What We Can Know - 5

A t the Bodleian I sometimes wonder if I’m suffering some mild form of dementia. If I look up from my papers and peep over the carrel’s partition at the room and its silent scholars, I can believe that I’m in a dream, and that my waking reality is within the pages in my hands, that I’m at the Barn with these friends gathering for an evening to celebrate Vivien and hear a new Francis Blundy poem. I could have been there. I am there. I know all that they knew – and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths. That they are both vivid and absent is painful. They can move me and touch me, but I cannot touch them. Sustained historical research is a dance with strangers I have come to love, and there are still two guests to arrive.

The baby, whose name was Todd, was eight months old and would not stop crying. He was being walked up and down the sitting room by his father, Chris Gage. The fifteen-year-old babysitter, Jess, watched from the sofa. She had three younger siblings by her mother’s second marriage and believed that she knew what to do, but that it would be impolite to say so. Todd’s mother, Harriet, hurried in with a bottle of pink viscous fluid and a plastic spoon. There were murmured commands and a tussle around the baby’s wide-open mouth as the screams grew louder. In the cramped living room of a small terraced house on Observatory Street, Oxford, the sound was overwhelming. The parents were distraught. Todd was their first child and their feelings of love for him were unexpectedly disorienting. Awareness of their incompetence and helplessness on display before a young stranger had a numbing effect. They stood irresolutely in the centre of the room, somehow holding the baby between them, and looked wounded as Todd reached for his highest note yet. This was to be their first night out together since the birth. Clearly, too soon.

At last Jess stood and raised her voice to offer to take a turn. They handed Todd across. Softly singing a nursery song in what sounded like fluent French, the babysitter walked out of the room, and slowly up the stairs, then down, pausing halfway, then up and, after five minutes, down again, this time empty-handed. There was silence. She had put Todd in his cot.

‘On his back?’ both parents said quickly.

Fifteen minutes later, Chris and Harriet were in their car, heading north out of town. They would only be an hour late, they kept telling each other.

‘So don’t race,’ Harriet said.

They silently contemplated a collision and the course of Todd’s orphaned life. Chris was thirty years old. He and those like him – this is from Vivien’s journal – had recently come to the attention of sociologists for defying the usual categories and representing an interesting shift within the general population: reasonably well educated, but not to the heights, no fixed careers, placed quality of life above income, shifted jobs often, were not officially classified as skilled, read books and watched art-house movies sometimes, followed music trends, travelled well, were socially tolerant, not politically engaged, rarely voted, used drugs without giving them much thought, had little in the way of savings, enjoyed wide friendships. Chris left school at sixteen, had talked his way into agricultural college and left after a year. During the next six years he worked in a warehouse, was an assistant stage manager in a rep theatre, worked in a local-authority call centre, then in a racing-bike shop, then trained to be a men’s hairdresser and worked in one of the new-wave barbers around Bloomsbury and Farringdon – industrial light fittings, white-tiled walls, bare floorboards, cutting-edge piped music. Two years later he moved on. He was good with his hands and worked for a friend who set up a shopfitting concern. After marrying Harriet, his girlfriend from schooldays, and they had moved to Oxford, into the house that Harriet’s estate-agent parents had found for them, Chris built or fixed things for people, arranged things, delivered things, was a good carpenter, could bring in the right people, and was generally known around north and east Oxford and Jericho as a capable guy you could trust.

Still Vivien: Harriet was more mainstream. English degree from the University of Newcastle, a spell for a local newspaper there, then freelance in London, eventually writing profiles for magazines. She was known for dependability rather than brilliance. Francis Blundy had a reputation for being foul to journalists. Three writers had turned down a profile commission for a magazine called Vanity Fair before a desperate editor approached Harriet. No one knew that the poet was going through a period of self-doubt and was anxious about his standing and, untypically, keen to be liked by the young woman who arrived at the Barn with flowers and a box of chocolates.

