They entered a low-ceilinged room that quite a few people would have felt inclined to call a parlour. By a window giving on to the front garden there was a characterless table and a hard chair with a flattened cushion. On the table Sue saw a cheap scribbling pad, one of its sheets detached and showing evidence of writing on the side not in view: no doubt that morning’s poem. Bowes at once set about assembling an indoor cairn on a larger, oval table: a biscuit-barrel and two empty decanters from the sideboard, ornamental mugs and pottery figures from the mantelshelf, a multi-tiered cake-stand complete. The general style of these, and of other objects in the room, was in a current fashion, but that would be coincidence; they must be survivals of what the Potters had bought when they were first married in 1924, or had come by from their parents. To judge from his behaviour, and the shakier evidence of his work, Potter was not a man to care for or notice what was around him.
Sue moved to a small bookcase that held the expected complete works in the expected new-looking condition, and a few dozen other volumes, mostly paperbacked and all, or all of those she could take in at a glance, by authors she had never heard of. Potter’s reading habits were well enough known, but she judged that a short trot over familiar ground would give him time to adjust to the change of scene and, with luck, to prepare himself for further revelations.
‘Do you read a lot, Mr Potter?’ asked Sue, while Bowes began setting up his lights and reflectors.
‘Not a lot, no. I’ve never really taken to it. Either it’s in you or it isn’t is how I’d put it, and it doesn’t seem to be in me. Oh, I quite enjoy books about Poland and Samoa and places like that where I’ve never been, but that’s about as far as it goes.’
‘No poetry?’
‘Yes, a little from time to time, just to see what other people are doing. I sometimes buy one of those anthologies.’
‘Who do you like particularly?’
‘Well, it’s hard to say. The standard seems to be so high, it’s amazing. Let’s see, I like Christopher Logue, John Betjeman, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Roth, Basil Bunting, John Berryman, Roy Fuller, John Lennon, Sylvia Plath, Fats Larwood, Robert Lowell… And Ezra Pound and W. H. Auden, of course. But, as I say, so many people are good.’
‘But surely—’ Sue cut herself off, realizing she could not say any of the seven or eight things she wanted to say. ‘Surely you prefer some of those names to others?’
‘Not… not really.’
‘I see. Have you any, what our readers would call hobbies?’
‘You mean how do I spend my time. I do quite a lot of walking; there’s still some country left round here. I have to answer quite a few letters, and then my agent rings me up. And in the evenings my wife and I play halma or something, or we watch television.’
‘In the chair, please, Mr Potter,’ said Bowes opportunely, setting off the equivalent of a smallish, slow-burning phosphorus bomb. ‘That’s lovely. Doing very well.’
Potter sat on for a few moments, seeming to shrink a little physically in the glare. Then he said, ‘As I was telling you, Mrs Macnamara, I keep wondering about those poems of mine. The people who weave those carpets have had other things in their lives. They’ve done other things. They’ve been builders or lawyers or sailors or mothers or lorry-drivers or something. Or they’ve told jokes very well or got drunk a lot or… had a lot of women or played tennis or travelled or helped other people. I couldn’t have done some of those things and I didn’t want to do any of the others. I’ve never done anything but write poems. So if the poems are no good my life’s been wasted.’
‘Oh, but everybody agrees they’re good. I was reading—’
‘Not everybody. I don’t agree for one. I don’t say I disagree, but I don’t agree. And unless I’m very much mistaken, neither do you.’
Sue could find nothing to say. She flinched at a sudden click-accompanied movement of Bowes behind her shoulder.
‘Good.’ Potter nodded approvingly. ‘Well, my dear, I was afraid all that was going to sound pompous, and it has. And not only sounded pompous. I think I must have got more conceited as I’ve grown older. It’s conceited of me to wonder whether I’m anything more than somebody who’s been lucky enough to be able to make up his own occupational therapy without any help from outside. But it’s a bad bargain no matter how you look at it.’
‘Could I have you writing, please?’ ordered Bowes from the shadows.
‘Of course,’ said Potter, taking out a felt-tipped pen and doodling quite convincingly on his pad. ‘It’s a bad bargain even if the poems are good. Whatever that may mean. From my point of view, nothing at all could compensate for getting on for forty years of feeling bad with a couple of days of not feeling so bad and ten minutes of feeling all right thrown in about once a month. There’s a very good young doctor in the town here who took over not so long ago from the fellow I’ve always had. He reads a bit of poetry and he says he likes what I write. I’ve told him a lot of what I’ve told you. He takes my point about occupational therapy and he says I sort of psychoanalyse myself through my work so that I can carry on. But I’m fed up with carrying on. He’s got every pill under the sun in that surgery of his, and he says he could probably find one that would make me feel all right most of the time, but it would probably, at least as probably, stop me wanting to write poems, or having to write poems. I’ve been holding out against that for about six months. Conceit again, I suppose. But I’ve decided I’m too old to be conceited any more. I’d like to feel all right for the rest of my life and never mind the poetry. So I’m stopping it, the poetry. In fact I have stopped. This one this morning was the last. Tomorrow morning I’ll be off to see that doctor and he’ll start me on what he calls a course. I’m really quite excited about it.’
‘Now I’d like you looking as if you’re looking for inspiration,’ said Bowes.
Potter raised his head and eyes to the ceiling less like a looker for inspiration than a man inwardly calling for celestial vengeance on some other party.
‘Can I print that?’ Sue recognized that the question she had been trying to frame, about why she was being told all this, had been answered. ‘About your giving up poetry?’
‘Oh, certainly. After all, this is an interview.’
‘You realize it’s news?’
‘News? Well, some very funny things seem to be news these days, don’t they? Do you want to telephone your editor?’
‘No thank you,’ she said, having, as he spoke, faced and solved a dilemma: whether to approach as soon as possible the parent newspaper for whose colour magazine she regularly wrote and had come here today, or to say nothing and allow her report of the interview, adorned with Bowes’s efforts, to appear as planned in (perhaps) four months’ time. If Potter told his piece of news to the representative of some other journal in the meanwhile, a lot of people would be cross with her, and her article, with its climactic point already common knowledge, might suffer severe cuts or even not appear at all. But that was just as likely to be its fate if she took the first of the two courses open to her, and she recoiled from the prospect of seeing an abbreviated, garbled and vulgarized version of her material under some such heading as ‘Veteran Bard Lays Down Pen’. It must be the second alternative, then, with the comforting thought that, since nobody on the magazine was inquisitive enough to read copy on the look-out for possible news items, or indeed for almost any other reason, the laying-down of the pen might very well rest securely in its context until her publication day.
‘Is there going to be much more of this?’ asked Potter, who was still looking, in fact glaring by now, high over Sue’s head. ‘I’m afraid I find it rather tiring.’