubly disadvantaged – male and pale. Quite right too. We ruled the roost for too long. I wouldn’t listen to someone like me either. You have to have content – a story – and I don’t.’

‘Maybe. But the point of a poem is to hold back, not spill the beans, so readers keep finding more. Freedom of expression includes the right not to reveal anything … Sorry, I’m boring you, we need to go.’

‘Nice scarf,’ I said, as we retrieved our coats from the cloakroom halfway down the stairs.

‘I’ve had it for years. Treated myself. It was either foxes or squirrels. A small shop in one of those arcades off Piccadilly used to sell them. I came across it by chance. Old Italian guy. He had a photo of Princess Di in his window. She once bought a tie there. For Charles, I suppose.’

‘Or Dodi Fayed. Silk’s more for a lover than a husband, wouldn’t you say?’

‘We might see Jill’s brother at some point. But we don’t really get on.’

Certainly, Rob didn’t. I could remember him describing Jill’s brother as an orang-utan.

‘The last I heard she was living in Sydney. On the streets, probably. Who the fuck are all these people? London gets more crowded every time I come in. Which way are you going?’

The air was cold. He tied his scarf tighter. Since his sudden move to Hadingfield ten years ago, he’d adopted the pose of a baffled provincial, unable to keep up.

‘Yeah, yeah. Better meet sooner, then. Let’s fix a date once the Christmas madness is over.’

‘Absolutely,’ he said, and probably meant it, just as I meant it. But we both immediately forgot about it. At any rate I did.

‘Being an editor’s like being a Sherpa,’ my about-to-be boss Leonie said during my job interview eight years ago, ‘we do all the work and they get all the glory.’ By ‘they’ she meant reviewers, though in relation to the authors whose books they appraise, most of them feel like Sherpas too. Still, I’d had some experience of editing by then and took the point. There’s a lot of baggage to carry and a lot of dull slog. And at the end, we’re anonymous, backroom girls and boys known to those in the business – authors, agents, publishers, fellow journos – but not to the world beyond. The only byline is the reviewer’s, even if, as often happens, we’ve virtually written the piece ourselves. It was a shock to discover how sloppily some writers write, not least famous ones. No doubt they’re too busy getting on with their own stuff to think a mere book review or arts feature is worth losing sleep over, though I’ve heard publishers’ editors complain that even with novels and memoirs it’s left to them to tidy the prose. For us it can be more like building a new house than tidying. Only a few writers send in good copy – and say what you like about Rob, he was one of them.

I was still thinking about him when I got back to the office. It was 3.15, absurdly late by my standards (on most days I buy a sandwich from round the corner and eat it at my desk), but we’d put the pages to bed the day before: the annual stunt whereby celebrity names (including the odd author) recommend their favourite titles had kept us there till after ten at night. Now the pressure was off, and with Leonie also out for lunch I’d not needed to rush from mine. Indeed, she still wasn’t back when I sat down at my screen and logged on. There were no interesting emails, just the usual stuff – an editor wondering why a ‘glitteringly authentic’ first novel she’d published in August hadn’t yet been reviewed by us (or anyone else, probably); a poet submitting three new odes (his word) from his Cornish Megalith sequence; a twitcher from Chipping Norton objecting to a passing reference to Manx shearwaters in a book review the previous week (‘everyone knows they migrate to the South Atlantic in winter’). It was too early to start laying out next week’s pages – none of the copy had come in. I spent an hour in the book cupboard instead.

