During drinks before dinner, it had bothered John when everyone had chuckled at the idea of his performing surgery on a snake. Reptiles had as good a claim on health as people did. When the poem ended and Francis was rolling up and securing the scroll, John returned to the couple, Sam and Jackie. He was a retired train driver, she a retired dental nurse. Now they volunteered a day a week at the practice. They fed the inpatient animals, tidied, cleaned, cut the grass and weeded the beds in the front garden. He and they had shared an intense concern, and it bound them. There was a lesson in this. If you could care for a damaged creature as biologically remote from you as a snake, then other closer human matters would fall into place. Startled by a sound, John joined in the applause.

  As Francis reached the end of his third sonnet, Mary Sheldrake, who had immediately thrilled to the poem, reflected as she had before, that poetry, not the novel, was literature’s indispensable form. The spoken or written poem was as old as literature, perhaps as old as speech, with roots in song, in the rhythms of daily life and the body’s pulse, in the hunger to catch the passing moment and to glorify love. It was not a generous concession she was making, but an uneasy one. Poetry, it was said, was the senior service. She had sat with novelists on onstage panels and contributed to the usual extravagant claims for her art, but it was the poets who made the book of life. The novel was the froth of recent centuries. It had developed to meet the needs of intelligent, privileged women excluded from formal education and meaningful work. Indeed, ‘work’ was the word Jane Austen and others used to describe womanly hours of incessant and pointless embroidery as they chatted about their neighbours. And so, Mary insisted, the novel grew into the paradigm of higher gossip. Love, marriage, adultery, contested wills – the stuff of neighbourly fascination. It took modernism to shake the novel up (Mary had no regard for Tolstoy or George Eliot) and offer it higher aspirations and bolder claims.

  Such thoughts often led Mary to turn on herself. She had crouched, but so gainfully, in modernism’s long shadow, riding on the waves of Virginia Woolf’s powerful wake. The Sheldrake style was so impenetrably bland that readers, academics included, mistook it for the hard gleam of postmodern profundity. Lulled by her public reception, she thoughtlessly deployed clichés, which were eagerly read through the prism of irony. The prose was empty of simile, metaphor or any extravagance of invention. She had turned her lack of a visual sense into a declared aesthetic. Her characters were not short of, but beyond, emotional complexity, their diction weirdly wooden, their motivation, or lack of it, unexplained. Her landscapes and urban settings were featureless. Taking no risks, she suspended her fictions above place and time, immune to any reasonable measure of their truth, sealed off against the mess of daily life.

  She had suffered before from moments of self-loathing such as this one (Francis was on his ninth sonnet. A strange man resembling Falstaff had appeared) but she had pressed on with her writing as usual. She couldn’t go on, but she went on. Who wouldn’t? She was accepted as having written one masterpiece after another. The state would soon honour her as a dame. ‘The sunshine of critical reception and readers’ applause warm her fraudulent heart,’ she wrote of herself in a notebook, in a style not her own. She had thought she couldn’t change, that she didn’t dare, but now she was going to. The poet’s lines were flashing by her, but one sensual aside caught her attention. On a hot day, the couple, obviously Francis and Vivien, step out of the house barefoot onto the terrace to cross the lawn and respond keenly to the coolness of summer grass on their soles after the warmth of York stone. Mary was impressed by the rich invocation of a tactile and sensuous moment.

  As Francis read, her admiration swelled. She would abandon the arid geometry of her fiction. The poet was reminding her, she wrote later, how good writing could be. She wanted his vitality and bright invention, but the spur was not only aesthetic. The recent turmoil, the thrill of momentous rupture, of breaking with Graham while wanting him, the possibilities of change and freedom in her life contributed to a sensation that rose through her, from the perineum to wherever in her brain these resolutions were located, a delicious, mad, tingling certitude. Later, at home, a sceptical inner voice told her that all she had in mind was an affair with this or that person, including her husband, and a possible furtive embrace with the amoral, easy-living ways of conventional fictional realism. Absolutely no need to have involved her perineum.

