That autumn Theo began travelling to east London for lessons with various elderly figures of the British blues scene, contacted through a friend of Rosalind's at her paper. According to Theo, Jack Bruce was the most impressive because he had formal training in music, played several
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instruments, revolutionised bass playing, knew everything about theory and recorded with everyone during the heroic period of the British blues, in the early sixties, the long-ago days of Blues Incorporated. He was also, Theo said, more patient with him than the others, and very kind. Perowne was surprised how an elevated figure like Bruce could be troubled to spend time instructing a mere boy. Disarmingly, Theo saw nothing unusual in it at all.
Through Bruce, Theo met some of the legendary figures. J|
He was allowed to sit in on a Clapton masterclass. Long John Baldry came over from Canada for a reunion. Theo liked hearing about Cyril Davies and Alexis Korner, and the Graham Bond Organisation, and Cream's first concert. By some accident Theo jammed for several minutes with Ronnie Wood and met his older brother, Art. A year on, Art asked Theo to join a jamming session at the Eel Pie Club in the Cabbage Patch pub in Twickenham. In less than five years he seems to have possessed the whole tradition. Now, whenever he's at the chateau he plays for his grandfather and shows him his latest tricks. He seems to need John's approval, and the old man obliges. Perowne has to hand it to him, he opened up something in Theo that he, Perowne, might never have known about. It's true that on a body-surfing holiday in Pembrokeshire when Theo was nine, Henry showed him three simple chords on someone's guitar and how the blues worked in E. That was just one thing along with the Frisbee throwing, grass skiing, quad biking, paintballing, stone skipping and in-line skating. He worked seriously on his children's fun back then. He even broke an arm keeping up on the skates. But he never could have guessed those three chords would become the basis of his son's professional life.
John Grammaticus has also been a force in Daisy's life, at least, until something went wrong between them. When she was thirteen, about the time he was teaching her brother the boogie in C, he asked her to tell him about the books she enjoyed. He heard her out and announced she was under132 Saturday
stretched - he was contemptuous of the 'young adult' fiction she was reading. He persuaded her to try Jane Eyre, and read the first chapters aloud to her, and mapped out for her the pleasures to come. She persisted, but only to please him. The language was unfamiliar, the sentences long, the pictures in her head, she kept saying, wouldn't come clear. Perowne tried the book and had much the same experience. But John kept his granddaughter at it, and finally, a hundred pages in, she fell for Jane and would hardly stop for meals. When the family went for a walk across the fields one afternoon, they left her with forty-one pages to go. When they returned they found her under a tree by the dovecote weeping, not for the story but because she had reached the end and emerged from a dream to grasp that it was all the creation of a woman she would never meet. She cried, she said, out of admiration, out of joy that such things could be made up. What sort of things, Grammaticus wanted to know. Oh Grandad, when the orphanage children die and yet the weather is so beautiful, and that bit when Rochester pretends to be a gypsy, and when Jane meets Bertha for the first time and she's like a wild animal . . .
He gave her Kafka's 'Metamorphosis', which he said was ideal for a thirteen-year-old girl. She raced through this domestic fairy story and demanded her parents read it too. She came into their bedroom in the chateau far too early one morning and sat on the bed to lament: that poor Gregor Samsa, his family are so horrid to him. How lucky he was to have a sister to clean out his room and find him the foods he liked. Rosalind took it in at a gulp, as though it were a legal brief. Perowne, by nature ill-disposed towards a tale of impossible transformation, conceded that by the end he was intrigued - he wouldn't have put it higher than that. He liked the unthinking cruelty of that sister on the final page, riding the tram with her parents to the last stop, stretching her young limbs, ready to begin a sensual life. A transformation he could believe in. This was the first book Daisy recommended
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to him, and marked the beginning of his literary education at her hands. Though he's been diligent over the years and tries to read almost everything she puts his way, he knows she thinks he's a coarse, unredeemable materialist. She thinks he lacks an imagination. Perhaps it's so, but she hasn't quite given up on him yet. The books are piled at his bedside, and she'll be arriving with more tonight. He hasn't even finished the Darwin biography, or started the Conrad.