She was intelligent and beautiful, she talked sensibly about his work. Afterwards, Vivien walked her round the garden and liked her too. Harriet’s article cast Francis Blundy as the rugged genius whose flinty exterior concealed a kindly heart, and as a profoundly sensitive, humorous and knowing figure now working at the unmatched heights of his art. The poet was content. Harriet and Chris were invited to lunch and it went well. But Francis couldn’t quite place or understand the young man and his mild cockney accent. Seemed a bit dim and had never read a book. Only after Chris had repaired the Barn’s leaking roof, increased the internet download speed, updated the poet’s ancient computer and introduced him to an excellent physiotherapist willing to drive out from Oxford was he accepted. Vivien took to the couple. When Chris expressed an interest in physics, she arranged for the Gages to come to dinner with nephew Peter. She later became close to Harriet once she was pregnant. A daughter at last, a grandchild-substitute in prospect. The Gages asked the Blundys to be Todd’s godparents.

Harriet and Chris were familiar enough at the Barn to let themselves in without knocking. As they entered the sitting room, the company stood. The gin and tonics were a memory now. Three empty wine bottles clustered on a nearby table. When the embraces were done – the couple was known to all – Vivien asked Harriet how it was going with poor Todd. Harriet answered that he was neither dead nor awake and everyone laughed agreeably and made space around the fire.

The subject was climate change, the mild term by which it was still known. That again. It was a major theme for Francis, and Harriet had tactfully excluded his opinions from her profile. He was, as someone had once said, a nuanced denier, but if opposed, a denier to his core. He had the knack in argument of making dissenting opinions appear like personal hostility. Most of his friends disagreed with him, and a few social occasions had been marred by raised voices. Now, when the issue came up, they tended to let him run on until the subject could be changed. They believed that the views of a poet made no difference to the earth’s fate and it was never worth making old Blundy furious. He derived his analysis from the press – a former solicitor turned columnist, an Australian poet and critic, an ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer.

What was animating Francis now was a radio item that morning about a leak from the UN’s intergovernmental panel. Its report was not due yet, but someone highly placed had divulged that alarm was spreading among the hundreds of contributing climate scientists. The community of nations was heading in the wrong direction at increasing speed. Here came the stultifying incantation: floods, droughts, typhoons and hurricanes, forest fires – increase in frequency noted; measurements across diverse scientific disciplines had confirmed accelerating ocean acidification, polar ice melt, glacier retreat, sea-level rises, land surface temperatures pushing upwards. Colossal migration, pandemics, resource wars and species extinction predicted – and so it went on. Francis was angrily unimpressed. Usefully, Harriet had transcribed her entire interview tape and kept the file. We can assume he made the same points that evening.

Interesting to note that in the mid-2030s, ‘the Derangement’, respectfully capitalised, came into general usage as shorthand for the usual list of global heating’s consequences – a litany that wearied activists and sceptics alike. The term suggested not only madness but the vengeful fury of weather systems. There was also a hint at collective responsibility for our innate cognitive bias in favour of short-term comfort over long-term benefits. Humanity itself was deranged. The term did not stretch to include the related Metaphysical Gloom – the collapse of belief in a future, or more specifically, the fading of a belief in progress.

Blundy pressed on as the young couple found their seats and were given a drink. It was obvious to any fool that this was a gravy train. Hundreds of left-leaning so-called scientists and their bureaucratic masters needed to keep frightening us to maintain a flow of lucrative funding. Naturally, they skewed their data. For example, the ocean was not rising to envelop Tuvalu. The geology was clear. Tuvalu was sinking!

