What We Can Know - 10

I t was fortunate that the Corona reading sent Vivien to her journal the next day to consider her life beyond gardening, recipes, family news and all else she deployed to smother her formidable learning. The prose has a staccato quality, like so many stabs. When Francis presented her with the roll of vellum, she thanked him and called him darling for the first time in a couple of years. She did so, she wrote, ‘for the benefit of our guests’. But perhaps, after all, ‘I do love him. Comfortable with it. Anyway, too late to go looking elsewhere.’ She liked her life, her dairy and garden, her walks, the tranquillity, her friends, the spaciousness of the Barn. She noted that over the past year Francis had borrowed books and guides to butterflies, birds and wildflowers and left them scattered around the place. He had ‘transmuted bland facts into sensual observation’. Later she wrote, ‘Francis is trying to beat Heaney at his own game.’ For a man and poet so ‘startlingly unobservant’, Francis had done ‘a job on himself, or on the voice in his poem. That’s his talent.’ But as a poem addressed to her in celebration of their ‘lifetime’s love’ (ten years, in fact) it was misleading. He was well known for disliking country walks. Away from his study, he regretted the wasted time. Why walk when he could write? She went ‘happily alone’ or, once or twice, with her nephew Peter.

It surprised her that Francis would want to imagine a life, evoked in such detail, in which they freely roamed, adoring nature’s plenitude. That was an existence she would love. It was as if he was beguiling her with all that was missing from their marriage. ‘Perhaps,’ she wrote that next day, ‘he’s about to change his ways.’ But ‘float down a river together on strong currents through a gorge? He could barely swim.’ On a summer’s evening, he might lower himself into their neighbour’s pool to cool off, gin and tonic in hand. He feared rivers because of Weil’s disease caused, so he claimed, by liver-destroying bacterial swarms that flourished in the urine of water rats. Vivien and Francis had married in a London registry office, not a rural church as she had argued for at the time. He had never expressed interest in the King James Bible. He was contemptuous of religion and its sacred texts. A poem was a fiction, but this one was addressed to her, and no reader could doubt that as the poet’s life companion, she was the subject.

Her first husband Percy had been ‘a different species of man’. He learned his birds from his mother, a gifted amateur ornithologist. Vivien learned her wildflowers at school. Before his illness they sometimes covered twenty miles on a long summer’s day, making discoveries and teaching each other what they knew. They once swam and drifted two miles down the Cherwell, then in spate, and ran back in wet swimsuits, barefoot along the footpaths. It troubled her that she was no longer able to see Percy vividly from ‘the primary source of memory’. Over the years he had receded into the photographs she kept in a walnut box he made for her one Christmas. In a drawer in her study wrapped in a tablecloth was the violin Percy had built for the sheer pleasure in his craft – a copy of a famous old model. His physical presence, once so powerful, left no record but clichés like the one she had once found in a Mary Sheldrake novel, ‘a great bear of a man’. He was big, bearded, cheerful, competent, reliably affectionate, loudly sociable, not the shape of a man you would associate with the delicacy of a violin maker. He worked from a shed in their Headington garden. Among chamber groups his reputation was growing. There was a significant leap in his income when he met a member of the famous group Radiohead, and designed and built for him an electric guitar. A friendly sound engineer from Oxford Brookes University helped Percy with the electronics. More orders came in for guitars, but he turned them down. His passion was for violins.

According to Vivien’s journal, they had been married four years when he suffered a serious lapse of memory. In a ‘spooky episode’, a few hours went missing from his life. The general medical view was that such lapses were common and harmless. Vivien was not convinced. The following year, a consultant neurologist showed her and Percy on a computer screen the results of a scan. There was the compromised brain tissue. The diagnosis was clear, and his future was set – Alzheimer’s, a case of early onset. He was forty-three. In retrospect it was not clear which time was worse, when he lived in anguish about his future and discussed suicide with her, or when he crossed the line into vacancy and no longer understood what was happening. The second stage was by far the longer. He reached a ‘dreary plateau’. For a long while he ceased to decline. Later he wandered at night. He was brought home by cheerful local volunteers in hi-viz jackets who went out with torches, phones and pet dogs to search for lost children and the demented. Vivien became more vigilant and at last accepted that she would have to take leave from teaching.

In their small house she began to doubt her own sanity. In eighteen months Percy had transformed from a happy, intelligent and worldly husband who loved and cared for her, into ‘a childish dope’ with incessant repeated questions, ‘meaningless frets and total dependence’. She hated herself for thinking this way. Her duty was to respect and maintain his dignity. She knew she shouldn’t be using a word like ‘dope’. But it was hard. Every few minutes he nagged her with the same question. For days it might be, ‘What time is it?’ Then shifting to, ‘When are they coming?’ If she asked, ‘Who’s coming?’ he would say, ‘I don’t know.’ He would wake her in the night to ask her the time. During the long day he followed her about the house. ‘What are you doing?’ And sometimes, without affect, ‘Why are you crying?’

