What We Can Know - 16

N ot long after I moved back in with Rose, I saw a cloud of butterflies. Apparently, this eruption of colour and erratic motion happens every year and I’d never noticed. On an afternoon stroll I saw a dog leap up and snap a tortoiseshell out of the air. I was shocked and wondered if an early symptom of ageing was fretting about and caring for the natural world. To honour the victim I taught myself some common names: meadow brown, ringlet, gatekeeper. I read about the butterfly’s brief life cycle and learned that right across the archipelago there are as many as eight species. But in Francis and Vivien’s time, I discovered, there were fifty-seven resident species, and I was reminded again of our diminished world. When I went with Rose in the early evening across the wild grasses to the beach, scores of pale moths called plumes rose from under our feet. It saddened me to read that many other June moths that Vivien would have known were extinct. My subject, my fixation, has settled on me a peculiar form of discontent. It is a constant background matter, a low hum, a one-note melody, a malady of yearning. Our clean sea, its turtles and schools of dolphins, its vast beds of gently undulating sea grasses are never enough when I know that Vivien and her contemporaries swam in seas whose cold depths contained cod, mackerel, hake, shad and sprat, pollock and three-bearded rockling, and scores of other extinct fish whose muscular names are known only to a few. Here is my Robert Louis Stevenson coming over the wrong bridge. I have one foot in the past, perhaps two. I live there, in 2014 or 2025, not here.

It may have been in a mood of self-punishment that I once took a virtual tour of an Oxford bookshop, the one Vivien had her back to as she was about to cross the street to hear Francis Blundy read. The year the shop was showing off its goods was 2018. I saw from the digital time stamp that I was the first to look at this clip in eighty-three years. Why would anyone take the trouble? To feel bad. I made myself feel worse by thinking of the Vale of Oxford Sea, and the bookshop, the Sheldonian, the Bodleian Library and Broad Street, silent in the watery dusk many feet below the surface as their limestone structures softly crumbled. But what treasures as the camera in a shaky hand showed me the shelves and packed tables. All recently published! I wandered through the shop in the company of what I imagined to be a young and earnest assistant. The history section should shame us. That season’s books outstripped a decade of our efforts. Serious and hefty, with richly coloured covers, general and abstruse topics, and likewise in the sections devoted to biography, science books for the general reader and the immediately outdated volumes on who we are or were, and where we were going. All wrong, of course, but enticing, with their gleam of intellectual boldness. The books in that shop can be summoned in an instant to our screens, but oh, to have wandered the aisles, thrilled to be riding the crest of newness, interest and abundance. At our middle-ranking university as at our best, we crouch in the shadow of the thought-rich past of a century ago. Its ringlets and three-bearded rockling are but dreams. I would like to shout from the twelfth-floor window of my and Rose’s apartment, We too are thought-rich, we too live in an open society! But our core concern is with cheery updates on heroic salvage crews bringing up the next 10,000 barnacle-encrusted vehicles for the steel mills. We celebrate our skilled engineers for creating simple new phones out of complex old ones.

Rose studies the same period and it does not sap her pleasure in our sleepy ahistorical times. She says that dolphins and turtles are an improvement on the jellyfish swarms and 3,000-mile-long algae blooms of the mid-twenty-first century. She points to our immaculate bay fringed by green slopes below the residential towers. Isn’t it beautiful? I agree. Empty or not, the sea from a distance right to the sharp horizon looks unchanged across the centuries. But I remind her of the shifting baseline effect. As natural beauty declines over the years, so too, unnoticed, do standards of beauty. I would have loved to be at Vivien’s side when she stepped out of the Barn on a sunny spring morning in 2008. She celebrated the glories of the landscape in an email to her sister. But an Edwardian lady, time-travelling forward a hundred years to stroll with Vivien, would be horrified to see banks of nettles along the roadsides in place of wildflowers, by the absence of river meadows, hedgerows, elms and cuckoo song. The roar of eight-lane motorways and the grotesque stride of giant pylons and their power lines would appear as elements of a nightmare.

