What We Can Know - 14

S omething extraordinary and wondrous happened and it was here, now , not in 2010 or ’14 but in our muted present. On a hot day in June, Rose and I went swimming after our last classes of the day. It was early evening and the air was warm and creamy on the skin. A smell of baked earth and herbs rose from under our bare feet as we crossed the grassy slope that gave on to the sandy bay below the faculty accommodation towers. We passed the lifeguard station and its single eucalyptus tree. The beach, a wide horseshoe of fine pinkish yellowish sand, was deserted but for a bunch of students playing volleyball half a mile away at the far end where the chalk cliffs begin. We stripped off and walked into the sea hand in hand. Usually, I lower myself in inch by inch. This evening the calm water gave a welcoming caress, and when it was deep enough, I collapsed into its embrace. We swam a couple of hundred metres from the shore, out across the sea grasses, gliding through translucent water, over the occasional sea turtle, to where we knew a sandbank rose without breaking the surface. The incoming tide was at its midway point, and we were standing in water chest-deep.

Face to face and close, we rested our hands on each other’s shoulders. We were grinning like imbeciles. It was as if, she said later, we suddenly remembered that we weren’t just minds, we had bodies too. We kissed and then, overcome by delight and desire, and for the first time in years, we made love. We stood in a rising sea, still breathing hard from our swim. Small pebbles and submarine grasses tickled our soles and ankles, and the smooth tidal wavelets made all the movement we needed, lifting us by inches and setting us down gently in a steady rhythm. The transition from seedy seminar rooms to this sensual paradise was preposterous. To see clearly a familiar face – ex-lover, long-term colleague – and in a quiet revelation understand her to be beautiful, was a transfiguration. I felt younger, healthier and more attractive than I could possibly hope to be at the age of forty-four. Some rapturous form of inner swagger assured me that I was worthy of the moment. The sea that had once obliterated cities was now our placid friend. We had tamed it. Rose’s face, her intense vertiginous regard, her wet hair curling in spiky loops below her ear, her firm shoulders and arms, her breasts part-submerged, her loveliness and intelligence appeared as one essential human element. I was gripped by an impulse to tell her that I loved her, but a lifetime’s various mishaps made me cautious of uttering those contractual three words, easily uttered and near impossible to unsay. I blamed myself for my caution and bad faith. Then she spoke the words for me, eerily, on one note, like plainsong. I had no choice but to say them too, and I did not want a choice. But how strange, even awkward, it was to say for the first time ‘I love you’ to an old friend.

It was done, we had crossed a line and made a promise, one that we would have found difficult to define. We would not always be standing here in a rhapsodic state, arms looped around the other’s neck, deep in warm clear seawater in beautiful evening sunlight with no one around. We sensed we had said something that implied a future, one that we would share and was bound to be more crowded and less ecstatic.

In acknowledgement that we were holding that time off a little longer, we swam further out, perhaps another hundred metres, keeping time with our strokes. We did not say much, preferring to remain with the echoes, the aftershocks of our declaration. Its stark subject-verb-object simplicity couldn’t be matched or improved. We stopped to tread water and rest. This far out, the water looked black, and six inches below the surface it was icy. There was now a deeper swell, with an obscure threat of danger in the freshening wind. We would no longer be visible to anyone on the shore. Our peopled world and all its obligations now seemed more homely. We set off to return to it and, still in silence, made a wide arc across the bay, moving faster now on the tide that surged towards the shore and our pile of clothes.

Her apartment was larger than mine. Over the next month, when I was not marking exam papers, I moved my stuff across. Everything went back to how it had been before, and everything was different. I informed the university accommodation office that I was terminating my rental agreement. Rose and I told each other we had never been happier in our adult lives. We were tender, passionate, sweet. We marvelled at how we could have been so stupid not to have found our love years before, when we lived together. Back then it was a perfunctory arrangement, an almost professional affair, until it became, after fifteen months, oppressive to us both, and I had moved out.

Once the exam papers were handed back and the examiners’ meetings were over, the long summer break would be ours. We decided to stay put, working on our projects, swimming and reading for pleasure on the beach of our south-facing bay, which would be empty once the students had left. Rose was forming some ideas for a paper she wanted to write. She was as happy as I was to stay here together on a deserted campus.

