Learning by Heart (23 page)

Kovic seemed to be trying to read him. ‘Funny guys are always real serious,’ he mused. He nodded, as if to confirm it to himself. Then he got to his feet. He held out his hand to Nick. ‘Tight schedule today,’ he said. ‘But we’ll talk again, OK?’

‘Yes,’ Nick said, standing up, too.

Kovic began to walk to the door. Andy, shooting Nick a sharp look, walked after him. Nick watched them hold a hurried conversation.

Nick dropped back into his seat and flexed his hands. He wondered how many times he would get another offer like that one. It was the sort of thing he used to dream of. Andy would never have gambled on bringing Kovic straight here without consulting Nick first on the figures, the deal, if he hadn’t been sure that Nick would be blown away by it.

Kovic was looking at the floor while Andy talked to him.

Nick closed his eyes. Well, this was it. One of life’s defining moments. In the space of a week, one chapter had finished and another begun: he was about to inhabit a brave new world, a world that he knew would suit him if he could put his mind to it. Who would turn down what he had just been offered? He was going back to California.

He thought of the manzanitas, the magnolias, the mountain lilac moving in the breeze, the Paoletti window in the church, the sound of the Tournai bells in the top of the tower. All the things that had once soothed him. He could go back and see them again. He could drive along the coast and get himself a house there.

Andy came back to the table alone. He glared at Nick, then sat down with a sigh. ‘This is what you used to talk about,’ he said.

‘Andy …’

‘This is what you always talked about, writing screenplays. When I sold your first book, when I sold
The
fucking
Measure
, you said it then. As I recall, you didn’t even thank me. You asked if I could sell the film rights.’ He screwed a fist to his temple, then pounded it, mid-air, in Nick’s direction. ‘I thought you’d never be satisfied. I was right.’

‘Don’t be like this,’ Nick said.

‘Why shouldn’t I?’ Andy demanded. ‘What’s wrong with Kovic?’

‘Nothing,’ Nick replied. ‘What’s the matter with you? Didn’t I just thank him?’

‘I suppose it’s not a big enough company?’

‘I don’t know what the hell company he’s got,’ Nick retorted. ‘I don’t even know what he’s offered in any detail.’

‘Look,’ Andy said, ‘we’ll go back to the office. I’ll show you the figures. We’ll run through all the clauses. We’ll read it backwards. I’ll write it out in my own blood.’ He shook his head. ‘This is a lot of money, Nick,’ he said slowly. ‘I thought you’d jump for joy, I really did.’

Nick smiled. ‘I’m twitching. Jumping comes later.’

‘It’s Zeph,’ Andy said. ‘That’s your trouble.’ He sighed, pushed back his chair, called the waiter and signed the bill. ‘Unless you want to eat?’ he asked, pen hovering.

‘No, thanks.’

‘I thought not.’

Nick knew that Andy was right. He couldn’t see himself in the fabled sunshine, driving the fabled soft-top car, with the fabled pubescent starlet on his arm. He wanted Zeph. But the odds were that the door had closed on all that. Grief washed over him. He had to let go of the one thing he wanted.

They got up, wove their way back through the tables. At the door, they both put on their coats and opened the door to the rainy street.

‘I’ll go,’ Nick decided. ‘I’ll take it.’

Andy squinted up through the drizzle at the clouded London skyline.

‘You don’t believe me,’ Nick said. ‘I just said I’ll go. I’m going. I’m on the plane. I’m knocking back my free drink. I’m waving goodbye to Heathrow. Goodbye, England. Whoosh! I’ve gone.’

Andy smiled briefly. ‘Look, Nick,’ he said, ‘why don’t you talk to Zeph?’

‘Because she won’t talk to me.’

‘Try again,’ the older man said, turning up his collar.

‘I don’t need to. I’m going for it,’ Nick said. ‘I can do it. You don’t believe me.’

‘I believe you,’ Andy said. ‘If you say so.’

‘I mean it,’ Nick told him. ‘I do say so. I’m going to live on the beach. It’ll be great. I’ll drive a Ferrari.’ He glanced from left to right as if taking in a fantastic new panorama. ‘Hey, get a load of me there!’ he said. ‘Writing by the pool. How cool is that? Oh! And here’s me at Kovic’s Golden Globe party. I’m the buttocks third from the right in the orgy picture.’

‘You’re crazy.’ Andy smiled.

