What We Can Know

Harry⁶ wrote to the Times Literary Supplement calling the evening the Second Immortal Dinner and declaring the poem a masterpiece. Francis³ never published it. In 2017, as Francis³ lay dying of pancreatic cancer, journalist Harriet¹⁰ published an article portraying the Corona as an environmental call to arms and demanding to know why it remained hidden.

An anonymous blog claimed oil companies paid Blundy³ for silence. Vivien² refused all comment. Over the following decades — through nuclear exchanges between India and Pakistan, the Inundation that drowned London and made Britain an archipelago, and the Third Sino-American War — the unread poem accumulated mythic power.

Activists wore Blundy T-shirts. Couples called themselves Blundy pairs. Poetry competitions tried to recreate it. The Corona became more beautiful for being unknown, a blank screen onto which each catastrophic age projected its hunger.

Tom¹ and his colleague Rose Church⁵ share a tangled history: fifteen months living together that went stale, then years as intimate friends who could not quite separate. On a hot June evening, they swim out from the campus beach across translucent water to a submerged sandbar.

Standing chest-deep, hands on each other's shoulders, they make love as gentle wavelets rock them. Rose⁵ speaks the three contractual words first. Tom,¹ who has spent a lifetime avoiding them, follows. They move back in together and marry in a five-minute ceremony before the university mainframe.

Rose⁵ assembles a paper on realism's crisis during the Derangement; Tom¹ drafts his reputation essay on the poem that exists only in people's minds. They argue constantly about whether the Corona still survives somewhere. She insists it is gone. He refuses to believe it.

Rose⁵ proposes they teach a joint course on the history of artificial intelligence. Tom¹ reluctantly agrees. On the first Thursday, fifty-eight students face them in a horseshoe arrangement. Rose⁵ begins a condensed history of computing. The silence feels wrong.

A graduate student named Kevin Howard¹⁵ stands — small, strangely beautiful, radiantly confident. He announces he speaks for the group. They are tired of being told what has been lost, tired of dead wars and extinct hedgehogs. They want to talk about their own future, not someone else's past.

As he speaks, students leave one by one in choreographed protest. When Howard¹⁵ finishes and hurries out, Tom¹ and Rose⁵ sit facing empty chairs, unable to look at each other. The humiliation becomes campus legend. Their professional reputation suffers, and a coolness settles over their marriage.

Tom¹ escapes to the Bodleian for more research, relieved to be away from Rose.⁵ He finds nothing new in the Blundy archives. Walking the cliffs, he contemplates whether their marriage can survive a failed course. He returns home at one in the morning.

A lamp burns by the sofa where an empty wine bottle and two glasses sit amid disarranged cushions. The bedroom door is closed. Rose⁵ emerges in her dressing gown, hair tousled, and says flatly that he is back early. Tom¹ demands she remove her visitor.

When the bedroom door opens, out comes Kevin Howard¹⁵ — the student who humiliated them — unable to meet Tom's¹ eyes. Rose⁵ positions herself between the two men as Howard¹⁵ hurries away. Tom¹ sleeps on the sofa. Within days he moves into a monastic studio apartment, feeling nothing, which frightens him more than pain would.

Months pass. Tom¹ teaches mechanically, avoids Rose,⁵ drifts through indifference. One November night at a dreary pub near campus, he opens a forgotten letter from Drummond,¹⁴ the Bodleian archivist. Drummond¹⁴ describes how his visiting niece Dolly, a fourteen-year-old math prodigy, became intrigued by the mysterious number in Vivien's journal.

When Dolly realized it could not be a phone number — no matching area code existed — she stripped the leading zero and recognized a geographic coordinate. Drummond¹⁴ entered it into an old map.

The location was the dairy at the Barn, Vivien's² study. A cryptic journal entry — four metres out from the long south-east edge — confirmed a burial site. Tom¹ leaps from his chair, sends it crashing backward. There is only one person he wants to tell, and her apartment lights are dark.

Tom¹ shows Rose⁵ the letter at lunch. She is electrified — the sort of eccentric thing Vivien² would do, she says. Their reconciliation proceeds cautiously through planning. Rose's⁵ inherited money funds the expedition. They hire Jo Mideksa,¹⁶ a compact, dark-haired captain with a shallow-draught fishing boat called Salty.

In March they sail from Port Marlborough through the Cotswold Islands. The site of the Barn is now a steep, tree-covered island. Tom¹ and Rose⁵ scramble ashore, haul packs up a cliff, and hack through birch thickets and bramble using compass bearings and paced metres.

Their backs ache, Rose's⁵ heel blisters, an insect lodges in Tom's¹ eye. They find the dairy's ruined stone walls and begin digging. The first hole hits impassable limestone. The second, guided by a coin toss, strikes something metallic at sixty-five centimetres.

They unearth a stainless-steel case, haul it through rain back to the boat, and cut it open with chisel, drill, and bolt-cutters. Inside a welded plastic inner container, embedded in moulded foam, lie two packages.