The ‘peasant poet’ John Clare – subject of Vivien’s doctorate – was one of the few nature poets who knew about nature. If he too were to make the hundred-year journey from the early nineteenth century to 1908 and tour the country with the same Edwardian lady, he would be shocked in his turn. Trees felled, pastures and their wildflowers vanishing under the plough, precious fenland drained, steam engines belching filth, roads and overcrowded cities congested with horse manure, open country enclosed for private ownership – an ancient way of life and its animals and birds discarded for profit. In pre-industrial times the baseline shifted more slowly. A Roman centurion traversing a thousand years to the European landmass of the thirteenth century would be surprised to find that more than three-quarters of its forests had been felled. He wouldn’t care.

In one of our exchanges Rose said, ‘It’s not all about hedgehogs or whatever else has gone. It took an agricultural and an industrial revolution to start to make a difference to human well-being. So there’s a cost and we’re happier than Vivien Blundy’s lot.’

‘Not me.’

‘Because you have a personal problem with happiness. Tom, it’s not the absent mackerel.’

I let that pass and said that three-quarters of species had vanished and I minded . Those creatures and plants were our companions. Without them our loneliness deepened.

‘OK,’ she said, ‘I’ll put it another way. If you were an ecologist working on restoring lost species, your discontent would be going somewhere, it would mean something. But you’re an academic like me, a bystander. You’re making yourself unhappy for nothing.’

‘I’m not a bystander. I’m restoring a great environmental poem to the canon.’

‘You don’t know that it was great. And was it that important, Tom, or is it just your obsession? Anyway it’s gone the way of the – what was that fast bird?’

‘The swift.’

‘And you told me once that Blundy couldn’t tell a buttercup from a dandelion.’

‘Irrelevant. The Corona is out there.’

‘Tom, it’s gone!’

We’d had the conversation so often it had acquired a ritual quality. All she wanted was for me to be happy. I conceded that I complained too often about our fallen world. It had always been falling and we had to make a life. If she thought the poem did not exist, then I would find it, publish it and prove her wrong. She told me she would be amazed and delighted to be wrong.

‘They’ll have to make you a professor.’

‘You too, Rose, if you’ll write the introduction.’

In fact, during that period, late summer of 2120, I was content with my work. I had abandoned hunches and theories and was relying on serendipity, making random trawls through my material with low expectation of finding anything significant, but taking pleasure in other times, other minds and in the constancy of human nature set against radically shifting circumstances. They touched me, these ancient everyday texts between Vivien and Francis, hypnotically unpunctuated and never intended for rereading: ‘doorway of laundrette where you?’ and the instant response: ‘almost there no umbrella’. This was Francis and Vivien trying to locate each other in a rainstorm for a secret rendezvous in the market town of Thame in Oxfordshire in 2002.

In 2009 Francis underwent a routine colonoscopy and was amazed to watch on a screen as a camera went gliding through his ‘coral pink entrails’. He was enchanted by a drug called fentanyl. While still in the recovery room, sipping tea, he made notes towards a poem about the experience and finished it a day later. He showed it to Harry Kitchener, who advised him to put the poem – three quatrains – in a drawer. Blundy emailed, ‘I agree. Now that fabulous stuff has worn off I know the poem is, in every sense, crap. But Harry, everyone should have a colonoscopy every day .’ The poem and notes are not in the archive.

More on my trawls. In 1997, Percy sent his first email. ‘I hope this goes off ok. I might be pressing the wrong buttons. But anyway, this comes first – I love you.’ Vivien, already an adept, wrote back, ‘It came through! Well done darling and welcome. No more licking stamps. I love you too.’ In 1999 there was an email from a consultant neurologist, himself an amateur violinist who, by coincidence, had bought an instrument from Percy. ‘Your scans are here. Nothing to worry about. Phone me please tomorrow morning between 7 and 8.’

I went shopping in 2012 with Vivien. She drove from the Barn to Oxford to buy herself ‘a beautiful, handmade pleated skirt’ at half price in a shop called Annabelinda. Vivien wrote to Rachel, ‘There was champagne. Everyone was merry and sad all at once. There were tears. This lovely shop is closing the day after tomorrow, after forty-one years!’

