Consequences (22 page)

Sam Priest is over there.

Molly is hailed by a familiar figure, drawn into a party in the corner. She has many acquaintances here, and one or two who are on the cusp of friendship. The room is crowded now—the staff and helpers are here, too, and some of the sponsors—the buffet is in full swing, it is noisy, hot, you could even call it festive.

She eats, she drinks a glass of wine. She is called away to sort out a problem over book supplies, and another to do with a poet who must leave earlier than scheduled and needs a lift to the station. When she comes back the food is cleared away, some people have drifted off, it is drinks at the bar time for those who wish to continue, and plenty will.

And now Sam Priest is alongside.

There is an alcove off the main bar; miraculously, it is empty, and here they sit.

“This is a good town,” says Sam. “It has a quality hardware shop. Look at these.” He unwraps the wrench and the drill guide.

Molly inspects the tools. “I’m afraid I’ve never got further than a screwdriver myself. But I understand about the motorcycle poem better now, which I liked a lot. You enjoy…tinkering.”

“Tinkering be blowed. I’m a mechanic.”

Molly stares.

“I’m a mechanic by trade. That’s how I earn a living.”

“Gosh,” says Molly.

“I do cars, bikes. Lawnmowers, as a favor. I’m at home three days, freelance, and I do two at the local garage.”

Molly is entranced by this originality. Forget school teaching, editing, the life of ease in some library.

“Since when? Always?”

“Since about age twenty-five. When I’d finished my Ph.D. on Marvell and knew that I wanted to be a poet and not an academic. And I’d always been handy with a spanner.”

There is a brief pause, as Molly digests all this. “I enjoyed the reading. Very much indeed.”

“You’ve already said that, Molly.”

“That was wearing festival organizer hat. Now I’m saying it as me.”

“Ah. Excellent. So I’m having a drink with you rather than with a festival organizer?”

“Well, yes. But then—am I having a drink with a poet or a mechanic?”

“Good point. At this moment, neither. Just a man glad to be off-duty. And in good company.”

“Me too,” says Molly.

They beam at one another. The alcove has become suddenly a fine and private place.

Sam Priest lives on the outskirts of a Devon market town. “I’ve been there,” says Molly. “Nice. We had a walking holiday on Dartmoor a few years ago.”

“Large family?” Sam’s tone is offhand; he takes a swig of wine, watching her.

“Just me and my daughter. I’m on my own. She was ten then.”

Sam brightens. “I’ve got a boy. At college. Lives mainly with his mother, but he spends time with me.”

They contemplate this symmetry for a moment. And then suddenly talk comes rushing—views, thoughts, opinions, circumstances, his taste for archaeology, her love of long walks, the son, the daughter, signals from the past that pepper what is said, that require pursuit. They exchange credentials: Molly’s parents, Lucas and Simon, the birth of Ruth, jobs, the flitting from one part of London to another; Sam’s youth in Manchester, son of a headmaster, his three brothers, the marriage that ended, the stint in a French village, the year in America, the writing, and the financing of the writing. In retrospect, the exchange would seem more like one of people who had lost sight of each other and needed to catch up than that of those who had never met before.

“
Three
brothers,” says Molly. “I can’t imagine that. I was just me. And Simon a long way after.”

“Mayhem. Daily carnage. My mother’s voice never fell below a shout.”

“Where are they now?”

“Dispersed. One teaching in Canada. A local government officer in Sheffield. A doctor in Derbyshire. Good solid citizens, you note. I was always the rogue element.”

“Not at all. ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’—tomorrow evening’s panel discussion—remember?”

Sam groans. “Oh, help—do I really have to do that?”

“You do,” says Molly sternly. “You’re down on the program.”

“I thought I wasn’t having a drink with a festival organizer?”

“Sorry, sorry…”

“I shall forgive you.” His hand covers hers, then is quickly removed. They have company. Someone looms in front of the alcove.

“
There
you are, Sam. I’ll join you, may I?”

Sam glares. Beat it. Scarper, would you? I am having a conversation with Ms. Faraday. He looks at his watch. “Not worth it. It’s gone ten and I’m pushing off in a minute.”

“Oh, come on—one more.”

“No way,” says Sam. “See you tomorrow.”

