Learning by Heart (4 page)

Cora had leaned out of the window. ‘I will ring,’ she had promised, ‘and write.’

She had sat down, after a brief wave, to watch impatiently as the countryside went past: Temple Combe, where she had spent most of her teenage years helping in a riding stables; Buckhorn Weston, where her mother’s friend had the rectory and an idyllic garden full of old English roses, and almost too full of scent. She watched as all the beautiful names blurred away – Abbas Combe, Fifehead Magdalen, Coppleridge – and the train gathered speed, great clouds of steam rushing by the windows, and they left behind Cranborne Chase and Salisbury, and wound on into ever more populated suburbs, until finally they were clanking and grinding into Waterloo.

Cora had let down the strap of the window, to the disapproval of two other women in the carriage, and had breathed in the dusty, oily smell of the capital. Nothing had ever seemed more sensual or exciting. She had put on the coat that her mother had given her the previous Christmas, then pulled down her leather suitcase from the rack, with a canvas bag that she suspected had survived the war and still smelt heavily of camphor.

Her friends had been waiting for her on the platform and, as soon as she descended the step, she saw them. They bundled her up, all talking at once. Now, when Cora looked at this picture in her mind, she thought they had been like a group of birds squabbling in a hedge, a flurry of wings and sound, a tight little knot of animation.

The next day, Jenny had introduced her to a friend of her father’s.

‘What does he do, Jenny?’

A toss of the head. Jenny was interested in City men – stockbrokers, bankers – the kind of man who could buy her a house like the one she had been brought up in – not art. ‘He’s something to do with books.’

‘A publisher? A writer?’

‘I’ve not the remotest idea.’

He was a literary agent. His name was Brian Bisley. He looked old, but Jenny told her he was in his early forties. He gave Cora her first job. He had a house by Camden Lock, filthy, five-storeys. The Lock was twenty-five years away from being fashionable, and when she opened the front door, already slightly ajar, to go in on the first morning she worked for him, a waft of stale cooking and staler manuscripts, with an even stronger stench of alcohol, greeted her.

At the party where they had been introduced the previous Friday, he had seemed fun, if a little drunk, full of scandalous stories about writers and actors. He was selling the film rights that week, he told her, in a well-known novel. The following month he was going to New York. He was a rich man – that, and a dozen other lies.

On that Monday morning, she heard him calling her name as she went through the door. ‘Cora?’ he shouted. ‘Is that Cora?’

‘Yes.’

‘Come on up,’ he yelled.

She did so. The house felt cold, even though it was a beautiful morning. Not only cold, but damp. The door to the bathroom was open, half-way up the stairs: she glimpsed its mildewy interior, and clothes slung on the floor in a heap.

‘I’m in here,’ he shouted. She made her way to the front upper room of the house.

It had once been magnificent. In forty years, when she came to London again, she would return to it, stand in the square and look up at it in all its restored splendour; but now it was slowly decaying. She glanced up at a magnificent Edwardian plaster ceiling, and down again at the mess in the rest of the room. Brian Bisley was sitting in a chair by the window. He was dressed, as all gentlemen dressed then, in a three-piece suit. It must have started out very correct – he wore all the right accessories: the watch-chain across the waistcoat, the laced brogues, the pinstripe shirt with its separate starched collar, the cufflinks at the wrist – but, as if the effort of dressing had been too much, it looked all wrong on Bisley. The suit was shiny and flecked with cigarette ash, the shirt collar a little frayed, and the shoes were unpolished.

Next to him on a small table stood a pile of papers, a black Bakelite telephone and an overflowing ashtray. That was the only small area of order in the place.

There was a row of government-stock filing cabinets on one wall. There was an open fireplace. There was a red carpet, stained brown in parts and faded almost to pink in others. And that was about the extent of what could be identified as something other than paper. Great drifts of letters, manuscripts, magazines and crumpled notes flooded every surface, and fell on to the floor.

Bisley was wiping his nose on a crumpled handkerchief; his eyes were reddened. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

‘Did you see the kitchen?’ he asked, by way of reply. ‘Pass it on your travels?’

‘No,’ she told him. ‘I came straight up.’

‘It’s on your right as you come in at the door,’ he said. ‘Be a love, and get me a couple of aspirins, will you?’