To adapt to a non-existent crisis, colossal wealth was being diverted from the world’s poorest. Of course, there was warming, and humans were partly the cause. But it was slight, and it had become taboo to mention the benefits. Huge tracts of northern Canada and Russia would soon be able to grow grain and feed the world. What about breadfruit? Nutritious. Delicious. The trees were spreading north and south out of the tropics and just one plant could feed a family for a lifetime. Birds and butterflies of the Mediterranean were migrating north to England. The Northwest Passage would open to global trade. Fewer old people would die of flu in winter. We needed to understand that the earth was a self-regulating system. A fractional increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide would encourage faster plant growth and more carbon dioxide would be absorbed. Likewise, warming would generate more vapour, which would deflect the sun’s radiation. The oceans were the perfect carbon sink. It all balanced out! Intellectuals of all kinds were professional pessimists and always had been. Even by their own standards, it should be clear to the green lobby that solar panels consumed more energy in their manufacture than they could ever generate. Slabs of glass and steel were despoiling the countryside for greedy profit. Offshore wind turbines were killing whales and seabirds. The end is nigh, was what these climate high priests loved to shout. But the end never came. It was fashionable nonsense! Life on earth, which included clever humans, was highly adaptable.

The company heard Francis out in silence. He paused, cleared his throat and concluded by saying brightly, as if all was settled between them, ‘Let’s have another drink. How about some red?’

John Bale got up to fetch the bottles he and Tony had brought. His alacrity was expressive of the general relief. Now they could move on, and Vivien’s birthday would not be spoiled. While John filled the glasses, she went to the kitchen to check on the meal. It was a necessary respite, to distance herself from Francis, if only by thirty feet. The quail, the sliced ceps piled about them, the cauliflower with anchovies, and the roast potatoes were ready. The plates were warm. She had heard her husband’s set piece too often, sometimes at breakfast. The guests’ indulgent silence embarrassed her. Francis believed he had made an unanswerable case. At times like this, and she couldn’t help it, she was irritated by his certitude, his entitlement, his capacity for repetition. A brilliant man, and such a fool.

We know from Mary Sheldrake’s journal and from her correspondence that as Francis was speaking, she was beginning to take a loftier view of her row with Graham. Her three glasses had been helpful. There was a comic aspect, obviously. Both having affairs. He the liar, she the hypocrite. Then it was simple. Why fight? They should declare it to each other – they had an open marriage. The benefits heaped themselves before her like a pyramid of captured treasure. Banish the ugly and tedious business of parting. No perilous furniture share-out. No property sale, no packing up, no house move that would likely wreck the novel she was halfway through. No excruciating explanations to their sceptical grown-up children. She looked across at Graham where he sat to the right of Francis. The glow from a dimmed overhead reading light caught the fine contours of his elongated face. She was reminded that he could be gorgeous in a soppy way. They’d had many wild times. Two men in her life, her husband and Leonard. The wild nights could go on. What then of a threesome? She knew her architect, a decent upright sort, would not take to that or the latest derivative of Ecstasy. She would have to have them both – separately.

Graham suddenly lifted his head and their eyes met. It was a deep, penetrating exchange. His face was immobile, impossible to read. He simply looked at her. They may have held themselves there for five seconds. Or longer. Ten seconds? As she wryly noted later, she would have found the moment difficult to describe. There was nothing new to say about the mutual gaze of lovers after John Donne’s twisted eye-beams threading eyes on a double string. The obscenities she and Graham had smeared over each other in the guest room across the narrow double bed had set them free. They were falling in love again.

Then, like a thrown switch, something happened, in her, not him. She doubted everything and had to look away. She was untethered and frightened. He had faced her with blank loathing, like the bullock-cart driver does the poet in the Lawrence poem ‘Meeting Among the Mountains’. ‘The brown eyes black with misery and hate.’ She had read too much. Everything was like something else. That was what weakened her hold on the real. Idiocy, to have assumed that her kind of intense communion was also Graham’s. She could no longer read him. He had given nothing away. Now he turned to talk to Francis, who smiled as he replied and placed a hand on Graham’s forearm. If he had shared her heightened moment of joyous possibility, he would have been incapable of light remarks. But nor could murderous loathing precede small talk. So it was pure indifference she had seen. Perhaps. She was in a void. Flustered – a rare state for Mary – she took her empty glass and stood. The friends round the fire went on talking and did not hear her as she muttered through an uncleared throat that she was going to give Vivien a hand.