Long Sonata of the Dead Read online

  We lasted nearly a term as a semi-detached couple before Adam decided he would have her for himself. He and I no longer shared a room, as we had in our first year. But we still saw a fair amount of each other. I was useful to him—I was the organized one, you see, who knew when the supervisions and lectures were, which library books we needed, how to find the material that could lift your grade from a B to an A.

  In a sense, it was Francis Youlgreave who brought Mary and Adam together. I knew something about Youlgreave, even then, because my mother had grown up in Rosington. Youlgreave was a Canon of Rosington Cathedral in the early twentieth century. She had one of his collections of poems, The Judgement of Strangers, which had once belonged to my grandparents. I was using this as the basis for my long essay, an extended piece of work we had to do in our final year which counted as a complete module of our degree. I’d made the discovery that there were several advantages to studying obscure literary figures—fewer secondary sources, for a start, and a better than average chance of impressing the examiners with one’s initiative.

  Mary was waiting for me in my room when Adam turned up one evening. He said he’d wait for me and, while he waited, he investigated the papers on my desk while chatting away to Mary. He found some of the Youlgreave material and Mary told him more.

  By the time I returned with an Indian takeaway for two, they were smoking a joint and chatting away like friends on the brink of being something closer. She responded to his charm like a plant to water. He had the priceless knack of seeming to be interested in a person. The takeaway stretched among the three of us. Adam and Mary got very stoned and I sulked.

  Next week Mary and I officially broke up. It was one lunchtime in the pub. She did her best to do it tactfully. But all the time she was being kind to me, she was glowing with excitement about Adam like a halloween pumpkin with a candle inside.

  As she was going, she said, “Don’t take it personally, Tony, will you? I’m always looking for something, you see, and I never quite find it. Maybe one day I’ll come round full circle. Or maybe I’ll find it. Whatever it is I’m looking for.”

  I didn’t know which disturbed me more: the knowledge that Adam was having an affair and that his marriage to Mary was breaking down; or the growing suspicion that he would take Youlgreave away from me, probably without even knowing what he was doing.

  I knew perfectly well that Francis Youlgreave wasn’t “mine” to lose in the first place. He was just a long-dead clergyman with eccentric habits, who had written a few minor poems that sometimes turned up in anthologies. Even I accepted that most of his poetry wasn’t up to much. If half the stories were true, he had taken too much brandy and opium to do anything very well.

  For all that, Youlgreave was an interesting person, always striving for something out of his reach. He was also interesting in the wider context of literary history. He was not quite a Victorian, not quite a modern, but something poised uneasily between the two.

  We were about to reach the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of his birth. Publishers love anniversaries, and I had pitched the idea of a short biography of Youlgreave with a selection of his better poems to an editor I’d worked for in the past. To my surprise she liked the proposal and eventually commissioned it. The advance was modest. Still, it was a proper book and for a decent publisher.

  I knew there wasn’t a great deal of material available on Youlgreave. It was rather odd, actually, how little had survived—I suspected that his family had purged his papers after his death. But when talking to the editor I made a big point of his friendships with people like Oscar Wilde and Aleister Crowley, and also his influence on the modernists who came after him. There were people who claimed to see elements of Youlgreave’s work in T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, which wasn’t as fanciful as it might seem.

  Besides, what we did know about him was intriguing. The second son of a baronet, he had published a volume called Last Poems while he was still at Oxford. He was ordained and spent the 1890s as a vicar in London. He was made a Canon of Rosington—some people said that his family pulled strings in order to get him away from the temptations of the capital—but had retired early owing to ill-health.

  Youlgreave was only in his early forties when he died. I had seen reports of the inquest. He was living at his brother’s house. He fell out of a high window. They said it was an accident. But no one really knew what had happened, and they probably never would.

  I had one advantage that I made the most of with my editor. Youlgreave had been a member of the London Library for most of his adult life. After his death, his family presented a number of his books to the library.