‘All right,’ she said.

‘And a large Scotch.’

‘Should you?’ she asked. ‘It’s only half past nine.’

‘Look, darling,’ he said, ‘do you want a job, or don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ she replied. She had enough money to pay two months’ rent, but no more. And, besides, fifties girls of good county stock were brought up to be grateful, not independent. Particularly if a man offered you something. A drink, a chair, a job, a lifetime of stultifying marriage.

‘Well, that’s the first thing you do every morning,’ Bisley informed her. ‘Stick the kettle on. That’s for you. Open the Scotch. That’s for me.’ He winked. ‘One of us has to be sober at teatime.’

He wasn’t an unpleasant man; he wasn’t aggressive. He was simply a drunk. How he remembered anything was a permanent source of astonishment to her; but he did. He didn’t need the overflowing filing cabinets because every book he had ever sold was logged in his head, and his memory was miraculously accurate.

He would tell her the most intimate details about writers.

‘He has a friend in Harlow whom his wife doesn’t know about,’ he explained one morning, when she had taken a phone call from someone who had been critical of an author’s contract. The secret man in Harlow, as it turned out. ‘He does my client’s accounts, poor bloody sod,’ Bisley had continued. ‘Little thanks he gets for it. Our genius will go over to Harlow when he and Glenda have had a falling-out. Which they do every six weeks or so.’

‘What do he and his wife fall out about?’ she had asked.

‘Bichon frisées,’ he told her.

‘What?’

‘They’re dogs. Snappy little beasts. They have four. Surrogate children. How he ever writes a line with them yapping round his heels I’ll never know.’

She had thought, on that first morning, that she would try to last the week. Bisley had turned out to be rather more rackety than she had hoped. He was not the kind of man her parents would have liked her to know. She would get a week’s wages, she had reasoned, then look for something else. In those days, it was easy to walk out of a job on Friday and be at work somewhere else on Monday morning. London was flooded with girls from the provinces, an inexhaustible supply, from Brighton, Esher or Woking. Nice girls flooding in from Saffron Walden, Chertsey and Bracknell, filling the trains to capacity. And London needed them to replace all of the typists and telephonists, clerks and shopgirls it consumed. She was one of those girls, leaving the little house in Camden at nine, taking the tube two stops, getting out near the corner shop, where she bought the daily pint of milk and a loaf of bread. Besides Scotch, toast kept Brian Bisley nourished.

But by that Friday, something had happened. For one thing, he had made her laugh twice with his outrageous gossip. And then there was Thursday. At four o’clock Bisley had rolled in from lunch and demanded to know what she was doing.

‘I’m tidying up,’ she told him.

‘What’s that?’ he demanded, pointing at the window-sill.

‘It’s a plant,’ she said.

‘Where’d you get it?’

‘I bought it.’

‘What the hell for?’

She blushed in confusion. ‘It’s pretty.’

‘Jesus Christ!’ he had exploded. ‘What do you think this is, a fucking florist’s?’

‘It’s just a plant,’ she objected, colouring deeply now.

‘I don’t like flowers,’ he said.

‘But everybody likes flowers!’

He had slumped into his chair and eyed her for some time, shaking his head. Eventually, unable to bear his gaze, she had picked up her coat.

‘What are you doing?’

‘If you’d rather I wasn’t here …’

He slapped his hands on to his knees. ‘Put that down!’ he bellowed. ‘I pay you to stay until five thirty! It’s now …’ he made a great effort to look at his watch ‘… eleven minutes past four.’

‘But there isn’t anything for me to do.’

‘Sit down,’ he insisted.

Reluctantly, she did so, with the coat across her knees, and stared at the carpet.

‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded.

‘Helping you,’ she said. ‘Typing. Answering the phone while you’re out.’

He laughed to himself. ‘You are not,’ he said. ‘You are here to further the cause of literature.’

She couldn’t help smiling.

‘Ah, I see I have caused you amusement,’ he said. ‘I’m so very pleased.’

Now she raised her eyes.