It’s more a glass cubicle than a cupboard, but the floor-to-ceiling shelves close it off from the rest of the office and if you shut the door, which has frosted glass, you’re invisible from outside. The rest of the office is open-plan, which makes the cupboard an object of envy and nudge-nudge comment. To my knowledge, no sexual activity has ever occurred in there, but colleagues have sometimes slipped in clutching a handkerchief or asked to borrow it for clandestine phone calls. We’ve taken to locking the door when we leave, but during the day it stays open, and there are always journalists who drift in, ‘for a browse’, which Leonie finds annoying (‘we’re not a fucking bookshop’), all the more so when, as invariably happens, the browser emerges with a review copy and offers to write a piece, an offer she’ll politely decline (‘ah, sorry, we’ve already commissioned someone’), then ridicule when they’ve departed (‘why the fuck does the fucking environment correspondent think he’s qualified to review the new Rushdie?’), unless the book is chick lit or military history, in which case she’ll say no thank, but they’re welcome to keep it. I’m easier-going than Leonie, but I didn’t want to be intruded on that afternoon and made a point of closing the door behind me.

I love it in the book cupboard – the half-light, the monkish silence, the smell of freshly printed pages – but it’s hard not to feel chastened. You pick up a novel, say, and think of where it began, with a man or woman sitting alone in a room, and of the work that’s gone into it since (the agenting, copy-editing, proofreading, designing and printing), and of the work still to come putting the word out and getting copies into bookshops, and of how any review you run, however brief, will matter hugely to the author, regardless of sales, which ought to weigh heavily on you, except that several dozen other novels are also coming out the same week, all of them in front of you in the cupboard, and if a glance at the dust jacket, or rapid sampling of the first page, suggests it’s not a book worth bothering with, you put it in the reject pile without even a twinge of conscience. Does that sound cynical? Maybe. But we’ve space to cover only a tiny fraction of the books published each year. And those we do cover have to be worthwhile journalistically, with either the author or the subject matter sparking an interesting review.

That afternoon, in the space of ten minutes, I put forty-three books in the reject crate, seasonal tosh mostly, or books that shouldn’t have been sent to us in the first place, since anyone familiar with our pages knows that we don’t review books on DIY, pet care, yoga, self-help and how to make your first million. That left only five books worth commissioning reviews on, all due out in January, one by a contemporary of mine at Bristol, Ed McKeane, whose last novel had been longlisted for the Booker and whom Leonie rated highly, as I might have too and indeed briefly did, since he seemed a good guy despite his public-school patina, someone who might become a friend, I thought, until he humiliated me in a first-year seminar for my pronunciation of the word ‘rhetoric’ – I knew what it meant, but I’d never heard it said aloud and put the stress on the second syllable, an error which Ed highlighted by leaping into the class discussion straight after me and repeating the word, with a stress on the first syllable and a smirk across the table. Now he was smirking at me again, from a dust jacket, twenty-odd years older but with his sheen and cleverness undimmed. I’d have loved to dump him in the reject crate, but Leonie had already set up a reviewer and I’d a duty to send it out.

‘There you are,’ Leonie said, pushing the door open as I stapled the Jiffy bag with Ed’s novel in it. With her black hair and dark brown eyes, she can look eerily pallid, but for once her cheeks were pink. ‘Good lunch?’ she asked before I could.

‘God, Robert Pope. I’d forgotten about him. You should get him to do something for us. He’s not a bad writer, for a poet.’

‘He’s rather picky,’ I said. ‘And less keen on us since we trashed his last collection.’

‘He’ll get over it. We should bung him something and offer lots of space. What’s in the Jiffy bag?’ she said, narrowing her eyes.

‘Sorry. Change of plan. Daphne read the proof and hated it. I’ve asked Bridget instead.’

‘I thought Bridget did his last one.’ I knew Bridget had done his last one. She’d called Ed the new Graham Greene. We try to avoid reviewers covering the same author twice, especially if they’ve been fulsome the first time. Bridget was like a Labrador pup: whoever the author, she jumped up and licked them all over.

‘Everyone else is too busy or already reviewing it,’ Leonie said. ‘What else has come in?’

‘Rubbish time of year. But I’ve found a few things. There’s the new –’

Leonie’s not a procrastinator, but she likes to do things on her terms. By tomorrow, she’d have looked at the books I’d saved from the reject crate and decided who should review them – she wouldn’t send them out before consulting me, but any discussion would be token. I’m not complaining. She’s the one responsible for the books pages. And they’re good pages, sharper and livelier than our rivals’. But if I were ambitious, I’d feel frustrated by how little commissioning I get to do. And if I were thinner-skinned, I’d feel slighted by her lack of regard for any suggestions I make.

