Lessons Page 3

  When they reached the narrow landing Roland said, “I need to sort the baby out first.”

  “I’ll wait here.”

  But five minutes later, when he came back with Lawrence on his hip, he found Browne in his bedroom, their bedroom, diminishing it rudely with his bulk as he stood by the window near the small desk Roland worked at. As before, the baby stared in astonishment. A notebook and three typed-up copies of recent poems were scattered around the typewriter, an Olivetti portable. In the underlit north-facing bedroom the detective was holding a page tipped towards the light.

  “Excuse me. That’s private. You’re being bloody intrusive.”

  “The title is good.” He read it tonelessly. “ ‘Glamis hath murdered sleep.’ Glamis. Lovely girl’s name. Welsh.” He put the page down and came towards Roland and Lawrence along the narrow space between the end of the bed and the wall.

  “Not my words and Scottish actually.”

  “So you’re not sleeping well?”

  Roland let this go. The bedroom furniture had been painted by Alissa in pale green with blue stencilling in an oak leaf and acorn pattern. He opened a drawer for Browne. Her jumpers were smoothly folded in three rows. The various scents she used made a muted blend, a rich history. The moment they first met overlaid with the time they last spoke. It was too much for him, her perfumes and sudden presence and he stepped back, as though from a strong light.

  Browne bent down with effort and took the nearest. Black cashmere. He turned aside to ease it into one of his plastic bags.

  “And my handwriting?”

  “Got it.” Browne straightened and tapped the camera bulge in his coat pocket. “Your notebook was open.”

  “Without my permission.”

  “Was that her side?” He was looking towards the head of the bed.

  Roland was too angry to answer. On her bedside table was a red hair clip with clenched plastic teeth perched on a paperback book, which Browne picked up by its edges. Nabokov’s Pnin. Delicately, he lifted the cover and peeked.

  “Her notes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you read it?”

  Roland nodded.

  “This copy?”

  “No.”

  “Good. We could call in forensics but at this stage it’s hardly worth the bother.”

  Roland was getting himself under control and tried to sound conversational. “I thought we were at the beginning of the end for fingerprints. The future is genes.”

  “Fashionable rubbish. Won’t see it in my lifetime. Or yours.”

  “Really?”

  “Or anyone’s.” The detective made a move towards the landing. “What you’ve got to understand is this. A gene isn’t a thing. It’s an idea. An idea about information. A fingerprint is a thing, a trace.”

  The two men and the baby descended the stairs. At the bottom Browne turned. The transparent bag containing Alissa’s jumper was under his arm. “We don’t turn up at a crime scene looking for abstract ideas. We’re looking for traces of real things.”

  They were interrupted again by Lawrence. Flinging out an arm he gave a full-throated shout that began on an explosive consonant, a b or p, and he pointed meaninglessly at the wall with a wet finger. The sound was practice, Roland generally assumed, for a lifetime of talking. The tongue had to get in shape for everything it was ever going to say.

  Browne was walking down the hall. Roland, following behind, said with a laugh, “I hope you’re not implying that this is a crime scene.”

  The detective opened the front door, stepped out and turned. Behind him, parked up on the kerb at a tilt, was his tiny car, a Morris Minor in baby blue. The low morning sun highlighted the sad drooping creases of his face. His lecturing moments were not persuasive.

  “I had a sergeant who used to say that where there’s people there’s a crime scene.”

  “Sounds like complete nonsense.”

  But Browne had already turned away and seemed not to hear. Father and son watched him go down the short weedy path to the broken garden gate that had never closed. When he reached the pavement he spent a half-minute, slightly stooped, rummaging in his pockets for his keys. At last he had them and opened his door. Then, in one movement and with an agile twist of his bulk, he folded himself backwards into the car and slammed the door behind him.

