The Pillow Friend (20 page)

“Oh, he won't mind me showing you round. I'm sure he'd want me to. After you've come so far, I couldn't send you away with nothing. Please come in.”

“Really, I'd rather meet him.”

“Well, of course you would, and why shouldn't you? You can come back again in a few days—better ring first to make sure he's in. But as long as you're here now, come in for a cup of tea. Wouldn't you like to see where his wonderful poems get written?”

It would have been too awkward to refuse. Following her inside, she wondered about the woman who played at being keeper of the shrine. In her hippy, gypsyish clothes—cheesecloth blouse and long madras skirt, silver bangles on her arms and a ring on every finger—she was unlikely his housekeeper or secretary. She knew he wasn't married, but asked with false naiveté, “Are you Mrs. . . ?”

The woman smiled. “I'm sorry, I should have introduced myself. I'm his girlfriend, Amy Carrick.”

There was something in the woman's proud smile and the little toss of her head that made her suspect she wouldn't have made such a claim in the poet's presence.

“Where is he now? Will he be back soon?”

“He's gone away for a few days, walking in Scotland. He does that sometimes, when he needs to be alone for inspiration. That's how poets are. Wouldn't you like to see his study, where the magic happens? Just through here. This is his desk, this is his chair. He always writes longhand, on a pad like this. There are his pencils, and a rubber, and a couple of Biros, but he's taken his favorite pen away with him, of course.” It was like being shown around a museum by a too-officious curator, facts forced upon one and never allowed a moment for thought or a meaningful private discovery. Although she knew she was being silly, she found herself disbelieving everything the woman said. No, this was not the room where he created his poems. Perhaps he wrote letters here, on that old manual typewriter shoved to the back of the desk, or typed out the final versions, but the poems had not been written at that desk, with the poet in that chair.

“Go on, I can see you're dying to try it. Go ahead, I won't tell him, sit down, see what it feels like to sit in the poet's chair!”

She backed away. “Could I use your bathroom, please?”

Amy led her to the other end of the small house, where the bathroom was beside the kitchen. “I'll make us a pot of tea while you're freshening up.”

She ran the water to mask any sound, and had a look around the bathroom. There were no signs of a woman's occupancy, no makeup, moisturizer, or tampons, not even a toothbrush in the mug beside the sink. Only one person lived here, and he was away.

“Why don't you take a seat in the lounge, make yourself at home. I'll be in with the tea in a couple of minutes,” called Amy as she passed. There was one armchair and a sofa in the room called the lounge, and by the evidence—a crumpled tissue and a paperback lying open on the seat—it was obvious that the other woman had been sitting in the armchair earlier. Perversely (“make yourself at home!”), she chose to sit on the chair, lifting the book (
A Bouquet of Barbed Wire
by Andrea Newman) and tissue and setting them on the nearest surface, then settling herself, wriggling her bottom deeper into the already flattened cushion. As she did so she felt something small and hard under her. Probably a button or a coin, she thought as she raised a buttock and slipped one hand beneath the cushion.

She had found a small gold key attached to a thin gold ring. The key seemed too small and delicate to be of any practical use, so perhaps it was the sort of charm that more usually would be worn as part of a bracelet or necklace. Without thinking, she slipped it onto her ring finger and it was a perfect fit. She turned it so that the key lay in the palm of her hand, and she closed her hand around it just as Amy came in with a tea tray.

“Here we are! Milk or lemon?”

“Lemon, please.”

“I thought so. I've noticed Americans don't often take milk in their tea.
He
never takes tea at all. He's a coffee drinker, but it has to be strong.”

She craved all such details of his life out of habit, but resented this woman for being the source. Anyway, she might be lying. She certainly didn't live here with the poet as she had implied. “Have you been to America?”

“Me? Oh, no. I used to work in a cafe where we had a lot of American tourists coming in, that's where I noticed. My boyfriend says noticing little details like that is really important in a poet.”