  After Harry Kitchener’s speech in praise of Francis had been forcefully interrupted by him, there was nothing for Harry to do but relax and sip the wine John and Tony had brought and watch as his brother-in-law fumbled with the tube, or whatever it was he had taken from behind the dining-room clock. There was a pencil and notebook by his glass. He liked to keep up with Blundy’s work, but Harry was clearer than ever – he was pulling out of the biography. Francis was too controlling. He would want to see drafts of every chapter. The past would have to be sanitised. The slightest reservation about his work enraged him. It was madness to have considered signing up to years of trouble that was bound to spread through the family. Harry disliked confrontations. There would be an unpleasant scene, but he had his own ambitions and could hardly be expected to commit to a biography simply to avoid his brother-in-law’s fury.

  He recognised the corona form, having tried long ago to write one himself in seven stanzas. He had given up. We know his reactions from the letter, not an email, he wrote to Francis five days later. It survives in the Blundy archive. Harry’s suave ironies drop away in favour of overstated praise. Pulling out of the biography might be rendered a little less stormy.

  The opening sonnet, Kitchener announced, rings out like ‘an Angelus bell’, a summons to total concentration. It has a magnificent, assured tone of triumph – ‘like the poker player behind his castle of chips, revealing at the end of play his royal flush’. Here, it is a set of promises: ‘memory, mortality, the elusive nature of time, and of poetry itself. You caught it, Francis – the natural world in the symbol of a fertility figure. We love him even as we destroy him. Beauty and murder.’ The assurances of religion are evoked, then fondly dismissed. Consciously, but fleetingly, ‘you summon your spirit companions – the great poets, Donne and Herbert, Wordsworth and Keats, old hats made new’, and then ‘your bow to Wallace Stevens and “Credences of Summer”. I’ve never forgotten how we used to quote it … “The physical pine, the metaphysical pine […] Let’s see it with the hottest fire of sight.”’ Glancing but generous references. It wouldn’t matter if other readers could not place them. ‘The sinewy disruptions of the poem’s iambic tread are Shakespearean, the Shakespeare of his late phase, when he was about to drown his book’, and in all the poem’s reflections, in the ‘hallucinatory splendour of lush nature observed in miniature’, there’s the ‘same valedictory quality, a farewell, but with regret and fondness – love for everything that lives, the ruin we inflict, as if we’re watching the slow death of an old friend’.

  Further on in this long letter Harry wrote, ‘Francis, it’s a glorious love poem, a hymn to Vivien.’ How striking, Harry wrote, working from memory or his notes, were the lines evoking a swim the couple take together in a river, through a gorge. Could it be the River Wye before it joins the Severn, he wondered, or in France where they went once, the Tarn or the Hérault? Then he was ‘entranced’ by the lovers in the porch of a rural English church, about to be married, and no one there but the vicar, whose words from the King James Bible ‘they love but do not own’. Harry had a sense of a ‘face drifting upwards, formed from the dust of a billion torn petals. A persecuted man, the figure of Jesus perhaps, is being sacrificed.’

  Then the couple as they grow older, love altered but still love in the face of an end from which they will not avert their gaze. ‘They must accept what Eliot called the gifts reserved for age.’ Fifteen sonnets, their ornate technical demands ‘breezily met’, and ‘the last sonnet so magnificently and coherently summoning the rest, truly your crown’. In the gathering momentum of the poem’s ending, Francis summoned not only Eliot but the grandeur of landscape from Wordsworth’s The Prelude and MacCaig’s songs to the Flow Country, both threatened, as if by Plath’s lyrical despair. ‘Your corona is a monument to a threatened biological civilisation. It’s not only the poem’s brilliance that strikes me, but its greatness.’

  On the same day that he wrote his letter, Harry started an email which he did not complete or send. He stored the message in his drafts and must have forgotten it was there. ‘In love? We must be mad. But I don’t think we’. No salutation, no addressee.