  * * *

  So Roland’s day, a cool day in the spring of 1986, could begin and it weighed on him. The chores, the pointlessness with a new element, the untidy unwashed feeling of being a suspect. If that was what he was. Almost like guilt. A deed, wife-murder, clung to him like the breakfast that had dried to a crust on Lawrence’s face. Poor thing. Together they were watching as the detective waited to pull into the traffic. By the front gate was a spindly sapling tied to a bamboo stick. It was a robinia tree. The garden-centre assistant told him it would flourish in traffic fumes. To Roland, from this threshold everything looked randomly imposed as though he had been lowered from a forgotten place into these circumstances, into a life vacated by someone else, nothing chosen by himself. The house he never wanted to buy and couldn’t afford. The child in his arms he never expected or needed to love. The random traffic moving too slowly past the gate that was now his and that he would never repair. The frail robinia he would never have thought to buy, the optimism in the planting he could no longer feel. He knew from experience, the only way out of a disassociated state was to carry out a simple task. He would go to the kitchen and clean up his son’s face and do it tenderly.

  But as he kicked the front door shut he had another idea. Now, with only one thought in mind, he went up the stairs with Lawrence to his bedroom to his desk to examine his open notebook. He could not remember his last entry. Nine poems published in literary journals within fifteen months—his notebook was the emblem of his seriousness. Compact, with faint grey lines, dark blue hard covers and a green spine. He wouldn’t allow it to become a diary tracking the minutiae of the baby’s development or the fluctuations of his own moods or forced musings on public events. Too commonplace. His material was the higher stuff. To follow the obscure trail of an exquisite idea that could lead to a lucky narrowing, to a fiery point, a sudden focus of pure light to illuminate a first line that would hold the secret key to the lines that must follow. It had happened before, but wanting it, longing for it to happen again, guaranteed nothing. The necessary illusion was that the best poem ever written was within his reach. Being clear-headed didn’t help. Nothing helped. He was obliged to sit and wait. Sometimes he gave way and filled a journal page with weak reflections of his own or passages from other writers. The last thing he wanted. He copied out a paragraph by Montaigne on happiness. He wasn’t interested in happiness. Before that, part of a letter by Elizabeth Bishop. It helped to appear busy but he could not fool himself. Seamus Heaney once said that a writer’s duty was to turn up at the desk. Whenever the baby slept in the day Roland turned up and waited and often, head on desk, slept too.

  The notebook was open as Browne had left it, to the right of the typewriter. He wouldn’t have needed to move it to take his pictures. The light from the sash window was cool and even. The lines were at the top of the verso page: his teenage years transformed, the course of his life diverted. Memory, damage, time. Surely a poem. When he picked up the notebook the baby lunged for it. Roland moved it out of reach, provoking a squeal of protest. Behind the typewriter, gathering dust, was a fives ball. He had never played but had squeezed it daily to strengthen an injured wrist. They went into the bathroom to clean the baby’s face and wash the ball. Something for Lawrence to get his gums into. It worked. They lay together on the bed on their backs, side by side. The tiny boy, just over a third of his father’s length, sucked and chewed. The passage was not as Roland remembered, for he was reading it through a policeman’s eyes. It had not improved.

  When I brought it to an end she didn’t f
ight me. She knew what she’d done. When murder hung over all the world. She lay buried, but on a sleepless night she springs up out of the dark. Sits close on the piano stool. Perfume, blouse, red nails. Vivid as ever, as though dirt of the grave in her hair. Ah, those scales! Horrible ghost. She won’t go away. Just the wrong time, when I need calm. She must remain dead.

  He read it twice. It was perverse to blame both women, but he did: Miss Miriam Cornell, the piano teacher who meddled in his affairs by novel means over distances of time and place; Alissa Baines, née Eberhardt, beloved wife, who held him in a headlock from wherever she was. Until she asserted her existence he would not be free of Douglas Browne. To the extent that he was responsible for shaping the cast of the policeman’s mind, Roland also blamed himself. On the second reading he thought his handwriting was obviously distinct from that on the postcards and note. It wasn’t all bad. But it was bad.