Lately, she had been mentioning again the Kitchener archive in Scotland. It was the one collection I needed to investigate, she insisted. I merely repeated myself. The Moidart library would of course be of great help to me, but getting there was too dangerous. I was more risk-averse now than in my twenties and thirties. I was not prepared to offer up my life to a bunch of Lake District thugs in electric canoes.

The summer of 2120 was a delight after the cold, wet winds and storms of the months before. Rose and I embarked on our idyll and it was just as we had hoped – we swam, hiked, read, worked and loved. We had never felt fitter or more capable and energetic. We woke early during the long heatwave to swim before breakfast which we ate on her apartment’s narrow balcony. It overlooked a bicycle park and a high-rise identical to hers, but it was at least shaded in the mornings. We worked or read until lunch. Rose needed the library, so I had the dining table to myself.

She was putting notes together for a monograph in which she would describe a crisis in realism in fiction between 2015 and 2030. The Derangement was a vast and complex subject, it was ‘existentially transformative’ and bred Metaphysical Gloom. The conventions of fictional realism, with its close attention to the mundane, the personal and the assumed continuity of everyday life, were inadequate. New forms were needed to frame the physical and moral consequences of a global catastrophe and certain writers were struggling to find them. The subject was a little too theoretical for my taste, but I was sure she would write a fine essay and I was impatient to read her first draft.

As for me, I had decided that before finding Blundy’s poem and revealing it to the world I should prepare the ground with a historical essay. For more than a hundred years, it had been accepted practice in the humanities to address not the matter under discussion, but the idea of the matter, how it was represented in the minds of others, and how that spectre flitted and danced across the decades. Long ago, as an undergraduate, I was required to adopt this approach. I was against it, even at the age of nineteen. I would tell my tutor that I wanted to write about a particular poem, not its reputation. Surely, it should be taken for granted that whatever I thought about the poem was an idea of the poem. I was not sufficiently informed or confident at that stage to make a good argument. I was easily swatted aside as a naïve empiricist. The only existence a literary work could have was in the minds of those who had read it – or, it should have been added, of those who had heard about it. My tutor tapped out the syllables on my sternum with, I remember, a long white finger: there is nothing else .

So here I was, twenty-five years later, a man in love, setting out with a fat bundle of notes to write about the thoughts and aspirations of a few generations concerning Francis Blundy’s ‘A Corona for Vivien’. The poem on the page did not yet exist. It had lived and still lived only in countless minds. There was nothing else. The thing itself might turn up one day in the attic of some ancient dwelling. There was a one-in-fifty chance it lay waiting in Harry Kitchener’s archive but I would have to accept that for now I was writing not about a poem, but about its shadow – and I was aggrieved. Rose was sympathetic. We were on our beach in the shade of the eucalyptus tree, eating a picnic lunch after a swim. The Corona was an exceptional case, she said, soothingly, and an important one, a vital cultural artefact. She reminded me that I had once described it as ‘a repository of dreams’, and on another occasion as ‘a mirror for the ages and all their anxieties’. My job, she told me, was to describe the dreams and the anxieties, not the poem.

I wondered about her inheritance, whether it was large enough to liberate us from low-paid teaching. It pained her to talk about it. In an account she never looked at, she said, was a ‘mid-five-figure sum’. 50,000 naira? She turned away and I knew not to ask. We were generally helpful with each other’s work. But we had a running dispute that predated our discovery of love. Rose thought I was subject to distorted notions of the period in which we specialised. I romanticised the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. I foolishly convinced myself that I was living in the wrong era. I exaggerated the vitality and beauty of the past and ignored its squalor and cruelty and morbid greed. If I was transported back there, I would loathe it. The stupidity and waste would suffocate me or make me insane. So would the nastiness of social media, then run for profit rather than as a public service. What, she demanded, of the self-serving short-sightedness or plain folly or mendacity or viciousness of political leaders – take your pick – and the quiescence or craven idiocy or terror of their populations? What of the people’s careless love of autocrats? How could we overlook or forgive the desolation those times bequeathed, the poisons they left in the oceans, the forests they stole, the soils and rivers they ruined and the Derangement they acknowledged but would not prevent? It was all scorched earth, all blithe contempt for the generations to follow. The world I hankered after was a privileged corner – Gloucestershire! The big world beyond was sinking. How could I go on about the James Webb telescope?

