Read Learning by Heart for Free Online

crippled her at school. She had thought she’d left it far behind; now it swamped her, filling her eyes with tears that Bisley didn’t notice.
    ‘What did William Langland write?’ he demanded.
    ‘I don’t know,’ she murmured.
    ‘ Piers the Plowman ,’ he said. ‘Don’t you know your own heritage? Don’t you care? This man tells you everything you need to know about the society he lived in. It’s a satire. Surely you know what satire is.’
    ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Like sarcasm.’
    He put the book down on the table. ‘This is a volume of English poetry,’ he said. He enunciated the words clearly and deliberately, pausing between each one. ‘It starts at Langland and it ends with Auden.’
    She looked down, afraid to let him see her face.
    ‘You sit downstairs and imagine I’ve brought you here to tidy up and put bloody flowers in my face,’ he said. ‘I suppose you think about some Brylcreemed bloke who’s going to shove his hand up your skirt – or the price of bloody shoes!’
    ‘I certainly don’t,’ she retorted, stung.
    ‘Well, if not, I don’t know what you do think about, because you haven’t a clue about writers.’ He turned and looked at the room and gestured at the desk. ‘They make these,’ he said slowly, ‘all those posturing gits that you’ve seen this week. All those queers on the phone. All the frigid, screwed-up little women you pass in the street who come up my stairs with their packages wrapped in brown paper, and all the loudmouths, and the silent ones who can’t speak for nerves. They’re all writers. It doesn’t matter what they sound like, what they look like. They look different and sound different, and you couldn’t be paid to sit next to some of them on a bus. Some are so psychologically bereft that they’ll nurture a grudge for decades. A few – just a few, mind you – are reasonably decent.’
    He turned back and examined her face closely. She had never heard anyone talk like that. Certainly never heard anyone swear like that. She wasn’t at all sure that she should listen. But she was listening.
    ‘They all have one thing in common,’ Bisley told her. ‘They’ve sat down and produced something. They’ve scoured what passes for their soul. And some of what they write is mediocre. Some are convinced they’re a literary genius when they couldn’t write a coherent laundry list. And some of what they produce is so bad that the best thing to do with it is light a bloody big fire.’ He scratched his neck. ‘Of which the vast proportion is sent to plague me , God help me,’ he muttered. ‘But some of it …’
    He looked for some point of contact, of understanding, in her expression. ‘Sit,’ he said. He went to another shelf, took down a thin volume and put it in front of her. ‘Wordsworth,’ he said.
    ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘The Lakes.’
    ‘Ah,’ he answered, smiling. ‘The great Lakes poet. Correct. Thank God. You’ve read something.’
    ‘I …’ She paused, then opted for honesty. ‘We had a holiday in Grasmere,’ she said.
    He slapped a hand theatrically to his forehead. ‘And bought the tea-cloth with the daffodil rhyme on it?’ he asked. ‘Oh, Jesus.’ A grin escaped him. He went to the first anthology, leafed through it and slammed it down in front of her. ‘Walter Savage Landor,’ he said. ‘An author. A poet. Read it to me.’
    She looked at the poem on the page, a four-line verse. ‘I’m not very good at reading poetry,’ she told him.
    ‘I’m astonished,’ he retorted drily. ‘Read it.’
    ‘“I strove with none, for none was worth my strife,”’ she began.
    ‘Speak up.’
    ‘ I strove with none, for none was worth my strife;
    Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art;
    I warmed my hands before the fire of life;
    It sinks, and I am ready to depart .’
    There was silence in the room. Distantly, very distantly, as if London had moved away a little, Cora heard the trains and the traffic, the passing of feet in