Together they strolled around for an hour in the unnatural humidity, under a nauseated sky (coppery twilight colours on a felt of blackness so deep that it made everything – trees, buildings, their own faces – seem electrochemically pale. And he thought, These are the colours loved by the mad). From his wallet he offered up three, no, four, no, five tenners, and went home to write.*4
—————
Afternoon.
She returned around three and disappeared into the bedroom; around five he heard the bare-flame whump of the gas water-heater and the rush of the taps. Around six she emerged with a towel turbaned over her hair, wearing a pleated dress shirt (One of Raoul’s cast-offs, she’d earlier explained. It’s newish but he was already too fat for it). By this time Martin had reached the end of his effectiveness at the desk and was to be found on the sofa, reading.
‘You must get a proper shower fitted, Martin. I can’t rinse my hair.’
He said inattentively, ‘Isn’t there that uh, that rubber tube?’
‘But it takes ages because it’s all flabby and warped. You just get dribs and drabs…Oh, so he’s got his nose in a book now, has he.’
‘That’s right. No fresh air and ruining my eyes.’
He went on reading or at least looking at the page.
‘…Oh, “poetry”,’ she said. ‘You’re such a hypocrite!’
‘Oi,’ he said lightly. ‘Hark at the pot calling the kettle black. I saw you in there yesterday. Having a sly look at High Windows.’ P. Larkin, 1974. ‘I saw you.’
‘Well if you will leave them lying around…Shove up then!’ He straightened his back and Phoebe eased in beside him. ‘And they’re meant to be great mates, isn’t that right? Him and Kingsley? Lifelong mates.’
‘…Yeah. Supposedly. Not lifelong. They met at Oxford. During the war.’
‘Oh. So he must’ve pinched your cheek and tousled your hair when you were little.’
‘Yeah, he was around, a bit. Maybe once or twice a year he’d come and stay.’
‘So he’d have you on his lap. Give you your baths.’
‘My baths? Christ no. He really didn’t like children. My baths…’
‘Oh, that’s funny. Because to me he looks like a classic…you know, the kind of bloke that hangs around the parks? I bet, I bet if you went into a copshop with your nippers and lodged a complaint, and they opened their album of local fiends and flashers, that’d be the first face staring up at you. The pasty dome and the specs. Don’t you think?’
‘Uh, what did Timmy look like? Fresh as a daisy, you said. Apparently there’s no real physical type. They come in all shapes and sizes.’
‘Still. When you were little, uh, did he ever uh…?’
‘No.’ He was starting to feel unnerved; but he was used to that by now and he said, in the supernormal tone he seemed to have developed for her, ‘No. He didn’t just fail to warm to children – he actively disliked them. It’s even there in a poem. Children, with their shallow, violent eyes. To him they’re like aliens…But he was all right, Larkin. Solemn but benign. Benign. And children can tell.’
‘Not at first they can’t. Often. Warm my feet!…No, he’s more than solemn, that one. Man hands on misery to man. It…’
‘It deepens like a coastal shelf.’
‘Get out as early as you can,’ she said. ‘And don’t have any kids yourself.’
‘Mm. So he says.’ Of course Phoebe had never drawn attention to the thing she shared with the poet: their common recusancy from the sway of common life. She couldn’t talk about it; but she could sometimes talk around it…Martin leant his head on her shoulder (the smell of talc and limey shampoo). ‘He doesn’t always feel like that. It’s a kind of poetic bravado. Or real bravery at least on the page. It’s just a mood, but poets have to go to the end of the mood.*5 To explore.’
‘Oh they explore, do they. Explore the mood. What’s the point of that?’
‘I don’t know – to contain it, the grievance. Whatever quarrel you pick with life, whatever it is that chafes you. You have to see it through.’
‘Yes, well that’s what I’m doing – seeing it through. Haven’t you noticed?…You say it’s just a mood, with him. When his mood changes, what’s he going to do? Up and start a family? At his age?’
‘Mm. Mm, a comical thought, I agree. No, you’ve got me there, Phoebe.’
‘…Now who’s this? Ooh, “Stevie Smith” no less.’
‘I think you’d take to Stevie Smith. Little girl lost in the woods – that kind of thing.’
She slid the book from his hand and leered at the back flap. Yes, this was very bad: not only poetry but poetry written by a woman. ‘Cor, you can pick ’em, Mart. Her and that other old boot. Begins with a B…’
‘Elizabeth Bishop.’
‘Yeah. Boiler Bishop. You’re such a hypocrite…I’m going to ring the papers and tell them what a dirty little bastard you really are. Underneath.’
‘The papers wouldn’t be interested.*6 Anyway, I’m reformed. I haven’t been a dirty little bastard for nearly three weeks.’
‘What about this morning? Oh, I suppose that doesn’t count because you didn’t…Well one thing’s for certain. You won’t be being a dirty little bastard tonight. Either.’
His shoulders went slack and he said, ‘Look at it out there, Phoebe. Listen to it out there.’ Listen to it: the hissing, the seething. ‘It’s a mess. Do we honestly have to go to this do? It’s for a nude magazine for Christ’s sake.’
Nude magazines
She said affrontedly, ‘You like nude magazines!’
‘Nude magazines, Phoebe, have their place.*7 But I don’t want to go to functions for nude magazines. Why’d they invite you anyway?’
‘Oh, I expect they’re asking
