Merle and Mevrouw Bonsma were old friends. They both lived in the Dorchester, at the bottom end of Twist Street, one of those establishments that housed whole floors of widows. Grannies a gogo, as Spilkin said. The two women had met up when Merle moved to the hotel after the death of her husband Douglas, but they had known one another for years. Mevrouw Bonsma, it turned out, had worked as a typist during the lean times when she could not find work as a musician, and was once employed by an insurance house where Merle kept the company library. She was the most elegant typist Merle had ever come across; her hands on the keyboard were almost lyrical.
It was Merle who showed me that there was more to Mevrouw Bonsma than met the ear.
‘If you think she’s “leaking indiscriminately”,’ said Merle, ‘you haven’t been listening properly, that’s all. She never plays anything without good reason. She’s like a weathervane, turning with the wind; open your ears and you’ll learn something about the air you’re breathing, the cross-currents you’re borne along by. She responds to the climate in a room, and she can change it too, as easily as opening a window.’
I had noticed from the very beginning a certain affinity between the music Mevrouw Bonsma played and the activities I was engaged in – the reliable rhythms of a waltz, for instance, suited lexical gymnastics down to a T – but Merle convinced me that such congruence was more than a happy accident. There was often a subtle interplay between the room and the music, as if Mevrouw Bonsma were a medium, communicating the moods of the patrons to the keyboard, turning them into music, and channelling them back, to bolster or subvert. When there was an argument brewing, voices raised, a fist thumping a table, she would find the dissonant chords to accompany it. And just as often, by a quiet counter-argument of interlinked melodies, she would smooth the ruffled feathers and cool the heated blood, and restore the company to an even temper.
Sometimes she seemed almost clairaudient. I made a note of the occasion when she began to play the uncharacteristically rowdy theme tune from Zorba the Greek. And who should come bounding through the door not a minute later but Mrs Mavrokordatos’s brother, who went by that name – or something very like it – and answered to that character. I had only seen him in the Café once, and it afterwards transpired that he had just stepped off an aeroplane from Athens after an absence of many months. Instead of greeting his sister with a conventional embrace, he began to kick up his heels to the music in a traditional dance of homecoming. He might have broken the crockery, if it wasn’t for the wall-to-wall carpeting.
Not all of Mevrouw Bonsma’s musical accompaniments were as dramatic as this. Often they were simply little chains of association, reminiscent, some of them, of an untaxing session of lexical fartlek. But even these connections were usually invisible to me, inaudible, below my threshold of hearing (not that there’s anything wrong with my ears). Merle, who was more educated than myself musically, made it all as clear as day, by an effortless and unassuming laying on of labels and drawing of distinctions.
I saw that I had misjudged Mevrouw Bonsma. She had a system, albeit one founded as much on intuition as on ratiocination; and there is nothing I admire more than a system. Enclosed in her hardy flesh was a sensitive, highly developed creature – and not struggling to get out, far from it, quite content to be there. Was refinement not precisely an appreciation of those qualities that were hard to see, that always lay hidden beneath the surface, where a superficial eye would fail to appreciate them? As usual the poor Americans had it all wrong; the real thing could not be grasped in a fist or quaffed in a few greedy gulps. It had to be found, more often than not, after vigorous effort. Under the benign influence of this understanding – which, I hardly need add, had an immediate appeal for a proofreader – the threat Mevrouw Bonsma had once posed was dispelled, and soon seemed inconceivable to me. Spilkin’s joke-telling subsided too, as suddenly as it had developed – an even more merciful reversal. So I finally accepted her into our company. When her shift was over, she would join us to talk or play games, and I came to enjoy her companionship almost as much as Spilkin’s and Merle’s. She seemed smaller, now that her contents were properly secured.
Merle, by contrast, was at home in our midst from the outset. Suddenly there were four of us. I have never been the most sociable of men, but I found her company unusually convivial. She was an organizer and perhaps we needed organizing, having nearly lost our sense of ourselves. She liked board games and cards, which neither Spilkin nor I had a taste for, but we played along because she was a good talker and had a quick mind. She tried to teach us bridge, and we bumbled through a few games of that. More often it was General Knowledge, always with a musical category for the benefit of Mevrouw Bonsma. Sometimes Merle insisted on giving her clues, humpty-dumpty-dum, so that she would not lag too far behind. Merle usually won. It was all in good spirit.