The intruder is routed.

“Well, good night,” says Molly.

“Don’t be daft.”

She laughs. “Is he a friend?”

“Not at that moment, he wasn’t.”

“I should really be seeing if I’m needed for anything.”

“You are. You’re needed here.”

Molly savors this. She savors the moment, this succession of moments, these hours. What is going on here? Why am I feeling so…happy?

“As a rule,” says Sam Priest, “I pass where poetry festivals are concerned.”

“I know. You turned me down once.”

“Did I? Thank God I saw the light this time. It’s not that I’m against two or three poets gathered together—it’s just that I grudge a weekend.”

“Sorry.”

“That’s the second time you’ve said that.”

“I know. The first time we were interrupted.”

“Oh…” He grins; his hand comes out, and this time remains rather longer on hers. “As it happens, this is turning out to be the best weekend I’ve had in a long time.”

Molly is briefly silent. Then: “When were you happiest? Ever?”

He reflects. “Probably in a field in France, when I was about twenty-one, on a camping holiday with a girl I thought I was in love with.”

“Thought?”

“A flash in the pan, as it turned out. But it left one of those indelible moments. And you?”

“Hmn. I think probably when Ruth was born. Lying looking at her. There’s always another person involved, isn’t there?”

“Too true. The catalyst. But there can also be those transcendent experiences—solitary ones.”

“Religion?”

Sam is shocked. “Good grief—no. Nor getting stoned neither. I tried that a few times and found it demeaning rather than uplifting. Happiness is the real world—the physical world, often.”

“The splendor in the grass—that sort of thing?”

“That sort of thing. Sheer relish for what’s on offer. An animal sort of feeling. Kicking up the heels.”

Molly nods. “Sunshine. Stars. A flower. A color.”

“I hate to tell you,” says Sam. “But I can get it from a satisfactory repair job. Getting something to work that wasn’t.”

“Would that apply to a poem as well?”

“Oh, yes. A more abstract pleasure, though—lacking that gratifying tactile effect.”

“Which I’ve missed out on entirely,” says Molly. “A well-scrubbed floor is the nearest I’ve got.”

“And is this happiness or satisfaction? And what about ecstasy, which suggests the flight of reason? Hence my queasiness about the claims of religion.”

“Children can seem to know ecstasy.”

“Exactly, and are not rational. Grown-ups settle for happiness. Gracious, Molly, what have you started, with that question? I’m going to find us another drink, before this discussion gets quite out of hand.”

The alcove, like the rest of the pump rooms, is sternly in period; it is striped from head to toe, its lights pretend to be candles, it is adorned with prints of Regency bucks and belles. It is a far from likely habitat for either Sam or Molly, but has become now a home, a precious retreat; both know that they will never forget it. Sam takes a while to return, and Molly sits there feeling most strangely bereft, deprived. When he arrives, both are aglow—it is a reunion.

“I got nobbled,” he says. “Had to be thoroughly rude in the end. I thought you’d give up on me and go.”

He puts the drinks on the table. “Whew…I was thinking about your father, while I was waiting for these. Where could I see his work?”

“Well,” says Molly “I’ve got some engravings in London. Lucas has more. The book illustrations…you find Heron Press editions and the other fine presses in antiquarian bookshops, sometimes, and they cost a bomb.”

“I knew a wood engraver once. Marvelous stuff. If I could have been an artist, that’s what I would have wanted to do. Using tools.”

“My mother kept my father’s. Lucas still has them.”

“I’m occasionally in London,” says Sam Priest. “Maybe at some point I could…”

Both glimpse some unthinkable future, and look away, lest this is tempting providence. Don’t rush it, thinks Sam, don’t bugger the thing up by going full pelt, you’re not an eighteen-year-old, for Christ’s sake.

Don’t feel like this, thinks Molly, you’ve spent a couple of hours with him, that’s all, don’t start fantasizing.

By eleven-thirty both have learned more, much more. Each begins to anticipate the other’s views, responses, reactions, a stranger is turning into someone else, a person partially known, tantalizingly known, about whom more yet must be exposed. Sam learns Molly’s twitch of the eyebrows when she is surprised, the way in which she may shoot off at a conversational tangent, that brown mole on her left cheek. Molly discovers his views on various other poets, his advocacy of vegetable growing and indeed of a particular kind of potato, his sudden explosive laugh, the fan of lines at the outer corner of each eye.