  He rolled onto his side to look at his son. Here was a discovery he had been too slow to make—in the sum of things Lawrence was more comfort than chore. The fives ball had lost its charm and rolled from his two-handed grasp. It lay against a blanket, shiny with saliva. He was gazing upwards. The blue-grey eyes were a blaze of attention. Medieval artists showed vision as light beaming outwards from the mind. Roland followed the beam towards speckled ceiling tiles that were supposed to retard fires, and a ragged hole from which once hung the previous owner’s bedroom chandelier. A hopeful gesture in a low room ten feet by twelve. Then he saw it, right above them now, a long-legged spider making its way upside down towards a corner of the room. So much purpose in so small a head. Now it paused, rocking in place on legs as fine as hairs, swaying as though to a hidden melody. Did the authority exist who could explain what it was doing? No predators around to baffle, no other spiders to seduce or intimidate, nothing to impede it. But still it waited, dancing on the spot. By the time the spider went on its way, Lawrence’s attention had shifted. He turned his outsized head and saw his father, and his limbs went into spasms of leg straightening and bending and arm flailing. This was dedicated work. But he was communicative, even questioning. His eyes were locked on Roland’s as he kicked out again, then he waited with an expectant half-smile. How was that? He wanted to be admired for his feats. For a seven-month-old to show off he would need some idea of minds like his own and of what it might be like to be impressed, of how desirable, pleasurable it could be to earn the esteem of others. Not possible? But here it was. Too complicated to follow through.

  Roland closed his eyes and gave himself up to a slow spinning sensation. Oh to sleep now, if the baby would sleep too, if they could sleep together here on the bed, even for five minutes. But his father’s closed eyes suggested to Lawrence a universe shrinking into frozen darkness, leaving him the last remaining being, chilled and rejected on a vacated shore. He inhaled deeply and howled, a piteous piercing wail of abandonment and despair. For speechless helpless humans, much power lay in a violent switch of extreme emotions. A crude mode of tyranny. Real-world tyrants were often compared to infants. Were Lawrence’s joys and sorrow separated by the finest gauze? Not even that. They were wrapped up tight together. By the time Roland had roused himself and was at the top of the stairs with the baby in his arms, contentment was restored. Lawrence clung to the lobe of his father’s ear. As they went down he probed its whorl with clumsy stabs.

  It was not yet 10 a.m. The day would be long. It was already long. In the hall the watery trail of shoe-dirt across the low-grade Edwardian tiles led him back to Browne himself. Yes, yes, it was bad. But here was the place to start. Eliminate. One-handedly he fetched a mop, filled a bucket and cleared up the mess, spreading it widely. This was how most messes were cleared up, smoothed thin to invisibility. Tiredness turned everything to metaphor. His domestic routines made him resent and resist the demands and lures of the worldly life beyond. Two weeks back there was an exception. International affairs invaded his past. US warplanes in a raid on Tripoli, Libya, destroyed his old primary school but failed to kill Colonel Gaddafi. Now, to read a report of a speech by Reagan or Thatcher or her ministers made Roland feel excluded and guilty for not paying attention. But it was time to keep his head down and stay faithful to the tasks he set himself. There was value in thinking less. Manage the fatigue and care for the essentials: the baby, the house, the shopping. He hadn’t seen a newspaper in four days. The kitchen radio, which was on low all day, sometimes used a quiet voice of virile urgency to woo him back. He tried to ignore it as he walked by with his bucket and mop. This is for you, it murmured. Riots in seventeen prisons. When you were about in the world you used to care for precisely this kind of thing…An explosion…developments came to light when Swedish authorities reported radioactive…He hurried past. Keep moving, don’t nod off, don’t close your eyes.

  After the hall he started on the kitchen while Lawrence sat in his chair eating and playing with a peeled banana. The sink-and-table clean-up was roughly achieved. He carried Lawrence upstairs. In the two bedrooms the order he imposed was cosmetic but the slide towards chaos was stayed. The world seemed minimally more reasonable. Here, after all, at the top of the stairs was a pile for the washing machine. Alissa was no better at this stuff than he was. In fact—but no, today he was not thinking of her.

  Later, Lawrence sucked dry a bottle of milk and slept and Roland went next door to his bedroom. Rather than sleep he had in mind some changes to his poem about sleeplessness. “Glamis.” In an understated way—it had to be understated because he didn’t know enough—it was about the Troubles. In ’84 he had spent some days in Belfast and Derry with a London Irish friend, Simon, newly rich from a chain of fitness gyms, and idealistic. Simon’s idea was to start a few tennis schools for kids across the sectarian divide. Roland was to be the head coach. They were looking for locations and local support. They were innocents, fools. They were followed, or thought they were. In a Knockloughrim pub a fellow in a wheelchair—kneecapped, they decided—advised them to “be careful.” Simon’s anglicised Ulster accent provoked indifference everywhere. No one was much interested in children’s tennis. They were held for six boring hours at a roadblock by British soldiers who didn’t believe their story. During that week Roland barely slept. It rained, it was cold, the food was atrocious, the hotel sheets were damp, everyone chain-smoked and looked ghastly. He moved about in a bad dream, constantly reminding himself that his state of fear was not paranoia. But it was. No one touched them, or even threatened to.

