awkward moment passed.
‘Not a cliff,’ I said quietly.
‘What?’
‘He mainly just told me I was a terrible writer, to be honest. He didn’t dance me off a cliff. He did that to you.’
Sophie stared at me, big bird eyes searching my face for meaning, as if meaning were a frightened mouse seen darting away through the heather. And then – she laughed. It was a tired laugh, a release of tension, an oh-fucking-hell and slumping-into-your-chair sort of a laugh.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘Oh, Tom. Listen, can you just drop this, please? I’ll sleep better knowing he’s just – gone.’
I looked at the objects on the table. I nodded.
‘Is that a yes?’
‘It’s an I’ll do my best.’
Sophie Almonds sighed a long, deep sigh. She picked up the note.
‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised if these are the most words he’s written since Cupid,’ she said. ‘I suppose you know that this text belongs to his publishers technically, under the terms of his contract?’
‘I do.’
‘You do.’ She held up the single sheet of notepaper, as if testing its weight. ‘What do you think? The long-awaited second Andrew Black novel?’
I stared at the small piece of paper dangling between her finger and thumb with its nine neat little words.
‘You’d be looking at some very generous typesetting,’ I said.
‘I’m not entirely sure that they wouldn’t try.’ She folded the letter and put it back into the envelope. ‘But let’s save them the trouble.’
‘I think that’s probably for the best.’
She slipped the Polaroid into the envelope as well, and slid it across the table to me. ‘You should save yourself the trouble too,’ she said. ‘I mean it.’
I picked up the letter and tucked it into my jacket pocket.
A flutter of old memories came back to me then. They hovered in the back of my mind, loitering around this meeting with Sophie, just like they always did, each one distilled down to a single movie frame from heavy use – The Open Leather Satchel Memory, The Water Dripping Down Gloss Paint Memory, The Shards Of Glass On The Doormat Memory – each one fluttering and batting at the edges of my thoughts, drawn to the light of our conversation.
I lifted my glass and took a long, deep drink, mentally shooing them away.
‘Would more have made a difference?’ I said, putting the glass down. ‘To what you think of him, I mean?’
‘More books? No,’ Sophie said. ‘But it would’ve paid off the mortgage. So, you know, it’s something.’
‘My father thought a lot of him.’
Sophie held my gaze.
‘Your father, who we’re not going to talk about, thought a lot of his talent.’
She took her purse from the table, unzipped it and slipped the newspaper clipping back inside. She was about to put it back in her bag when she noticed my nearly empty glass.
‘Another?’ she said.
o
‘Tom, have you ever heard of Frederick J. Klaeber?’
Sophie had returned from the bar with a round of drinks. I’d been staring out of the window, watching the river, lost in thought.
‘What? Sorry – who?’
‘Frederick J. Klaeber,’ she said, passing me a glass and sitting down. ‘Great academic. Early translator of Beowulf.’
‘Sorry. I don’t know much about Beowulf.’
This was true. For whatever reason, my parents had never owned a copy of Beowulf and I’d never felt the need to track one down.
Sophie looked surprised. ‘Really?’
‘I mean, I know the story, but nothing about the business end.’
‘Would you like to?’
‘Sure.’
‘All right then. So, the problems with Mr Klaeber’s translation of Beowulf,’ Sophie said, ‘begin with the Old English word aglæca’.
‘What does—’ My mouth lost its nerve, like a horse at Becher’s Brook.
‘Aglæca.’
‘Yeah, what does it mean?’
‘Well, that’s the thing. Nobody knows. The meaning of the word is lost, so we can only make an educated guess based on the way it’s used in the story. But Klaeber’s educated guess back in 1922 was a little . . . suspect.’
‘How so?’
‘Well, the word appears several times in Beowulf. For instance, it’s used to describe Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon at the end.’
‘Okay, so it means something like “monster”?’
‘Aha. This is what Mr Klaeber says too. In his book, which is considered the gold standard of Beowulf scholarship by the way, he translates aglæca as . . . hang on.’ Sophie dug her little black notebook out of her bag and thumbed through it until she found what she was looking for. ‘Monster, demon, fiend. In the case of Grendel’s mother, the word is modified to aglæc-wif.’
‘Female fiend?’
‘Klaeber charmingly opts for “wretch, or monster of a woman”, and where Klaeber’s translation goes, all the others follow.’ Sophie turned a page. ‘“Monstrous hag” is Kennedy’s definition, “ugly troll lady” from Trask, “monster-woman” from Chickering, “woman, monster-wife” from Donaldson. Even Seamus Heaney translated aglæc-wif as “monstrous hell bride”, can you believe it?’
‘I can,’ I said. ‘I mean, I can’t see why he wouldn’t. What’s the problem?’
‘The problem is that aglæca also appears in the poem to describe Beowulf himself.’ Sophie closed her book with a theatrical snap. ‘What do you make of that?’
I thought about it.
‘Beowulf wasn’t a monster, was he?’
‘No, and when the word appears in reference to Beowulf – the exact same word, remember – Mr Frederick J. Klaeber translates it as “warrior, hero”.’
‘Hmm.’