  9

  The humanities are always in crisis. I no longer believe this is an institutional matter – it’s in the nature of intellectual life, or of thought itself. Thinking is always in crisis. But we count ourselves a lucky generation. Together, science and technology (a technology largely devoted to the search for materials or their substitutes) devour most of the meagre feast, and we take the crumbs. But historically, these leftovers are almost sufficient, and we do not cost much anyway. Our major libraries and museums are relatively safe at their various elevations. Everything that ever flowed through the internet is now held centrally in New Lagos and has been well catalogued. Advances in quantum computing and mathematics have cracked open all that was once encrypted. I’d like to shout down through a hole in the ceiling of time and advise the people of a hundred years ago: if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend. Do not trust the keyboard and screen. If you do, we’ll know everything.

  Yes, for now we are safe. Some years ago, as a bunch of ambitious young academics with a project, we fought a battle which, seen through the rosy prism of success, we still love to celebrate. But how self-serving, the bitterness of the opposition, how depressed our spirits were sometimes. We called our dream ‘90–30’ for short. Our plan was to set up a small department nestling in the folds of the Humanities Complex, along one of its shabby and interminable corridors. Our official title: ‘The Literature and History Joint Programme in Postgraduate Studies, 1990 to 2030’. Immediately, our elders, the deans and professors, rejected our proposal. The period was too narrow! The great wars came before and after those forty years! The Inundation had not happened, the internet and the Derangement had hardly begun. The finest literature belonged to the 2050s and 60s as Mabel Fisk established her ascendance. The old professors were jealous, defending their own turfs, anxious to ensure that any extra funding came their way, not ours.

  Among much else, they resented our youth, and they were right to. We would never have set this down in our submissions or even admitted it among ourselves, but it was precisely our youth that drew us to the period. What brilliant invention and bone-headed greed. What music, what tasteless art, what wild breaks and sense of humour: people flying 2,000 miles for a one-week holiday; buildings that touched the cloud base; razing ancient forests to make paper to wipe their backsides. But they also spelled out the human genome, invented the internet, made a start on AI and placed a beautiful golden telescope a million miles out in space. Then, of course, hardly worth repeating, they watched amazed as the decades sped by and the Derangement gathered pace, the weapons proliferated and they did little, even as they knew what was coming and what was needed. Such liberty and abandon, such fearful defiance. They were brilliant in their avarice, quarrelsome beyond imagining, ready to die for bad and good ideas alike. As science extended its domain, religious belief and conspiracy theories swelled. They were big and brave, superb scholars and scientists, musicians, actors and athletes, and they were idiots who were throwing it all away, even as their high culture lamented or roared in pain. We thrill in horror at their feistiness. They were loud, hungry, reckless and free, except for the hundreds of millions they left behind. We longed to study their literature and times with our students. We hoped the kids would share our passion for the furious energy of those times, and that they would throw off their own constraints and the timorous orthodoxies that hobble our institutions.

  We had come a long way since our ‘Politics and Literature of the Inundation’. We understood how the departments worked, and how to get round the professors. We knew how to teach. At last, we won through, and every year since it began, ‘90–30’ has been oversubscribed. Other universities have followed us, with variants. Most take the view that 2030–90 at the Pennines Institute covers even greater tragedies and splendours. I never spoke about it while we were fighting our battles, but I intended to write a book about our period on its own terms, not describe it with historical or literary neutrality or through the misty lens of our own regrets. On that, I failed. The regrets were impossible to shift. My ambition, however vague, was to present the times as if I were living them. The sources were rich and diverse, the material was copious. It was while I was preparing the ‘Francis Blundy and his Circle’ seminars that a clearer plan took shape. I would let the poet himself be my vehicle, my vector. I would live with the Blundys, share with them that vital evening and recount the story, the journey through the decades of a lost poem. Where the source material did not exist, surely it was permissible to make educated guesses about the subjective states and lines of thought of people who had died a hundred years ago. Perhaps it was not. I had many changes of mind. Unprofessional to make things up, arid not to. I thought I was set free when a colleague suggested that the full title of our course pointed the way and granted permission. Let history and literature conjoin. Set out the facts, the story as told by the participants. When faced with the essential but undisclosed inner life, invent within the confines of the probable. I thanked him. However, in biography the price of invention is unease, then guilt, amplified in my case by Rose’s scepticism. It was not my business, she insisted, to invent.

