Long Sonata of the Dead (2 page)

“Move up,” she said, as I was lighting my own cigarette. “There’s room for two.”

There was but only just. I shuffled along the refrigerator. She sat down, her thigh nudging against mine. I felt her warmth through my jeans.

“Christ, it’s cold.”

“Have my jacket,” I suggested.

When we had settled ourselves again we smoked in silence for a moment, listening to the noises from the house and the rather different noises from the mattress.

“Anyway,” she said, “you should always look sad.”

“Why?”

“Because you look beautiful when you’re sad. Sort of soulful.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say. I wondered if she was stoned. Or if I myself was much, much more stoned than I had thought, and this was some sort of hallucination.

“I’ve seen you around, haven’t I?” she went on. “It’s funny we’ve never actually met. Until now, I mean. What’s your name?”

“Tony,” I said.

“I’m Mary,” she said. Then she kissed me.

You’re such a complete shit. You won’t get away with it.

The words gave me a sweet, sharp stab of pleasure. The writing was definitely Mary’s. The “you” must refer to Adam. They had been together now for nearly twenty years. They had married a couple of years after university.

Over the years I had looked up Adam in
Who’s Who
and Debrett’s
People of Today
on several occasions, so I knew the dates. I knew the landmarks of his career, too—the deputy literary editorship at the
New Statesman,
the years at the BBC, the handful of books and the four documentary series, linked to his later books. The documentaries were usually on BBC2, but the last one had graduated to BBC1.

Adam was my age but he looked ten or even fifteen years younger. He was one of those well-known authors who seem far too busy to have much time to write. I’d glanced through his articles in the
Sunday Times
and the
Observer
, and I’d heard him endlessly on radio and seen him on television. Two years earlier, he had chaired the judges of the Man Booker Prize. He was always judging something or another or commenting on something. Even Adam’s friendships had a professional or literary flavor—he played tennis with a best-selling novelist, for example, and shared a holiday house in Umbria with the CEO of a major publisher.

I got up to put the books on the trolley for shelving. I was about to return to my seat when I saw Adam himself coming into the reading room by the north door, the one leading to the new staircase that acts as a spine connecting the disparate parts and levels of the library, old and new.

Panic gripped me. He glanced about the room. It all happened so quickly I had no chance to turn away. He was carrying three or four books. For a moment his eyes met mine. There was no sign of recognition in his face, which both relieved and irritated me. He saw an empty seat near the window end of the room and made his way towards it.

The spell that held me broke. I slipped through the glazed doors and onto the landing of the main staircase of the old building. I hurried downstairs, past the portraits of distinguished dead members, a parade of silent witnesses.

Once on the stairs, however, I could think more clearly. I saw how absurd I was being. Why was I acting as if I had done something wrong, as if Adam were for some reason hunting me down? On the other hand, what on earth was going on between him and Mary? And was he really planning something on Francis Youlgreave? I told myself that I had every reason to be curious.

Besides, Adam was unlikely to leave the reading room for a while.

I continued more slowly down the stairs and into the issue hall. I turned into the passage where the lockers are. These are on the left. On the right is a line of tall cupboards, always open, with hanging spaces for coats and shelves where you can leave your bags.

The Burberry was in the fourth cupboard down, hanging between a tweed overcoat and a torn leather jacket. Adam’s bag was on the shelf beneath.

This was the moment when I crossed the line. It didn’t seem like that at the time. It seemed quite a natural thing to do in terms of my Youlgreave book. One has to research the possible competition.

I looked over my shoulder. No one was paying me any attention. The bag was one of those canvas-and-leather affairs that look as if they ought to have a bloodstained pheasant or a dead trout inside. I lifted the flap and checked the main compartment and the side pockets. I found nothing but the
Guardian
, the
Spectator
and a couple of crumpled paper handkerchiefs.

Straightening up, I patted the coat. In one pocket was a packet of Polos and a shopping list on the back of an envelope. The list was in Adam’s scrawled handwriting:
burgundy
,
flowers
,
milk
,
salad veg.
The other was empty.

I nearly missed the coat’s third pocket, which was inside and fastened with a button. It contained something small and rectangular that didn’t yield to the touch. I slipped my hand inside and felt the outline of a phone.

It was an iPhone. I had one myself as it happened, though mine was an older model. The ringer switch was in the off position. I pressed the control button. The screen lit up.

The phone was locked. But someone had sent a text, and this was briefly displayed on the screen.

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

There was no name attached to the text, only a phone number.

So that explains the Post-it note, I thought. The complete shit is having an affair.

Nothing new there.

So I come back to Mary. She told me later why she kissed me in the garden at the party: as a demonstration of disdain to her newly ex-boyfriend, who was watching us through the kitchen window. But it developed into something else.

While the party thudded away in the house, we stayed in the garden and talked and drank and smoked another joint. I can’t remember what we talked about. But I do remember that for once in my life I seemed to have leapfrogged the paralyzing shyness that usually characterized my attempts to talk to attractive girls and landed without any apparent effort into something approaching friendship.

Later I walked her home, and she kissed me again when we said goodnight. The next day we met between lectures for coffee, dispelling my lingering fear that she’d have forgotten me completely overnight. By the end of the day we had tumbled into bed together.

I felt as if I’d been turned into someone new and infinitely preferable, like the frog kissed by a princess. Mary was so beautiful, so vital. She always knew what she wanted and she was very direct about getting it. I envied her that. The mystery was why she wanted me. It was still a mystery.

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.