Public Library and Other Stories

The ex-wife

At first I thought it was just that you really liked books, just that you were someone who really loved your work. I thought it was just more evidence of your passionate and sensitive nature.

At first I was quite charmed by it. It was charming. She was charming.

But here are three instances of what it was like for me.

1: I’d be deep asleep, in the place where all the healing happens, the place all the serious newspapers talk about in their health pages as crucial because that’s where the things that fray or need patched in our daily lives get physically and mentally attended to and if we don’t attend to them something irreparable will happen. Then something would wake me. It’d be you, suddenly sitting straight up in the bed so all the covers would be off both of us, then it’d be you not there, I mean I’d come to myself and the covers would be off me, I’d open my eyes into a blur of dark, put my hand out and feel the place going cold where you should be. Then a light would come on somewhere in the house. Then a small noise would be happening. I’d get up. I’d blur my way downstairs, one hand on the wall. I’d blur into the front room, or the kitchen, or the study. You’d be sitting at the table. There’d be a too-high pile of books on it. Even in the blur I’d be able to see that that pile was going to topple any moment. You’d be sitting beyond it, looking through a book. Your eyes would be distant, as if closed and open at the same time. I’d stand there for a bit. You’d not look up. What’s going on? I’d say. It’d come out sounding blurry. Nothing, you’d say, I just need to know whether Wing was actually the original kitten of Charlie Chaplin. To know what? I’d say. In a letter to Woolf somewhere, you’d say. There’s a kind of family tree, and I know Athenaeum is one of the kittens that Charlie Chaplin gave birth to. But there’s another one and I’m pretty sure it’s not Wing or at least not called Wing in this particular reference and I need to know what its name is and whether it’s another name for Wing, or whether Wing was actually another cat altogether or maybe even another name for Charlie Chaplin. You’re looking up her cats now? I’d say. Now? What the fuck time is it? I need to know, you’d say. Why exactly do you need to know this? I’d say. Because I realized I don’t know it, you’d say. In what context could it possibly be useful? I’d say. I’ll just be another minute, you’d say. I know pretty much where to look, it’ll just take a minute. You’d pull another book out of the pile and catch the pile, shunt it back together with your elbow, wait till it was definitely not going to fall, and open the book at the index at the back. I’d go up to bed. I’d lie there unable to sleep. When you’d come up again two and a half hours later I’d be pretending not to be awake. You’d sigh back into bed and lie down next to me. Immediately you’d be asleep. But for me the windowblind would be edged with something far too bright. What would that noise be now? Birds.

2: We’d be talking about something really important, well, important to me at least. We’d be talking, for instance, about what happened to me at work, how everybody’s running really scared about the cuts. I’d tell you what had happened in the office that day. And you’d say, God, you know that’s exactly like in psychology. And I’d say, what in psychology, like manic depression or passive aggression? And you’d say, no, not psychology, I don’t mean psychology, I mean pictures, it’s exactly like in pictures, and I’d say, pictures of what? and you’d say, well, what happens is, this woman, she’s a bit past it though she used to be a good singer, she got a medal for it, but now she’s more middle-aged and she’s trying to get a job as an extra in films so she can pay her rent, and the first thing Mansfield does is, like, the story opens and this woman is lying in bed in a rented room and she’s got no rent. Oh, right, Mansfield, I’d say. Yeah, you’d say, and she wakes up and she’s cold and she thinks it’s maybe because she hasn’t eaten properly, so then it’s like a pageant of images crosses the ceiling in front of her, pictures of hot dinners sort of marching over the ceiling, and then she thinks she’d like some breakfast and then on the ceiling it’s a pageant of images of big breakfasts, it’s brilliant really when you consider what it’s doing, it’s a story about the fantasy of nourishment and what happens when that fantasy hits, like, reality, she even uses the word nourishing at one point I think. It’s a fantastic critique of cinema actually. Yeah, I’d say, but I’m struggling to make the link between you telling me the plot of a short story and Johnston email-bullying me at work. Are you saying I’m a bit past it? No, you’d say, listen, if you read it you’d see, it’s obvious, I’ll go and get it for you. No, don’t, I’d say. It’s okay, really. I can sort it out for myself. I don’t need to talk about it to anybody. But you’d be on your way to the shelf, and it’s got this really lovely little throwaway phrase, you’d be saying, I can’t remember it exactly but it kind of goes, something fell, sepulchral, she’s so brilliant, that so-simple word fell with the word sepulchral after it, wait, it’s here somewhere, I’ll look it up. Look up the word sepulchral for me while you’re at it, would you? I’d say. You know what sepulchral means, you’d say. Yeah, obviously, I’d say, everyone knows what sepulchral means. Well, everyone will one day, you’d say. Ha ha, yes, I’d say. Too true. And I’d have to tell myself to remember to look up what it meant later. I myself am not very interested in books, or words. When we were first together you used to tell me it was a relief, to be with me, because I wasn’t.