  One of them was his own copy of The Voice of Angels. Youlgreave’s last collection of poems, published in 1903, was called The Tongues of Angels. Voice was a privately-printed variant of Tongues that included an extra poem, “The Children of Heracles.” The poem, which has strong elements of cannibalism, was unpleasant even by today’s standards; presumably Youlgreave’s publisher refused to include it in Tongues.

  I suspected that the cataloguer hadn’t realized how rare this book was. It was not in the British Library or the Bodleian or Cambridge University Library. As far as I knew, the London Library’s edition was the only known copy in a collection that was accessible to the public, though there may have been a few in private hands.

  The Voice of Angels was valuable not just for its rarity and for the extra poem. This particular copy had penciled marginalia by Youlgreave himself. Some of them are illegible, but not all.

  Best of all, on the endpaper at the back, Youlgreave had jotted down a number of disjointed lines and clusters of words—fragments, I believed, of a poem he hadn’t lived to write. One phrase leapt out at me when I first saw it: the long sonata of the dead.

  I recognized the phrase. This was going to be one of the main revelations of my biography. Samuel Beckett had used the identical words in his novel Molloy, which he published nearly half a century after Youlgreave’s death. It was too unusual to be dismissed as coincidence. To clinch the matter, “The Children of Heracles” included the line: What words and dead things know. Beckett had used an almost identical phrase in Molloy.

  There was only one conclusion: that Beckett had somehow seen The Voice of Angels, this very copy that I had found in the London Library, and he had admired it enough to plagiarise at least two of Youlgreave’s lines.

  Now I had to face the possibility that Adam was going to take that from me too.

  All this passed through my mind as I stood there with Adam’s phone in my hand.

  I still had one thing in my favor: The Voice of Angels was safe on my shelf at home. It wasn’t listed in the library’s computer catalogue yet, only in the older catalogue, which consists of huge bound volumes with strips of printed titles pasted inside, the margins of the pages crowded with hand-written annotations by long-dead librarians. But, if Adam were serious about Youlgreave, sooner or later he would track it down and put in a request for it. Then I would have to return it to the library.

  It was possible he wouldn’t notice the discrepancy in the title. It was possible, even, that he wasn’t doing anything significant on Youlgreave. That was what I really needed to find out.

  I thought of Mary right away. She would know—she was credited as a researcher on the documentaries and in the books. And it would give me an excuse to see her, which was what I wanted to do anyway.

  But did I want to see her? The very thought terrified me. Since Adam had walked into the London Library, all the comfortable certainties that shored up my life had crumbled away. Would she even talk to me after all these years? What would happen if I showed her the message on Adam’s phone and proved to her that her husband was having an affair?

  I had a practical problem to solve first of all. I didn’t even know where to find her. Adam hadn’t included his private address in his Who’s Who entry. The library would know it but members’ addresses were confidential.

  That was when
I remembered the crumpled envelope I had found in the Burberry. I took it out again. It was a circular addressed to Adam. There was the address: 23 Rowan Avenue.

  I glanced over my shoulder. No one was looking at me. I slipped the phone into my trouser pocket.

  The library kept a London A-Z. Rowan Avenue was out towards Richmond, not far from Kew Gardens.

  I gave myself no time to think. I took my coat and left the library. I cut across Pall Mall and the Mall and went into St. James’s Park. Hardly anyone was there because of the rain. My hair and my shoulders were soaked by the time I reached Queen Anne’s Gate. A moment later I was at the Underground station. I was trembling with cold and, I think, excitement.

  Proust was right about his madeleine.

  Once something unlocks the memories they come pouring out. I was drowning in mine just because I’d seen a man standing in the rain outside the London Library.

  Adam had always been a bastard, I thought. People don’t change, not really. As time passes, they just become more like themselves.