The upside is that she has children and – unlike the other (mostly male) department heads – doesn’t believe in us working after six unless we have to. It’s a mixed blessing to be home before the children go to bed. But I usually manage it.

We’d finally got Jack and Noah off, though with Noah you couldn’t be sure about the finally: he was two now and capable of sleeping through, but as often as not he’d wake about an hour after we’d put him down and demand that one of us sit with him till he went off again, so dinner tended to be a quick affair, timed so that we’d just about digested whatever it was (tonight, tortellini with pesto and parmesan, plus green salad), before whoever’s turn it was to deal with him disappeared upstairs, often never to return, since there’s nothing like lying in bed with your infant son after a meal and glass of wine to send you to sleep, even if it’s not yet ten o’clock and even if, since Marie became pregnant again, we’d given up the wine, she for health reasons and me out of solidarity.

‘I’m sure you did. But it’s some creepy power thing. He wants to keep a hold over you when he’s gone.’

‘It’s all he ever does think of. Himself and all things pertaining to. Never Jill.’

Marie had met Jill only once, at a small dinner for the launch of Rob’s fourth collection. She wasn’t much more acquainted with Rob – my relationship with her goes back only a decade, by which point I was seeing less of him. But that dinner was enough to convince her that she’d got the dynamic of their marriage sussed. And that Rob was even more vain, pretentious and misogynistic than she’d feared. She might have forgiven him for that, up to a point, since several other male writers she’d come across were no better. But she couldn’t forgive him for neglecting Jill, who, as Marie saw it, he’d left on her own that evening, at the far end of the table from him, and who looked lost, miserable and bored until Marie swapped places with someone and came to her rescue. It wasn’t that she especially warmed to Jill. Their lives and careers had little in common. Marie works with children who have speech problems and she spent the evening struggling to coax words out of Jill. None of which she held against her. It was all Rob’s fault, for being a selfish bastard.

‘All I’ll have to do is keep him in print. And see that any royalties go to Jill.’

‘Jill won’t have crossed his mind. He treats her as if she’s of no account.’

Rob used to joke about being the only poet in history married to an accountant (‘Other poets have muses or mistresses, I have a mathematician’). The word wasn’t quite accurate. At university Jill had read geography, and her job as CFO to an environmental charity was more about managing people than managing money. But she’d a talent for numbers: that much was true.

‘Whatever else,’ Marie said, helping herself to the last soggy parcel of tortellini, ‘I know you love me. Jill’s never had that reassurance from Rob.’

Marie sees the world in black and white, whereas I like to think I’m more nuanced, even if that doesn’t impress her (‘Nuance is for people too chicken to say what they think’). She’s quick to pass judgement and never fails to overstate the case. But she’s also rarely wrong. If her instincts tell her something, there’s no dislodging it, and invariably subsequent events will prove her right: that teenage boy whose inertia everyone attributed to adolescent torpor was addicted to skunk; the husband who she noticed playing with his wedding ring over dinner was having an affair; that babysitter she wouldn’t use despite all the friends who swore by her was stealing from them. Maybe that’s why I needed Marie, to give me a handle on life. She knew next to nothing about the world I moved in, but when something was bothering me (one of the subs being uppity, say, or the editor leaning on me, while Leonie was on holiday, to get a book by a friend of his reviewed), she’d help me see my way round it and encourage me to make a stand. Perhaps that’s what marriage is about, once kids come along and there’s no time for sex or not the kind of sex you had at the beginning (a languorous run of repeats rather than coitus interruptus). I was no less attracted to Marie than I’d ever been: if she’d lines on her forehead and shadows under her eyes, so what? She was still Marie. Her belief in me helped me to believe in myself. And made me tougher and more resolute. Well named, she used to say about me: Matt as in doormat. These days I was less of a pushover.