A month or two after the advent of Merle, influenza kept me abed for a few days. When I returned to the Café – to a salubrious air from ‘The Happy Huntsman’ – she said she was delighted to see me. ‘I wanted to come in search, because I thought you might be ill. But Myron wouldn’t tell me where you stayed. It wasn’t the same without you. We’ve become quite a little circle, haven’t we?’
‘Not that,’ Spilkin admonished her.
She was taken aback. ‘I’d call us a circle. Wouldn’t you, Aubrey?’
I wasn’t sure. Probably. But before I could make up my mind, Spilkin said: ‘It’s a question of arithmetic – or is it geometry? Two people cannot be a circle. Two is a couple, a pair, a brace. Three is a crowd only in idiom. Primarily three is a triangle. Four will always be a square – or two pairs.’ Was that a meaningful glance at Mevrouw Bonsma, who was pulling up her chair beside his? ‘But five …? Now my head and my heart tell me that five might be a circle. Only a specialist would see a pentagon. It’s a good thing there are just the four of us. A circle is a dangerous thing.’
‘Viz, it has no end,’ said the Bonsma cheesily.
‘What do you say, Tearle?’
‘I’m with you, Spilkin.’
He was right. Ever since Merle’s arrival, we had settled down very comfortably. The four of us made for solid geometry. We were bricks, regular good fellows. Four-square was the term that came to my mind. Four squares too, I’d no objection to that: four of a kind, four equals, coevals, discriminating human beings, adults with compatible systems of thought and feeling, gathered around a table to amuse themselves, to pass the time pleasantly in conversation, in listening to music, in reading and other pursuits that broadened the mind. I might have wished that the table itself was square rather than round, to underpin our quadrilaterality, our state of balance, but how could I have guessed what lay ahead when Spilkin and I first made the choice?
Which isn’t to say that Merle did not have some peculiar ideas. Here was a woman who turned first to the last page of a book and read that to see whether she felt like tackling the whole thing. It was abnormal. When she suggested that the four of us go to the symphony to celebrate Mevrouw Bonsma’s fifty-eighth, I followed Spilkin’s lead and made short shrift of the idea. There was no point in throwing the rules and regulations overboard.
So the two of them went on their own.
*
Proofreading, properly done, is an art. It demands great reserves of skill, experience and application. It is also a responsibility; and while not all responsibilities are onerous, never mind what the newspapers say, this one deserves the adjective. Only when an eye has scrutinized every word in a text may it truly be said to have been read. And the fact is that more often than not, the only eye that looks at every word and at the spaces in between them, at the folios, the running heads, every last entry in an index, every full stop and comma, every hyphen and parenthesis – the only eye that does all these things belongs neither to the author, nor the editor, nor even the most assiduous reader, but to the proofreader. The proofreader is a trailblazer and a minesweeper. The readers who follow him may take any pa
th with confidence, may go down any passage and cross any border, and never lose their bearings.
Getting things right is not just a matter of form (although that is important enough in itself), but of necessity. Dotting one i might be regarded as a mere punctilio, and failing to do so dismissed as a trifle. But all the dots left off all the i’s accumulate, they build up, they pack together like a cloud over a field of stubbly iotas. Soon there is a haze of them in every hollow, and the finer distinctions begin to evade us. In the end, the veil of uncertainty grows so thick that everything is obscured. As for the crosses left off the t’s, who do you suppose shall bear them?
It is one of the ironies of the art that the better it is practised, the fewer traces of it remain. The world remembers a handful of proofreading blunders – the Breeches Bible, the Printers’ Bible, the Unrighteous Bible of 1652 (see Ebenezer Cobham Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, at Bible) and a few ghost words in the dictionaries – gravy, abacot, Dord. But the world knows nothing of the successes.
