by Ali Smith
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.
When I got home that night I keyed in your address above an email and sent you that photo of the wall and the plantlife without saying where it was of, or telling you anything about it.
Then I put the books I had stolen from you back on the shelf you’d kept them on in the study, and I shut the door. And then I went and got on with it, the rest of my life.
Here’s a stanza from a poem by Jackie Kay called ‘Dear Library’, and this part I’m quoting is based on what her father, John Kay, said when she asked him what he thought about the public library system:
I treasure your lively silence; your very pleasant librarians.
They represent what a public service is truly, libertarian.
Impossible, did I say that already, to put a price on that. Again,
Stop me if I am repeating myself, your staff will tell
Me of a Saramago Street in a nearby town.
Browse, borrow, request, renew – lovely words to me.
A library card in your hand is your democracy.
Anna Ridley sent me this:
The local library of the Cumbrian market town where I lived provided plenty to satisfy my curiosity when I was growing up, with well-stocked children’s and young adult sections. As I became a teenager, though, I needed more. Having experimented with Nietzsche, I got it into my mind I wanted to read the Marquis de Sade. I think I had read an interview with a musician in the NME who namechecked him or something. Finding nothing on the shelf, the kindly librarian, who had known me since I was born, checked the database. The only book that came up was Justine, or Good Conduct Well Chastised, which wasn’t stocked in any of the local libraries, or even the city library – in fact there was only one copy in the whole county, and it was nearly ninety miles away. We filled out the request card and I waited. When the book arrived a few weeks later, it was a large hardback. I was alarmed as soon as I saw it – I can’t remember exactly what was on the jacket, but I do remember it worried me enough that I bundled it straight into my school bag, and once I got home I removed the dust jacket and hid it behind my wardrobe. And having skimmed through the book and got the gist of it, even now it looked unassuming without its jacket, I hid it in a pile of books under my bed. I’m not sure what horrified me the most – the thought of my mum finding it, or the idea that the librarian had known all along what she was letting me in for! I’d like to say that age thirteen I’d read it, but actually after a few furtive encounters I kept it hidden under my bed until I came up with a cowardly plan to return it to the anonymous book drop in the bigger city library ten miles away. It amuses me to think of the miles that well-thumbed book had travelled, satisfying the curiosity of readers around the county, enabled by the library system. Not long afterwards, I got a Saturday job in a brilliant second-hand bookshop, from which I could borrow whatever I liked, and was able to pursue my reading curiosity a bit less publicly.
This is what Clare Jennings told me:
For me libraries represent a serendipity of learning. It’s as if some internal compass draws you to areas which you never imagined visiting. At eighteen I started a degree in chemistry but didn’t feel entirely at home in the subject and found myself repeatedly gravitating towards the small philosophy section in the library. Before the first year was out I’d left to study philosophy instead. I really enjoyed studying philosophy and while there found myself drawn to the art section of the library and later completed a second degree in illustration. Libraries can definitely lead you astray in the best possible way.
Emma Wilson sent me this:
In Jacques Rivette’s 1974 film Céline and Julie Go Boating, Dominique Labourier plays a librarian. She has glasses as well as sexy shoes. This is a French library. You can smoke (discreetly). The librarians read the Tarot cards behind the desk with its stacked, ordered card index system. Juliet Berto, a magician, sits hiding behind a large size Bécassine picture book. The film plays in a Surrealist arcane. Its signs and titles point out to the streets of Montmartre.
In my local library in England when I was a child one of the librarians was French. I loved her. She made me feel she was intent just on me. Choosing books each week was like laying out the dreams I could have. I remember that beautiful moment of transition to borrowing from the adult section, the wider fan of cards, the longer shelves, a stretch of titles. And in that local library then, here in England, in the 1970s, there were books in French, lots of them, a whole case. I remember seeing the white and cream spines, the foreign words, lavish sentences, Colette, Duras.
I learnt to read those French books. In the library. Here in England.
Here’s what Emily Wainwright and Lori Beck said:
Public libraries allow us to explore the self or the desired self in many forms
&
The only way I can express how important public libraries are is to tell you about myself.