Still, as far as Rob’s request went – his ‘demand’, as Marie put it – she thought I’d given in too easily.

‘He’s always been brutal about looking after himself. And when he’s dead, he’ll expect you to be brutal on his behalf.’

‘If sorting through his stuff is how you want to spend what little spare time you have, then fine. My only point is: you don’t owe him a thing. He wouldn’t do it for you.’

Why not? Except that on the one occasion Rob had been asked to help me, when my first and only novel came out, he had let me down. Officially, it was my publishers who asked him, when they sent a proof copy which they hoped he’d ‘endorse’ with a quote for the dust jacket. But he must have known it was me who suggested him. Rob’s reply, which my editor passed on to me with an accompanying ‘!!!’, was a lesson in how not to decline an invitation. He would like to help, it went, since I was ‘in effect’ an old student of his and we were good friends, but he doubted that praise from him would cut much ice, since he was a poet not a novelist, besides which he had an urgent deadline to meet (do poets have deadlines?), and since the events of the previous year (9/11) he had lost faith in the power of literature, on top of which he’d begun a set of onerous dental appointments for root canal work, all of which meant he wouldn’t be able to read the novel before it came out, so with regret he must decline. As Marie says, if you’re going to decline an invitation, give one excuse, not a hatful. A sentence was all we were after, which – since he’d seen parts of the novel in draft – would have taken far less time than the paragraph he’d written explaining why he couldn’t write it. But for the fact that two novelists from the same publishing house (close friends of the editor) had come up with puffs as good or better than anything Rob would have written, I might have been seriously offended. But in my virginal euphoria at getting a book published, I let it go, and felt right to have done so when, after a couple of lukewarm reviews appeared, Rob wrote a long letter to say how much he liked the book, which he’d now read twice, and proceeded to give a breakdown of what was good about it – ending the letter with a PS that read ‘By the way, your publishers asked me to give a quote, but I was suffering from depression at the time: apologies, now I’m feeling better of course I wish I had.’ Had he been suffering from depression? Marie would have dismissed that as bullshit. But I’d never told Marie about the episode, because it predated her, and I certainly wasn’t going to tell her now.

‘Any pud?’ I said, rearranging the dishwasher before sticking our plates in – Marie might be wise about most things, but when it comes to stacking crockery and glassware so there’s an outside chance of it getting clean or remaining intact, she hasn’t a clue.

‘A peppermint tea will do me.’ A cry floated down: Noah, bang on time. ‘I’ll have it upstairs.’

She kissed me on the cheek as she passed, and I watched her kick a balloon aside in the doorway. It was Jack’s latest fetish, since his fifth-birthday party three weeks previously: five balloons were to remain inflated at all times; if one of them burst or began to sag, another must take its place. The balloons added to the general clutter in our basement kitchen, which had seemed so spacious when we moved in. Everything seemed spacious after the Hackney flat, and though buying a house meant moving further out, to Wood Green, because no property nearer in was affordable, we revelled in the freedom: four storeys, three bedrooms and a forty-foot rear garden was more than we’d dared to hope for when we started looking, London property prices being what they are or have become. Luckily, the flat sold for more than we’d expected (Hackney was cool), and Marie’s parents met the shortfall on the mortgage with a £30,000 loan, one they didn’t seriously expect us to repay. We felt to be living in Arcadia – 41 Arcadian Gardens to be precise – and, with Jack just a baby, the house was far bigger than we needed. When Noah came along he slept with us at first, then moved in with Jack, which left the spare bedroom free to double as an office. But with a third child it would become the nursery, and any work Marie or I brought home would have to be done at the kitchen table. We’d cope – of course we’d cope. We loved living where we did, in a street whose inhabitants were so proud, old-fashioned or impoverished as to do their cleaning, gardening, childcare and dog-walking themselves, rather than hiring others to do it for them. But any space in the house was shrinking, and the clutter in the basement kitchen, which doubled as a playroom, shrunk it even more. Pre-children, clearing up meant little more than a quick wipe of the table and worktops. Now, to take a small sample of the tasks I found myself performing while the tea brewed and Marie quieted Noah upstairs, it meant picking up stray pieces of jigsaw puzzle and finding the right box to put them in; stowing the Lego back in the red crate and the alphabet cards in a transparent plastic bag; detaching Play-Doh from chair legs, and swabbing juice stains from seats; herding Jack’s five coloured balloons into a corner, while resisting the temptation to burst them, since bursting them might wake him and even if it didn’t would require that I blew up five more; and – because I was feeling especially virtuous or malicious, I’m not sure which – wiping the blackboard clear of the chalky purple giant depicted there, with the twiggy arms that came out of his ears and the nine toes on each of his feet.

