The Miracle Inspector Read Online Free PDF Page B

Spoiled

    Reading Jesmond’s letters was strangely intimate. It was flattering to have this famous man addressing her directly, talking of love, parties, infidelity, the genesis of his poetry, even though, of course, he wasn’t addressing her; he had written the letters to someone else. She was growing very fond of him. She was falling for him, she might have said, if she wasn’t already married. She had never had an insight into the mind of a grown-up in this way. She’d never talked to her own father as an adult because by the time she had grown up he had been taken away. She was struck, over and over again, by how like her generation Jesmond’s generation was, and also how different; less guarded but more damaged. Needier, somehow, but less defensive. She knew she couldn’t assess a whole generation based on a few scribbles and rejected love letters from a man like Jesmond. And yet still, she did.
    She wished she could share this with Lucas, talk over Jesmond’s motivations, speculate about who this woman was, who he was writing to. When he came to the house, hadn’t Jesmond said something about collecting shells on a beach with a woman he was in love with? Surely that was the same woman. Unfortunately Angela didn’t remember him saying her name.
    She couldn’t talk to Lucas about it. He’d only say, ‘I don’t know how he could live that god-awful, bohemian lifestyle that he and my father lived, caught up in the importance of their music and their poetry and their feelings, and shagging around while the country went down the shitter.’ Something like that, anyway. It was a pretty fair summary of his opinion of Jesmond.
    It was illogical but as Angela read Jesmond’s letters, it felt as if he had known that she would one day read them and that (even though she had only just been born at the time of writing) he was in some sense writing to her future self. If so, she was sure he would have been disappointed if he’d discovered what she was really like. The letters assumed a wisdom and complexity in the reader, a level of sophistication that she didn’t have. She had barely travelled further than the edge of the kitchen table, and the reader of the letters – the legitimate reader – seemed to have seen and done so much. She wished she could have some experiences that would change her. She longed to see something of the rest of the world and learn from what she saw. If Jesmond had been there to talk it through with her, would he have cautioned her to be careful what she wished for? Or would he have joked with her about it, as he used to joke with the woman he loved?
    Angela had looked in the journal and found a scrap of the poem Jesmond had mentioned in the first letter she had read. It had been written hastily, without revisions, as if it was a first draft, and then there was a single line going through it, diagonally, from bottom left to top right, as if he wasn’t happy with it. But he hadn’t ripped the page out or scribbled through the words completely, as he had elsewhere in the book.

    Spoiled
    My touch left a muddy
    fingerprint, a speck on the film stock,
    a smear on the family china,
    a fly in the marmalade you
    were making.
    Don’t reproach me.
    Don’t think I’m trying to
    trivialise by mentioning
    household items. I wish we had
    a household.
    I wish we were together,
    you and me.

    I would take care of you.
    I would not breathe on you or
    touch you or handle you – there I
    go again, saying the wrong thing.
    I mean I would find a way to
    worship you, to be with you
    without changing you while still
    knowing that to be with you would
    change me.

    She couldn’t have read it to Lucas. He hated poetry. ‘What’s the point?’ he’d ask. ‘What’s it good for? What can it do?’
    She’d leave it to educated people (the archivists?) to judge whether or not it was any good. Lucas would sneer at that business about the fly in the marmalade. Surely it didn’t matter – all poetry, pretty