And Natalie Williams sent me the following:
Once a week, on a Tuesday, a pale blue van would pull up outside the Post Office in the Dorset village I grew up in. The driver/librarian sitting behind her desk; the smell of slightly old and battered books in their plastic cases, the glue in their spines, the stamps in their inner sleeves. Four or so books every week, dutifully read and returned to the pale blue van on a Tuesday. It served as a precursor to when I was a little older and spent inordinate amounts of time at the Dorchester Library, which allowed a spectacular twelve withdrawals and had a brilliant biography and music section. I should add that we had plenty of books at home, but there was something about this weekly ritual that fuelled my love of books. I still have plenty of books at home, and I still sign up to my local library, regardless of where I am in the world.
The art of elsewhere
I’ve been trying to go elsewhere all my life.
Last year, I went all over the place. I went to Greece, I went to France, I went to Holland, I went to Morocco, I went to Canada, I went to Germany. That’s just some of the places I went to. I flew, I cycled, I went on Eurostar, I went by ordinary train, I walked, I got the bus, I drove, I sat in the backs of a lot of taxis. Wherever I went, however I went, there was no getting away from it. I would put my bag down on the cobbles, or the pavement, or the grassy side of the road, or the walkway next to the canal, or the plastic-strewn beach, or the railway station platform, or the bed, or the folding table-thing made of canvas and aluminium that some hotels have especially for suitcases, and where would I be?
I’d be sitting on a bench in a pretty garden high up the side of a fairly built-up slope above the city of Naples. If you looked up you’d not see Vesuvius at all, because of the pollution. And if you looked down, you’d know Naples was down there, and you’d be able to hear the crazy hooting and roaring of the traffic, but because of the pollution it was like Naples didn’t exist.
Beautiful.
I mean Rotterdam was lovely. It’s got some great galleries. I particularly liked the medieval Madonna and Child with the tiny golden angels radiating out in interwoven rings round them both, playing golden musical instruments, forming a series of hoops of light, like vibrations or aura are emanating from them, and under her feet she’s crushing a long thin black monstrous-looking thing, a kind of devil I suppose it’s meant to be. And when I stood and looked at the painting, a painting as small as my own hand, of a pile of beautiful old books on a table and one book propped up and open at a double page, blank but for the figure of a man standing at the far end holding a spade, as if the blank pages were a field waiting to be farmed, for a moment, for a few seconds, looking at that picture, I was both right there in front of it and I was elsewhere.
Also, the gallery had a very lovely café/restaurant; there was leek soup the day I went, very nice, and even its toilets are works of art, with little plaques outside them like paintings
have next to them for their title/artist information.
But pretty much the whole time I was there, I was still trying to get elsewhere.
*
There was a girl I knew when I was at school; her name was Debbie and her dad was famously elsewhere. That meant he was doing time, my mother told me; it was well known among the parents that Debbie’s father, from time to time, did time. Her mother worked at the petrol station where my elder brother worked the car-wash on Saturdays and Sundays, and this, along with a kindly demeanour, meant that Debbie, who was quite a tough sort of girl, and the kind who failed exams or tended to do averagely, was protective of me if I ever came under threat from the little gangs of girls who’d hang around the school gates waiting to slap the face of a swot.
We had sewing class last thing on a Friday and for this we were seated alphabetically, which meant that Debbie and I were put next to each other. Because she knew I liked books she told me about her favourite book, which was The Railway Children by E. Nesbit. The film is good, yeah, she said, but the book is much, much better. Then she lent me it, and was so delighted, when I gave it back to her, that I’d liked it as much as she had that she actually did my sewing for me for weeks; she’d do her own double-quick then give me hers to hold, and work away at mine under the table, right under the sewing teacher’s nose. It was the only term in my life that I ever got a good mark in sewing. Once, in an English class, our teacher, who called himself the Gaelic version of his name and was known for his ritual of firing a cannon and raising a saltire in his back garden every year at New Year, and who still wore a black gown to teach in, which no one else in the whole school did, and who always gave himself the best parts when we read Shakespeare round the class, and who despised Debbie for some reason, presumably because the staff, like the parents, knew about her dad and his doing time, told us all to open our poetry books at a poem by Rudyard Kipling called If. Then he said that the first one of us to stand up and recite, word-perfect, the whole thing off by heart could leave the class and go to lunch early.
