What We Can Know - 19

T he man I shared a bathroom with was an authority on the thirteenth-century papal court of Innocent III, its reforms, crusades and spiritual sway over Christian princes across Europe. When I bumped into Cyril Baker on the landing for a chat, he soon turned the conversation to that court. He spoke with an air of baffled wonder at its complexity and intrigues. He wanted to lend me some books about it, one of which was by him. Not to have lived in that time, he told me once, was his only enduring regret in an otherwise happy life.

Cyril was an obsessive tender of our bathroom’s porcelain and its tiled floor. He wiped down the walls, the chrome taps and shower head and used bleach on the lavatory after each use. When he was done, he took his towel and washbag back to his room, leaving no trace. I was no slob, but I felt obliged to raise my game. After sharing with others at the Bodleian, I was sympathetic to the notion of an aseptic communal space, burnished clean of a stranger’s presence. I wanted to be alone, purged of mess, connection, entanglements and reproaches, especially my own or Rose’s. The indifference I experienced on the Snowdonian heights had hardened into the saintly detachment of a hermit. I was beyond liking or disliking anything or anyone. My monkish cell of a room suited me. Lidded boxes of clothes, books and notes were piled along the walls, almost to the ceiling. More boxes than the Francis and Vivien archive. What was not there of my entire life was held digitally elsewhere, suspended, just as I was.

My one tether was the project. I made no advances or discoveries and wrote nothing. Immersion was all I needed. To swim through the gloom of the irrecoverable past, among the familiar sunken wrecks and their scattered debris, was enough. Rereading was the thing. With no aim in mind, I went through hundreds of Percy Greene’s emails of the 1990s onwards. Specifications and costings for violins, loving messages to Vivien, arrangements for evenings, weekends and for what he intended to cook for her. He knew his way round Italian cuisine, he liked ‘the hearty country wines of the Midi’, he was fussy about knives and brought his own to her flat on the top floor of a north Oxford house. In his twenties he had played rugby as a second-row forward with a serious amateur team until he tore a ligament in his knee. He was an experienced hiker and scrambler, could fix things, knew basic wiring and plumbing. Among Vivien’s friends, Percy the craftsman and handyman was a rarity and welcomed, just as Chris Gage was in the Blundy household. Percy carried out emergency repairs for them sometimes. Vivien’s circle consisted of academics married, mostly, to other academics. Percy had left school at sixteen. Reading and talking about books made him restless. To relax from the painstaking construction of violins he played a five-string banjo for a traditional jazz band, the Hotfeet, that performed Jelly Roll Morton numbers at weekends in an east Oxford pub. He played, it was said, in the languid but precise style of Johnny St Cyr and, as if by instinct, knew his way round the more unusual augmented chords. His solos, especially the one for ‘Doctor Jazz’, were big favourites with a knowing crowd.

The pub was on the Cowley Road, well off Vivien’s usual beat. She was taken there in 1993 on a warm Sunday lunchtime by a husband and wife, professors of Arabic and Spanish respectively. Jazz, and in particular traditional New Orleans jazz, had never interested Vivien, but sitting with her friends, drinking halves of bitter, sometimes chatting, sometimes listening, she became entranced by the merrily whirling counterpoint of trumpet, trombone and clarinet, the elephantine tread of the euphonium and most of all by the syncopated choppy clinking sound of the banjo. She was a half-competent pianist and she knew enough to be impressed to hear him strike four different but related chords to each bar. She watched the banjoist’s left hand flash up and down the frets, she admired the flickering muscle in his bare forearm and, naturally, she studied his face, ‘that most erotic of parts, second only to the mind. Ah, is this the almost middle-aged woman’s first flight from the body?’

Her journals record and seem to predict her course towards him. He never glanced at his hands. His attention was on the audience, though ‘sometimes he bestows a grateful nod and half-smile on one of the other players’. It was a ‘big, generous wholesome face’. His expression was ‘bold and friendly’. There was ‘a challenge in his look which seems to say I hope you’re having as much fun as me’. He became aware of her gaze and briefly met her eye and smiled without parting his lips. Meanwhile, ‘his fingers go on playing as though they have nothing to do with him, though occasionally he cocks his head to listen’. The next Sunday she went to the pub alone and approached him at the bar during the break between sets.

He saw her coming and before she could speak, he said, ‘You again. That’s nice.’

