at moments like these—and there were many such—that one of the primary causes of his arrested development had been the diversity and complexity of the sleeping arrangements that he had been required to master. There was a certain hammock, in particular, that he would never quite forget.
“Well,” said Mrs Pollard at last, “there it is. That’s the best I can do for you.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s not a bad bed, really. Pollard won it in a newspaper. He arranged ten hardy annuals in the order in which he would like to be given them for Christmas. We used to sleep in it. I suppose it has a sentimental value for me. It’s really quite a good bed. Big, too. Big enough for two, wouldn’t you say?”
But Barnes did not tell her what he would have said. He was polite enough to wait until she had returned with his stone hot water bottle, and then, when she had finally left the room, he fainted.
Chapter 3
THE MORNING WAS CRISP AND WHITE, IDEAL FOR shaving. Barnes had slept well, as he always did after fainting, and as he shaved he felt in excellent form. The quarto sheets were waiting for him, the water was hot, and soon his work would begin. He could hear Mrs Pollard going about her morning tasks in another part of the house, and for a moment he felt uneasy. He hoped that she wasn’t going to make demands on him. Then he dismissed the thought and turned to more important things.
When he had shaved he dressed and when he had dressed he raised the main part of his bed and slid it back towards the head, to reveal, where previously there had been only a bed, a sofa. Then Mrs Pollard brought him his breakfast. She asked him how he was, how he had slept, what were his plans, but they had little conversation, and he hardly minded her presence. He ate fast, for he was intoxicated by the infinite possibilities that were whirring about in his head. He had never before felt as strong as he did at this moment.
At last the breakfast things were cleared, and he was alone. He seated himself at the table and gazed proudly round the room. There was the sofa, the piano, the table, the easy chair and the hard chair. He noted with delight the Scottish glen above the piano, the Dresden hyenas on the mantelpiece, the tapestried axioms above the sofa, the two ivory ospreys, between which there were as yet no books, and the old polished range in the middle of which, like a neon cat, his absurdly small gas fire sat hissing. During the night there had been virtually no vacant floor space even to put his shoes and socks in, and even now, when the bed had become a sofa, the room was small. And although there was a window behind the sofa, affording a pleasant vista over Mrs Pollard’s cosy little garden, it afforded very little light, the cosiness being caused by high walls and surrounding houses. Yet despite all this he looked around him with joy. Here was the haven that he had sought, in which he could distil the experience of a long and lonely life. Here was something that was his, and yet did not belong to him, and would not clutter him up.
The sheet of quarto writing paper lay on the table where he had left it. Beside it was his HB pencil, and beside the pencil lay his souvenir rubber, on which the letters “ME TO MA” suggested a filial devotion that circumstance had, in fact, denied him. Originally the rubber had read “WELCOME TO MARGATE.”
He picked up his pencil. It was a moment to savour, and he was still savouring it an hour and a half later when Mrs Pollard brought him his coffee. Then, after his coffee, he began to write.
For the next ten days he sat at the table, free. He ate egg and bacon for breakfast, stews for lunch and cold meats for supper, and between meals he wrote. Every now and then he would add a word to the collection that he was gathering in front of him, and every now and then he would discard a sheet of paper into the waste paper basket. Every now and then Mrs Pollard would take the waste paper basket to the dustbin, and twice a week the dustman, who had no knowledge of poetry, would empty the bin into a lorry. So there was no chance of the dustman bursting in and exclaiming: “I can’t accept this. It isn’t rubbish. It’s a masterpiece.” No, once it was gone it was gone. And each time he arrived at the end of a sheet it was gone, gone for ever. For nothing that he wrote seemed good enough to keep.
Often he would sit for many minutes without writing. It was not so much that he could not think of a word. That, with the dictionary to help him, presented no problem. It was rather that he found it impossible to decide which word to choose, of all those that were available to him in such abundance. His hopes were so high, his possibilities so infinite, that each actual word crushed him with its puniness. The moment a word was conveyed to paper, it seemed ridiculous. Why, he would ask himself, should he start with that? Or finish with it, for that matter? So that he was for ever adding words at both ends, until the original word had become lost in a welter of qualifications and preambles, and had to be discarded. And once it was discarded the whole structure around it collapsed, and it was necessary to begin again.
But how? He tried several methods. He tried selecting at random the first word of each line, and then working forwards, or selecting the last word, and working backwards. He tried writing the first word of the first line, the second word of the second line, the third word of the third line, and so on, and then going back and filling in the gaps, just as he had done with his impots at prep school. He tried writing down words which he knew to be conducive of poetic inspiration, words like “spring” and “autumn” and “corpses” and “e’er” and “o’er”. All to no avail. As those ten long days passed, the moments when he wrote no words grew longer, and longer, and longer.
And all the while Mrs Pollard was finding excuses to visit his room. She would leave things there and have to return for them. She would think she heard the shilling finish in his fire. She would bring him a cup of tea and an assortment of sweet biscuits. Each time she came she seemed to hover over him, and each time, had there been a train to his thought, she would have broken it.
Finally, towards dusk on the tenth day, when he had not added a word for many hours, she remarked: “Still working, then?”
“Er, yes.” He was annoyed at the interruption, although it interrupted nothing.
“You’ll get round shoulders. Still, it’s none of my business.”
“No.”
“I’ve never really been creative myself.” She had taken the fact that he had replied as an invitation, and had seated herself on the sofa, setting off a series of twangings and screechings that irritated Barnes beyond measure. “I’ve never really had anything to say,” she continued. “But you….” she paused, and for the first time for ten days Barnes looked at her as if she existed.
“I?”
“You have something to say.”
“And how am I going to say it?”
“In your poems.”
“I’ve written no poems.”
“You said you were writing poems. I was led to believe that you were writing poems. I don’t expect my tenants to lock themselves away for days on end, not speaking to me, and not even a couplet to show for it.”
“I tried.”
With astonishing speed a soft maternity enveloped Mrs Pollard. “You’re new to this business, aren’t you?” she asked.
He blushed and fidgeted awkwardly. “Yes,” he admitted.
“You aren’t really a poet at all.”
“No.”
“As
