The Malarkey Read online

  ‘Does it cast a shadow?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  His cough caught at him. I propped him with pillows.

  ‘You should not talk,’ I told him. He moved his head from side to side, restlessly. Then he said,

  ‘You must understand that I will not regain my health now, Severn. I have studied enough anatomy to know that.’

  We lived in our own world all those weeks. The next cup of broth, the next visit from Dr Clarke, the beating-up of pillows, the lighting of fires and measuring of medicines. Some days I hadn’t a moment to call my own. Some nights I did not undress.

  I was glad of it. He lay with the marble egg given to him by Miss Brawne in his hand. Women keep such an egg by them when they sew, to cool their fingers. He held that marble hour after hour, day after day. It soothed him as nothing else did. He wanted to know why he was still living, when everything was finished for him. This posthumous life, he called it.

  He was sorry after he said it.

  ‘My poor Severn, you have enough to do without listening to my misery.’

  We had a piano carried upstairs so that I could play for him. He loved Haydn.

  ‘Don’t you hear that they are the same, Severn: the piano, and the fountain? Listen. But what am I thinking of? You cannot listen to yourself play, any more than a blackbird can hear itself sing.’

  I was there as the days wore him down. His other friends, Dilke and Brown and Reynolds and the rest, they were far away in England. Now we fight over his memory like cats. But it was to me that he spoke. I wiped the sweat off his face and washed him and changed his linen. I told him about the sheep that roamed over the graves. He smiled. He never tired of the sheep, the goats, the shepherd boy and the violets. The next day he would ask again, as if he’d already forgotten.

  But I don’t think he forgot. Words were like notes of music to him. He liked to hear how they fell.

  ‘Sometimes I think I am already buried, with flowers growing over me,’ he said, as he stared up at the ceiling where the painted flowers swarmed.

  Signora Angeletti became suspicious. She waylaid the doctor, asking what was wrong. Was it consumption?

  ‘I am a charitable woman, but I must think of my other lodgers.’

  I didn’t know the laws of Rome then. She feared that they would strip her rooms and burn everything. I suppose she was right, but she was compensated. She lost nothing.

  I heard the patter of Signora Angeletti’s voice from the mezzanine. We were in her hands. No other boarding-house would take us now: he was too obviously ill.

  He understood Signora Angeletti very well. She gave us a bad dinner, not long after we came, and he threw it straight out of the window onto the Steps. A crowd of urchins came from nowhere and scrabbled for it.

  ‘She won’t serve us such stuff again,’ he said, and he was right. She had given us rubbish, to see if we were willing to swallow it. I wished I had his firmness. I was nervous with Signora Angeletti, and she knew it. In those ways he was more worldly than I was.

  Yes, they make him a plaster saint of poetry, with his eyes turned up to heaven. They fight over his memory, shaping it this way and that. But I remember how he rocked with laughter when that dinner splattered on the marble steps!

  ‘My best plate!’ screamed Signora Angeletti. But he said,

  ‘If that plate is the best you have, Signora, then I am very sorry for you.’

  After that the dinners were always hot and good.

  I’ve told the story of those months so many times that they hardly seem to belong to me. If I say that they were the high point of my life, you will misunderstand me. You may even accuse me of cruelty. A man lay dying, and I say it was the high point of my existence? How can I recall those months of agony and dwindling hope, except with a shudder?

  I remember the nights chiefly. We set the candles so that as one died, the next one would light from its burning thread. Once he said that there was a fairy lamplighter in the room. The flame would burn down until it seemed about to collapse on itself. He watched intently all the while. When the next sprang up and began to bloom, he would allow himself to close his eyes.

  When I was very tired the room seemed to sway and the noise of the fountain reminded me of our voyage from England. Sometimes I fell asleep for a few seconds and really believed that I felt the motion of the ship under me.

  I remember one incident which I have never written down, or spoken of even. I was in the small room which was intended for my studio. I thought of his words.

  ‘You should be painting, Severn! Here you are in Rome and you do not paint at all.’

  I was standing at the table, going through my sketchbook. It contained a few studies which I hoped might be worth further work. I had sketched the cemetery for him. The pyramid of Caius Cestius, with the young shepherd sitting on the grass. But I had never shown him the sketch. How can a man say to another:

  ‘Look, here is the place where you will be buried. Just there, where that shepherd sits and dreams.’

  I decided to be buried there too, beside him. My heart grew easier then. I felt no more estrangement from him.

