Public Library and Other Stories (7 page)

She waved her arm at the bushes behind us, and her other arm at the pond in front of us.

This new bracken is like
HG
Wells dream flowers, like strings of Beads
, she said.
The sky in the water is like white swans in a blue mirror.

She was right. The sky in the water
did
look like she said. The bloom on the bracken behind us
was
like beads,
did
look strange, like made up in a dream. But while I was looking at this, off she went. When I looked back there was nobody else on the bench and though the park was full of people it was like there was nobody left in it either.

*

I don't know who you are but I know who you are.

The way it was impossible haunted me.

That night I sat down in front of my computer and wrote you an email. It was the third email I'd sent you since we broke up. The first one had been fifteen pages long when I printed it out; it was mostly mundane lists of things: kitchenware, DVDs, things you'd done that'd made me furious. The second one said: Please also return the three Kate Rusby CDs, the hat that belonged to my father, the picture frame which I bought and paid the whole amount for in Habitat and have a receipt for, the TV Digibox, the food processor which I bought and paid the whole amount for in Dixons and have the receipt for, and the kitchen bin which I still can't believe you took. I will record any other items I find missing as I find them missing.

You had sent me none, not even one saying you wanted those precious books back.

This time I typed in your address (I had to do it by hand and from memory because I'd deleted you off my system) and I wrote in the subject box: not about the Kate Rusby CDs etc please read.

Then in the body of the email I wrote: Please write back telling me one single thing you think I should know about the life of the writer K Mansfield.

I pressed send, then I went to bed.

I saw the light come round the edge of the windowblind. I heard the waking of the birds.

I logged on before I left for work, and under the subject heading
one thing
you had sent me this:

Mansfield was close good friends with the writer
DH
Lawrence, but it was a very rocky friendship, it blew hot and cold, and there were times in their lives when neither of them could stand the other. Once, when they'd had one of their most serious fallings-out and Mansfield was full of fury at him, she was sitting in a tea room with some friends and they overheard two or three people talking about one of Lawrence's books, a collection of poems called Amores. One of them was holding it up and they were all being most disparaging about it. She herself had just been being most disparaging about Lawrence to her friends, before they went to tea. But seeing these other people be it, she leaned over and asked politely, sweetly, might she just have a look at that book they were talking about for a moment. Then she stood up and simply left the tea room, taking the book with her. The people sat there waiting for her to come back. She didn't come
back.

I read this three times before I left for work. At work I read it too many times to count. I wasn't sure what it meant, but I liked it. I sat in my mid-morning break and thought about how like you it was to use the words
most disparaging
. Most disparaging. Most disparaging.
Blew hot and cold
. I sat in my lunch break. I loved the last sentence, but all the same it worried me.
She didn't come back.

*

Wasn't it Santayana who said: every artist holds a lunatic in leash?
I was back in the park with what was left of the life of your favourite writer, whose five volumes of letters and whose big thick journal I had removed from the book box by the front door when you were busy loading the van, and the space left by which I had filled with my Stieg Larsson Girl With The Dragon Tattoo books, which I knew you hated, and which I had disguised by placing all those volumes of that book Pilgrimage on top of.

I went most evenings after work now to the park, before I got the bus home. I went at lunchtimes too.
James makes me ashamed for real artists. He's a pompazoon
. Who was James? I didn't care. I never knew what she was talking about, but I loved it. She was so much herself, and she was different every time, could change her air like the horse can change colour in The Wizard Of Oz. It crossed my mind to ask her, did she know what The Wizard Of Oz was. Maybe the book. She'd definitely died before the film. Strange to think she never knew Judy Garland or the tune of Somewhere Over the Rainbow, or that song about the munchkins. I wondered if anybody in your work circles had ever written a paper about that. What would it be called? Ultra-Modern Future-Memory: A Study Of Things That Happened After My Ex-Wife's Ex-Wife Died And How They Feature In The Work Of My Ex-Wife's Ex-Wife.

