‘Does it cast a shadow?’
‘I suppose so.’
His cough caught at him. I propped him with pillows.
‘You should not talk,’ I told him. He moved his head from side to side, restlessly. Then he said,
‘You must understand that I will not regain my health now, Severn. I have studied enough anatomy to know that.’
We lived in our own world all those weeks. The next cup of broth, the next visit from Dr Clarke, the beating-up of pillows, the lighting of fires and measuring of medicines. Some days I hadn’t a moment to call my own. Some nights I did not undress.
I was glad of it. He lay with the marble egg given to him by Miss Brawne in his hand. Women keep such an egg by them when they sew, to cool their fingers. He held that marble hour after hour, day after day. It soothed him as nothing else did. He wanted to know why he was still living, when everything was finished for him. This posthumous life, he called it.
He was sorry after he said it.
‘My poor Severn, you have enough to do without listening to my misery.’
We had a piano carried upstairs so that I could play for him. He loved Haydn.
‘Don’t you hear that they are the same, Severn: the piano, and the fountain? Listen. But what am I thinking of? You cannot listen to yourself play, any more than a blackbird can hear itself sing.’
I was there as the days wore him down. His other friends, Dilke and Brown and Reynolds and the rest, they were far away in England. Now we fight over his memory like cats. But it was to me that he spoke. I wiped the sweat off his face and washed him and changed his linen. I told him about the sheep that roamed over the graves. He smiled. He never tired of the sheep, the goats, the shepherd boy and the violets. The next day he would ask again, as if he’d already forgotten.
But I don’t think he forgot. Words were like notes of music to him. He liked to hear how they fell.
‘Sometimes I think I am already buried, with flowers growing over me,’ he said, as he stared up at the ceiling where the painted flowers swarmed.
Signora Angeletti became suspicious. She waylaid the doctor, asking what was wrong. Was it consumption?
‘I am a charitable woman, but I must think of my other lodgers.’
I didn’t know the laws of Rome then. She feared that they would strip her rooms and burn everything. I suppose she was right, but she was compensated. She lost nothing.
I heard the patter of Signora Angeletti’s voice from the mezzanine. We were in her hands. No other boarding-house would take us now: he was too obviously ill.
He understood Signora Angeletti very well. She gave us a bad dinner, not long after we came, and he threw it straight out of the window onto the Steps. A crowd of urchins came from nowhere and scrabbled for it.
‘She won’t serve us such stuff again,’ he said, and he was right. She had given us rubbish, to see if we were willing to swallow it. I wished I had his firmness. I was nervous with Signora Angeletti, and she knew it. In those ways he was more worldly than I was.
Yes, they make him a plaster saint of poetry, with his eyes turned up to heaven. They fight over his memory, shaping it this way and that. But I remember how he rocked with laughter when that dinner splattered on the marble steps!
‘My best plate!’ screamed Signora Angeletti. But he said,
‘If that plate is the best you have, Signora, then I am very sorry for you.’
After that the dinners were always hot and good.
I’ve told the story of those months so many times that they hardly seem to belong to me. If I say that they were the high point of my life, you will misunderstand me. You may even accuse me of cruelty. A man lay dying, and I say it was the high point of my existence? How can I recall those months of agony and dwindling hope, except with a shudder?
I remember the nights chiefly. We set the candles so that as one died, the next one would light from its burning thread. Once he said that there was a fairy lamplighter in the room. The flame would burn down until it seemed about to collapse on itself. He watched intently all the while. When the next sprang up and began to bloom, he would allow himself to close his eyes.
When I was very tired the room seemed to sway and the noise of the fountain reminded me of our voyage from England. Sometimes I fell asleep for a few seconds and really believed that I felt the motion of the ship under me.
I remember one incident which I have never written down, or spoken of even. I was in the small room which was intended for my studio. I thought of his words.
‘You should be painting, Severn! Here you are in Rome and you do not paint at all.’
I was standing at the table, going through my sketchbook. It contained a few studies which I hoped might be worth further work. I had sketched the cemetery for him. The pyramid of Caius Cestius, with the young shepherd sitting on the grass. But I had never shown him the sketch. How can a man say to another:
‘Look, here is the place where you will be buried. Just there, where that shepherd sits and dreams.’
