What We Can Know - 4

W hile Vivien took a phone call from one of the delayed guests and had tea with G-and-M, Francis was having a shower. He knew his own processes and outcomes well enough to be convinced he had written ‘something exceptional, of beauty and resonance’. As he stood under an insufficient trickle, for the shower pump had failed,

Certain lines ran through my thoughts like old-fashioned ticker tape. Then a voice was reading them in the light tenor of a young man, my younger self. If I didn’t feel young, I could at least remember how it once felt.

Again, he played with the idea of publishing. Vivien would not object. But the intimacy and weight of the gift would be reduced.

His mad scheme was also bold. The Corona was addressed to her, profoundly addressed. He must remain true to his original plan, and so in a burst of self-praise, he indulged some thrilled contemplation of his achievement, of how its 210 lines had not been cramped by the demands of the form but had kept instead

a warm conversational tone, also lyrical, wise, also loving, also playful. It loves the natural world more than I do. Good on flow of passing time, on nature, on murder of what she loves. Rhymes unforced. Rhythm, like melody by Purcell, nicely sprung against iambic ground.

He thought it was too good not to escape into the public realm one day. But he did not need to be the one to set it free, and there was no hurry.

He stood by the bedroom window drying his shivering body. Coming up the valley, partly hidden among the trees, was an old Renault with running boards, a car that always reminded him of Chicago gangster movies. Somewhere for a thug to stand with a machine gun. He glimpsed a white shirt-sleeved elbow protruding through the driver’s open window. The car was moving slowly, barely ten miles per hour. Tony Spufford, a professor of botany, and John Bale, a vet, were taking in the valley’s glorious russet light. They would surely love this poem. They would not understand it. But Vivien would.

He dressed quickly, took the rolled-up vellum from his desk and went into the sitting room. Vivien had gone back into the garden with Mary. Graham wasn’t in sight. Francis watched through the sliding doors as the novelist stooped to examine the raised beds. At the sound of a voice calling, the two women turned to greet Tony and John. They all knew each other from their north Oxford years. Francis came away. He felt comfortable in his thoughts and would rather have done without company, even if it included old friends. But soon it would be six and time for a drink. Then he would feel differently. His arthritic right hand would not allow him to work a corkscrew, but with his thumbs he could ease the stopper off a bottle of gin, he could get out the flask, ice, lemon and tonic and fill the flask. He went into the dining room and slipped the scroll behind the mantel clock. We know from digital photographs that its faded yellow dial was supported by two cherubs. The pouting smile of one was distorted into a toothless grimace of pain by a crack in the polished wood. It had been like that for thirty years, while its companion had remained cheerful.

Fifteen minutes later they were in the kitchen except for Mary and Graham who were in their room. Those with good hearing may have heard raised voices. Vivien drained the parboiled potatoes and put the quail in the oven on a low heat. Tony and John were watching Francis’s method with their drinks. He had filled a two-litre vacuum flask with ice, one part gin and two parts cold tonic. He added lemon chunks to four of the ten tumblers lined up and poured. Plenty left for a second round and for the visitors yet to arrive. They were about to lift their glasses to Vivien when the G-and-Ms appeared, flushed and in need of a drink. They all lifted their glasses in a birthday toast. It was a strong mix, they agreed, and you could taste the herb-infused gin. When someone asked John Bale how his practice was doing, he told a story about an operation he had performed that morning on a little girl’s tortoise. It was suffering from a stomach blockage. In the theatre he turned the creature on its back and held it steady.

‘I was about to give the Saffan anaesthetic when the fellow brought his old head slowly out of his shell and gave me this long look. We stared at each other. You know, he looked so intelligent. Like ET. A million years old. He seemed to be saying, Am I about to die? Do you really know what you’re doing? And I actually began to wonder if I did. I gave the injection and these leathery lids rolled down over his eyes. First incision, then it was straightforward. You know, the inside of a tortoise is a thing of beauty.’

According to Mary Sheldrake’s journal, Francis invoked Larkin. ‘The tortoise was right. “The anaesthetic from which none come round.”’

‘The girl came with her dad after school to see the dozy patient in his cage. She cradled him in her arms and cried for joy. Just eight years old. Quite a scene.’

This detail caused Vivien to turn away to spread olive oil, salt and pepper over the potatoes.

The exchanges were recorded or invented by Vivien and Mary. Tony said, ‘Until I met John, I didn’t know they did surgery on reptiles. A while ago he did a snake with a broken back.’