Because he was wakeful at night, he sometimes dozed in his chair in the afternoons. Then she would phone or email her sister, Rachel, her vital resource. In one message Vivien wrote

What’s so weird as well as pitiful is that he looks like he always did, like his real self. As long as he’s not saying anything. He gets up, washes, sometimes even trims his beard. He puts on the clothes I set out for him. At breakfast he’s in his usual place, drinking coffee. I glance across at his lovely big face and I think it’s all been a bad dream. In a minute he’ll get up and kiss me. He’ll go out to his workshop to start on a commission. He looks at me and I imagine a gleam of mischief. He’s been pretending all along. It’s been a joke in bad taste. He was testing my love. Then he says, ‘When are they coming?’ When I fail to answer, he asks again. I go into the kitchen and start on the dishes. I know he’ll follow me in and ask, ‘What are you doing?’ It’s only seven thirty and there’s a whole day ahead. Nowhere to escape to, for me or for him. If I take him for a walk, he’ll ask, ‘Where are we going?’ If I tell him, he’ll forget and ask me again. But then he holds my hand and gives it a squeeze and I know I love him. I can never put him in a home. We’re both prisoners here.

Her sister came to sit with Percy to give Vivien a few hours to herself. The first time Vivien stepped out of the house alone into the back garden, passed his unused shed and opened the gate onto the gravel lane outside, she ‘almost fainted with guilty joy’. The track ran along the backs of the Edwardian terrace and where it ended at the rotted remains of a stile, before a vast field of cereal crops, was an old chalk pit filled with rubbish and a copse of horse chestnut trees. They had ‘somehow escaped the farmer’s mad chainsaw’. A path formed by tractor wheels took her across the field under the ‘dipped and humming cables of giant striding pylons’. It was ‘a defiantly unlovely landscape of chemical farming’. But this ‘lifeless immensity, scraped clean of hedgerows and trees’ gave her a large sky, and ‘the iron lid on my spirits was lifted for a while’.

Rachel came as often as she could, despite her own health problems. Vivien always took the same walk. To take any other route, by going out of the front door, would be dull, taking her down the suburban streets she walked most days to reach the local shops. When she returned from her solitary stroll, it became a reassuring routine to call out to Percy and Rachel that she was home. During that time, 2000 to 2002, Percy’s mental shrinking proceeded imperceptibly. Vivien was desperate. She loved him and lived in ‘constant grief’. This Percy was not the one she married, not the one who had ‘brought me such freedom and delight’.

Rachel often brought her eldest, Peter, with her. Vivien adored her nephew. He was eleven years old, beginning to be a lanky boy, with an endearing shy manner and graceful movements. His dark brown hair grew thickly over his ears. He would not speak unless prompted, and then his manner was intimate and gave the impression of a rich inner life. What also struck Vivien were his eyes, clear, also deep brown and, whatever his mood, always merry. He did withdraw sometimes, not into sulkiness, but into a curious diffidence, as if he did not wish to be impolite and tell his aunt he had drifted far off to a place he could not describe, even to himself. She felt protective of him, worried that his tenderness and delicacy would not survive the demands of the school football pitch and the crude jostling competitiveness of male adolescence.

Peter and Percy always got on well. Before the illness they spent hours together in the workshop, where Percy, with good-humoured patience, cast the boy as his indispensable assistant, a natural luthier, he would say. Peter was a quick learner, with focussed curiosity about how things worked – machines, weather, animals, the cosmos. He was drawn to the fine electric polisher and miniature clamps ranged along the shed’s workbench. In a solemn ritual on entry, he would tie on one of his uncle’s enormous brown aprons, fix the specially adjusted goggles over his eyes, and work on a scrap of discarded seasoned rosewood that Percy had kept for him. He had the knack of treating his nephew as an adult with whom he was on easy terms, showed him some chords on the banjo and let him hold the special violin he was building – not a commission, but a personal project to recreate in maple and spruce the famous ‘Vieuxtemps Guarneri’ violin of 1741. Vivien once watched Percy and Peter coming up the garden path from the shed for their lunch, hand in hand, talking intently, and she felt ‘a stab of love for them both that was almost like pain. The child we never had.’

It would have been actual pain had she known what lay ahead. When Percy began to unravel, Peter’s visits dropped away, but that was Rachel’s decision, not the boy’s. When he did come and found the shed locked up, his uncle changed and the Guarneri violin forgotten, Peter adapted instantly. He and Percy remained close. It may have been that a more childlike quality in his uncle drew them even closer. Percy did not trouble Peter with repeated questions. Instead, they had inconsequential exchanges in low voices that could last an hour. Vivien overheard and wrote down the following.