The kids are too young to tidy up, Marie said, if I complained, adding, on one occasion, ‘If you were younger, you’d not make such a fuss about it.’ She had a migraine at the time and later apologised, saying she hadn’t really meant it. But I knew she did mean it, the ten-year gap in our ages being a topic I was touchy about, and which Marie had learned to avoid, though the fact was always screamingly present to me, not so much because the statistics suggested I might pre-decease her by as much as twenty years (that was too distant a prospect to worry about), but because it reminded me of other gaps between us, some of them minor (like the lack of overlap between the television programmes we watched as kids or the music we listened to as teenagers), others weightier but get-roundable, like the disparity in our upbringing and education, yet a few that caused us more grief, like the reality of Marie having friends who were still in their mid-thirties and, as she put it, up for doing stuff, whether clubbing, weekends in Barcelona or trips to health farms, whereas my friends were people like Rob, who’d never done stuff in the first place or weren’t about to start now.

Being fourteen years younger than Rob and ten years older than Marie put me in the middle, more or less, just as having parents (a mother, anyway) as well as kids put me in the middle. My job put me in the middle, too – between my colleagues on one side and authors, agents and publishers on the other. And I was middle-aged – forty-five – and middling in height (five foot ten), weight (eleven and a half stone) and appearance (brown-black hair, hazel-green eyes, ochre-white skin). I thought about my middlingness a lot. On good days, I took heart: there I was, look, a centred kind of guy living at the heart of things. On bad, I despised myself as grey, compromised, Matt the middleman. Becoming Rob’s executor would mean more of the same, as I mediated between his manuscripts and the public, a task I hoped wouldn’t arise for some time, but if it did would have to be fitted in between obligations to the paper, Marie, the kids, my mother and my increasingly neglected ambitions as a novelist. He’d left it open to me to decline, but I couldn’t. Increasingly melancholy in recent years, he had seemed bleaker than ever at lunch – bitter, too, that the world, or his muse, had abandoned him. To refuse him would have been cruel. As my dad used to say, never kick a man when he’s down.

Marie’s peppermint tea had brewed too long; I poured half away and topped it up with boiling water. Jack’s wind-up woolly dog lay waiting to trip me at the bottom of the stairs. When I nudged it aside with my foot, its tail wagged and it let out noisy yaps. Setting down the mug of tea, I removed the A4 batteries housed in the underbelly hatch and left it lying stiffly on its side.