What makes Lawrence a real writer is his passion. Without passion one writes in the air or on the sands of the seashore.
Oh, I know about you and Lawrence, I said, because a friend of mine told me a story about that. But she was off like a butterfly on to the next flowerhead.
Nathaniel Hawthorne – he is with Tolstoi the only novelist of the soul. He is concerned with what is abnormal. His people are dreams, sometimes faintly conscious that they dream
. Right, I said. I get that. Right.
The intensity of an action is its truth. Is a thing the expression of an individuality?
No, I said. Well,
maybe sometimes it is. Sometimes yes and sometimes no.
Maupassant – his abundant vitality. Great artists are those who can make men see their particular illusion
. I like that, I said, looking her right in the eyes. She did have extraordinarily clear and piercing eyes.
I want to remember
, she said,
how the light fades from a room – and one fades with it.

And one what? I said. Fades, did you say?

The sky is grey – its like living inside a pearl today
, she said.

She said such beautiful things that often they left me with nothing to say. She leaned forward on the table, shook her head, held her face in her hands.

I have been feeling lately a horrible sense of indifference
, she said.

Indifferent? I said. You? No way.

A very bad feeling
, she said.
Neither hot nor cold; lukewarm.

Doesn't sound at all like you, I said.

Nearly all people swing in with the tide
, she said,
and out with the tide again like heavy seaweed. And they seem to take a kind of pride in denying Life.

Yes, I said. Much better to be hot or cold, like you and your friend, what's his name. The delivery man. DHL.

Mentioning him to her was usually a good way to get her up and talking and excited. But she placed
her hands on the edge of the table in fists that were little and bony.

I woke up early this morning
, she said,
and when I opened the shutters the full round sun was just risen. I began to repeat that verse of Shakespeare's; lo here the gentle lark weary of rest, and I bounded back into bed. The bound made me cough. I spat – it tasted strange – it was bright red blood.

I felt myself go pale.

You what? I said.

Since then I've gone on spitting each time I cough a little more
, she said.

No, I said.

Perhaps it's going to gallop – who knows –
she said,
and I shan't have my work written. That's what matters … unbearable … ‘scraps', ‘bits' … nothing real finished.

I saw then how ill she looked, and how thin, and how far too young. I had to look away in case she saw, by looking at me, what I was seeing.

I began reading the songs in Twelfth Night in bed this morning early
, she said.

Right, Twelfth Night, right, yes, I said.

Mark it, Cesario, it is old and plain. The spinsters and the knitters in the sun. And the free maids that weave their thread with bones. Do use to chant it – it is silly sooth. And dallies with the innocence of love. Like the old age
, she said.

She saw how close to tears I was.

Come away, come away death, etc
, she said.

Then she gave me a sly look from under her fringe.

I could make the girls cry when I read Dickens in the sewing class
, she said.

*

And here it fell. Sepulchral.

That's the actual real line from the story you were telling me about once. I've read the story now. I've read all her stories, from the one at the start of the book where the girl is in the emptied house and the little birds flick from branch to branch, to the one at the end of her life about the poor bird in a cage, and that one about the fly that gets all inked.
Oh, the times when she had walked upside down on the ceiling, up, up glittering panes floated on a lake of light, flashed through a shining beam!

I sat down in front of my computer in what was once our house and I typed the word WING into the subject heading. Then I wrote this.

Hello.

I wanted to tell you that I found out a thing that might be of use to you, well a couple of things, well three things altogether.

1: I was speaking to a lady from New Zealand at work because of our New Zealand contract and I told her I was reading your ex-wife and she told me an amazing story, and then she sent me a newspaper
clipping, and this is what it says in short, that your ex-wife maybe was actually given birth to in a hot-air balloon. Yes I know it sounds unlikely and like I'm lying but I have the newspaper to prove it and I knew it would interest you. It says in it that her mother was pregnant with her and on the day your ex-wife was born she had actually booked to go up above Wellington in a balloon with a man called Mr Montgolf who was charging five shillings a shot. Anyway on 15 October 1888 a newspaper called The Dominion reported that the flight the day before took ‘much longer than expected because of the medical condition of one of its female occupants … fortunately this young woman had recovered by the time the balloon landed'. Which means, the paper implies, that your ex-wife might have been born with both feet off the ground.