Rose knows Vivien’s journals almost as well as I do, and she knows the literature and social history of the period better than anyone. She reads the first drafts of my chapters as I complete them and our conversations often turn around the same issue. She is impatient of what I regard as an essential freedom to speculate, infer, make educated guesses and animate circumstance and states of mind with the reasonable projection of a common humanity unchanged across the intervening century. The alternative, I tell her, would be a numbing series of agnostic shrugs. The dead hand of academic neutrality would cause these characters to wither. I tell her that my duty is to vitality , to convey the experience of lived and felt life, to what it was to live in a certain time, however remote. Rose replies that my only duty is to the truth. Misquoting – not St Augustine as I thought, but the great twentieth-century philosopher, Wittgenstein – she says, whereof you do not know, thereof you must be silent. Otherwise, she adds, own up each time you make an educated guess. Our positions have become entrenched, but I think our exchanges are good-humoured, or at least we don’t raise our voices.

Our first conversation fixed the pattern for the rest. Rose said, ‘It could be missing from my notes, but Vivien doesn’t mention in the journal what she cooked on the big night.’

‘Quail with mushrooms was one of her special dishes. Blundy was very keen on it.’

‘But you can’t know. So you don’t know what she shopped for.’

I said, ‘Highly likely she bought cauliflower, another favourite.’

Rose kept at it. ‘You don’t even know she went shopping.’

‘She must have been. Remember that tree blocking the road as she drove back.’

‘Ah yes. Tree, or was it just a branch?’

I did not reply. Rose pressed on. ‘That reading Blundy gave at the Sheldonian, Tom. Was it videoed?’

‘No. But I’ve watched dozens of his other events.’

Before one respite afternoon and evening in January, Vivien knew that it was not a big sky she needed but stimulation. At the end of a lengthy goodbye, a complicated disentanglement, during which she almost changed her mind, she kissed Rachel and Percy and walked fast to her nearest bus stop. Soon she was standing across the street from Christopher Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre. It was forty minutes until the event and already a queue was forming. Over to her left was the King’s Arms, where she sometimes used to meet her students. Blackwell’s bookshop was at her back, Hertford and New College minutes away. The epicentre of her professional career. She was eight months into an unpaid year’s sabbatical. Around was the life she had left behind. She crossed the road to join the line and stood numbly waiting, speaking to no one. She had forgotten how to be with talkative strangers.

She was among the first fifty or so to be admitted. The poetry-loving public was too polite to take seats at the front. Prompted by healthy stirrings of entitlement, she removed one of the reserved signs in the first row and sat. During the next twenty minutes, as the Sheldonian filled, colleagues came by to ask after Percy and how she was coping. One, an emeritus professor of French, told her that he had been scanned and recently received the same diagnosis. They swapped notes in curiously humorous mode. Within several minutes she experienced something swelling in her spirits. It was simple pleasure, she later told her sister, in meeting people she admired and liked, who liked and respected her! ‘I was crawling out of my cage,’ she wrote. But she also noted, when everyone was seated and she was alone again, a ‘boiling impatience’ and a sense of ‘life charging past me’.

As Professor Harold Kitchener brought his distinguished guest and brother-in-law out and the applause began, Vivien was reviewing her neglected projects – two essays for a collection, a conference keynote speech she should have given, a state school outreach programme she had been about to run, two abandoned PhD students and her abandoned book brought her back to her ‘dismantled’ personal life. The ‘piles of wreckage’ behind her included a two-week stay in Aleppo she and Percy had planned for this year, staying with a scholarly Arabist friend and her husband, a diplomat. At the bottom of the heap of that ‘builders’ rubble’ was desire. Its remnant was a soft ache she felt in the early mornings. She was not, she thought, so old after all.

The applause died away as the two men took their seats. She watched the famous poet closely. She had come reluctantly to his work. In her twenties she had written on her cherished American women, Bishop, Sexton, Rich, Glück. Blundy’s concerns were not hers. It was his technical flair that began to attract her attention. Then a handful of end-of-the-affair poems moved her. A celebratory lecture on Blundy given by Karl Miller and another a year later by Frank Kermode were impressive, but it was a paper by Barbara Hardy that won her over and she read Blundy again with growing respect. There was no way round it, he had a gift.

The two men sat on leather armchairs. Between them were glasses of water on a low table. After announcing that Francis Blundy needed no introduction, Kitchener went on to introduce him at length. The awards, the prizes, his themes of love, urban decay, the blessings and afflictions of modernity, his notorious refusal to bow to the queen, his scathing attack on the prime minister Tony Blair and New Labour, Blundy’s championing of certain elderly, neglected poets and novelists who had refused to conform to the prescriptions of modernism. For almost fifteen minutes, Kitchener spoke with soft assurance through a half-smile, slumped in his chair, right leg crossed over his knee. Occasionally, he made a wagging movement with his free foot encased in its soft suede boot.