From the summer of Bronte and Kafka onwards, Grammaticus took charge of Daisy's reading. He had firm, old-fashioned views of the fundamenials, not all of which he thought should be too pleasurable. He believed in children learning by rote, and he was prepared to pay up. Shakespeare, Milton and the King James Bible - five pounds for every twenty lines memorised from the passages he marked. These three were the sources of all good English verse and prose; he instructed her to roll the syllables around her tongue and feel their rhythmic power. The summer of her sixteenth birthday, Daisy earned a teenage fortune at the chateau, chanting, even singing, parts of Paradise Lost, and Genesis and various gloomy musings of Hamlet. She recited Browning, Clough, Chesterton and Masefield. In one good week she earned forty-five pounds. \ I
Even now, six years on, at the age of twenty-three, she claims to be able to spout - her word - non-stop for more than two hours. By the time she was eighteen and leaving school she'd read a decent fraction of what her grandfather called the obvious stuff. He wouldn't hear of her going anywhere to ?
study English Literature other than his own Oxford college. !|
Though Henry and Rosalind begged him not to, he probably *.
put in a good word for her. Dismissively, he told them that these days the system was incorruptible and he couldn't help .]
even if he wanted to. Familiarity with their own professions &
told them this could never be strictly true. But it soothed their f
consciences, the handwritten note to Daisy's headmaster from
^ "TP
a tutor which said she'd given a dazzling interview, backing 1
every insight with a quotation. *
134 H Saturday
A year later she may have had a little too much success for her grandfather's taste. She arrived at St Felix two days after the rest of the family, and brought with her the poem that had won her that year's Newdigate Prize. Henry and Rosalind had never heard of the Newdigate, but were automatically pleased. But it meant more, perhaps too much, to Daisy's grandfather who had won it himself back in the late fifties. He took her pages into his study - her parents were only allowed to see them later. The poem described at length the tender meditations of a young woman at the end of another affair. Once more1 she has stripped the sheets from her bed and taken them to the launderette where she watches through the 'misted monocle' of the washing machine, 'all stains of us turning to be purged'. These affairs also turned, like the seasons, too quickly, 'running green to brown' with 'windfalls sweetly rotting to oblivion'. The stains are not really sins but 'watermarks of ecstasy' or later 'milky palimpsests', and therefore not so easily removed after all. Vaguely religious, mellifluously erotic, the poem suggested to a troubled Perowne that his daughter's first year at university had been more crowded than he could ever have guessed. Not just a boyfriend, or a lover, but a whole succession, to the point of serenity. This may have been why Grammaticus took against the poem - his protegee had struck out and found other men. Or it may have been one more pitiful attack of status anxiety - in forming Daisy's literary education he hadn't intended to produce yet another rival poet. This Newdigate after all had also been won by Fenton and Motion.
Teresa made a simple supper of salade nicoise with fresh tuna from the market in Pamiers. The dining table was set right outside the kitchen, on the edge of a wide expanse of lawn. It was another unexceptionally beautiful evening, with purplish shadows of trees and shrubs advancing across the dried grass, and crickets beginning to take up where the afternoon cicadas left off. Grammaticus was last to appear, and Perowne's guess, as his father-in-law lowered himself
135 Ian MeEwan
into the chair next to Daisy's, was that he'd already sunk a bottle of wine or more on his own. This was confirmed when he laid his hand on his granddaughter's wrist, and with that hectoring frankness that drunks mistake for intimacy, told her that her poem was ill-advised and not the sort of thing that generally won the Newdigate. It wasn't good at all, he told her, as though she must know it already and was bound to agree. He was, as a psychiatrist might have said, disinhibited.