‘That’s right.’ Nick grimaced. ‘Oh, looking down the years, I have a shrink. And I’m putting on weight. It was my birthday last week. I just hit fifty. I have indigestion a whole lot.’ He straightened his shoulders, and grinned. ‘Oh, but I get lucky at fifty-two,’ he said. ‘I get married to one of Beyoncé’s backing singers. I have a toupee. I have my jowls pinned behind my ears. I mainline Viagra.’

Andy shook his head, grinning.

‘Here comes seventy,’ Nick continued. ‘I have trouble peeing. I have a minor procedure. I have a major procedure. I win an Oscar. The shock gives me a minor stroke. But I’m perky. Time goes by, I make tea for my wife’s lover when he visits. The bastard. Never mind, hey-ho, here comes eighty. On a pretty Thursday in October I have a heart attack buying Big Butt jeans in Wal-Mart. I’m dead.’ He spread his arms wide. ‘Hey!’ he said. ‘That was a great life.’

Andy laughed.

Nick stood with a rigid, determined smile in place, his arms open. All the while the rain pattered on his hair. He turned his face upwards, closed his eyes, screwed them tight, clenched his fists.

At last, he dropped his arms to his sides. Not in satisfaction, but defeat. He seemed small, standing there in the middle of the narrow street.

‘How did I do?’ he asked Andy softly.

‘You did great,’ Andy replied, taking his arm. ‘All your life. Just great.’

Verde

There is a house in Enna behind the cathedral. And the day that I am taken to see it, it is hot. Very hot. Much too hot to be standing in my smartest clothes, wondering if I should buy simply because my heart is here
.

The garden is so green it is almost unbelievable. But, then, most of Sicily is green here in the spring. I have driven here through the greenest fields on earth up the winding road under the shadow of the towers of Castello di Lombardia, the castle that overlooks the heartland of this island
.

I have come for a wedding. One of my nieces is getting married. Her husband is much older than she is, but I think they will do well together
.

Jesus, when I knew you, Cora, this girl hadn’t been born. Her mother, my elder sister, had only just got married. That’s how long ago it was. Nineteen years
.

I have been working hard lately. I am back at the university. This time, I am the lecturer. I have changed places, and now I am the one taking seminars, watching the students come in by ones and twos, bleary-eyed. I have a pupil called Francesco who always comes with his girlfriend, and I can see them through the open door, saying a torrid goodbye to each other before he walks in
.

Parted for a whole hour! Such is youth
.

I set them Petrarch to teach Francesco a lesson about patience, though I doubt it will work. He’s a big, broad, talkative boy who can’t wait to get going. He has big plans. He was telling us all about co-operative farming the other day. He has a dream straight out of the sixties, to have a communal operation. Christ, it hardly seems possible. I thought all those dreams were done with. I told him that the commune farms in California had failed because the men sat about talking politics all day while the women were left with the drudgery. I told him that everything comes to an end, and he looked at me pityingly. I could tell that he was thinking, You are an old man. At thirty-eight, I’m old and cynical. Or so this boy supposes
.

Maybe he’s right. We all sit reading Petrarch, and I think, Three hundred and sixty-five songs to Laura de Noves: what a waste. Petrarch first saw her when she was seventeen and had been married for two years; he watched her at an Easter service. He probably never spoke to her directly, and she died when she was thirty-eight, twenty-one years to the day after Petrarch first saw her. She was someone else’s wife, and she ignored him. But he wrote
The Song Book
for her just the same
.

Don’t think that the comparison is lost on me
.

But I’m not Petrarch. And I want to reach across the desk and tell Francesco so. I’m not tied up with my books. My life is green, not white. It’s not dried to parchment yet. It’s not an empty sheet of paper. It’s not the dead and plain colour of the wedding dresses, veils and white cloth that I’m looking at this weekend. It’s not white like my niece’s face as she comes up the aisle of the church, nervous because she always thought that she was insignificant and now this imposing man has decided to marry her. It’s not white, like roses. Like some roses. I turn my head away from the bridal couple in the church, and I don’t think about white roses climbing the wall of a house in Syracusa, and, if I do, I think it was all a long time ago and a wasted enterprise
.

Petrarch had a life far outside the page. He had two mistresses and two illegitimate children, and he got married eventually. He travelled to Flanders and Rome, Liège and Verona, and he created his sonnet form, which had come from the ducal courts in Sicily. He was a classical scholar and a diplomatic courier, and he knew people, he understood them. So, I tell my students, don’t think that this laureate lived the life of a bleached saint, always yearning and pining in a closed room for the woman he couldn’t have
.