He bought her a drink, they chatted and she came to hear the band the next four Sundays before, as she wrote, ‘our first date, and I’m nervous’. After it, she told herself, ‘Beware. Good sex can be your undoing.’ Elsewhere: ‘that such a big man can be so kind, so delicate in bed!’ She was in love, she told her journal. He wrote to her, ‘I want to write I love you a thousand times but I have a bus to catch so this will have to do.’ The postmark shows 17 October. She noted that he took her to see his workshop, a damp basement in Jericho, Oxford. ‘A weird yellow mushroom is growing on the wall which he refuses to remove. Too close to the canal. No place for a master luthier.’ She found him a place in Summertown on Oxford’s north side, a ground-floor flat in an Edwardian terraced house and paid the rent out of her lecturer’s salary. Three months later, in one day Percy received late payment for one violin and sold another. He paid her back. That night they ‘feasted, drank and decided to get married. I think it was my decision. P too dazed and happy to disagree.’ The next day Vivien wrote, ‘If I was a bank manager of love, I would estimate that P’s principal asset is kindness. Big and kind. What luck!’

Until his cognitive decline, history knows nothing of Percy Greene’s faults. A close friend, the trumpeter of the Hotfeet and a doctor, said at Percy’s funeral, ‘Whatever natural substances occasionally surge through our brains to make us delighted and delightful, the endorphins, the serotonin etc., Percy had quantities all and every day to supply a small town. His daily allowance would be for us a lifetime’s high point. Call it virtue or genetic luck, we were privileged to be around him.’ These were the faintly humorous exaggerations felt obligatory at funerals. Vivien was closer to the truth when she wrote, three weeks after the wedding, ‘what’s so lovely is that basically, in a quiet way, he’s simply glad he exists. Whatever the difficulty, the baseline isn’t disturbed. Then that line becomes mine too.’

In the brief years before the illness hit, Vivien exulted in their love and in Percy’s temperament that, as she saw it, made their union so delightful. In volume four, when they were well established in the Headington house, she wrote:

Books bore him. Gluing violin bits together doesn’t interest me. So a marvellous space is opened up for everything else. We must have walked all the footpaths between here and the south Cotswold Hills. He can tell at a glance every bird, moth and butterfly. He was excited to see in one afternoon a swallowtail and a Duke of Burgundy. I know the names of wildflowers. We trade! He loves music in all its forms and he widens my tastes beyond Bach etc. I read to him. He loves it, especially when it’s poetry. But he wants to hear it, not read it. Last month he mentioned his taste for red socks. I read him that too-famous poem, ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’. He wanted it again. He got it because he loves things , how they feel and look, how they work, what they do to us or for us. He could see that wheelbarrow, its redness, the white of the chickens. I quoted Williams’s line from another poem, whose title I’ve forgotten: ‘no ideas but in things’. It’s become his catchphrase. After breakfast he sometimes murmurs those words as he kisses me and heads off to his shed for the day’s work.

Three years later she returned to this passage and scribbled in the margin, ‘In love, we forgot that we too were things that could get broken or lost.’ Nowhere in the journals are there doubts or complaints about the marriage until the burden of nursing her husband began to crush her. His death in 2003 and the coroner’s court proceedings were reported in the two local papers, with mentions of the slow response time of the ambulance service. The cuttings were among Vivien’s papers but over time they disintegrated. Probably handled by too many researchers. About eighty years ago, a curator replaced them with downloaded printouts, along with an explanatory note. The matter came before the coroner because of doubts whether Percy died from injuries to the brain or because of a loss of blood and the delayed ambulance. According to one press item, Percy was certified dead on arrival at the John Radcliffe Hospital. He had been suffering a loss of motor control and stumbled and fell down a flight of stairs. After hearing expert medical evidence, the coroner concluded that since Percy was a big man, the impact on the hallway’s tiled floor would have been severe. Likely he was already dying as Vivien came running from the kitchen.

She sank into herself and corresponded with no one, except her sister, Rachel. The occasional journal entries are mostly bitter self-reproach. She should have been kinder, more patient and sweeter to Percy, should have managed some detachment in looking after him, should have remembered their love as it had been, should have acted sooner on the health visitor’s advice and made a bedroom for him downstairs in the living room. Her liaison with Francis might have been another cause for guilt but she does not address it. After seven months, there is a brief email message from him, presumably in response to a phone call: ‘OK, we’ll talk tonight.’ A resumption of the affair or a consolatory conversation – there is no record.

Vivien asked her sister if she would come and help her clear Percy’s workshop of its contents and sell off his tools on the internet. Despite poor health, Rachel came immediately. Percy’s two banjos fetched a high price. The sisters cleared the house of the rest of his possessions. ‘The dressing gown hanging in the bathroom contains his shape. It’s agony to see it there … The leather strap of his watch is curled round the form of his wrist. It all must go … The Red Cross came last week to collect but it’s made no difference. Only added to the unrelenting din of his absence.’

