The Itinerant Lodger

While she was gone Barnes fetched from his suitcase a sheet of blank quarto writing paper. On it he wrote: “Poem, by Barnes,” and then he placed it in the middle of his table, where it would await him in the morning.

“I’ll show you how to make your bed,” Mrs Pollard said on her return, and he followed her to the sofa. She lifted the back of the sofa to its full extent, and then she brought the seat forward and at the same time lowered it, to reveal, where previously there had been only a sofa, a bed. She then pursued the reverse process, taking care to lift the under-bar so that the springs wouldn’t catch and be torn to ribbons. She then asked Barnes to demonstrate, just for her peace of mind. He proved a most unresponsive pupil, and it was several minutes before she felt that she could safely leave him. To him these minutes were as charged with the torture of practical anguish as those dreadful hours that he had spent making and remaking his bed pack, in the Pay Corps, long ago, during his formative years. He was in no doubt, at moments like these—and there were many such—that one of the primary causes of his arrested development had been the diversity and complexity of the sleeping arrangements that he had been required to master. There was a certain hammock, in particular, that he would never quite forget.

“Well,” said Mrs Pollard at last, “there it is. That’s the best I can do for you.”

“Thank you.”

“It’s not a bad bed, really. Pollard won it in a newspaper. He arranged ten hardy annuals in the order in which he would like to be given them for Christmas. We used to sleep in it. I suppose it has a sentimental value for me. It’s really quite a good bed. Big, too. Big enough for two, wouldn’t you say?”

But Barnes did not tell her what he would have said. He was polite enough to wait until she had returned with his stone hot water bottle, and then, when she had finally left the room, he fainted.

Chapter 3

THE MORNING WAS CRISP AND WHITE, IDEAL FOR shaving. Barnes had slept well, as he always did after fainting, and as he shaved he felt in excellent form. The quarto sheets were waiting for him, the water was hot, and soon his work would begin. He could hear Mrs Pollard going about her morning tasks in another part of the house, and for a moment he felt uneasy. He hoped that she wasn’t going to make demands on him. Then he dismissed the thought and turned to more important things.

When he had shaved he dressed and when he had dressed he raised the main part of his bed and slid it back towards the head, to reveal, where previously there had been only a bed, a sofa. Then Mrs Pollard brought him his breakfast. She asked him how he was, how he had slept, what were his plans, but they had little conversation, and he hardly minded her presence. He ate fast, for he was intoxicated by the infinite possibilities that were whirring about in his head. He had never before felt as strong as he did at this moment.

At last the breakfast things were cleared, and he was alone. He seated himself at the table and gazed proudly round the room. There was the sofa, the piano, the table, the easy chair and the hard chair. He noted with delight the Scottish glen above the piano, the Dresden hyenas on the mantelpiece, the tapestried axioms above the sofa, the two ivory ospreys, between which there were as yet no books, and the old polished range in the middle of which, like a neon cat, his absurdly small gas fire sat hissing. During the night there had been virtually no vacant floor space even to put his shoes and socks in, and even now, when the bed had become a sofa, the room was small. And although there was a window behind the sofa, affording a pleasant vista over Mrs Pollard’s cosy little garden, it afforded very little light, the cosiness being caused by high walls and surrounding houses. Yet despite all this he looked around him with joy. Here was the haven that he had sought, in which he could distil the experience of a long and lonely life. Here was something that was his, and yet did not belong to him, and would not clutter him up.

The sheet of quarto writing paper lay on the table where he had left it. Beside it was his HB pencil, and beside the pencil lay his souvenir rubber, on which the letters “ME TO MA” suggested a filial devotion that circumstance had, in fact, denied him. Originally the rubber had read “WELCOME TO MARGATE.”

He picked up his pencil. It was a moment to savour, and he was still savouring it an hour and a half later when Mrs Pollard brought him his coffee. Then, after his coffee, he began to write.

For the next ten days he sat at the table, free. He ate egg and bacon for breakfast, stews for lunch and cold meats for supper, and between meals he wrote. Every now and then he would add a word to the collection that he was gathering in front of him, and every now and then he would discard a sheet of paper into the waste paper basket. Every now and then Mrs Pollard would take the waste paper basket to the dustbin, and twice a week the dustman, who had no knowledge of poetry, would empty the bin into a lorry. So there was no chance of the dustman bursting in and exclaiming: “I can’t accept this. It isn’t rubbish. It’s a masterpiece.” No, once it was gone it was gone. And each time he arrived at the end of a sheet it was gone, gone for ever. For nothing that he wrote seemed good enough to keep.

