‘She’s not here. My wife’s… not here.’
He spoke with great but unspecific force, implying anything from violent death to a grossly whimsical sortie round the shops in the town. Sue, whose thorough self-briefing had indicated a Mrs Potter alive and in residence, responded with a dead bat.
‘You’re on your own for a little while, then.’
‘Yes, I am, and a very unpleasant mode of existence it is too, I don’t mind telling you. I avoid it whenever I can. But the woman who looks after my sister-in-law, who can’t move, fell downstairs on Monday and broke both her legs, so I’ve had to let my wife go until such time as they can find someone else. That’s why I’m glad you don’t want any tea, because I’d have had to go and get it. In my experience, no kind of meal or refreshment is worth a single moment’s preparation. On one’s own part, that is.’
‘What do you live on, then, when Mrs Potter’s away?’
‘Beer and cornflakes mostly. I don’t take sugar on them, the cornflakes, so that’s one bit of bother saved. Of course, there is opening the new packet. I can’t see any way round that.’
Neither could Sue, but she was saved having to admit as much by the intervention of Bowes, who sat Potter down in one of Potter’s garden chairs, a canvas-and-rusted-metal affair, in the manner of an army dentist with a battalion’s worth of extractions and fillings before him. His thrusting of a light-meter to within an inch of Potter’s face was also faintly dental, suggesting a dry run with syringe or drillhead. Sue found herself stationed in a similar chair near Potter at one of the comparatively few angles nobody would naturally choose for any sort of conversation. Not far off, Bowes had thrown together a sort of cairn of stuff he must have found lying about: a couple of metal drums that might once have held paraffin, some cardboard boxes, some flowerpots, some white-painted rocks fit for a past or future rock-garden, a primordial lawn-mower, a half-sized St Francis or related figure in dirty stone. Without any trouble, Sue could visualize the end-product of this arrangement as a fashionable back-to-front portrait, a sprawling, blurred mélange in the foreground with the tiny in-focus shape of Potter in the distance, plus, no doubt, about two-fifths of herself at the edge — whatever fraction would most bore and annoy the beholder. Right up the art editor’s street, and Bowes would know it; but he was not the sort of photographer, nor the sort of man, to have two or three tries at something when two or three hundred would do. Here he was in his ritual dance, approaching, retreating, squatting, on tiptoe, clicking, winding on, now and then standing stockstill to gaze at Potter in evident consternation, only to go twitching back into the measure.
Sue had opened her notepad. ‘Before we begin, Mr Potter, I should tell you that you’ll be sent a proof of the article in advance, so that you can make any alterations or cuts.’
‘I say, that’s jolly decent of you. Not many of you do that.’
‘I think quite a lot of people are more forthcoming if they know they have that sort of control.’
‘Enlightened self-interest, which is very enlightened. Right, then. I was born in Croydon, Surrey in 1899, and educated at the—’
‘Excuse me, Mr Potter: I think I already have really all the obvious known facts about you, what with the Lacey-Jones book, and your publisher…’
‘Good Lord.’ He lifted his glasses above his eyebrows and looked at her as hard as he had done when they first met, but this time not uninterestedly. His eyes were light brown, with darker flecks. ‘This is the first time one of you has ever… But then you’re not really one of you, if I make myself clear. I should have seen that before.’
‘Could we have the glasses up again, please?’ said Bowes in a managerial tone, and fell to bobbing and straightening as he clicked his way round a semi-circle that brought his camera within a hand’s breadth of Sue’s ear. She said to Potter, who was still obediently holding his glasses up in the required position,
‘Can you think while this sort of thing’s going on?’
‘I can think while any sort of thing’s going on, in so far as I can think at all. I wrote my first poems while I was working in a timber yard. But you’ll have read about all that. What there was of that, I mean.’
‘Can I ask you about those first poems? And about what made you write them? I’m sorry, I know that’s a damned silly question, but our readership’s not of a very—’
‘I think it’s a fascinating question, not as regards me personally, but as regards all writers of poems. But before we get on to it, I’ll save you the embarrassment of asking another question I’m sure you’ll quite reasonably want to ask. I write with a pen or a pencil, or anything that makes marks, on any sort of paper. I expect if I had nothing but a blackboard and a piece of chalk I could manage with them. Not a typewriter: I’ve nothing against the typewriter, I just can’t use it, not even for the fair copies — I get my wife to do them, and then she sends them off to my agent without my looking at them again. She keeps a carbon for the files. She does all that, very nicely too.’
‘I see. Why don’t you look at the fair copies before they go off?’
‘No point in it. I write very clearly and my wife’s a very accurate typist.’
‘So in a sense the first you see of the poem in its finished state is when it appears in print.’
Potter glanced over at Bowes, who was doing something technical to one of his cameras, or trying to. ‘Well… it’d be truer to say that the last I see of it in its finished state is when I give the manuscript of it to my wife for her to type it out.’
‘You mean you don’t ever… you don’t normally look at it when it’s originally published? I suppose it is more satisfying to wait until you’ve got a whole collection in front of you, inside hard covers, properly done. The way they lay poems out in magazines and so on is often very… shoddy…’
‘Some — some people probably do find a book of things they’ve written more satisfying than the separate bits typed out or in a magazine. I just find it more frightening.’
‘Frightening?’ Sue was nearly certain that Potter had never publicly talked to this effect before, but the rising excitement she felt (and tried to conceal) was more than journalistic. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘Seven books of my poems have been published, and they all cover, each one covers about five years’ work. Seven fives are thirty-five: I started late. As you know, Mrs Macnamara, but that’s by the way. One book is five years’ work, and five years’ work is roughly between fifty and sixty poems, and that’s all. What I mean by that is that that’s all I do in the five years that I count as doing anything. I worked in the timber yard and then in that factory office, and afterwards for those tinned-fruit people until I’d started making enough money from my poems to retire. As you know. It was work, at the timber yard and the other places: somebody had to do it and I’m not despising it: but I don’t count it. All I count is the books, and unless the books—’
‘We’ll take the break there,’ said Bowes generously, coming down to a stooped position at the mid-point of the triangle formed by Potter, Sue and the heap of properties. ‘Very good, both of you. Now you relax while I go and reload and do a bit of minor surgery on this bit of Jap ironmongery’ — he waved an offending camera — ‘out in the car. Rejoin us in a couple of minutes.’
When he had gone, Sue lit a cigarette and considered, as calmly as possible, how to lead Potter back and round and along and forward again to the point he had reached when interrupted. ‘Could you tell me a little more about how you write? How a poem takes shape, or how you know when it has?’
‘Lots of words and phrases go through a person’s mind all the time without staying there. At least they do through mine. Then, every so often, without the person knowing why, one of the words or phrases, it just sticks there and won’t go away. That’s the beginning. I don’t mean necessarily the beginning of the poem when you see it when you read it, but it can be, quite often it is, but it’s your way into the poem, if that doesn’t sound too silly. I mean it’s the man who’s writing the poem’s way into his poem. Then a lot more words go on going through until another one gets caught, like in a net, and it sticks with the first ones because it belongs with them, you realize, or you realize later that it belongs with them. And so on. Do you fuck?’