I reminded her of a biological truth established during her despised twentieth century. The smaller the island, the less diverse its species. In this country, we lived on islands, and we were lucky that ours was thirty-eight miles long. Others were far smaller. As in biology, so with culture. We all thought the same things. We were almost all the same pale brown colour. We lacked diversity! There was no tension of ideas or ways of life, or of understanding life, no opposition to the moribund orthodoxies we lived by, nothing radically new or interesting to challenge us or prompt discoveries. If we weren’t crushed by the past, we were terrified by it. Our finest achievement was not to be at war. It was not enough to tell ourselves that our seas were cleaner, with life beginning to return, and that our islands in good light looked lush and pretty. That was not down to virtue. It was the result of civilisation’s collapse. Whenever humans got out of the way, the rest of the living world edged back and flourished. As for our precious universities, the kids we taught were inert, the culture fed them pap, and we were the elderly scolds, repeating the orthodoxies, the sacred canons, every year, just as we might have in the fifteenth century.

I conceded that much that Rose said about our special period was true. Its talent for self-destruction was unrivalled. It had been ready to take the future down with it. But that was not the entire picture. I knew she loved the literature of those days as much as I did. Sure, the golden age, the Mabel Fisk period, was a few decades ahead. Our period of interest was a bronze age, perhaps not even that. But those people tried hard. The times were copious, like rivers in spate. Its teeming hordes of novelists, poets and dramatists formed a giant army massed against its readers, who were never quite sure of what was good . So the arguments were insecure and loud, and that was fine, a democracy of contesting tastes, a chaos of unconformity. I treasured the crazy music and fads and troubled movies and serious science, serious history, serious biography. My list was long – the suspension bridges, the orchestras, street parties and a thousand forms of music festivals, and people’s gardening and cooking, their need for holidays, extreme sports, historical enactments, gay-pride carnivals, the risks they took with AI, the sense of humour, the safe airplanes, the passion for pointless sports. A hundred thousand at a football match! An astronaut playing golf on the moon! Did she know about the cheese-rolling competitions? Four billion people watching the—

‘Enough, Tom.’

‘Rose, have you any idea how delicious and varied the food was back then?’

‘That would depend on where you lived and what you could afford.’

I told her again. The best thinkers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries were troubled by a world in love with war and its technologies, and they wrote well about it. As for us, all that kept us from each other’s throats was seawater and a shortage of metals to make decent weapons.

We have been around this too often. We haven’t raised our voices – we are island people. But I suppose we came to influence each other a little. I’ve come to appreciate that our period of study might be described as a sewer. I might not want to live in it, but I wanted her to accept that sections were majestic feats of design and engineering mastery.

After nine days, I had set down 3,500 words of introduction to what I was calling my ‘reputation essay’. In it I promised to explore the ghost of a poem that lived in people’s thoughts, but I could not help myself, I insisted that the poem existed. Rose read my pages.

A day later she told me what she thought. ‘Thomas Metcalfe, you’ve checked all last messages, wills, Letters of Wishes of first-generation survivors and of their survivors. You’ve studied Vivien’s papers and what’s left of Blundy’s agent’s and publisher’s archives. You’ve read the contemporary press, masses of internet material, masses of scholarly stuff.’

All true. I had been down those rabbit holes, as had many others. We had looked into the last wishes of Vivien, Rachel, Peter, Peter’s wife Jessica and their children Basil and Kirsten, Jane and Harry Kitchener and their children Susanne and Ralph, Harriet and Chris Gage and their children Todd, Laura and Jack. Rose’s advice was simple. Stop driving yourself nuts. I had searched, others had searched. The poem was no more. Accept it. The essential business was the biography of a non-existent work whose reputation endured. Such was the power of literature – and there was my subject. I did not attempt to argue. However, I still could not abandon my secret hopes, which were founded on one reasonable assumption and one possibility. Vivien’s love of poetry was too fierce to let her consign the poem to oblivion. It was somewhere and I would find it. The Corona might be in a document box in the stacks of a small library 500 metres up a mountain in the north-west of Scotland. Only cowardice stood in my way.

Rose and I were married in August in a modest five-minute ceremony in front of the university administration office’s mainframe.