  I didn’t have to wait more than a couple of minutes for a Richmond train on the District Line. Kew Gardens was the last stop before Richmond. It was now late afternoon. The carriage was at the end of the train and nearly empty.

  I sat down and stared at my reflection in the black glass opposite me. I saw an untidy middle-aged stranger where I half-expected to find a slim, sharp-featured student with shaggy hair.

  It was still raining when I left the train and took my bearings. Kew was a nice place, just right for nice people like Adam and Mary. You couldn’t imagine poor people living there. But it wasn’t not for the very rich, either, for people who flaunted their money and slapped it in your face. In a perfect world I might have lived there myself.

  Rowan Avenue was a gently curving road about five minutes’ walk from the station. The houses were terraced or semi-detached-solid Edwardian homes, well-kept and probably unobtrusively spacious. The cars outside were Mercedes, BMWs and the better sort of people carriers designed for shipping around large quantities of nice children.

  Number 23 had a little glazed porch with a tiled floor, a green front door and a small stained glass window into the hall beyond. I rang the bell. Adam and Mary had no children—I knew that from Who’s Who—but there might be a cleaner or a secretary or something. Mary might be out. The longer I waited, the more I hoped she would be.

  There were footsteps in the hall. The stained glass rippled as the colors and shapes behind it shifted. My stomach fluttered. I knew it was her.

  With a rattle, the door opened a few inches and then stopped. It was on the chain. I felt unexpectedly pleased—London is a dangerous city, growing worse every year; and I was relieved that Mary was taking precautions.

  “Hello,” she said, giving the word a slight interrogative lift on the second syllable.

  “You probably won’t remember me.” I cleared my throat. “It’s been a long time.”

  I could see only part of her face. She seemed a little smaller than in memory. The hair was carefully styled and much shorter.

  She was frowning. “I’m afraid I don’t …”

  “Mary, it’s me—Tony.” Despair nibbled at me. “Don’t you remember?”

  “Tony?” Her voice was the same. Slightly breathless and husky. I used to find it unbearably sexy. I still did. “Tony?” she repeated, frowning. “From university?”

  “Yes,” I said, more loudly than I intended. I touched the beard. “Imagine me without this.”

  “Tony,” she said. I watched recognition creep over her face. “Tony, yes, of course. Come in.”

  She unhooked the chain and opened the door. She was still Mary, my Mary. She was wearing jeans and a green shirt with a jersey over it. Cashmere, I thought. She was looking at me and I was acutely aware of my own appearance, something I rarely thought about.

  For the first time I saw her face properly. “What have you done?” I said. “Are you OK?”

  Her upper lip was swollen on the right hand side as if a bee had stung it. Or as if someone had hit her.

  “I’m fine. I walked into the bathroom door last night. So stupid.”

  The hall was large and long, with rugs on stripped boards. Mary took me through to a sitting room dominated by an enormous TV screen. The furniture was modern. There were hardback books lying about—new ones, recently reviewed—and a vase of flowers on the coffee table.

  “This is … nice,” I said, for want of something to say.

  She switched on a couple of lamps. “Do you want some tea?”

  “No, thanks.”

  I thought she looked disappointed.

  “Do sit down. It’s good to see you after all this time.”

  That’s what she said: what she meant was: Why are you here?

  I sat down on a sofa. There was another sofa at right-angles to mine. She chose that one.

  “It’s been ages, hasn’t it?” she said. “How’ve you been?”

  “Fine. I—”

  “What have you been doing?”

  “This and that,” I said. “I review—I do odds and ends for publishers—reading for them, sub-editing, blurb-writing. I’ve ghosted some memoirs. That sort of thing. I’m working on the biography of a poet at present.”

  “Which one?” she asked.

  “Francis Youlgreave.”

  “Really.” Her eyes widened as the memory caught up with her. “You always had a thing about him. Funnily enough, Adam’s thinking of doing something about him too.”

  “There’s an anniversary coming up,” I said.

