‘How many more, Pat?’
‘Nearly there. Another couple.’
That meant a dozen or so, but a quick dozen. For the second time in five minutes, Sue searched for a remark. Finally she said,
‘You must think of the thousands and thousands of people to whom you’ve given pleasure.’
‘Yes, I do try to sometimes. It’s true I get a lot of letters saying some very nice things, and believe me I’m not at all ungrateful, but—’
‘Could you relax and look out of the window as if you’re thinking?’
‘I’ll do my best,’ said Potter, setting a new lower limit to the amount of dryness the tone of a human voice could carry without its being altogether imperceptible. ‘But, as I was going to say, I have wondered if the pleasure people say I’ve given them mightn’t have prevented them from coming by some much higher kind of pleasure from other writers of poetry who really are good. I expect all this pop music prevents some youngsters from ever appreciating Brahms or Elgar.’
‘You must know that’s not a fair comparison, Mr Potter. And I don’t think it’s true anyway, your example.’
‘Perhaps it isn’t, my example. There’s no way of knowing.’
‘Right, that’s it,’ said Bowes. ‘I’ve got some first-class ones there. Thank you for being so patient, Mr Potter. I can tell you’re a pro at this job.’
The lights went and for a second or two the room seemed dark; then Sue saw it was only late afternoon outside. Bowes started disassembling his equipment while Potter, on his feet, stuck his hands in his pockets and stared at the floor. Sue waited until Bowes had gone out to the car and then said:
‘I don’t want to poke my nose in, but what are you having for your dinner tonight?’
‘Cornflakes and a couple of sardines, I thought. And a bottle of light ale.’
‘But that’s not enough. You must have a proper meal. Something hot.’
‘I can’t be bothered.’
‘May I see your kitchen?’
‘Yes, it’s just… through the… in here.’
In one corner of the small room was a tiny larder containing a good deal of tinned and cartoned food and very little fresh food. Sue made a selection from the tins, found two Spanish onions that seemed to have started to lose weight, decided that some cold boiled potatoes must be harmless despite their appearance, and looked round for a frying-pan.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Potter as if the preparation of a meal were genuinely strange and wonderful to him.
‘Do you like corned-beef hash?’
‘I like all food, but I don’t see—’
‘I’ll just have a word with Mr Bowes.’
The word, or words, told Bowes that Potter wanted to add some information in total confidence. Tractable as ever outside the photographic sphere, Bowes at once said he would go and have a pint at a pub he had noticed a couple of hundred yards back down the road, and that Sue could join him there at any time she might fancy.
Back in the kitchen, Sue found Potter standing, presumably by chance, exactly beneath a well-patronized fly-paper that hung from the ceiling. He said,
‘I don’t want you to go to any trouble on my account.’
‘It’s very little trouble.’ She set about peeling and slicing the onions. ‘It’s a small return for all the help you’ve given Mr Bowes and me. Now I’m going to cook this to the point where all you have to do is warm it up before you eat it. Can I trust you to do that?’
‘Yes. Yes, I’ll do that.’
Nothing more was said for some minutes, while she went on with her work. Then he asked abruptly,
‘Would you consider staying on here a little while and sharing the corned-beef hash with me?’
‘I’d like to, Mr Potter, but I’m afraid I’ve—’
‘No, of course, yes, I quite see.’
The immediacy of his interruption showed her in the plainest terms that he had taken her to be simply blocking off the possibility of a return to the question he had put to her in the garden. She turned away from the gas stove, went over and took him by the hand.
‘I shall have to go quite soon, Mr Potter,’ she said slowly, ‘because I have to be back in London in time for my husband to take me to the theatre. Do you see now?’
He nodded, not perfunctorily, and moved towards the window. She worked on through another pause, which again he broke.
‘Mrs Macnamara, I want to ask you a fact, but you must understand I need it just as a fact, nothing more. What’s your Christian name?’
‘Susan, but I’m always called Sue.’
‘Is that s, u, e?’
‘Yes.’
‘Thank you.’
He left the room and stayed away until the hash was nearly ready. When he came back he was carrying a sheet, now folded in two, of the paper she had seen on his table.
‘I think you’ll know what this is, Mrs Macnamara. I’d like you to accept it as a very small mark of my esteem, and as a way of saying thank you for being so sympathetic and understanding.’ (A careful rehearsal of this in the parlour was not very difficult to imagine.) ‘Please don’t look at it until you’ve left here,’ he went on, holding the paper out to her. ‘There are no surprises, but I’d just rather you didn’t.’
‘You’ve made a copy of it, have you?’
‘No. I never do that.’
‘But what about your wife typing it out? I can’t walk away with a unique copy. Suppose I lost it? And what about publication?’
‘I don’t suppose you’ll lose it. If you really want to, perhaps you could type it out one day and send a copy to my agent’ — whom he named — ‘and a carbon here. Addressed to my wife. Please take it.’
She took the sheet, faintly warm from his hand. ‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘There’s nothing that needs to be said. I’ve thanked you with that and you’ve thanked me by making me this splendid meal. Is it done? How do I heat it up?’
‘Ten minutes on a half gas’ll be enough.’
‘Just as it is. I see. Now I mustn’t keep you from your husband; I expect you’re late already. Where’s that young man got to?’
‘He’s waiting in the pub.’
‘Good, so you’ll be able to get back to London all right. It’s been a great pleasure meeting you, Mrs Macnamara. Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye, Mr Potter,’ she said as they shook hands on the doorstep.
At the gate she looked back, but the door had already shut. Four telegraph poles away in the direction of the town Bowes’s car was parked by an inn-sign. She began to walk slowly down the road towards it, wishing she had been able to think of some leave-taking message to Potter that would not have been either sickly or stilted, deciding to write him a letter the next day, then taking the sheet of paper from her handbag and unfolding it. The writing was in soft pencil, clear and commonplace. It read:
UNBORN
From summer evenings, gazing
heartrise always ahead, there,
book and dream,
reaching out,
ten miles of fields of raw daffodils
streets engines advertisement hoardings
all raw,
myself raw,
but certain.
Swept now, swept
book
dream
field
street
engines cheerfully off or rusted
hoardings ablaze or demolished
nobody there
Not unfound
not unreached, unborn
unfated
Dear illusion with the bright hair
all swept aired lit plain known listed
swept
At the foot were a couple of lines in the same hand, written upside down. She turned the sheet round and read,
To Sue Macnamara with the kindest regards possible
from Ted Potter
That last was the product of something like ten minutes’ thought, she said to herself, and written upside down to avert the risk of reading a single word of the poem.