To a cuckold:
Miles mate, you don’t know me and if you did you wouldn’t like me and if you knew what I get up to with your misses you’d like me even less. 
But honest, I’m doing you a favour, haven’t you noticed how sweet and attentive she’s become? How she sings when cooking supper and never complains when you spend Sundays at the golf course? She’s lost weight too and looks younger, why be jealous? It’s me who endures her guilt and remorse whereas with you she’s happily luxurious. The key to a good marriage is adultery you see, every husband needs a louse to warm the bed for him every Union a bastard like me. So when you find out and come looking for me, don’t bring a knife bring a thank you present. The day she stops betraying you is the day your problems begin.
Matt Holmes, à journalist on the book pages has his annual lunch with his friend and twenty years his senior, the Poet Robert Pope, “the bow-tied poet”. Pope asks him to be his executor in the event of his death to which Holmes, without giving it too much thought agrees. Soon after Pope dies unexpectedly and the story unfolds in two timelines, as the narrator, Holmes relates the present day and also his relationship with Robert Pope. Holmes’ first surprise comes at the funeral when Louis, Popes literary agent tells Matt that Pope had asked him to be his executor a few months after he had made the request to Matt who is left feeling unwanted, but things are soon cleared up:
I got the call at the office a couple of weeks after the funeral, only Marie phones my extension everyone else e-mails so it took me a moment to grasp who the caller was, “What do you mean both of us?” I said.
“It’s common enough” Louis said “after we talked at the wake I realised that’s what he’d probably done, I tried to find you to say so but you’d rushed off. I spoke with his solicitor yesterday the will was straight forward, he left everything to Jill the codicil concerns his literary remains, nice phrase eh? he named us as joint executors, officially I’m general executor and you’re literary executor, but in effect we’ll be acting together.”
“Right.”
“You sound dubious?”
“I’m just surprised, I assumed he’d dropped me.”
“Well I’m glad he didn’t, my role is to sell his work, I’ve not the expertise to sort through the manuscripts”.
“I’m no scholar either.”
“Well he trusted you, he knew you’d do it well. There might not be much to do, he told me he’d written nothing since his last collection.”
In the present day, Matt advances then slowly as Popes office is at Jill, his frosty and wary widow’s home where Matt is ill equipped emotionally to deal with Jill but where Matt’s wife Marie seems to understand her and enables Matt to slowly find the right tone, but initially finds no new material. In the past he relates how they met when Pope was a lecturer an Brandon, an american university, and Holmes was studying there, they hit if off, with Pope telling him of a girl Corrine, he had fallen for but who had left him and of the late age he had lost his virginity. Soon after Holmes comes back to London, he tells us of the return of the energetic, city loving Pope, a contrast to the older suburbs living Pope:
His poems began to appear in journals and within months to my amazement and envy he got some reviewing work too, editors liked his fearlessness, he was the new kid on the block, cudgel in hand ready to take on the old guys.
“It helps that I don’t know anyone.” he said “once you’re friends with other writers you’re sunk.”
I was unpublished and didn’t count, but writers can’t make a living without contacts, and though he continued claiming not to know anyone, people got to know him, editors, publishers, radio producers.
“I’m enjoying my fifteen minutes” he said, stressing his lack of credentials failed PhD student, second rate academic, wannabe poet.
As the story then progresses, Holmes slowly discovers unpublished poems hidden away in other documents that cast his friend in another and as yet unforeseen light, as a misogynist and a predator of women, illustrated by the opening poem. Was he serially unfaithful to Jill, was it possible to write these poems with such apparent feeling without having lived these events?
The conflict within the story is then centred around Jill, fiercely fighting to keep the exiting vision of Robert Pope, and Matt trying to as best as possible carry out the will of his friend and to publish his works, and what if there were more to these poems than we imagined?
A clever story that keeps the readers interest and an ending in keeping with the mood of the book.
First Published in English as “The Executor” in 2018 by Vintage.
South of Paris books 