‘What did you do?’
‘My first instinct was to ask him about it in front of the group, but I resisted. I’m not sure why. Maybe I was already aware of Archie’s vulnerability. I simply took him aside and told him I knew. I think I expected that would be the last we saw of him, but for all he was weak, Archie was tough too. He came to the following meeting, this time with his own work. I must have been curious because I agreed to read it.’ James grimaced. ‘The poems he gave me were good. Not perfect, but original.’
Murray nodded towards Lunan’s book, perched on top of the pile at the professor’s elbow.
‘Did any of the poems he showed you appear in Moontide?’
‘One of them. “Preparation for a Wake”. It was revised and tightened up by the time the collection was published, of course, but the concept was there at the start: the raising of the dead man, the play on words between a wake and awake, the horror his drinking companions feel when their dead mate sits up ready to join in the merrymaking. The lyricism of the language wasn’t as successful as it was in the published version, but it was still remarkable.’
‘What did the rest of the group make of it?’
‘I don’t recall any particular debate. You have to remember it was a long time ago, and we were privileged to be at the birth of many remarkable pieces.’
James looked Murray in the eye. It was like a door slamming.
‘How did Archie get on with the group in general?’
‘Okay, as far as I remember. But as I said, it was a long time ago.’
Another door shut.
James gave the kind of smile favoured by American presidents on the stocks, but the professor’s teeth were yellowed, his gums pink and receding.
‘What about your own response to his work?
‘My own response?’
The professor made the question sound preposterous.
Murray smiled apologetically.
‘What was your initial reaction when you eventually got to see his writing?’
It was a sunny day outside, but the sitting room windows had taken on the smoky taint that glass acquires after a year or two’s neglect and the pair were stuck in murk and shadow. The dust that coated the air was formed from James and James’s wife, decayed and merged. Murray wanted to brush them from himself, but instead he smiled and waited.
James moved a hand against the arm of his chair, as if trying to make his mind up about something. When he spoke his voice was dangerously gentle.
‘Are you asking if I was jealous of Lunan’s ability?’
Murray hesitated, surprised by the revelation in the old man’s question.
‘Your professionalism is beyond reproach.’
James lifted the copy of Moontide from the table next to him and looked at Lunan’s Rasputin face. Somewhere a clock ticked.
‘I was jealous, of course, but I was jealous of others too. Maybe we were all jealous of each other, beneath the comradeship. I honestly don’t think I ever let it affect my dealings with him, and then. . well. . how can you be jealous of a dead man?’ He put the book back on the table and smiled at Murray. ‘But I am, of course, every time I read his poems.’ He laughed and gave the chair a slight slap as if rousing himself to business. ‘The strange thing was that the filched poem he’d presented was way beneath the standard of what he was capable of creating. That’s what I mean about a vulnerable streak. Archie was over-sensitive, lacking in confidence and yet at the same time burdened with an exaggerated ego.’
‘Not the most attractive combination.’
‘No, but Lunan could be attractive. He had the gift of the gab and a sense of the absurd. When he was in the right frame of mind, he was good company.’
‘And when he wasn’t?’
‘Morose, sarcastic, inclined to drunkenness. I had to ask him to leave the session on two separate occasions. If he’d been anyone else I would have told him not to come back. There were precedents: at least one drunken writer had been barred.’
‘But he was too talented to dismiss?’
James leaned back in his chair and gazed at the ceiling again. It was a theatrical gesture, a pause that preceded a point to be underlined.
‘Talent’s an odd thing, essential of course, but no guarantee of anything. To be perfectly frank I doubted he had the discipline to succeed. I thought he was more in love with the idea of being a writer than with the need to create.’
‘What made you think that?’
‘Partly, I suppose, because I’d seen it before. We never turned any sober customers away from these get-togethers, you know. We didn’t advertise them, of course, it was strictly word of mouth, but from time to time you’d get romantic heroes wafting in. They couldn’t play an instrument so they thought they would wield a pen. It’s a very powerful image — young Thomas Chatterton, Percy Shelley, Jack Kerouac — the disaffected writer battling the world before dying young and beautiful.’ He laughed. ‘Well, maybe not so beautiful in Kerouac’s case, killing yourself with alcohol tends to be a bit bloating, but you get my drift.’ The professor sighed. ‘Working with young people for as long as I have, it’s inevitable that one is going to encounter untimely deaths, a car crash, an overdose, a climbing accident.’ He paused. ‘A drowning. It’s a cliché to say it’s a waste, and yet what else is it? A bloody waste.’ There was another pause as if he were silently mourning the young people who had died before their span. ‘So, to answer your question, yes I was aware of his talent early on, but I thought it squandered on him. Remember the poems I saw had potential, but they weren’t there yet.’ He grinned. ‘And there was I with my reservoirs of discipline and hard-won knowledge unable to create the magic that he could.’ James shook his head. ‘My God, I was ripe for some Faustian pact.’ His eyes met Murray’s. ‘But I wasn’t the only one.’
The professor laughed and a taint of decay scented the dead air of the darkened room. Murray cleared his throat then asked, ‘So how did he take his expulsion?’
‘I told you: stoically.’ The old man shook his head. ‘No, not stoically, casually. Shook my hand and wished me well. I was keen for Lunan to repeat the year, and he said he’d think about it. But I got the impression he was humouring me. It was infuriating. I remember I smelt beer on his breath and thought that if I were his father I’d knock some sense into him.’ James gave a second chuckle, though this time it sounded hollow. ‘That was the way we thought in those days. But we’d been brought up by men who’d gone to war, and gone to war ourselves.’ James sighed. ‘Lunan was like a man squandering an inheritance. He had the brains to do well, but he wasted them, the same way he wasted his talent and ultimately his life. He let that slip from him as casually as he idled away his university career.’ Professor James looked up at Murray; his too-big head grinning like a Halloween mask. ‘I’m glad you’re doing this book. Those of us who were left behind could have served his work better. Debts owed to the dead seem to grow heavier with time.’
Murray nodded, though he could think of no debt the old man might owe the dead poet.
The professor’s voice took on a lilting cadence and he recited,
‘My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends –
It gives a lovely light!’
‘Archie despised poems that rhymed, but that describes him perfectly: a fragile light that burned brightly, but all too briefly.’
‘So you weren’t surprised to hear of his death?’
‘Surprised?’ James’s voice dropped an octave as if some of the shock still lingered on in his memory. ‘Of course I was surprised. I still remember discovering that he’d drowned.’