During this period, the Blundy journals are focussed even more than usual on work, on poems in progress and notes towards some seminars and lectures he was giving at Princeton. Proof of Vivien and Francis together again is the holiday they took in May 2004. She was positive enough to buy herself a first digital camera. There is no record of their travel arrangements. Her photo library shows them in southern Europe, in a location which others long ago identified as the Greek island of Amorgos. It was reached by an eight-hour ferry journey. Chances were reduced of meeting anyone they knew. The best or closest of the photographs, possibly taken by a waiter, shows them sitting side by side, but not touching. No holding hands, no friendly arm around a shoulder. Vivien smiles bravely. The poet looks tense.

I remembered where I was, stood up, yawning, and glanced around me, at my cell. My life had shrunk, my career was in poor shape. On publication, my introduction to my ‘biography’ of a lost poem had aroused little interest. My marriage was over. In Rose I had lost my best friend, best colleague, best lover, and I had hit a bedrock of indifference. A fiend had come in the night to take an ice-cream scoop to my brain and made off with my darkest emotional flavours, fury, humiliation, self-pity, desolation. If they all came back at once, they would wreck me. Any day now, I told myself, I would start to feel. Watch out. But two months passed without change. I taught the same classes, including for the thirteenth time the Wyatt poem, to first-year students, ‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek’. I did it as if in my sleep, explaining rhyme royal and reading out their various attempts to parse the poem – ‘Those girls used to screw me, now they cool me’ and so on. After two shouting rows, I was courteous and cool to Rose whenever work threw us together. Neither of us wanted to talk. In our first set-to, much the louder, I did not need to lay out an accusation. I merely had to say his name. In our bed! Sensibly, she went on the attack. I was emotionally dead, detached, closed off to her, careless of her needs. My indifference caused her betrayal. I was unhappy to find myself in the wrong century. Did I have any idea how infectious unhappiness could be? The only person I cared for was Vivien Blundy. Touché!

It was too late for supper in the refectory. I ate an apple and remembered Blundy’s poem about the Covent Garden apple juggler. When Francis died in 2017, his obituaries had long been in place in newspaper offices. The more popular media, loath to be discussing poetry, fell back on the enduring story of the poet meeting Queen Elizabeth II in 1988. Instead of bowing or giving even a cursory bend of the neck, he smiled pleasantly and gave a formal but friendly greeting. He treated her as an equal, was the judgement of outraged commentary. Asked about it afterwards, he said to reporters, ‘On monarchy and inherited power I’m with John Locke, our greatest philosopher.’ He liked to quote, ‘Regal and Supreme Power is properly and truly his, who can by any Means seize upon it.’ He was dismissive when others pointed out that Locke’s quarrel was with absolute, not constitutional monarchs. In the serious papers the missing Corona was at that stage no more than an interesting footnote. One obituarist wrote that Blundy was our finest poet since Tennyson. Others mentioned Donne and, of course, Eliot. On the poet’s character, there was much made of the worn trope, ‘not suffering fools gladly’. Harriet Gage would have been pleased to be quoted and see her ‘awkward genius with a heart of gold’ reiterated. One writer jokily wondered why Blundy had so few wives. ‘A poet of his stature should have five or six weddings behind him by his mid-sixties.’ The rumour that he was privately gay and had an affair with an Oxford vet was dismissed. Blundy was happy, the consensus ran, to indulge a life of serial monogamy but ‘his late marriage to Vivien brought him not only love but the calm domestic setting of the famous Barn in Gloucestershire during his last dozen years. In this time, he published some of his greatest and most popular work, including the cycle of love poems inspired by some days with Vivien in a Cotswold hotel.’

Reading through these articles again only pushed Francis and Vivien further from view. The absence of genuine detail had a wintry effect. The subject hardened into a public posture, like a pigeon-stained statue of a forgotten general. I prefer Francis omitting to wish his wife a happy birthday, then heading to his study to make the final preparations of his vellum gift and eating an apple along the way. But that fruit was my supposition.

In the months after his death, it was too soon to say of Francis Blundy that he was vain, opinionated, self-important, careless of others, ungenerous, mean-spirited, dependent and entitled and a great poet. In his personal pantheon, his bust would be up there on a stone shelf with John Locke’s. His present to Vivien was more about himself than her, which was why he needed to perform it to the company on that evening in October 2014.

If apples served the poet well in three poems, they were not enough for me. It was almost ten and I was hungry. A half-hour’s walk away was a pub that served food as an afterthought to its tasteless beer. I looked outside. Another November snowfall and the wind looked strong, but I decided to go. If I walked fast, I should be in time for something dull but filling. There was no space in my room for a cupboard and the administration had not provided hooks for outdoor clothes. I rummaged in my boxes until I found my warmer coat, which I had not worn since my last Bodleian trip. I couldn’t find a hat or gloves and I was in a hurry.