I, too, have a mistress, a divorced woman who is older than me. I have known her for a few months. I don’t write her love songs. She is a cheerful, independent person who makes time for me occasionally, which suits me. She is a good cook. She laughs a lot. She makes fantastic
torrone,
and has shown me how to work the butter, cocoa and almonds together. I think I really wanted to take her to bed the first time I saw her make it, and, when I told her this, she kissed me hard. She tastes delicious, just like
ricotta al caffè;
she tastes of chocolate and coffee and cigarettes, smoky and sweet and bitter all at once. The other day, I watched her pour half a litre of cream into a bowl, beat in five eggs with some wine, then pour it over brioche. I started to laugh. ‘What is it?’ she asked
.

‘
I love you,’ I told her
.

‘
You don’t love me,’ she retorted, grinning. ‘You love your stomach
.’

So, there is no Laura. Anyway I’m too busy in middle age to nourish a passion. The students fire me up and rush my life along; I like the public lectures, the ones where they get up and challenge me. I hate the ones who sit there meekly. And I’ve got into trouble for not behaving like a good faculty
professore.
But I don’t want to run along the lines someone draws for me
.

I travel. I go to the States a lot, working. I’ve been to Australia and Japan. I’ve made a name for myself. They hire me for talking too loudly. I like being a mouthpiece, and I like causing a little trouble. Poets are ignored in every country of the world, or not appreciated enough. So I get other poets to come to my venues, and they heckle me from the audience. It’s like cabaret, which is how living verse should be
.

And I have written my book
.

At last. I have written my book
.

And I try not to listen to the little voice when I turn out the light to go to sleep
.

I am an academic, a writer, a man of property
.

And from this week I shall have another house
.

And that’s what matters, a full life
.

And no Laura and no love songs
.

And the small midnight voice in the dark each night whispers, Liar, and tells me how green it was, in the shade of another garden
.

Fourteen

Cora and Richard had been married for fourteen years when they went to Sicily. One of the men with whom Richard had served had settled there, and occasionally letters came. Once or twice a year, Richard would receive the bulky white envelopes; alongside the letter there would invariably be photographs of a house where Alex Carlyle lived alone, a beautiful place in Taormina.

‘You must come,’ the last letter had said. ‘This year if no other.’

All that week Richard didn’t refer to the letter; he was due to be out of the house for two days, delivering medlar and quince to an estate near the Fowey estuary that had ordered them. Cora helped him load the five-year-old trees into the truck, wrapping each one to protect the branches. It was early March and they had pruned them a week earlier, thinning out the exhausted shoots and fruit spurs. There were forty, ordered two years previously. She had watched Richard drive away, and had gone back to the garden, to the sheds and greenhouses.

It was still too early for the sun, rimming the horizon, to be fully up; there was frost on the ground. As had been her custom every day since they had first built the south-facing walls, Cora walked back along the lines of trained espaliers, fans and trees, admiring the beautiful shapes of the new morellos, flourishing where it would be too cold for anything else at the top of the slope.

She drew her coat close round her. Two dogs, black Labradors, were at her heels. They were nine years old, from a litter at a farm where Richard and she had bought their first rootstock. They followed her now to the top of the garden where she could see the roof of the white van disappearing between the hedges. Richard would be out on the Honiton road within half an hour, and in Cornwall by twelve. For the rest of the day he would be planting at the country house whose owners were trying to re-establish its Victorian garden.

‘I’ll come back tomorrow,’ he had told her. ‘I’ll be home by six.’

She looked down at the house, with its lean-to extension along one side, and the roofs of the sheds showing in neat red parallel lines to the edge of the field. As she turned in the other direction, she could see smoke curling from her father’s chimney. She decided to go down to see him; since his stroke, he had managed well but he could be forgetful. Tearful, too, which was the worst of it. In winter, when it was more difficult for him to get out, Cora would sit with him during the afternoon and listen to the long list of her mother’s virtues, delivered in a voice that was not quite her father’s any more. He had become a querulous old man, unsure of himself, forgetful of his friends. He never turned Richard away, though: he liked him to stay in the evening sometimes to play gin rummy and whist with him; and Cora, who had never been good at cards, would go home alone, through the garden and out of the lane gate.