The grass the polyanthus cheques;
And polished porphyry reflects,
By the descending rill…
and then observes: ‘Anyone who knows, by good luck, the limestone country of Raby, and of Staindrop Moor alongside, and Teesdale, will at once see the flower and the rock and the waterfall in a characteristic conjunction which Smart must have known in his County Durham days, the limestone so finely polished by centuries of the descending rill, protruding from grass chequered with the lilac umbrels, by the thousand, of the Birdseye Primrose.’
Geoffrey, whose beloved older brothers were slaughtered in the Great War, was never ‘half in love with easeful death’. Extinction was the nastiest of his enemies. He loved a letter by William Cowper, written in 1790, ‘after madness and preliminaries of vengeance and hell’: ‘The consideration of my short continuance here, which was once grateful to me, now fills me with regret. I would like to live and live always.’
Well, he couldn’t, and nobody can. Geoffrey wrote many poems, and I fear that many of them will be forgotten. Yet there is a single poem, set down in his last years, that ought to endure in anthologies. It is short, and elegiac, and – to my ears – beautiful:
You are young, you two, in loving:
Why should you wonder what endearments
Old whisper still to old in bed,
Or what the one left will say and say,
Aloud, when nobody overhears, to the one
Who irremediably is dead?
Jane said, ‘Oh, sod it all’, and said it again and again, often with a laugh, when she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. In those final five years of our deepening friendship, we talked on the phone every evening at six, mentioning books that Geoffrey would have relished dissecting – all overpraised, most now mouldering away – and exchanging recipes. The supply of socks for Circe showed no signs of running out.
In the spring of 1989, I went with Jane on an eating tour of the Highlands of Scotland. One day we came across something memorably daft – ‘daft’ was one of her favourite words, which she spoke with the flat ‘a’ of her native Sunderland. It was a notice outside a hotel which read:
ROOMS
LESS GOOD – £12
SLIGHTLY BETTER – £16
BEST – £30
The sight of it inspired her to laughter. Her laugh was like a hoot, rising and rising in volume, and there were times when I thought it would never stop. It was a wonderful noise she made – warm, generous, unconstrained. It was the SLIGHTLY BETTER – £16 that inspired her now. I waited for Jane’s hooting to cease, as curious passers-by stared in amazement. In that same small town, we went in search of a cotton shirt which I wanted to buy. The assistant in the men’s clothing shop told us, ‘Ye’ll nae get a cotton shirt here. Try the tobacconist across the street.’ The tobacconist indeed sold shirts, but not cotton ones – ‘There’s no call.’ It was typical of Jane that she kept her laughter in check until we were outside. ‘There’s no call,’ she repeated, and we both had hysterics for the second time.
I remember, too, that we stopped to have a picnic by Loch Ness. The monster was otherwise engaged, but an unidentifiable seabird compensated for his or her absence. It ate bread, cheese and salami on the bonnet of the car. Jane smiled, and said of the husband who had left her desolate, ‘Geoffrey would have recognized the bird in an instant.’ She opened a bottle of alcohol-free white wine someone had given her. ‘What do you think?’ she asked after we had taken a sip. Before I could reply, she said, ‘It’s disgusting, isn’t it? Let’s have the real thing.’ So we did.
Later that year, I cooked lunch for Jane and Bryan Robertson, with whom she had been in love thirty years earlier in Cambridge. It was the happiest of reunion s, with Bryan in unstoppable form as they exchanged memories and gossip. The pioneering curator and restorer of the Whitechapel Gallery in the 1950s and 60s – who had rescued Turner and Stubbs from disregard and neglect, and brought Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko to the attention of the British – was hooting as heartily as Jane that day. Jane said afterwards that she had loved Bryan for his rare intelligence, for his enthusiasm, and for a quality he shared with Geoffrey – a deep, deep knowledge of books, paintings and poems that fashion had overtaken and overlooked. And when Bryan died – on 18 November 2002 – at the end of a gruesome illness, borne with much good humour and concern for his friends – I thought of Jane’s high regard for him, and his glowing affection for her.
At Jane’s memorial service, in the spring of 1990, I was privileged to read a poem by Geoffrey that had never been published. It was a love poem, addressed to his young bride, which Jane carried in her bag wherever she went. She needed no written confirmation of his love, which was demonstrated by look and touch, but it must have comforted her when her husband, mentor and lover was no more.