“Are you a poet, too?”

“I try,” she said, casting her eyes down, more coy than modest. Then a thought alarmed her, and her eyes came up quick and fierce. “Are you?”

“Oh, goodness, no. I'm just a reader; I can't write.” The lie soothed whatever dark suspicion had briefly disturbed Amy's complacency. She knew she'd been right in her reflexive, almost instinctive lie. She didn't want this woman knowing too much about her.

When she left—as soon as she had finished her tea—she was still wearing the key ring. Distrusting the other woman as she did she couldn't bring herself to hand it over to her. She justified this with the thought that all the other rings on Amy's hands were silver, so this was unlikely to be hers. This might belong to the poet's real girlfriend, in which case it would be much better to give it to him when she came back another day. After all, it was his house she had found it in.

But as soon as she was outside on the street she was gripped by panic, realizing that however she justified it, she had just stolen a piece of jewelry. She should have shoved it back under the cushion again before she left—what had possessed her to put it on in the first place? The panic died away as she accepted the fact that it was too late now, and she'd just have to try to explain herself when she met the poet. Her hand made a fist around the fragile key as she walked away.

She fell asleep early and woke, disoriented but wide awake, just before dawn. It was too early to have breakfast or go anywhere, nothing would be open, and although she would have enjoyed just walking through the streets of London she was afraid it wouldn't be safe. With a sigh she reached for the book she had been reading the night before, but soon cast it aside. Her dreams lately had been more interesting, unusually vivid and strange. There had been one scene in particular. . . .

Thinking about it, she remembered something she'd seen walking back from the poet's house in Harrow, and made a connection. Words hung in her mind, glittering slightly, suggesting new connections, conjunctions, interesting clashes. She scrabbled in her bag for her notebook and a pen.

By the time the maid knocked on her door several hours later she had completed a poem, and she had the thrilling feeling that it was the best she'd ever written.

During the next few days she saw the sights of London and she wrote. She wrote in the early mornings in her room, she wrote in cafes, tea shops, and restaurants in the afternoons, and in pubs or her narrow little hotel room in the evenings. She had never known anything like this overpowering burst of creativity, and she'd seldom been so happy. Writing poetry had always been a struggle for her, and the results of that struggle usually mediocre. Now everything was changed. The poems were not easy to write, they didn't spring into her head full-blown, she had to work at them, shaping and reshaping the initial idea, but it was like working in clear daylight after bumbling around in the dark for so long. She had something to say now, and the words to say it. The skill had come, perhaps, from all the years of practice, of looking and listening, reading and trying to write, but why here, why now?

She developed a superstition about the key ring, which had not been off her finger since she found it, but it was not something she was able to put into words—it would have sounded too silly. Yet she had not gone back to Harrow-on-the-Hill, or even thought about it, during her week of writing, and now, as she began to think about the poet again, feeling that old familiar tug of longing, the thought of having to give the ring up, to give it back to him, was almost painful enough to make her abandon her original plan to meet him.

Finally she shut herself into a telephone box and dialed the number she knew by heart. A man's voice answered, repeating the last four digits she had dialed. Unable to think of any response, she hung up.

She put all her recent poems into a big brown envelope and set off for Harrow. She didn't know what she would say, but she would let him see that she wore the ring, let him read her poems, and then he would decide her fate. Standing before his green door, her hand poised to knock, something else seemed to take over and decide for her. Instead of knocking she bent down and leaned a little forward and pushed the envelope containing her poems through the letter slot. Feeling as free, happy and satisfied as when she read through a poem she had just written and found it good, she walked away from his door.

Halfway down the hill on her way to the station she remembered her name was nowhere on any of the poems or the envelope. He would have no idea who had written them, or how to get in touch with her. But that didn't matter. She understood now that she had written them for him, and now he had them. She would get in touch with him after he'd had time to digest what she had written, and then they would meet as equals, two poets together at last.