  As I turned the pages of my sketchbook, a cruel truth hit me like a blow. The reason I could not paint was not so much my cares for the invalid, as my fear that I would never paint well enough. Here I was in Rome, the heart of the painted world. Here were my masters all around me. Nothing I achieved could ever equal one of Bernini’s marble coils.

  The noise of the fountain grew louder. It was drowning me. It told to give up, stop pretending that there was merit in my pitiful daubs or in the travelling scholarship I’d been so proud to win. Rome would wash me away, as it had washed away a thousand others, leaving no trace. I seized hold of the leaves of my sketchbook, meaning to rip them out so that no one would ever guess the contemptible folly of my ambitions.

  At that moment I felt a touch on my shoulder. A clasp, a warm, wordless, brotherly clasp. The fingers gripped my shoulder and then shook it a little, consolingly, encouragingly.

  I knew straightaway that it was him. God knows how he had dragged himself out of that bed and come to find me. I could not imagine how he’d guessed at my anguish. I said nothing. His clasp was enough. After a moment the grip of the hand tightened, and then left me.

  He was going back to bed, I thought. But there were no retreating footsteps. I looked over my shoulder. No one was there. He could not possibly have moved so fast. I hurried to the bedroom and there he was, deeply asleep. I stared at his face and I knew that he was dying, not weeks or months in the future, but now. How had I not recognised it before?

  I sat down by the bed. My sketchbook was still in my hand. I got up again, noiselessly, and fetched what I needed from the little room. I was ready to draw him now.

  The noise of the fountain. The sound of a pencil moving. His breath. A long, dragging pause. Another breath. You can live an entire life between one breath and the next. That’s where my life was spent, in one night, in one room. The rest is memory.

  Dis

  The obvious story, my darling,

  is that Dis caught you

  into his dark kingdom.

  I don’t know where I was

  when he seared the grass

  with winter footprints.

  If your mother was not there

  whose hand could hold you

  when he opened the earth for you?

  I see your fingers

  twist in your lap

  as you keep mute.

  You will not eat the seeds.

  You know what he offers you.

  They glow softly, like coral

  in the blue vaults of this hell

  where I am only a shadow

  squeaking its anguish.

  Let me take your place in the dark.

  Dis knows you have eaten nothing

  of his gifts, his pomegranates.

  For months he’s kept you,

  whispering ‘Your mother

&
nbsp; never loved you as I love you.’

  Part your hands, my darling.

  Let me pour into them

  salt and grain.

  Newgate

  Beneath the bulk of the block the bins

  sweat with a week’s refuse.

  In the concrete corridor lines of lockers

  gape, hiding a man who’s

  back-to-the-wall, intent

  as the last words of his sentence

  lock together, his own jigsaw

  starting to make sense.

  He tunes up a stifle of terror

  in the girl he’s got by the throat

  while she claws at his fingers.

  He’s bored. He flicks the remote.

  He’s had enough of all this noise

  and endless interference –

  lights going out, pupils pinpoints.

  Why can’t they let him be as he is?

  Far away a bin lid drops down

  and the arches of Newgate tighten

  as dead men walk through them

  on the way to their dying.

  What architect first squinnied

  to fix this perspective? Getting it right

  meant waiting for the reaction

  when it came into sight.

  Now they are breathing. Now

  guards shovel the quicklime.

  Now the girl uncurls from her sofa,

  and takes the rubbish down.

  The guards whistle, nonchalant

  as the prison van backs up.

  Even now the soiled dark of the cell

  even now the thrash of the girl.

  At Ease

  When I was four at the feet

  of my grandpa and my great-uncle

  we heard how well Frank had done

  all those years with his war pension.

  He got the better of them.

  They doled it when he was young

  mustard-gassed and not likely to live

  long enough to do more than dint it –

  but he married on it.

  That was in the Great War

  when my grandpa kept order

  in the burning Dardanelles.

  You wouldn’t guess how many flowers

  grew in those brown hills.

  For a month they bled anemones

  then they were blue with hyacinths –

  little wild ones, not like these.

  Harbinger

  Small, polished shield-bearer

  abacus of early days

  and harbinger of life’s happiness

  that the world offers

  things scarlet and spotted

  to alight, hasping and unhasping

  unlikely wings,

  that there can be three or thousands

  but not a plague of ladybirds

  no, a benediction of ladybirds

  to enamel the weeds.

  Small, polished shield-bearer

  abacus of early days,

  harbinger of life’s happiness.