Standards of proofreading have been declining steadily since the nineteen-sixties, when the permissive attitude to life first gained ground, and so have standards of morality, conduct in public life, personal hygiene and medical care, the standard of living, and so on. All these are symptoms of a more general malaise. Decline with a capital D. Perhaps it goes back to the War. While I myself was working in the field, I did not have time to devote to proselytizing; I had my own garden to tend. Once retired, I began to pursue that most genteel form of activism, the letter to the editor. Nevertheless, I had always felt that the solution to the problem of declining standards lay with the individual, in the revivification of outmoded notions of personal responsibility, and so I turned from tending my garden to ‘cleaning up my own backyard’, as the expression goes (in point of fact, I don’t have a backyard at all). I am no Dictionary-thumper and I try to be tactful, but my patience was often tested. Take the Haifa débâcle.
The speciality of the Haifa Hebrew Restaurant was not, as one might have expected, traditional delicacies such as smoked salmon or gefilte fish (chopped fish mixed with crumbs, eggs and seasonings), which I had come across before on hotel menus, but things called schwarmas, composed primarily of grilled lamb. A special device had been installed for their manufacture. The lamb, piled up into a tower on an electric spit, was suffered to gyrate crazily before red-hot elements, while a singed onion and a deflating tomato, skewered at the top of the tower, dribbled their juices down its length. (These juices, dispelled in aromatic vapour, often made mouths water in the Café Europa up above.) I had peered into the smoky interior of the restaurant several times in passing and mistaken the translucent orb at the top for a sheep’s eye: the discovery that it was something more palatable was the immediate reward of my first venture across the threshold. A sign picked out in plastic lettering on an illuminated glass panel of Mediterranean blue informed the paying public that the lamb now rotating would be served in a so-called pita, with tehini, which sounded merely laughable, or humus, which sounded truly nauseating. It was that infelicitous ‘humus’, glimpsed from the doorway a few days earlier, which had brought me here in defiance of the threat of bomb blasts that hung in those days over fast-food establishments. I have no special knowledge of the Hebrew tongue, but I had done my homework in the greatest school of all, the Oxford English Dictionary, and came equipped for battle. Although this was a professional visit, I did not want to appear ill-mannered, and so I ordered one of the schwarmas, and while the chef was carving my portion with a machete, introduced myself to the manager, a certain Shlomo.
‘Forgive me if I speak frankly,’ I said after the pleasantries, ‘but you do not want to put “humus” on the mutton.’
‘Hey? What you?’ and so forth.
‘“Humus” is in the ground. Decomposing vegetable matter in the soil. Leaves, peelings, biodegradable stuff. What you want is “hummus”. Two m’s.’
‘Two humus fifty cent extra,’ said Shlomo, whose intellectual apparatus really did seem to be in slow motion, going to talk with his lady friend at the other end of the counter.
I pursued him with the dictionary. The seventh edition of the Concise was the first to record ‘hummus’ and I had brought it along purposely to show him the entry. ‘Look – two m’s. Em-em.’
‘English not so good,’ he said with a sympathetic grin, which made me suspect that he was referring to mine! Then I noticed the derivation: from the Turkish humus. An awkward moment. A version with one m could only cloud the issue. I put the dictionary away and resorted to some schoolboy dactylology and the mouthing of duo and tuo and twain, hoping to hit on something that would approximate the Hebrew. ‘Bi, bi,’ I said.
‘Bye-bye,’ chirruped the lady friend and pointed at my head with her Craven A. Some days before, I had scratched my salient excrescence – cranial, high noon – on an overhanging branch at Pullinger Kop, and it was still inflamed. I retired self-consciously to a dimmer corner of the counter.
To my surprise, the schwarma was quite tasty, and the double helping of hummus did no harm – in fact, I have preferred it that way ever since. Instead of the customary plate, there was an ingenious little aluminium stand like a letter-rack for propping the schwarma in, and as the pita itself was rather like an envelope of unleavened bread with enclosures of lettuce and lamb, it suited very well. I resolved there and then to become more cosmopolitan in my eating habits, even as I set about the big ‘clean-up’.