Rob and I met at Brandon, Massachusetts, in the early nineties. I was twenty-four and had been awarded a scholarship on the MFA Fiction program on the basis of a good degree and a couple of Carveresque short stories. I was immensely chuffed and couldn’t have afforded it otherwise, but (unlike Iowa’s, say) the creative writing program at Brandon was far from prestigious, as I soon found out. Rob didn’t teach creative writing. Throughout his twenties he’d been working towards a PhD on Keats. The PhD was never completed, but he succeeded in placing a chapter from it in an American scholarly journal, and on the back of that, against all odds, was appointed to a lectureship in Tennessee (‘a hotbed of Keatsians’, he said), where he taught for several years before moving to Brandon. As an authority on Romanticism, he was put in charge of the fresher course on Byron, Keats and Shelley, a course students flocked to ‘because of the James Dean Marilyn Monroe Keith Moon Mama Cass all-the-good-die-young factor, which I do my best to dissuade them of’. He preferred the postgraduate seminar he ran, on the Augustan period (‘I’m a Pope by name and nature’), because the students were fewer in number and sometimes went so far as to read the texts. It was through the seminar that we met, not because I was enrolled for it, but because Kirsten, a girl I knew on the fiction course, had taken it the previous year and described Rob as a genius – a tortured one, she added, which I took to be a reference to how he looked and spoke in class, not to the fact that (so I found out later) he’d failed to respond when she flirted with him, something so unfathomable to her (Kirsten was a very beautiful girl) that only the word ‘tortured’ could explain it, though it’s true that after a second, more decisive rejection, at which I was present, she did use several other words, including ‘weird’, ‘repressed’ and ‘fucked up’.

‘There’s a bar he goes to on Thursdays after class. We could hang out there.’

The bar was mock Western: swing doors, wooden floor with sawdust, lassos and cowboy hats festooning the walls. The last place I’d associate with Rob. But he was different back then – less fixed in his ways.

He was alone at a table in the corner, with a beer, the New York Review of Books and the air of someone who doesn’t want to be disturbed. With his T-shirt, jeans, mass of hair and bushy forearms, he looked more like a construction worker than an academic. The only pedagogic touch was his beard, with its premature dabs of grey.

‘Um, not really,’ he mumbled, which I took to be a refusal of the beer, rather than a protest at the title – he wasn’t a professor, but every lecturer at Brandon, however lowly, got called that. He didn’t look as if he recognised Kirsten, let alone knew her name.

‘Well, good luck. I don’t believe creative writing can be taught. Certainly none of the poets here should be teaching poetry.’

‘Are you sure you won’t have a beer, Professor Pope?’ Kirsten said, oblivious to how badly things were going.

‘I’m only reading this shit. Ten thousand words on John Ashbery. Christ, he’s not even any good.’

Not having read Ashbery, I was stuck for something to say. Rob didn’t seem to mind. He spent the next five minutes telling me – and once Kirsten had returned with the drinks, the half-hour after that telling both of us – why Ashbery was no good, and Wallace Stevens not much better, and that the whole American literary-critical ‘circus’ were either stooges of the CIA or dimwits who couldn’t tell a Hardy from a Heaney. I could follow barely half of what he was saying, but I enjoyed the spleen. He waved his arms around a lot. The word ‘repressed’ seemed way off the mark.

The incident that made Kirsten use it of him was yet to occur. And there was no reason to see it coming. Both of us were equally wide-eyed, would-be novelists whose opinions on what constituted good writing were still at the infant stage and who couldn’t imagine ever becoming as knowledgeable as Rob. Far from resenting our presence, he seemed to enjoy having an audience, one that wasn’t there by compulsion (as his undergraduates were) and wouldn’t argue back or cut him off (as his fellow profs doubtless did). A bar, rather than a lecture theatre, seemed to be his natural habitat. From time to time, I glanced across at Kirsten. ‘Open-mouthed’ is the cliché for awestruck listeners, but she was tautly attentive rather than slack-jawed, smiling and nodding as if she too thought ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ the least fatuous of Ashbery’s poems, even if horribly flawed.

‘I love poetry,’ Kirsten said. ‘Expressing your feelings – that’s so creative.’

‘Poets are so physical,’ Kirsten said, undeterred, ‘so intimate, so erotic, it’s what I’m aiming for in my own writing. I just love Whitman’s “Song of Myself”.’

‘Terrible title, terrible poem. “Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” – what bollocks.’

‘What about British poets?’ I said, to spare Kirsten from Rob’s harangue. More vituperation followed. I wish I could remember all the epithets he used, and though I did later write a few of them down, Boswell-fashion, they seemed lame without hearing his voice, or rather the voices of the poets he was taking off. He’d a gift for mimicking regional accents, Northern Irish as well as Liverpudlian, that Kirsten couldn’t have appreciated, though she laughed as if she did.

