Annie went to hall, grabbed her coat, felt for her car keys in the pocket then called out a hasty farewell to Fran and Natalie, who stood in the kitchen doorway looking puzzled. ‘Tell Carrie I’m really sorry,’ Annie added as she turned the doorknob. ‘And wish her a happy birthday again from me. I’ll ring later. Got to go.’ She paused before closing the door and grinned. ‘One day I’ll tell you about it.’
‘Anna Akhmatova,’ said Linda, pushing her empty lunch plate aside. ‘She was a strange one. Beautiful, though you’d hardly think it from existing photos. But elegant, aristocratic. Modigliani sketched her, you know. They were lovers for a while. And like all her lovers, he left her. She was always ill. Suffered from TB and heart problems all her life. Not to mention the revolution, the problems of surviving Stalin’s Russia and the Second World War. Like all artists in Russia, she had to be so careful what she said, or didn’t say. Especially if she committed it to paper. Don’t forget, if you fell afoul of the authorities, it wasn’t just yourself you put in danger. It was your entire family and circle of friends. Sometimes they would leave you free, so you could suffer the guilt of causing your family’s murder. She ended up lonely and sad, with most of her friends and family and lovers and fellow writers dead or on the gulag, but she was celebrated. That was always important to her. That people loved her poetry. She could be very competitive.’
‘Do you feel the same way?’
Linda pursed her lips and thought for a moment, swirling her red wine in the glass. ‘Competitive? Not so much, no. My life has been very different, of course — for one thing, I have never had to live under a totalitarian regime — and I think the English attitude towards writing poetry is very different from the Russian approach. We’re probably more Larkin than Pushkin, on the whole. Oh, I tell myself I don’t give a fuck what the critics say, but I’ll fume or cry over a bad review like anyone else. I suppose if you do put yourself out there then, you want to be appreciated, celebrated, even, not shat on. But that’s not the reason you do it. That’s a different sort of compulsion.’
They were having lunch in the Low Moor Inn, a pub Banks had discovered quite by accident in the middle of nowhere, vast stretches of wild inhospitable moorland all around. For some reason, they had taken to frequenting it for their occasional poetry sessions. Today the landscape was shrouded in a grey gauzy haze, with patches of frost still visible on distant stretches.
The pub was squat and sturdy with thick stone walls, a fireplace you could stand up in and watercolours of local scenes all over the rough plastered walls. The dining room was quiet, conversations a gentle rising and falling murmur around them, no music or machines to break the spell. They had finished their discussion of Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ just before Banks had asked Linda about Akhmatova. Banks had found Eliot’s poem fascinating, though he admitted he couldn’t really understand it. Linda had said that didn’t matter and that he had to get rid of that archaic and irritating habit of wanting to translate poems into rational prose in his mind. He thought he had imagination, but often poetry defeated him; maybe it was because he’d been thinking like a policeman for too many years. Still, he tried, and the effort was rewarding.
‘Why are you asking about Akhmatova, by the way?’ Linda asked. ‘I don’t believe I’ve ever talked about her before.’
‘Someone mentioned her to me the other night,’ Banks said. ‘Why?’
‘I’m not sure you should be getting into poetry in translation just yet. Especially Akhmatova.’
‘Difficult, is she?’
‘Not especially. Not on the surface of it. But there are particular difficulties with just about anything Russian artists produced in the last century.’
‘Rather like with anything their politicians produce in this century.’
Linda laughed. ‘Well, they do have a complex history.’
Banks nodded. ‘I’m a big Shostakovich fan, but half the time I feel lost and stupid when I try to work out the context of his life, the secret meanings of his symphonies and quartets. What Stalin really defined as true socialist realist music and what he dismissed as “formalism” or unpatriotic bourgeois drivel.’
‘I know what you mean. I think you’d have to be Russian to even attempt an answer to those questions, though Julian Barnes wrote a fine book about Shostakovich recently.’
‘Yes,’ said Banks. ‘I read it. But it must have been different for a poet. Music doesn’t carry meaning in the same way words do. It’s more subjective, perhaps.’
‘True. And it wasn’t only criticism of the party that went against you, it was also embrace of the personal, the romantic. Bourgeois individualism. Anna could sound like a lovesick schoolgirl, even in her sixties, but there was always some image, some phrase, metaphor or observation, that would pull the rug from under you, throw you sideways. Maybe it would be a cynical comment on her own emotions, or something like that, but it constantly changes and challenges your perception of what you’ve just read, puts everything in a different context.’
‘Most poetry does that for me,’ Banks said. ‘Like most cases.’
Linda laughed again. ‘Maybe that’s why so many people try to avoid poetry at all costs.’ She paused to drink some wine. ‘I visited Russia once, you know. Just Moscow and St Petersburg. I saw all the usual sights: the Kremlin, St Basil’s, the Hermitage, the Nevsky Prospekt, but I remember being struck constantly whenever I saw elderly people in the streets what some of them must have lived through. The suffering showed in the lines of the old women’s faces, in the hunched, stiff figures of the men. And even then, when I was there in the early nineties, there were still long queues for what little was in the shops. I thought of the famines, the siege of Leningrad, Stalingrad, the purges, all the depredations visited on that country — and no, I didn’t forget that so much harm was done by the Russians to themselves, not an invading army, though it must often have seemed that way. All in the name of Communism. And the terrible things they did to the countries around them — but there’s something very... I don’t know... something that really puts you in your place when you visit somewhere like that, with such a weight of history. Now Putin. Have you ever been there?’
‘No, but Doctor Zhivago’s always been one of my favourite films,’ Banks said.
‘I could have guessed. Julie Christie. Men.’
‘That, too. But I was thinking more of Zhivago and his wife’s family. In the film. They were from the aristocracy, too. And look what happened. That scene when Zhivago gets back to the family house in Moscow after all he’s been through and finds they have to share it with a lot of strangers always scares the hell out of me. I used to have nightmares about getting home and finding my parents gone and families I didn’t know living in all the rooms — including mine — and all the way up the stairs.’
‘It’s a frightening thought.’ Linda tapped his arm. ‘But you might have to get used to it, the way the housing crisis is going these days. There’s plenty of room for a few more families in your cottage.’ She glanced out of the window at the broad expanse of wintry moor. ‘And who knows? In a few years’ time all this may be covered with council estates.’
‘Social housing, please,’ said Banks. ‘It sounds much nicer.’
‘Have you read the novel? Doctor Zhivago.’
‘I’m ashamed to say I haven’t.’
‘You should.’
‘I will. If only there were movie versions of great poems, too.’
Linda laughed. ‘Or musicals.’
‘Well, there was Cats,’ Banks said. ‘But could you imagine Prufrock: The Musical?’