‘Nevertheless,’ he added, ‘I am perfectly serious, though it may seem a great joke to you.’ There was a pause. Bisley gave a great sigh, and pulled a wry face. ‘Actually, I’ll tell you a secret, dear girl,’ he said. ‘It
is
a joke. The vast majority of this,’ he waved his hand over the sea of manuscripts, ‘is complete rubbish. We all hope that we’re going to get the next Rattigan, but the truth is, we bloody don’t.’ He gave another laboured sigh. ‘When I was a teenager, I fell in love. Not with a woman. Not with a man. But with books.’ He rubbed his eyes wearily. ‘Real books. Do you ever read books?’

‘Yes,’ she lied.

‘I mean literature.’

‘Yes,’ she repeated, flustered.

‘Name one,’ he said.

She said the first thing that came into her head. ‘
War and Peace
.’

Bisley laughed. ‘You haven’t read
War and Peace
,’ he said. ‘Nobody has. All right. Forget the ancestral greats for a moment. Name one book published in the last ten years that you have read.’

She stared at him.

‘A book in the last year, then. One title.’

Her mind was a blank. Abruptly, he got up. He walked to the door, saying, ‘Follow me,’ without looking back.

They went upstairs. For a horrible moment she thought they were heading for Bisley’s bedroom, but he opened a door on the landing and began to climb a smaller flight of stairs. There was another door at the top. He took a key from his pocket, and, fumbling, unlocked it. He looked back at her. ‘Well, come on,’ he said. And, as if reading her mind, ‘I won’t bloody molest you. I haven’t the strength. Or the inclination.’

The attic, unlike the rest of the house, was clean and ordered. This was long before the age of loft conversions; even so, a series of skylights illuminated the space, which ran the entire length of the house. Bookshelves were arranged on one side, and a long table on the other beneath the windows. There were several small reading lights.

Bisley walked to a shelf, and took down a volume at random. ‘How long have books been printed, rather than written by hand?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

‘Caxton?’ he prompted.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘What did they teach you at school, apart from how to embroider a cushion cover?’ he muttered. He took the book to the table and laid it down carefully. ‘Come here,’ he said. ‘Look at this.’ He smiled. ‘This is my secret passion.’

The book he had opened was small and leather-bound. The cover looked soft: worn calfskin as pliable as silk. The flyleaves were patterned with a dull pink; the edges of the pages were gold leaf.

‘Do you know who John Keats was?’ Bisley asked.

‘A poet?’ she guessed, having trawled the dim recesses of her memory.

‘A poet,’ he confirmed. ‘One whose name is writ in water.’

She gazed at him blankly.

‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘This is his last volume. 1820.’

‘It’s very old,’ she observed politely.

‘I’m not showing you because it’s old,’ he said. He turned round, stumbling, and stared at the shelves, then went to another and selected a larger book. ‘William Langland,’ he said.

Cora felt the hot-behind-the-eyes embarrassment that had sometimes crippled her at school. She had thought she’d left it far behind; now it swamped her, filling her eyes with tears that Bisley didn’t notice.

‘What did William Langland write?’ he demanded.

‘I don’t know,’ she murmured.

‘
Piers the Plowman
,’ he said. ‘Don’t you know your own heritage? Don’t you care? This man tells you everything you need to know about the society he lived in. It’s a satire. Surely you know what satire is.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Like sarcasm.’

He put the book down on the table. ‘This is a volume of English poetry,’ he said. He enunciated the words clearly and deliberately, pausing between each one. ‘It starts at Langland and it ends with Auden.’

She looked down, afraid to let him see her face.

‘You sit downstairs and imagine I’ve brought you here to tidy up and put bloody flowers in my face,’ he said. ‘I suppose you think about some Brylcreemed bloke who’s going to shove his hand up your skirt – or the price of bloody shoes!’

‘I certainly don’t,’ she retorted, stung.

‘Well, if not, I don’t know what you do think about, because you haven’t a clue about writers.’ He turned and looked at the room and gestured at the desk. ‘They make these,’ he said slowly, ‘all those posturing gits that you’ve seen this week. All those queers on the phone. All the frigid, screwed-up little women you pass in the street who come up my stairs with their packages wrapped in brown paper, and all the loudmouths, and the silent ones who can’t speak for nerves. They’re all writers. It doesn’t matter what they sound like, what they look like. They look different and sound different, and you couldn’t be paid to sit next to some of them on a bus. Some are so psychologically bereft that they’ll nurture a grudge for decades. A few – just a few, mind you – are reasonably decent.’