As early as her final year at school, just eighteen, head girl and academic star of the sixth form, Daisy had developed her precise and self-contained manner. She's a light-boned young woman, trim and compact, with a small elfin face, short black hair and straight back. Her composure looks impregnable. At dinner that night, only her parents and brother knew how fragile that controlled appearance was. But she was cool as she unhurriedly withdrew her hand and looked at her grandfather, waiting for him to say more. He took a long pull on his wine, as though it was a pint pot of lukewarm beer, and advanced into her silence. He said the rhythms were loose and clumsy, the stanzas were of irregular length. Henry looked at Rosalind, willing her to intervene. If she didn't, he would have to, and the matter would assume too much importance. To his shame, he was not absolutely certain what a stanza was until he looked in a dictionary later that night. Rosalind held back - breaking into her father's flow too early could cause an explosion. {
Managing him was a delicate art. On her side of the table, f|
Teresa was already suffering. In her time, and on many occasions in the years before her time, there had been scenes like this, though never one that involved the children. She knew it could not end well. Theo rested his jaw in his palm and stared at his plate.
Encouraged by his granddaughter's silence, John went on a roll, warming to his own authority, stupidly affectionate in his manner. He was confusing the young woman in front of
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him with the sixteen-year-old whom he had coached in the Elizabethan poets of the silver age. If he'd ever known, he had forgotten what one good year at a university could do. He could only imagine she felt as he did, and he was only telling her the obvious: the poem was too long, it tried too hard to shock, there was a simile they both knew was convoluted. He paused to drink deeply again, and still she said nothing.
Then he told her her poem was not original, and finally got a reaction. She cocked her neat head and raised an eyebrow. Not original? Perowne, seeing a telltale tremble in the dainty chin, thought the cool manner wouldn't hold. Rosalind spoke up at last, but her father talked over her. Yes, a little known but gifted poet, Pat Jordan, a woman of the Liverpool school, had written up a similar idea in the sixties - the end of the affair, the spinning sheets at the launderette displayed before the thoughtful poet. Was it possible that Grammaticus knew how idiotic his behaviour was but could not pull back? In the old man's weak eyes there was a dog-like cringing look, as if he was scaring himself and was pleading for someone to restrain him. His voice cracked as he strained for affability, and he talked on and on, making himself more ridiculous. The silence around the table that had enabled him was now his punishment, his affliction. Theo was gazing at him in amazement, shaking his head. Of course, John was saying, he wasn't accusing Daisy of plagiarism, she may have read the poem and forgotten about it, or simply reinvented it for herself. After all, it wasn't such an exceptional or unusual idea, but either way . . .
At last he wound down, unable to make his situation worse. Perowne was pleased to see that his daughter wasn't crushed. She was furious. He could see the pulse in her neck throbbing beneath the skin. But she was not going to relieve her grandfather with any sort of outburst. Suddenly, unable to bear the silence, he started up again, talking hurriedly, trying to soften his judgment without actually altering it. Daisy cut
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in and said she thought they should talk about something
else, at which Grammaticus muttered a simple 'Oh fuck!', J
stood up and went indoors. They watched him go - a familiar
sight, that receding form, but upsetting too, for it was the
first time that summer.
Daisy stayed on another three days, long enough for her grandfather to have thought of ways of resuming relations. But the next day he was brisk and cheerfully self-absorbed and seemed to have forgotten. Or he was simply pretending - like many drinkers, he liked to think each new day drew a line under the day before. When Daisy left for Barcelona it was an arrangement that had long been in place - she brought herself to kiss him goodbye on both cheeks and he gripped her arm, and afterwards was able to persuade himself that a reconciliation had taken place. When Rosalind and then Henry tried to convince him that he still had work to do on Daisy, he told them they were making trouble. He must have wondered then why she didn't appear at St Felix the following two summers. She found good reasons to travel with friends in China and Brazil. He should have written to her when she got her first, but by then he had fallen into a sulk about the matter. So it was a risky move when Rosalind sent him a proof copy of Daisy's poems. Wasn't he bound to dislike them? Especially when her publisher was the one who let his Collected go out of print.
If his enthusiasm for My Saucy Bark was tactical, he concealed it brilliantly. His long letter to her opened by conceding he had been 'a disgraceful boor' about the launderette poem. It wasn't included in the book, and Henry wondered, though never aloud, whether she thought her grandfather was right about it all along. She had found a conversational tone, he told her in his letter, that was nevertheless rich with meaning and association. Every now and then that everyday, level voice was interrupted by lines of sudden emotional intensity and 'secular transcendence'. In this respect, he found everywhere in her poems the spirit of his beloved Larkin,