Throughout, Blundy sat rigid, staring straight ahead. He was a fair representation of the public’s idea of a great poet – white hair swept back, a lined and sculpted face. At fifty-one, an early curse of age had turned down the corners of his mouth into ‘a default expression of scorn, like Graham Sutherland’s drawing of Somerset Maugham’. Blundy was a man facing into a gale which could not intimidate him. His chin was raised, and he did not blink to modify his reproachful pale blue stare. He was not listening to the speech and its pointless praise.

When Kitchener was done, the poet rose and crossed to a lectern. No formal thanks, no greeting, no ingratiating himself before his readers. In a flat tone, he announced the title of a poem – ‘In the Saddle’ – and spoke it from memory, glaring at his audience from left to right and back, daring those tempted to let their attention wander. It was a popular beginning. Many would have known it from their schooldays. A young girl, probably in her mid-teens, is helped onto the back of a large horse. From this vantage point, she looks down at her father, who is holding the leading rein while talking to a friend. The girl sees the ‘old coin of baldness’ on her father’s scalp and feels a rush of delight. She is above him and no longer fears him. There is a muted suggestion that she knows he is unfaithful to her mother. The giant horse stirs impatiently. The girl runs a hand over its silky neck and the smooth polished saddle. If she is not free yet, she knows she will be soon, when the rein will fall from her father’s grip and the horse will be at her command. The promise of impending liberation – from people like Francis Blundy, detractors liked to say – made the poem especially popular among schoolgirl adolescents.

Between poems, he returned to his seat and spoke loftily about his life, poetry in general and the famous poets he had known. Unlike most writers at public events, he felt no obligation to make his audience laugh. He talked about Auden, Larkin and his ‘far too gifted rival’, Seamus Heaney. The event was over quickly. Including Harry’s speech, it lasted less than an hour and a half.

By the end of it, Vivien had made her decision. There was to be a reception afterwards in St Catherine’s College. She had not been invited, but her confidence was restored. She knew she would be welcome. Within forty minutes of the final applause, she was in a noisy room, glass of wine in her fist, talking poetry with the great man. Close up, he was warmer than she had expected. She was ‘pushing on an open mind’. From Blundy’s point of view, it was equally simple. ‘A young woman, a round-faced beauty … knowledgeable and wise about poetry, inc. mine … softened me up by quoting me at various points … Seemed determined and I was fed up and couldn’t resist.’

They spent what Blundy called ‘a decent night’ at the Randolph Hotel. Vivien’s version was warmer, but equally guarded. She wrote of a ‘delightful encounter’ and of being ‘seduced by conversation’. He sent a friendly email after a tactful three days and hoped he might ‘bump into her again’. She also let some time pass before thanking him and mentioning a ‘chronically ill husband’, by which she no doubt hoped to convey to Blundy her availability as well as her difficult circumstances.

The return to her ‘Headington non-existence’ was tough. It would be a month before Rachel could get away from her own constrained life to sit with Percy again. Vivien wrote, ‘I long to scream.’ She found herself snapping at Percy, then dissolving in guilt and desperate to make amends. While he sat in front of the TV one afternoon, she locked the house and took a taxi to a local-authority care home and was given a rapid tour. She was back in the house within the hour and Percy had not noticed her absence. Vivien was shocked by the cheerful but worn-out staff, the overcrowded communal room, low-grade TV on all day and ‘everywhere the suffocating smell of awful cooking failing to conceal other odours’. Most residents were in a worse state than Percy. In her anguish, she wrote to Rachel, ‘I will never put him away.’ There were better places, country houses set in parkland, with lakes, fountains, piped classical music, but Vivien had no savings.

We do not know how the arrangements were made for the famous ‘Cotswold tryst’. After their first cautious exchanges, matters progressed. We must assume there were telephone conversations, or letters that were destroyed or lost. We know that Rachel helped with advice about the five-day local-authority respite care. It was in a slightly better place, beyond the Oxford ring road in the Cowley direction. No biographer has been able to locate it. But Vivien took Percy there by bus, settled him somehow, then was collected by Francis in a taxi which took them for a long, expensive ride west to an inn somewhere in the southern Cotswolds. Some have argued for the Swan in either Swinbrook or Bibury, others the Lamb or the Ship in Burford. None of them exists now, of course, and it hardly matters. What does is that when those five days were up, Francis began his sequence of celebrated love poems, eventually published in his volume Feasting , and that Vivien’s return to the little terraced house was even harder than before.