  10

  It was fortunate that the Corona reading sent Vivien to her journal the next day to consider her life beyond gardening, recipes, family news and all else she deployed to smother her formidable learning. The prose has a staccato quality, like so many stabs. When Francis presented her with the roll of vellum, she thanked him and called him darling for the first time in a couple of years. She did so, she wrote, ‘for the benefit of our guests’. But perhaps, after all, ‘I do love him. Comfortable with it. Anyway, too late to go looking elsewhere.’ She liked her life, her dairy and garden, her walks, the tranquillity, her friends, the spaciousness of the Barn. She noted that over the past year Francis had borrowed books and guides to butterflies, birds and wildflowers and left them scattered around the place. He had ‘transmuted bland facts into sensual observation’. Later she wrote, ‘Francis is trying to beat Heaney at his own game.’ For a man and poet so ‘startlingly unobservant’, Francis had done ‘a job on himself, or on the voice in his poem. That’s his talent.’ But as a poem addressed to her in celebration of their ‘lifetime’s love’ (ten years, in fact) it was misleading. He was well known for disliking country walks. Away from his study, he regretted the wasted time. Why walk when he could write? She went ‘happily alone’ or, once or twice, with her nephew Peter.

  It surprised her that Francis would want to imagine a life, evoked in such detail, in which they freely roamed, adoring nature’s plenitude. That was an existence she would love. It was as if he was beguiling her with all that was missing from their marriage. ‘Perhaps,’ she wrote that next day, ‘he’s about to change his ways.’ But ‘float down a river together on strong currents through a gorge? He could barely swim.’ On a summer’s evening, he might lower himself into their neighbour’s pool to cool off, gin and tonic in hand. He feared rivers because of Weil’s disease caused, so he claimed, by liver-destroying bacterial swarms that flourished in the urine of water rats. Vivien and Francis had married in a London registry office, not a rural church as she had argued for at the time. He had never expressed interest in the King James Bible. He was contemptuous of religion and its sacred texts. A poem was a fiction, but this one was addressed to her, and no reader could doubt that as the poet’s life companion, she was the subject.

  Her first husband Percy had been ‘a different species of man’. He learned his birds from his mother, a gifted amateur ornithologist. Vivien learned her wildflowers at school. Before his illness they sometimes covered twenty miles on a long summer’s day, making discoveries and teaching each other what they knew. They once swam and drifted two miles down the Cherwell, then in spate, and ran back in wet swimsuits, barefoot along the footpaths. It troubled her that she was no longer able to see Percy vividly from ‘the primary source of memory’. Over the years he had receded into the photographs she kept in a walnut box he made for her one Christmas. In a drawer in her study wrapped in a tablecloth was the violin Percy had built for the sheer pleasure in his craft – a copy of a famous old model. His physical presence, once so powerful, left no record but clichés like the one she had once found in a Mary Sheldrake novel, ‘a great bear of a man’. He was big, bearded, cheerful, competent, reliably affectionate, loudly sociable, not the shape of a man you would associate with the delicacy of a violin maker. He worked from a shed in their Headington garden. Among chamber groups his reputation was growing. There was a significant leap in his income when he met a member of the famous group Radiohead, and designed and built for him an electric guitar. A friendly sound engineer from Oxford Brookes University helped Percy with the electronics. More orders came in for guitars, but he turned them down. His passion was for violins.