Outside, the snow was six inches deep from the last fall and the wind was bitter. I hunched into it and rammed my hands into the pockets of my coat. In the right there was a folded piece of paper. Old notes, I thought as I pulled it clear. It was a crumpled unopened envelope with my name on it typed in capitals. I slowed, struggling to remember, and then I had it, Donald Drummond and his note of apology handed to me by his colleague. I walked on.

The remaining item on the pub’s menu was a leek and potato soup with bread and a square of greasy protein cake. Monday night and the place was almost empty. I had forgotten to bring a book, but it would have made little difference because the light was poor. It was no different in daytime. Glass was expensive and windows were generally built small. For something to do, I took out Drummond’s letter and could just make out the typing, which covered a whole page. Sure enough, it was a long apology for his absence due to flu. But he had been wanting to talk to me about an important matter. He had his brother’s family to stay. It included a quiet and gifted girl of fourteen. Donald got along with her very well. She often came into his study to chat. She had a lovely manner, was exceptionally gifted at maths, in fact, something of a genius. Her name was Dolly and she … I gave the exasperated gasp of the childless and put the letter down. Whose children, nieces, nephews and grandchildren were not geniuses?

The publican himself brought my meal, setting it down hard on the table. He didn’t like university types in his bar. It was the kids who caused the trouble, but he made no distinction. Vegetable flavour had been artfully purged from the soup. Only more salt could rescue it. I fetched it myself from a stained tray by the door to the men’s lavatory. I morosely resumed my supper. After I had finished, I was reluctant to move from my warm seat. I picked up the letter.

I had some notes on my desk and Dolly asked me what I’d been up to. As soon as I mentioned that we’d been trying to solve a puzzle she was interested. I told her about that phone number in Vivien Blundy’s journal and how it wasn’t in any contemporary directory. Dolly was intrigued and wanted to see. I wrote it out for her. She took it to a chair in the corner of my study. I went on answering the emails that had piled up during my illness. A half-hour later, she came over and told me what she thought. After some false starts, she decided it might not be a phone number at all, in which case the zero was irrelevant. Straight away she knew what she had. She put the sequence into the standard format. When she showed me, I gave a yelp. Tom, it’s a map reference!

I called up an old map and entered the numbers. Blundy’s place. The dairy! Then I remembered that other odd entry in her 2020 journal: ‘4m out from a long seedge’. Four metres out along the line of the south-eastern edge, has to be it. Something is buried there. Please be assured, I’m going to do nothing about it. This is yours by right. You must get yourself to the dairy, or its remains. 51°44’14″N, 2°4’18″W. But you owe me this – I want you to tell me immediately what’s there. You’ll need to put your find in a safe place with expert curating resources. The Bodleian will be at your service. And could you please send Dolly a reward – a bar of real chocolate (if you can find one!). I hope you can sleep. I know I can’t.

I sat immobilised by powerful and contrary feelings. Excitement, naturally, and exultation, and impatience to start my preparations for a journey. But the letter was two months old. Drummond could have reasonably given up on me and have gone to see for himself. It was suspicious that he had failed to send me a follow-up message. He could be there now, hauling up a sack from a hole in the ground by torchlight the treasure that was, as he had conceded, rightfully mine. Or he was at his desk, readying the Corona for publication, with his accompanying monograph in which I would be kindly footnoted. I had to get the reference into my computer and see for myself. I snatched the letter and envelope, stood up too quickly, sending my chair crashing backwards against the floorboards. I picked it up and strode to the door. The publican shouted after me to come back and pay for my meal and beer. I did so, and then I ran through the snow for the first half-mile. For no reason. It was too late to phone the Bodleian. I did not have Drummond’s home number. I faced a night without sleep.

I slowed and in my rare state felt amazement at my stupidity: if the number was not in any directory, then of course it wasn’t a phone number. Dolly knew to take that first simple step and put me to shame. How wrong I had been about Donald Drummond, a truly decent man – unless his hands were closing around my poem. And that lovely clever Dolly. I would write her an emphatic letter of thanks – and include ten bars of real chocolate if such stuff still made it across the oceans.

Soon, I was nearing the faculty residential blocks. Their stacked lights illuminated snowflakes in windblown downward spirals. What came next was inevitable and I had to stop to consider. There was only one person in the world I wanted to tell, one person who would fully grasp the magnitude of this development, bring the right degree of scepticism and – better face it – possess the funds to mount a proper expedition. In an instant my indifference dissolved. Yes, I loved her and of course, I had known it all the time. I looked up, blinking against the thickening snowfall. I knew which window in which high building was hers. Blessed place! The lights in her apartment were off and the eloquent Mr Howard, active or post-coitally asleep, was in my bed.