Alas, all my attempts to alert the shopkeepers of Hillbrow to the errors of their ways met with the same inarticulate incomprehension I had encountered at the Haifa. After half an hour of fruitless argumentation, the manager of the Restless Supermarket – he had introduced himself as Stan, although the badge on his lapel clearly said Stelios – showed me into his little office, a mezzanine cubicle with pegboard walls and gunmetal furniture. In the top drawer of the desk I saw lying a stapler, a bottle of Liquid Paper (God help us), and a revolver. When I had seen the stationery, he pushed the drawer shut with his thigh and offered me a drink, which I accepted out of politeness. He said:
‘My friend, we ollaways open. You come any day, twenty-four hour.’
‘I accept that, Stelios (if I may). But my point is that “restless” doesn’t mean that you never rest. Don’t you see? It means, and I quote, never still, fidgety.’
‘But we ollaways busy, never close.’
‘You’d be even busier if you’d just listen to me, man. The name “Restless Supermarket”, it creates the wrong impression. One thinks of mess, of groceries jumbled together, of groceries jumbling themselves together, of wilful chaos. Is that what you want?’
He looked disbelievingly at the shelves on the closed-circuit television, where sturdy towers of Bourneville cocoa and orderly ranks of tinned fruit and washing powder mutely supported my argument, and said, ‘My friend, you come two o’clock, you come three o’clock, I’m talking a.m., I got fresh rolls.’
‘That’s another thing, that sign on the bakery wall that says: “All our food is fresh and clean.” Clean food? I’m sorry, it doesn’t make sense.’
After ten minutes of this, he opened the drawer again.
Then there was the time I ventured down Nugget Hill to the Casablanca Roadhouse, no easy walk with my knees, to point out the unwitting obscenity that shoddy neon calligraphy had produced in FLICK LIGHTS FOR SERVICE. They wouldn’t hear a word of it. Fuck you too, they said quite amiably. Not having a car made my mission doubly difficult: the waiter kept asking what had become of my ‘wheels’ and pretending to attach the tray to my forearm. I had to eat a Dagwood Bumstead for my pains, the speciality of the house, served at a very uncomfortable picnic table with a round of dill pickle adhering to the outside of the wax-paper wrapping. It was one culinary adventure that did not bear repeating, although it repeated itself of its own accord, ad nauseam.
And then there were the ‘wanton dumplings’ at the Majestic Tasty Chinese Take Away, which I wouldn�
�t touch with a disposable chopstick, and the unfortunate messages in the fortune biscuits.
Not all my efforts at reform, nor even my most telling ones, had to do with commercial signage or catering. Once Spilkin complained so bitterly about the typographical errors in a book he had just purchased that I was persuaded to look into it myself. I hadn’t read a novel in twenty years, and one glance at the contents of The Unhappy Millionaire showed the wisdom of abstention: it was the story of an American Midas whose life had been ruined by his immeasurable riches. On the other hand, it seemed that I had been neglecting an exceptionally rich field for my System of Records. I found a spelling mistake on the title-page and a dittography in the first line. There were five obvious corrigenda on the first page alone. Some professionals regard one proofreading error in five pages as an acceptable norm; I myself think that one should aim for perfection and let the norms take care of themselves. Spilkin was reluctant to demand a refund from the bookseller, and so I took matters into my own hands.
The publishing house was a well-known English one with branches, or perhaps one should say tentacles, all over the world. I decided to make an example of them. I spent the next week proofreading this corny farrago, meticulously as you please, and then mailed it to their head office in London, surface mail. Was it any wonder, my covering letter said, that this millionaire was unhappy, finding himself in such a shabbily produced publication? They were welcome to share my work with their editorial department as a lesson in how it should be done.
Such a high-minded gesture, made at my own expense, would be easy to ridicule. But my new friends at the Café Europa, not excepting Mevrouw Bonsma in her placid way, seemed to understand what was at stake.
Schwarma, incidentally, from the Hebrew for ‘lamb’. I had imagined, rather fancifully, that there might be some connection with ‘schwa’, the character rendered as ә in phonetic transcription and derived from the Hebrew word for ‘empty’. The lexical world was overpopulated with scrawny, open-mouthed schwas, like hordes of hungry little pitas waiting for their stomachs to be filled.
The Restless Supermarket Page 9