  He worried that his poem owed too much to Heaney’s “Punishment.” How the figure of a woman long preserved in a bog evoked her Irish “betraying sisters,” victims tarred for consorting with the enemy while the poet watched on, both outraged and complicit in his understanding. What could an outsider, an Englishman with one week’s faint engagement, have to say about the Troubles? His fresh idea was just that—to shift the poem towards his ignorance and insomnia. Tell how lost and fearful he had been. Now there was a new problem. The typed draft before him had been in Browne’s hands. Roland read the title and heard in his thoughts the detective’s flat voice and was repelled by “Glamis hath murdered sleep.” Weak, portentous, riding free on Shakespeare’s back. After twenty minutes he put the poem aside to contemplate his latest idea. He opened the notebook. The piano. Love, memory, harm. But the detective had been there too. In his presence privacy had been violated. An innocent pact between thought and page, idea and hand, had been ruptured. Or polluted. An intruder, a hostile presence had made him dismissive of his own phrasing. He was forced to read himself through another’s eyes and struggle against a likely misreading. Self-consciousness was the death of a notebook.

  He pushed it away and stood, remembered his immediate circumstances and their weight. They were enough to make him sit again. Think carefully. It was only a week ago that she left. Enough weakness! Precious when he should be robust. Some poetic authority had said that writing a good poem was a physical exercise. He was thirty-seven, he had stre
ngth, stamina and what was written remained his own. The poet would not be deterred by the policeman. Elbows on desk, chin propped in hands, he lectured himself in these terms until Lawrence woke and began to scream. The day’s work was done.

  In the early afternoon, as he was dressing the baby for a shopping trip, the sound of birds squabbling in the roof gutter at the rear of the house prompted a thought. Downstairs, with Lawrence under his arm, he checked in the desk diary he kept by the phone in the hall on top of a pile of directories. He hadn’t noticed that it was already May. Since it was Saturday then it was the 3rd. All morning the small dusty house had been warming. He opened a window on the ground floor. Let the burglars come while he was at the shops. They would find nothing to steal. He leaned out. A butterfly, a peacock, was sunning itself on the brickwork. The sky he had ignored for days was cloudless, the air smelled richly of next door’s mowing. Lawrence would not need his coat.

  Roland was not quite carefree as he left the house with the baby in the pushchair. But his constricted life seemed less important. There were other lives, bigger concerns. As he went along he attempted a breezy indifference; if you’ve lost a wife, then do without or find another or expect her back—there was nothing much in between. The heart of wisdom was not to care too much. He and Lawrence would get by. Tomorrow they would go for dinner with good friends a ten-minute walk away. The baby would fall asleep on the sofa protected by a line of cushions. Daphne was his old friend and confidante. She and Peter were excellent cooks. They had three children, one of them Lawrence’s age. Other friends would be there. They would be curious about fresh developments. Douglas Browne’s visit, his style of questioning, the shallow grave in the New Forest, the outrageous intrusions, the little camera in his pocket, what his sergeant had said—yes, these Roland would reshape into a comedy of manners. Browne would become Dogberry. He smiled to himself as he walked towards the shops and imagined the hilarity among his friends. They would admire his resilience. To some women a man caring alone for a baby was an attractive even heroic figure. To the men he would seem a dupe. But he was a little proud of himself, of the laundry churning in the washing machine even now, of the clean hallway floor, of the contented well-fed child. He would buy some flowers from a zinc bucket he had passed two days before. A double bunch of red tulips for the kitchen table. The shop was just ahead, more newsagent than florist, and while he was in there he would buy a newspaper. He was ready to embrace the wider turbulent world. Lawrence permitting he might read it in the park.