In 1997 a customer wrote to Percy, ‘After all that (and thank you!) it had its first outing, Beethoven, Razumovsky 3, at the Holywell music room. Mr Greene, it is so warm, so lively, so sensually playable. It was all I could do not to sing along with the gorgeous creature in my hands. You could have charged someone richer than me twice as much. You’re a god!’

Two men losing their minds over Vivien: in 1996 a breathless handwritten letter from Percy to Vivien (my copy from her papers). ‘What happened? I can’t stop thinking about it, feeling about it, reliving it. Couldn’t work this morning. So wonderful, unbelievable, to arrive at this new place with you. Again please. Tonight?’ Then 2002, a postcard and its envelope, from Francis to Vivien, my copy from the Blundy archive – ‘I can’t stop thinking about you. I’m going nuts. Where is this taking us? I must see you.’

There were earlier lovers, including a lawyer called Roderick, and before him a graduate student, Ted. Vivien kept only one passionate letter from each. Blundy was prone to fits of retrospective jealousy and she had to be careful. But during her marriage to Francis, she risked keeping Percy’s letters and scrawled notes. I stared for a while at a photograph of Vivien in her twenties. Her hair cut in a bob, white blouse and short white skirt, three fat books under her arm. She stood on a college lawn, a river at her back, probably the Cherwell. There was liveliness and daring in her look, an appetite for fun in the way she shifted her weight and jauntily cocked her hip.

In the long hot afternoons at the dining table in the flat while Rose was at the library, I would tip back in my chair and daydream. Vivien was bold, her desires were strong. Was she more beautiful than Rose? No. Was she cleverer? Probably not. But she was the lead character in the story I was trying to uncover. She was the one I was closest to. Blundy fascinated me, but he repelled me. Harry Kitchener was too self-regarding. Percy was sympathetic but he was cursed, and his world did not include the Corona. Vivien knew where the poem, my poem, was. We are side by side on that lawn. There are silent punts on the river. We exchange a squeeze of hands as she begins to tell me what she did with my poem.

It was a terrible idea to have once said to Rose that I could imagine myself falling in love with Vivien and marrying her. We, that is, Rose and I, had been married only a few weeks. It was a tactless remark, and she was in a mood to take it badly. I tried to backtrack, but I made matters worse. It took a day and much contrition to smooth things out and return us to where we had been moments before I spoke. But during the following year, whenever matters were not quite bonny between us, which was rare enough, she would recall tartly that I would rather be with Vivien Blundy. No matter that she was dead these past eighty years, I had revealed that among ideal wives, Rose was not my first choice. So whenever I spoke about my research, I avoided uttering Vivien’s name. The effect was to make her a living presence, a neighbour, working in the same department as ours, an ex-lover of mine, the number-one lover. Vivien was vivid in my afternoon daydreams. I, not Francis, drove to Thame in heavy rain, light-headed with expectation. Rose’s feelings were not unreasonable.

But Rose and I were happy and I should not exaggerate our difficulties. Or, rather, mine. We were more than happy – often ecstatic, irreversibly changed and charged, as we told each other, by that swim out to the sandbar. Well into the first week of November we swam daily. Rose was bringing her paper to a conclusion and was excited by what she had so far. It was rich with good ideas and apt quotations. She convinced me that in its infancy, the Derangement could not have been addressed by fictional realism. It was inadequate to the scale of the problem. I was content too, drifting through the vastness of my material, putting aside selections for later consideration and hopeful, after deciding to take guidance from NAI, the national AI service, that the machine would propose useful paths. I was already set on a return to Snowdonia. Beyond work and sensual pleasures, Rose and I were harmonious, companionable, we stimulated each other with good ideas, we read to each other and we laughed a lot. We even talked about having children, but didn’t reach a conclusion. At weekends, we cooked for our friends. Months went by without Vivien’s name coming up, and when it did at last, gentle breezes soon dispersed the little cloud.