‘I love America,’ he said, which wasn’t an answer, but prompted another riff, non-literary this time, on how he’d always wanted to come to the US, his great-grandfather having emigrated to Michigan as a young man to work for Chrysler, which he did for twenty years before returning to the UK with his family and, armed with advanced mechanical know-how, setting up a garage business, which had prospered so well that the Pope family was still reaping the benefits, long after they’d sold the business. He’d been told that his great-grandfather once killed a man, a no-good negro (‘his phrase, not mine’, Rob said) who used to lie in wait each Friday as the workers came out of the Chrysler factory with their pay packets, until he, the great-grandfather, bought a gun and shot him dead – perhaps in collaboration with others, Rob said, since they carried the man back inside the factory and laid him out on a workbench and left him there, rightly guessing that the corpse would be gone by Monday morning, no questions asked. ‘Probably apocryphal,’ Rob said, ‘and deeply shameful if true,’ but to a young boy the story made America seem an exciting place, and so it had proved. He’d no intention of going back to the UK in the immediate future, though to get his poems published he would have to; the stuff he wrote, such as it was, had no appeal to Ashberyites, about whom – apologies if he’d bored us with his rant – he’d said more than enough already.

Rob was impressive. And I was lonely, new to the US and in need of a new mentor. My dad had been first; then Mr Haigh, our English teacher at school (who came into his own, or helped me to come into mine, in the sixth form); then Diarmid Shannon, convener of the Modernist module at Bristol. I’d left them behind, in the UK, opening a space for Rob to fill. Even as I sat there, having only just met him, the familiar sensations passed through me – deference, admiration, the wish to learn.

The incident that made Kirsten call him ‘repressed’ occurred as I brought the third or fourth round of beers back to our table, though I caught only the tail end, which consisted of Rob saying ‘No offence’ and Kirsten looking highly offended. She had proposed, so she reported to me later, that we all have dinner afterwards, and he’d replied that it would be inappropriate. ‘Man,’ she said, ‘he might be a genius, but he’s so fucking weird and repressed. I mean, what’s inappropriate about a prof having dinner with two grad students? It’s not like we’re even taking his course. How fucked up is that?’

‘Yes, seriously fucked up,’ I concurred, not because I believed it (didn’t genius and fucked-up-ness go together?) but in the hope that concurrence would allow me to make a move on Kirsten, with whom I was by then drinking tequila over an oilcloth-covered table at her place. We’d left the bar pretty swiftly after Rob’s refusal, she having fallen silent in its wake. She’d remained more or less silent as I walked her home, and her ‘Wanna come up?’ took me by surprise. Up was the fifth floor of an old tenement building, now occupied by students. She shared the flat with three other girls, all currently across town at a gig, she told me, which seemed a good omen, as did the offer of tequila rather than coffee. Most encouraging of all was her dissing of Rob, his genius status now forfeited by his fucked-up-ness. Beyond the oilcloth-covered table was a sofa, and beyond that a couple of doors, one of which surely opened to her bedroom. American courting etiquette can’t be so different from British, can it? I reflected, as Kirsten, excusing herself, disappeared to what she called ‘the ladies’ room’, a term I associated with pubs and restaurants not domestic spaces, and anyway every room in the flat was a ladies’ room or lady’s room. Would Kirsten return wearing ‘something more comfortable’, as women did in Hollywood films, having changed into a flimsy nightdress, hair unpinned for good measure? Undeterred when she didn’t, I stood up with the intention of taking her in my arms (‘sweeping her up’ was the phrase in the film scenario still running in my head), till she cleverly sidestepped me, like someone shrinking back from a shower because the water has run cold.

‘You’re so sweet, Matt,’ she said, ‘but I’m not ready for a relationship.’

Contents

About the Book

About the Author

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