Often he would sit for many minutes without writing. It was not so much that he could not think of a word. That, with the dictionary to help him, presented no problem. It was rather that he found it impossible to decide which word to choose, of all those that were available to him in such abundance. His hopes were so high, his possibilities so infinite, that each actual word crushed him with its puniness. The moment a word was conveyed to paper, it seemed ridiculous. Why, he would ask himself, should he start with that? Or finish with it, for that matter? So that he was for ever adding words at both ends, until the original word had become lost in a welter of qualifications and preambles, and had to be discarded. And once it was discarded the whole structure around it collapsed, and it was necessary to begin again.

But how? He tried several methods. He tried selecting at random the first word of each line, and then working forwards, or selecting the last word, and working backwards. He tried writing the first word of the first line, the second word of the second line, the third word of the third line, and so on, and then going back and filling in the gaps, just as he had done with his impots at prep school. He tried writing down words which he knew to be conducive of poetic inspiration, words like “spring” and “autumn” and “corpses” and “e’er” and “o’er”. All to no avail. As those ten long days passed, the moments when he wrote no words grew longer, and longer, and longer.

And all the while Mrs Pollard was finding excuses to visit his room. She would leave things there and have to return for them. She would think she heard the shilling finish in his fire. She would bring him a cup of tea and an assortment of sweet biscuits. Each time she came she seemed to hover over him, and each time, had there been a train to his thought, she would have broken it.

Finally, towards dusk on the tenth day, when he had not added a word for many hours, she remarked: “Still working, then?”

“Er, yes.” He was annoyed at the interruption, although it interrupted nothing.

“You’ll get round shoulders. Still, it’s none of my business.”

“No.”

“I’ve never really been creative myself.” She had taken the fact that he had replied as an invitation, and had seated herself on the sofa, setting off a series of twangings and screechings that irritated Barnes beyond measure. “I’ve never really had anything to say,” she continued. “But you….” she paused, and for the first time for ten days Barnes looked at her as if she existed.

“I?”

“You have something to say.”

“And how am I going to say it?”

“In your poems.”

“I’ve written no poems.”

“You said you were writing poems. I was led to believe that you were writing poems. I don’t expect my tenants to lock themselves away for days on end, not speaking to me, and not even a couplet to show for it.”

“I tried.”

With astonishing speed a soft maternity enveloped Mrs Pollard. “You’re new to this business, aren’t you?” she asked.

He blushed and fidgeted awkwardly. “Yes,” he admitted.

“You aren’t really a poet at all.”

“No.”

“As if I minded. You could have told me.”

“I didn’t know.”

“No offence, I hope. Some of my best friends haven’t been poets. But I said to myself when you mentioned it: ‘That one a poet? H’m. I wonder.’”

Barnes replied quite mechanically to her maternity. All the verse had gone out of him. Of infinite possibilities he no longer had the slightest inkling. He was a boy again, and he could think of nothing to say to this new mother of his.

“Perhaps you’ll think of something later on,” said Mrs Pollard. “Some blank verse, or a nice hexameter. There’s no harm in keeping on trying.”

“I’m just not a poet.”

“You mustn’t say things like that. Faint heart never won fair lady.”

His faint heart fluttered like a moth with thrombosis, and he lowered his eyes.

“I’ll make you a stew,” she said, as if it was a thought that had just occurred to her for the first time and had opened up visions far in excess of those she had ever imagined. “Perhaps that’ll cheer you up.”

“Thank you.”

“You do like my stews, don’t you? You aren’t tired of them?”

“Not at all, no.”

“You aren’t just saying that?”

“No, I—it would be very nice.”

Left to himself, he made a final great effort to concentrate on his work. It was no use giving up. What would Chaucer’s friends have said if he’d packed the whole thing up just before Strood? The possibilities were even more infinite than he had imagined. Well, he must be that much more determined. It was a challenge, and he must rise to it. Perhaps he had been trying in the wrong way. Perhaps there had been something over-deliberate in his approach. Well, he must try a more open method, make himself more receptive, allow his thoughts and images freedom to form in their own good time. He decided to make his mind go a complete blank. This it did instantly, and it was still a complete blank when Mrs Pollard returned.

“I wondered if you’d like a little garlic?” she inquired coyly.

“Yes, that would be very nice.”

“Only some do and some don’t.”