2: You know the story you told me about, the one with the word sepulchral in it? The one about the past-it lady who goes to act as an extra in films. Can you remember, I wonder, that there is a moment when she is filling in a form to see if she is the right sort of extra and it says, ‘Can you aviate – high-dive – drive a car – buck-jump-shoot?' And you know how your ex-wife also did quite a lot of extra-work in films in the war years and once even caught a quite bad cold from doing a long shoot in evening dress in January? Well, I went looking for
whether there was any chance of seeing her on any of these films, so far I have been unsuccessful. But I have discovered, by chance, that in the mid-1920s loads of those films, hundreds and hundreds of them made by the British film industry in the earlier years, were melted down and used to make the resin that was painted on the wings of aeroplanes to make them weather resistant. So now when you think of your ex-wife it is possible to think of those pictures of her moving as maybe really on the wing.

Also I remember that one of the things you were working on was a book by her friend and rival Virginia Woolf about a plane that all the people in London look up and see, that's writing words in the sky above them, and I remember you gave a paper about it somewhere. Well, I have deduced that because they started coating the wings of planes in or before 1924 with melted films, it is perfectly possible that the wings of the plane all those people are craning their necks and looking up at in Virginia Woolf's famous novel which if I am right is the one that was published in 1925, could actually be coated in melted-down moving pictures of your ex-wife. It is funny to me too because I have a sense that Virginia Woolf always thought your ex-wife a bit flighty.

3: Finally did you know that it is now possible to fly from Auckland to Sydney in your ex-wife? There is a new generation Boeing 737 that Qantas use
whose features include a 12 seat business class and 156 seat economy, with individual state of the art Panasonic in-flight entertainment-on-demand systems in both business and economy, ergonomic cushions and adjustable headrests and a choice on board of New Zealand or Australian wines. The plane is called The Katherine Mansfield.

It all really makes me think of the thing she says where she says: ‘Your wife won't have a tomb – she'll have at most a butterfly fanning its wings on her grave and then off.'

You might say I have been thinking of you a bit.

I very much hope you are well.

*

I didn't send that flight email in the end. I looked at my language and couldn't. I knew I'd got punctuation and things wrong, and was embarrassed at the words I'd used when I looked back at it later after a glass of wine, which is usually when embarrassment disappears and it's easier to press send. Those are some of the reasons I didn't send it.

The main one, though, was that I didn't want you to think I was trying to know more about something you knew about than you did. Also, I was worried that maybe you really wouldn't know these things. I realized I really didn't want to know more about what you knew about than you.

Which is all a roundabout way of saying I didn't want to trespass on what was yours.

Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change.

So suffering must become love.

That is the mystery.

In the end what I did was this. The next time I was in London, I went to find the house your ex-wife had lived in for, well I didn't know if it was for longest, but I knew it was for happiest.

I stood outside it and I thought about how close it was to the Heath, and how much that must have pleased her cats. I worried about what an uphill climb it must have been to get to the house from the nearest Tube, for somebody not very well. I thought about how she wrote to this address from a cold house in Italy. She wrote imagining coming home and kissing its gate and door, and about how she imagined the cat going up the stairs, it was how she pictured home, and I think the word she used is
lopping, Wing come lopping up
. There's a big locked gate on it, too high to see over and you can't see in, though there is a blue plaque on it saying it is your ex-wife's house and that her husband lived there too. (The plaque doesn't mention the Mountain.) But I took a photo of the outside of it on my phone, and then I took a close-up of the brick of the whitewashed wall of it, where ivy or some plant with tiny splayed-out roots has grown
over the place and someone has repeatedly stripped it back. Some of it, delicate, is preserved forever under the whitewash, and some of it has kept on growing new roots on top of the whitewash.