She had grown tired of city life and the turmoil of London, so the next morning she packed her things and took the train down to Cornwall, dreaming of high white cliffs above the slate-blue sea, of quaint fishing villages, of ancient stone circles and wild moorland ponies. The weather was kind. She sat and wrote in the sun in the ruined castle of Tintagel, and in quayside cafes in half a dozen Cornish fishing villages. She lived each day—walking, looking, eating and writing—without thinking beyond the moment, and she was happy. When the weather turned and rain swept in from the sea, she got back on the train. She visited Exeter, Bristol, Bath and Brighton. And then one night, sitting in a pub in Brighton with a half-pint of bitter and her notebook and pen, she saw two lovers, a few feet away from her, holding hands and kissing. She felt a pang of loneliness as she remembered how she had loved the poet, yet never met him. She was scheduled to fly back to Texas in just over a week.

The next day saw her back in Harrow. She pushed her latest poems through his letter slot, but then, instead of retreating to a hotel in London, she hauled her duffel bag farther up the hill where a pub called The King's Head had rooms for rent. She spent the rest of the day wandering around the hill, browsing in antiques shops, gazing at the picturesque old buildings of Harrow School, and reading inscriptions on tombstones in the churchyard. She had dinner in the hotel restaurant, and afterward settled herself in a quiet corner of the lounge bar, having decided to spend the rest of the evening writing.

She hadn't been there long enough to set pen to paper when the poet walked in. He wore jeans, an open-necked white shirt, and a scruffy old tweed jacket going at the elbows. He looked around with a gaze as wide-open and innocently curious as a baby's and intercepted her stare. She was unable to look away. After a moment his eyes left hers and he turned to the bar. She shoved notebook and pen away in her bag. She was trembling. A few minutes later, as she had known he would, he carried his drink away from the bar, across the room, and joined her at her table.

It was an ordinary sort of pickup, with nothing poetic about it. Probably, if she hadn't known who he was, she would have brushed him off—she had no liking for the sort of casual encounters that began in bars—but if she hadn't known who he was, she would never have stared at him in that way which encouraged, practically demanded, his attention.

When they got around to exchanging names, she did not reveal that she knew who he was. He touched her left hand very lightly. “Married?”

Her heart pounding very hard, she turned the ring on her hand so that the key was visible. “No. You?”

If he recognized the ring he gave no sign. “Never. Women never stay with me for very long. I can't blame them. I'm a selfish bastard, and my work comes before a relationship. No woman likes to feel she's second-best, not even those who seem the most sympathetic, even those originally drawn to me by the work.” He hesitated, as if expecting her question, and then explained, “I'm a poet, you see, and one with a rather old-fashioned attitude toward the Muse. Oh, don't feel embarrassed because you haven't heard of me! I'm
quite
successful as a poet, but I know how little that means in this country today!”

When closing time was called, he gave her a look shifty and shy and invited her home with him.

This was the invitation she had longed for, the answer to her dreams, yet she hesitated at the intrusion of an unwelcome memory. “Do you have a girlfriend?”

He gazed at her with unbelievably guileless eyes. “Not yet. But I'd like to.” He put out his hand and caught her fingers. “What do you say?”

She said yes. They were up most of the night, making love. She was ecstatic. They were so right together, their bodies a perfect fit, and they understood each other so well. He was the perfect lover she had always dreamed of.

In the morning they went back up to the King's Head to get her things, and she moved in with him. It was only supposed to be for a week, but when the time came for her to fly home, she forfeited her ticket and let the plane go without her.

Tears of joy shone in the poet's eyes as he pulled her back into his bed and made love to her again. But as they rested, still joined together, in the warm afterglow, he told her gently that she would have to find a place of her own. “I love you, but I can't live with you. How would I ever be able to work, knowing you were in the next room, knowing I could be making love to you? I need time to myself, to commune with the Muse. I can't live with anyone. Poets shouldn't.”