  She nodded. “It’s part of a series for him. Another documentary.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Literary culture in the 1890s—The Naughty Nineties, I think that’s the working title. There’s going to be a book, too.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “It’s going to be revisionist,” she went on. “In the sense that they’re arguing the really influential figures aren’t the obvious ones like Wilde and Henry James.”

  “Hence Youlgreave?”

  “I suppose. I don’t really know. Tony—it’s awfully nice to see you, of course, but is there a particular reason for you coming? Like this, I mean, out of the blue.”

  “This is a bit difficult,” I said. I wanted so much to be honest with her. “I saw Adam today—at the London Library. I didn’t even know he was a member.”

  “So he knows you’re here?”

  “No—I don’t think he saw me. But I … I happened to see his phone—he’d left it lying around. There was a text.”

  She sat up sharply, her cheeks coloring with a stain of blood. “A text—what do you mean? You’re telling me you’ve been reading Adam’s texts?”

  “I didn’t mean to, not exactly.” I knew I was coloring too. “But, Mary, I think you should see it. That’s why I’m here.”

  I took the iPhone from my pocket and handed it to her. She stared at the screen. I couldn’t see her face.

  I miss you more and more every moment we’re apart. J xxxx.

  “He’s having an affair, isn’t he?” I said. “Did you know?”

  She didn’t look up. She shrugged.

  “Did he hit you, too?”

  “If you must know, yes.” Mary put down the phone on the arm of the sofa. She stared at me. “We’re getting a divorce. We—we can’t agree about who gets what. The old story.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  Her expression softened. “I really think you are. Bless you.”

  “I know what it’s like. I was married for a while but it didn’t take. Who’s ‘J’? Do you know?”

  “She’s called Janine—she used to be his PA. About ten years younger than me.” She swallowed. “Nice woman.”

  “Not that nice.”

  She stood up suddenly. “I’m going to make some tea. Will you have some now?”

  “Is it OK me being here? What if Adam comes back?”

  “He’s m
eeting his agent for dinner at Wilton’s at nine o’clock. That’s what his diary says, anyway. He was going to work in the library until then.”

  I followed her into the kitchen. She put on the kettle and then stood, arms folded, looking out of the window at the back garden.

  “This is going to be so bloody awful,” she said. “He’s got most of our assets tied up in a couple of companies. One of them is offshore, which makes it even more complicated. And he controls the companies; that’s the real problem. I was so naive, you wouldn’t believe. I just signed where he told me when he set them up.”I thought of the Post-it note I had found in Adam’s library book. You’re such a complete shit. You won’t get away with it. But it looked as if he would get away with it.

  “You’ve talked to a solicitor?”

  “Yes. For what it’s worth. If I fight Adam for my share, it’ll cost a fortune. But I haven’t got a fortune. I’ve hardly got anything. I shouldn’t be telling you this—it’s not your problem.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Anyway, the odds are I’ll lose if we go to court.”

  “What will you do?” I said.

  “God knows.”

  She turned to face me. I couldn’t see her face clearly; the window was behind her and the winter afternoon was fading into dusk. Neither of us spoke for a while. The kettle began to hiss quietly at first and then with steadily rising urgency. At last there was a click as it turned itself off.

  “I normally have green tea in the afternoon,” she said, as if this was a normal conversation on a normal day. “But there’s ordinary tea if you prefer, or herbal—”

  “Green tea’s fine,” I said.

  She picked up a packet of tea and a spoon. Then she stopped moving and the conversation wasn’t normal any more. “I made a mistake, Tony, didn’t I?” she said. “I wish …”

  “What do you wish?” My voice was little more a whisper.

  “I wish I could put time back,” Mary said. “To when it was just you and me in the garden. Do you remember? At that stupid party? It all seemed so simple then.”

  On Tuesdays, the London Library stays open until nine p.m. When I got back it was nearly six o’clock. The Burberry was still hanging in the cupboard. I hung my own coat beside it.