‘Grass snake, crushed spine. But she came through.’

After John had told how he had operated on the snake, Francis said, ‘Who’d like another drink?’

‘A few years back,’ John Bale said, ‘this old-school vet in Buffalo, New York told me that tortoises don’t feel pain. He’d pop his patient in the fridge the night before to make it sleepy and then set to.’

When Francis reached for the flask, Graham was the first to hold out his glass. He said, ‘If you’re an animal in our world you’re better off with fur and big eyes.’

‘Doesn’t stop us slaughtering sheep.’

They heard a car pulling up outside and in the kitchen there was a sense of relief. Tortoise injection, crushed snake and slaughter had lowered the festive atmosphere. Mary could not dispel an image of John bent over his scalpel, slicing into a bleeding snake with extruding innards. Tyre marks on the patterned skin! She thought she would not be able to eat. Quietly, she asked for water.

Vivien suspected that something was upsetting Graham and Mary. Their voices were constricted or flat.

Together the company took their drinks outside to greet the Kitcheners, Harry and Jane, sister of Francis. They were both well built and tall. It was quite something, to watch them emerge from their car, unfolding themselves into the dusk and stretching their arms. Harold T. Kitchener was also a poet, not much read, for his work was difficult, with frequent allusions to Italian Renaissance painting and sculpture and Hindu gods. He was also Blundy’s editor at one of the grand publishing houses and had become a fierce arbiter of contemporary poetry and a champion of his brother-in-law’s work, about which he had written two books. Whether their friendship was independent of that fact or because of it was discussed among a younger generation of poets. But it hardly mattered. Where the Blundy oeuvre was concerned, Blundy shared Harry’s high regard. Harry had agreed after much discussion to be his brother-in-law’s biographer, but had recently changed his mind for reasons unknown, and had not yet told Francis. Now the two men embraced, then Jane, a professional potter, took her turn, and when all the hugging was done – there were no strangers here – they went inside and Francis poured the welcoming drinks. The Kitcheners had some catching up to do, and there was still plenty for the last couple, who had been delayed because their baby would not settle.

The sun was down. With a clear sky, the temperature, so the records show, dropped within the hour to eleven degrees. My sources for the evening stretch across the entire company and are collated here. Email and social media traffic are held centrally these days, and easily accessed by those who work for an institution. Where necessary, I have added a few touches, but always within the bounds of the highly probable.

Vivien was on her way across the room to the fireplace but was intercepted by John and Tony, who were concerned by how much she took on and liked to tease her about it. While they got the fire going and brought in more logs from the shed outside, she went back to the kitchen to make a salad. Jane and Mary insisted on helping. As always, she resisted, then allowed them to lay the table. Francis, Graham and Harry, vaguely aware of work going on around them, protected their conversation by moving further away. Two years before, Sir ‘Jimmy’ Savile, a radio and TV personality, friend to the young and disadvantaged, supporter of charities, close to certain of the royals and the former prime minister, Mrs Thatcher, and knighted by the queen, had been revealed as a monster, a rapist, a serial abuser of children, even very ill children. There were rumours of necrophilia. A TV documentary had been repeated recently. A few months before, the Secretary of State for Health had given an apology in Parliament to those who had suffered abuse as children while staying in state-run hospitals and care homes.

Harry said, ‘Do you remember people saying, “I always knew he was a wrong’un. I always thought there was something fishy about that bastard”? But where were they, when we needed them?’

‘Savile hid in plain sight,’ Graham said. ‘Came on as a grotesque. Then look.’

Francis took their empty glasses. ‘Another one? Can it be true? How could he have sex with corpses in a morgue undetected?’

‘Friends in low places.’

They laughed mournfully and at that moment there was a crash and a cry from Jane of ‘Fuck!’ across the kitchen. Mary had let slip from her wet hands a large salad bowl, one that Jane had thrown and painted ten years ago as a wedding present for her brother and Vivien. It had smashed and scattered across the flagstones. Now she and Mary were stooping to gather up the bits. Vivien was trying to soothe them both.

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘But that was bloody stupid. I’m so sorry. So sorry !’

‘Really, it’s OK.’

Jane said, ‘I can do them another.’

‘I’m so ashamed!’

‘Mary, it’s OK.’

When the larger pieces were on a newspaper in piles and Tony had finished with a brush and dustpan, Vivien and Jane embraced Mary, Savile was set aside, and all was well again as they drifted towards the fire.