  The Hyacinths

  Pressed in the soil’s black web, nursed by the rough

  offhand embrace of frost, the hyacinths

  turn in their sleep. Such blunt stabbings

  against the paperiness of ancient skin,

  such cell-memory, igniting

  a slow fuse laid in the ground.

  Pressed in the soil’s black web, rocked back to sleep

  by the storm that tugs at the holly tree’s roots

  the hyacinths know they are listening

  to the west wind that kills them,

  but they are safe, having given themselves to darkness.

  All they desire is not to flower.

  Hyacinths, when I see you forced from the soil

  glossy and over-talkative

  with your loud scent and demand for attention

  I will put you back to sleep, forking

  the long-fibred darkness over you.

  The Night Workers

  All you who are awake in the dark of the night,

  all you companions of the one lit window

  in the knuckled-down row of sleeping houses,

  all you who think nothing of the midnight hour

  but by three or four have done your work

  and are on the way home, stopping

  at traffic lights, even though there is no one

  but you in either direction. How different the dark is

  when day is coming; you know all this.

  All you who have kept awake through the dark of the night

  and now go homeward; you, charged with the hospital’s

  vending-machine coffee; you working all night at Tesco,

  you cleaners and night-club toilet attendants,

  all you wearily waiting for buses

  driven by more of you, men who paint lines

  in the quiet of night, women with babies

  roused out of their sleep so often

  they’ve given up and stand by their windows

  watching the fog of pure neon

  weaken at the rainy dawn’s coming.

  Visible and Invisible

  (for Jane)

  That dream when we were young,

  that hunt for the magic

  which might make it happen:

  invisibility.

  Such glittering cloaks

  such eagerly swallowed

  rose-petal potions

  but we stayed solid and sunlit

  jumping on our own shadows

  defeated by ourselves.

  We didn’t know how easy

  the trick would turn out to be.

  All you do is let the years pass

  and quietly on its own it happens.

  You only have to let the airy cloak of years

  fall on your shoulders.

  The Snowfield

  No matter how wide the snowfield

  you don’t walk in your own footprints –

  each day the apparent freedom

  narrows, sun greases

  your steps to ice

  until the steep track glistens beneath you

  and you dare not go on

  but stand trembling

  bruised, struggling to balance,

  you stand trembling as night comes on

  on the wicked lip of the hill that stands

  between you and home.

  Lemon tree in November

  (for Kurt and Caroline Jackson)

  Dark, present, scattering night,

  the blows of the wind

  on the upturned hull of home

  the stub of the lighthouse wiped out

  the land crouched

  our lemon tree

  shaking its leaves

  in the wet garden

  the palm at the window

  hissing, rattling

  as the lighthouse beam

  buds and grows

  on a gnarl of foam.

  Dark, present, scattering night

  with the curtains bulging

  and the wind again

  on the upturned hull of home.

  Bildad

  The dark, present, scattering night,

  the thick stub of the light-house folded

  and put away like linen

  but still the bud of its light opening

  over a gnarl of foam,

  such an oncoming

  dark in the garden

  the slim leaves of the lemon tree

  quite gone,

  its structure hung

  by the light of its fruit.

  Palm leaves hiss

  in the rough hands of the wind,

  that wind again

  kneading the air as it wants –

  The more the decades

  the less we belong,

  tangential as thistle

  while the wind booms

  seizing the chimneys

  lifting the curl

  of our ill-made sunroof.

 
; Untouchable

  the wind does what it wants

  playing harmonica

  on the upturned hull of home:

  such quaintness

  to build a house here,

  to slip a bribe to the rock

  not to open under it

  and pay the sea to turn back.

  Tonight the ravaging of cliffs

  is the hunger of pack-animals

  jostling for place,

  hunting the man named Job

  in the land of Uz

  whose imagination painted him

  a righteous kingdom

  where he washed his steps with butter.

  But the wind answered him

  and naked, Job said, I came

  and naked will return

  as he sat on the ground.

  The wind scours our faces with stars.

  We wriggle like children

  eyes screwed up tight,

  our quaint imaginations

  busy planting lemons

  lulled by the ear-drowse

  and zing of bees.

  There is a cup, blue, full to the brim

  with tea. There is catnip

  and the brief shade of an olive tree.

  Outside, a dusty road, and from time to time

  walkers, who greet each other with silence

  or a curt nod which affirms

  the rubric of the stranger

  and we are all strangers here.

  At the far side of the earth’s curve