‘Yes, but only my husband,’ said Sue with some approximation to the truth.
‘That’s a pity. I mean it’s a pity for me, because I get so few chances these days: I can quite see it’s a jolly good thing for you. And your husband. I’m in the same sort of position myself as a rule, but obviously a good deal less so, if that makes any sense, because I don’t happen to be very attracted to women of sixty-eight. That’s how old my wife is, you see. With her being away, and you being here anyhow, so to speak, I thought it would be silly not to just ask. And then in the end it dawns on you that there’s no more to come, not this time, that’s all there’s going to be of it. The thing’s over and done with and finished. At that point you write it down.’
It was not until now that Sue realized that, for the past quarter of a minute, Potter had been talking about his poetry again. His question had taken her completely by surprise, a gigantic achievement in the face of one so constantly asked if she fucked (in those or other terms) as Sue Macnamara: no preliminary switching-on of casualness, no quick range-estimating glance, no perceptible inner shaping up or squaring of the shoulders, nothing. In the same way, her refusal had evoked not the least hint of pique, mortification, retrospective embarrassment or — what she had noticed as quite common among the over-fifties — ill-dissimulated relief: all this gathered up in his not having bothered to make anything whatever in the way of an as-I-was-saying gesture before he went back to his previous theme, about which something had better be said soon on her own part.
‘I see. You always wait until the poem’s complete in your mind before you put anything on paper.
‘Normally. If I’ve got to go and get on a train or something like that before it’s finished, I write down as much as I’ve done and then think about something else until I can have another go at it. That seems to work.’
‘Sorry about that,’ said Bowes as he approached, expressing sincere regret for having, however unavoidably, let the rest of the company in for a stretch of utter idleness. He went into a prowling circuit of the space where they sat, every few steps snatching his camera up to eye-level, failing to take a photograph and subsiding again: a more intrusive routine, if anything, than the clicking and buzzing it replaced. But at least he was about, and so might deter Potter from asking Sue just how it had come to pass that she only fucked her husband, should it occur to Potter to do so.
‘When the poem’s all there on paper, do you revise it much?’
‘Not at all, ever. I don’t even read it through. I give it straight to my wife to type, or if it’s the middle of the night I leave it face down on my table until I can give it to her.’
‘You were saying you didn’t read it, any given poem, when it’s typed or even when it comes out in a magazine. When do you read it?’
Potter moved the tip of his tongue to and fro between gaps in his teeth. ‘I suppose I must have read all my poems at least once. But it’s not a thing I dwell on, or enjoy at all. The early morning’s the only time. Then I may pick up one of my books and read a few things. To remind myself I’ve done them, more than anything else. I keep a count of how many I’ve done. I’ve just finished number four hundred and twenty-three. I wrote it out just this morning, as a matter of fact.’
‘What do you feel when you read one of your poems?’
‘If I’m lucky, relief that it doesn’t seem any worse than it seems. Often, I wonder what on earth I meant, but I don’t try to remember. Or it just doesn’t register in any way.’
‘No pleasure? Pride in achievement?’
‘Achievement? No, nothing like that.’
Having learnt how easily a revelation of real interest could stem the most torrential flow of confidences or confessions, Sue tried to keep up her bright, nurse-like tone. ‘Another over-simplifying question, I’m afraid, Mr Potter: why do you write poetry?’
‘No, I think it really is a simple question. Or perhaps I just mean the answer I personally would give’s quite simple. I write poetry to be able to go on living at all. Well, not quite at all, but to function as a human being. I’m afraid that doesn’t sound very simple now I’ve said it. I’ll have to risk you putting me down as pompous and sorry for myself. When I was working in that timber yard, my life started being a burden to me. Not just the life in the yard, but the whole of my life. It happened quite suddenly and I’ll never know why. Nothing had gone wrong; I was happily married, in a secure job and earning enough to keep the two of us in reasonable comfort — we’ve never had the luck to have any children, but it wasn’t that either. I stopped being able to enjoy anything or see the point of anything. I felt bad from morning to night every day. Then, after about a month, some words came into my mind and straight away I felt a little better. I forget what they were, but they brought more words with them and they made me feel a little better still. By the time the words stopped coming I felt at peace. I wrote them down on the back of a delivery note — I do remember that — and it was only then I woke up to the fact that what I’d done was write a poem. The moment I’d finished writing the words down I started feeling bad again. Not as bad as just before the words started coming, but still bad. The next day I felt a little worse, and the day after that worse again, and so on for another three or four weeks until another lot of words started turning up. It’s been like that ever since.’
‘This feeling bad,’ said Sue, telling herself that after all she was a journalist — ‘can you describe it any more fully?’
‘No. If I could I would, believe me. I don’t know what the poems have to do with it, either. I tried once not writing the poem down, but all that happened then was that I forgot it and started feeling bad again, so the only net result was that I was a poem short. Of course, if you look at it in one way, it’s all rather like that business they call occupational therapy, where people weave carpets to take their mind off themselves and their problems. The point there is that it doesn’t make any difference to anybody whether the carpets are any good or not. I’ve been wondering for over thirty years, on and off, if it’s the same with my poems.’
The placid, rather monotonous voice stopped as Bowes shoved his stocky bulk squarely between the other two and let off a long burst of click-and-buzz. He had been well within earshot for some time, but his assumption of his own total primacy over anybody interviewing or being interviewed had its helpful side: he was stone-deaf to all talk not directly about sex, cars or photography. Sue thought Potter might have guessed something of the sort. She used the couple of minutes’ interval to complete, in her own semi-shorthand, a nearly verbatim account of what Potter had said in the last four or five. She was certain that the information in it had never been divulged before.
Clearly and succinctly, Bowes now intimated that they were all to move indoors, to where Potter worked. Potter said he worked nowhere in particular, or everywhere, though there was a little table where he occasionally wrote things down, and Bowes answered that that was what he had meant.