I decided to be buried there too, beside him. My heart grew easier then. I felt no more estrangement from him.
As I turned the pages of my sketchbook, a cruel truth hit me like a blow. The reason I could not paint was not so much my cares for the invalid, as my fear that I would never paint well enough. Here I was in Rome, the heart of the painted world. Here were my masters all around me. Nothing I achieved could ever equal one of Bernini’s marble coils.
The noise of the fountain grew louder. It was drowning me. It told to give up, stop pretending that there was merit in my pitiful daubs or in the travelling scholarship I’d been so proud to win. Rome would wash me away, as it had washed away a thousand others, leaving no trace. I seized hold of the leaves of my sketchbook, meaning to rip them out so that no one would ever guess the contemptible folly of my ambitions.
At that moment I felt a touch on my shoulder. A clasp, a warm, wordless, brotherly clasp. The fingers gripped my shoulder and then shook it a little, consolingly, encouragingly.
I knew straightaway that it was him. God knows how he had dragged himself out of that bed and come to find me. I could not imagine how he’d guessed at my anguish. I said nothing. His clasp was enough. After a moment the grip of the hand tightened, and then left me.
He was going back to bed, I thought. But there were no retreating footsteps. I looked over my shoulder. No one was there. He could not possibly have moved so fast. I hurried to the bedroom and there he was, deeply asleep. I stared at his face and I knew that he was dying, not weeks or months in the future, but now. How had I not recognised it before?
I sat down by the bed. My sketchbook was still in my hand. I got up again, noiselessly, and fetched what I needed from the little room. I was ready to draw him now.
The noise of the fountain. The sound of a pencil moving. His breath. A long, dragging pause. Another breath. You can live an entire life between one breath and the next. That’s where my life was spent, in one night, in one room. The rest is memory.
Dis
The obvious story, my darling,
is that Dis caught you
into his dark kingdom.
I don’t know where I was
when he seared the grass
with winter footprints.
If your mother was not there
whose hand could hold you
when he opened the earth for you?
I see your fingers
twist in your lap
as you keep mute.
You will not eat the seeds.
You know what he offers you.
They glow softly, like coral
in the blue vaults of this hell
where I am only a shadow
squeaking its anguish.
Let me take your place in the dark.
Dis knows you have eaten nothing
of his gifts, his pomegranates.
For months he’s kept you,
whispering ‘Your mother
&
nbsp; never loved you as I love you.’
Part your hands, my darling.
Let me pour into them
salt and grain.
Newgate
Beneath the bulk of the block the bins
sweat with a week’s refuse.
In the concrete corridor lines of lockers
gape, hiding a man who’s
back-to-the-wall, intent
as the last words of his sentence
lock together, his own jigsaw
starting to make sense.
He tunes up a stifle of terror
in the girl he’s got by the throat
while she claws at his fingers.
He’s bored. He flicks the remote.
He’s had enough of all this noise
and endless interference –
lights going out, pupils pinpoints.
Why can’t they let him be as he is?
Far away a bin lid drops down
and the arches of Newgate tighten
as dead men walk through them
on the way to their dying.
What architect first squinnied
to fix this perspective? Getting it right
meant waiting for the reaction
when it came into sight.
Now they are breathing. Now
guards shovel the quicklime.
Now the girl uncurls from her sofa,
and takes the rubbish down.
The guards whistle, nonchalant
as the prison van backs up.
Even now the soiled dark of the cell
even now the thrash of the girl.
At Ease
When I was four at the feet
of my grandpa and my great-uncle
we heard how well Frank had done
all those years with his war pension.
He got the better of them.
They doled it when he was young
mustard-gassed and not likely to live
long enough to do more than dint it –
but he married on it.
That was in the Great War
when my grandpa kept order
in the burning Dardanelles.
You wouldn’t guess how many flowers
grew in those brown hills.
For a month they bled anemones
then they were blue with hyacinths –
little wild ones, not like these.
Harbinger
Small, polished shield-bearer
abacus of early days
and harbinger of life’s happiness
that the world offers
things scarlet and spotted
to alight, hasping and unhasping
unlikely wings,
that there can be three or thousands
but not a plague of ladybirds
no, a benediction of ladybirds
to enamel the weeds.