The larger one, tapered and light, contains Percy Greene's⁴ unfinished replica of a Vieuxtemps Guarneri violin — the instrument crafted by Vivien's² first husband before Alzheimer's destroyed him. Tom¹ recognizes it from Vivien's journals and his eyes fill. The smaller package is rectangular: not a poem on vellum but a prose manuscript on thick cotton paper.

Vivien's² confession. Tom¹ passes the folder to Rose,⁵ who reads, turns pages, and places her hand on his arm. Then she guides his hand to her belly, to a faint swell he had not noticed. She tells him it will be all right, and so will they.

Vivien's² confession opens with her childhood: a dismissive airline-pilot father who valued his son over his daughters, a compliant mother, sisters Rachel⁸ and herself liberated by neglect into good educations. After university, Vivien² took an estate-agent job in London, fell into partying, and became pregnant by a man who walked away.

She named her daughter Diana. For six months she was happy, cared for by medical-student housemates. Then came the night of a large party. Vivien² drank terribly. She forgot about Diana. She went to bed without checking on the baby.

In the morning she found her daughter face down in vomit. At the inquest, the coroner was gentle — which deepened the shame. Vivien's² sister Rachel⁸ brought her home. Eventually Vivien² crawled back to Oxford for a doctorate on the poet John Clare, certain she did not deserve another child.

At an east Oxford pub, Vivien² watched a banjo player with a generous face and flickering forearm muscles. Percy Greene⁴ was a violin maker, a hiker who learned his birds from his mother and delighted in physical things. They married. He was kind, tender, competent — everything her father was not.

Then came the morning his memory swallowed several hours whole. Scans revealed compromised brain tissue: early-onset Alzheimer's at forty-three. The long plateau of decline followed. Percy's⁴ questions repeated endlessly. He followed Vivien² through the house.

He forgot their love, forgot the Guarneri violin half-built in his shed. Vivien² took unpaid leave from teaching to nurse him alone, escaping only when Rachel⁸ could visit. Meanwhile, she carried on a secret affair with Harry Kitchener,⁶ Francis Blundy's³ married editor — Tuesday evenings, ostensibly Italian classes.

Harry⁶ ended things in seconds, leaning on his car door in the back lane with the casual smoothness of a man returning a library book. Vivien² smiled through the humiliation, quoted Drayton, and went inside. The fury came later — weeks of rehearsing retorts she should have made.

When an invitation arrived for a Blundy³ reading at the Sheldonian Theatre, she saw her chance. She sat prominently in the fourth row and after the event approached Francis³ at the reception, making sure Harry⁶ watched them leave together.

At the Randolph Hotel, instead of sex, they talked until two in the morning — about families, faith, dementia, and Vivien's² most guarded secrets. Francis³ listened like no one since Rachel.⁸ What began as a calculated humiliation of her ex-lover became something she had not foreseen: genuine, dangerous connection with a man whose mind seduced her.

Rachel⁸ arranged four days of respite. Francis³ drove Vivien² to the Cotswolds to see his Barn under construction and the old dairy he intended as her study, complete with oak writing desk. He outlined their future together: herb pots by the kitchen door, poultry, fresh eggs, bookshelves being built in Witney.

They spent four days reading, talking, cooking, and making love in London. Then everything stalled. Percy⁴ refused care homes. Rachel⁸ had breast cancer. Francis³ took other lovers. The couple was reduced to twenty-minute meetings in his parked car in Vivien's² back lane.

During one such meeting, Francis³ told her flatly they had to act. His meaning was unmistakable. She said no and fled to the house. But her desperate emails continued — describing Percy's⁴ incontinence, her sleeplessness, her hatred of what his disease had made him. Francis³ kept every message.

One night, while Percy⁴ slept and Vivien² sat in an exhausted daze at the kitchen table, tapping came at the French windows. Francis³ stood in a wide-brimmed hat and leather gloves, carrying a cloth shoulder bag. He asked where Percy⁴ was and told her to stay.

She was too slow to understand, too stupefied to move. She heard Francis's³ voice upstairs, then Percy's⁴ body hurtling headfirst down the steep stairs. He struck the tiled hallway. Francis³ knelt beside him, pulled a short-handled mallet from the bag, gripped Percy's⁴ hair, and brought the metal down against his forehead.

Vivien² watched. She did not intervene. Francis³ gave instructions: delete emails, destroy letters, wait five minutes, call an ambulance. The coroner ruled death by misadventure — a common fate for Alzheimer's patients on steep stairs. No one investigated.

After seven months of silence, Francis³ summoned Vivien² to a Greek island. On Amorgos he accused her of complicity — her desperate emails amounted to consent, he insisted, and he had kept copies. Trapped, Vivien² proposed marriage. Years later, on the night of her fifty-fourth birthday, after guests departed and Francis³ retreated, she took the scroll to the dairy.

Reading the final sonnet, she recognized what Francis³ had done: stolen Percy's⁴ life — their walks, their river swims, their delight in naming wildflowers — and inserted himself. The poem's symbolic murder of a bearded nature figure was Percy,⁴ re-enacted in verse.

Vivien² leaned toward the woodburning stove, stretched out her hand, and released the vellum. It caught, blazed, and was done — the only copy turned to ash. What she preserved instead was her own prose confession, buried with Percy's violin for the future to find.