It is closing time in the pump rooms, ejection time, shutters are being slammed down in the bar, others are already going out of the doors and down the steps. The alcove is no longer home.

“What about a walk?” says Sam. “Quite a long one?”

She has occasionally wondered what it would be like to be kissed by a man with a beard. At one o’clock in the morning on the doorstep of the people with whom she is staying, she finds out: a little scratchy, but otherwise the experience as known, except that it is not because this is better than any previous kiss, it is brand new, arousing, unnerving, it is the one she has always hoped for, it is…

Oh my God, she thinks, I believe this may be it.

Sleepless, she lay staring at an unfamiliar ceiling. She heard Sam Priest’s voice, she saw him; again and again he returned to the alcove with a glass in each hand, and it was as though they had been apart for hours, days. He said certain things over and over; she felt his touch.

I’m going to be wiped out tomorrow, she thought. Must
sleep.
And at some point she tipped into a benevolent black pit, from which she awoke in daylight, gazing once more at the evening that was gone. How would it be when they saw each other again? Would there be embarrassment, and avoidance? What had happened? Had anything happened?

She was at the pump room, checking on ticket sales before the first event, when he came through the doors. He walked straight over, and stood in front of her.

“Good morning, Molly.”

And she knew then that it was all right. The way he spoke; the way he looked. It was true; whatever had happened, had happened: she had stepped overnight into some new dimension of being, she was floating, she could focus on nothing else, she had knocked onto the floor the cash till on the box office desk, one of the volunteers was scrabbling to recover the contents, and there Molly stood, impervious.

Sam said, “Comfortable night?”

Molly smiled happily. “Frankly, no. Didn’t sleep well.”

“Funny you should say that, neither did I.”

The volunteer finished retrieval of the cash box and its contents, restored it to the desk, and withdrew.

Sam said, “When and where do I see you?”

She spread her hands: the press of people around them, the impending event, the program that reached through the rest of the day.

“I know, I know. We’ll have to sort something out. Meanwhile…”

Meanwhile…she thought. Meanwhile, all I want is to continue in this state of…grace, to stay in this new world.

“Meanwhile,” said Sam Priest “I’ll have to make do with getting you a coffee in an hour or two.”

All through the day he is there. She glimpses him across the room, they are in the same group at lunch, they sit next to one another during the afternoon event. They are never alone, and yet entirely alone; they are surrounded by other people, but no one else signifies. When they manage to speak to one another, what is said is inconsequential, but they are in tacit alliance, they are a secret unit.

All day, Molly is busy. She is talking to people, she is troubleshooting, she is smiling and greeting and thanking, she is in the thick of it, but she is also cruising in her own stratosphere on autopilot.

And suddenly, somehow, the evening has arrived, and the last event, the panel discussion. She meets Sam at the door of the hall, shortly before.

“I warn you,” he says. “I’m going to let you down. I’m not going to be able to get my head around this. I’m brain dead today.”

“I don’t know whether to be at the back or the front.”

“The front. Where I can see you. Where you can be inspirational.”

There are three poets on the platform, and a chairman, who invites each to comment on the proposition before they embark on a general discussion. The first speaker flails around somewhat, wondering at too great length what is implied by the term “legislators,” it is apparent that he has not considered Shelley’s essay and is winging it. The second is an impassioned woman who is also distracted by terminology, and seems to be saying that poets—all artists, indeed—are a unique category and should not be concerned with the banalities of social organization. It is left to Sam to refer the quotation to its historical context, to cite Shelley’s unease with utilitarianism, to talk about the apposition of reason and imagination, to consider imaginative perception as a force for moral good. Shelley was incensed with the downgrading of poetry as significant comment, he says—Shelley thought poets were more crucial than political theorists. I’m not certain I buy that, says Sam, I’m not sure what sort of a fist we’d make of the blueprint for a perfect world, but I take Shelley’s point about poetic antennae; maybe what we can do is point things out, whether it’s a matter of moral choices or simply the perception and celebration of the world.