Small, polished shield-bearer
abacus of early days,
harbinger of life’s happiness.
The Hyacinths
Pressed in the soil’s black web, nursed by the rough
offhand embrace of frost, the hyacinths
turn in their sleep. Such blunt stabbings
against the paperiness of ancient skin,
such cell-memory, igniting
a slow fuse laid in the ground.
Pressed in the soil’s black web, rocked back to sleep
by the storm that tugs at the holly tree’s roots
the hyacinths know they are listening
to the west wind that kills them,
but they are safe, having given themselves to darkness.
All they desire is not to flower.
Hyacinths, when I see you forced from the soil
glossy and over-talkative
with your loud scent and demand for attention
I will put you back to sleep, forking
the long-fibred darkness over you.
The Night Workers
All you who are awake in the dark of the night,
all you companions of the one lit window
in the knuckled-down row of sleeping houses,
all you who think nothing of the midnight hour
but by three or four have done your work
and are on the way home, stopping
at traffic lights, even though there is no one
but you in either direction. How different the dark is
when day is coming; you know all this.
All you who have kept awake through the dark of the night
and now go homeward; you, charged with the hospital’s
vending-machine coffee; you working all night at Tesco,
you cleaners and night-club toilet attendants,
all you wearily waiting for buses
driven by more of you, men who paint lines
in the quiet of night, women with babies
roused out of their sleep so often
they’ve given up and stand by their windows
watching the fog of pure neon
weaken at the rainy dawn’s coming.
Visible and Invisible
(for Jane)
That dream when we were young,
that hunt for the magic
which might make it happen:
invisibility.
Such glittering cloaks
such eagerly swallowed
rose-petal potions
but we stayed solid and sunlit
jumping on our own shadows
defeated by ourselves.
We didn’t know how easy
the trick would turn out to be.
All you do is let the years pass
and quietly on its own it happens.
You only have to let the airy cloak of years
fall on your shoulders.
The Snowfield
No matter how wide the snowfield
you don’t walk in your own footprints –
each day the apparent freedom
narrows, sun greases
your steps to ice
until the steep track glistens beneath you
and you dare not go on
but stand trembling
bruised, struggling to balance,
you stand trembling as night comes on
on the wicked lip of the hill that stands
between you and home.
Lemon tree in November
(for Kurt and Caroline Jackson)
Dark, present, scattering night,
the blows of the wind
on the upturned hull of home
the stub of the lighthouse wiped out
the land crouched
our lemon tree
shaking its leaves
in the wet garden
the palm at the window
hissing, rattling
as the lighthouse beam
buds and grows
on a gnarl of foam.
Dark, present, scattering night
with the curtains bulging
and the wind again
on the upturned hull of home.
Bildad
The dark, present, scattering night,
the thick stub of the light-house folded
and put away like linen
but still the bud of its light opening
over a gnarl of foam,
such an oncoming
dark in the garden
the slim leaves of the lemon tree
quite gone,
its structure hung
by the light of its fruit.
Palm leaves hiss
in the rough hands of the wind,
that wind again
kneading the air as it wants –
The more the decades
the less we belong,
tangential as thistle
while the wind booms
seizing the chimneys
lifting the curl
of our ill-made sunroof.
 
; Untouchable
the wind does what it wants
playing harmonica
on the upturned hull of home:
such quaintness
to build a house here,
to slip a bribe to the rock
not to open under it
and pay the sea to turn back.
Tonight the ravaging of cliffs
is the hunger of pack-animals
jostling for place,
hunting the man named Job
in the land of Uz
whose imagination painted him
a righteous kingdom
where he washed his steps with butter.
But the wind answered him
and naked, Job said, I came
and naked will return
as he sat on the ground.
The wind scours our faces with stars.
We wriggle like children
eyes screwed up tight,
our quaint imaginations
busy planting lemons
lulled by the ear-drowse
and zing of bees.
There is a cup, blue, full to the brim
with tea. There is catnip
and the brief shade of an olive tree.
Outside, a dusty road, and from time to time
walkers, who greet each other with silence
or a curt nod which affirms
the rubric of the stranger
and we are all strangers here.
At the far side of the earth’s curve