Fidelity

It was somewhere to live. I was

Just hanging around, courting you.

Afloat on the morning tide and tipsy feelings

Of my twenty-fifth year. Gutted, restyled

A la mode, the Alexandria House

Became a soup-kitchen. Those were the days

Before the avant-garde of coffee bars.

The canteen clatter of the British Restaurant,

One of the war’s utility leftovers,

Was still the place to repair the nights with breakfasts.

But Alexandria House was the place to be seen in.

The girls that helped to run it lived above it

With a retinue of loose-lifers, day-sleepers

Exhausted with night-owling.

Somehow I got a mattress up there, in a top room,

Overlooking Petty Cury. A bare

Mattress, on bare boards, in a bare room.

All I had, my notebook and that mattress.

Under the opening, bud-sticky chesnuts,

On into June, my job chucked, I laboured

Only at you, squandering all I’d saved.

Free of University I dangled

In its liberties.

Every night I slept on that mattress, under one blanket,

With a lovely girl, escaped freshly

From her husband to the frontier exposure

Of work in the soup-kitchen. What

Knighthood possessed me there? I think of it

As a kind of time that cannot pass,

That I never used, so still possess.

She and I slept in each other’s arms,

Naked and as easy as lovers, a month of nights,

Yet never once made love. A holy law

Had invented itself, somehow, for me.

But she too served it, like a priestess,

Tender, kind and stark naked beside me.

She traced out the fresh rips you had inscribed

Across my back, seeming to join me

In my obsession, in my concentration,

To keep my preoccupation intact.

She never once invited, never tempted.

And I never stirred a finger beyond

Sisterly comforting. I was like her sister.

It never seemed unnatural. I was focused,

So locked onto you, so brilliantly,

Everything that was not you was blind-spot.

I still puzzle over it — doubtful, now,

Whether to envy myself, or pity. Her friend,

Who had a bigger room, was wilder.

We moved in with her. That lofty room

Became a dormitory and HQ

Alternative to St Botolph’s. Plump and pretty,

With a shameless gap-tooth laugh, her friend

Did all she could to get me inside her.

And you will never know what a battle

I fought to keep the meaning of my words

Solid with the world we were making.

I was afraid, if I lost that fight,

Something might abandon us. Lifting

Each of those naked girls, as they smiled at me

In their early twenties, I laid them

Under the threshold of our unlikely future

As those who wanted protection for a new home

Used to bury, under the new threshold,

A sinless child.