3: There was the day I came home from work and I found you sitting holding a glossy book, and the cardboard envelope from Amazon still on the floor. The book was open on your knee, one page black, one page white. On the black page there was a picture of a twined thick piece of hair. On the white page there was another picture of a coiled palmful of hair, darker, and a black and white picture of a woman, a girl. You were crying, and it was about the most ridiculous thing I could think of, in the real world with all its awful things to really cry about. The thing is, I never imagined her in colour before, you said. The book you were holding was called Traces of a Writer. It was full of pictures of what was left of your favourite writer after she died, pictures of a brooch, a little knife, bits of fabric, a little pair of scissors, a chess set, things like that. This was the day I first called her your ex-wife. I said, it’s like living with an extra person in our relationship. It’s like there’s always someone else. I meant it as a joke. But you were off on to the next page. You said, look, look, what’s this little leather thing? It’s called the fairy purse. Look. It’s a purse, for a sovereign. She gave it to her friend when they were schoolgirls, her friend that stayed with her all through her life, you know. It’s a bit weird, though, looking at this private stuff, isn’t it? I said. You’d stopped crying. It’s a bit necro, no? I said. You wiped at the sides of your eyes. It says here there’s a message inside it, a note, you said. It says here it’s never been taken out because it’s too fragile, but that it says on it, ‘Katie and Ida’s fairy purse’. How do they know it says that, if they haven’t ever taken it out? I said. And what if your ex-wife doesn’t want people looking at her private stuff? I don’t know that I’d want the general public always to be reading my letters or looking at my private writings, even if they did have research grant money to do it and they could give looking at old bits of rubbish left behind by a dead person a grandiose name like The Memory Meme And Materiology In Katherine Mansfield’s Metaphorical Landscape. Stop pretending you’re stupid, you said, why do you always pretend you’re stupid, why do you always pretend to be less than you are, and why do you always use my passion for what I’m working on against me to duck responsibility in our relationship? Ha! I said, I do know some stuff, actually. I can read Wikipedia as well as the next person, actually, and if she’s your ex-wife, then which does that make you, the vain incompetent who was always letting her down and who sold everything after she was dead and made a fortune out of it, or that poor woman she kept calling the Mountain? Because whichever one of those you are, that makes me the other, and I’m not playing that kind of weirdo role-play thank you very much. She was cruel, your ex-wife. She was a piece of work, all right. It was shortly after that that you threw the glossy book at the shelf and four of the little cups we’d bought in Mexico broke. Then I went over to the shelf, took the fifth cup, held it up above the fireplace and dropped it, and we both watched it break. It wasn’t long after that particular day that you and I split up.

Not long after that, I remembered, and looked up the meaning. Something fell. Sepulchral.

*

I was walking through the park, through the bit where the fountains and the bushes are all laid out neatly. It was dusk and I was coming home from a meeting. It had been quite a tough meeting. I had had to lay off three people, most of a whole team, and we’d been told that Google Translate was basically going to be used to replace our report copywriting in all the sub-Saharan countries. I was a bit fed up. On top of this, I’d gone into the park to get a bit of space from the traffic and the people on the pavements, but I was still feeling crowded even here in the park, as if someone was walking a little too close to me. Someone was walking a little too close to me. There was a definite feeling of boundary-trespass in it. Then this voice, close to my ear, said: To think one can speak with someone who really knew Tchekhov.

I stepped to the side, turned like you do when you want to signal to people to back off.

I’ve no change, I said, I’ve no money at all to spare and there’s no point in asking me.

Indecent, she said and shook her head. We must never speak of ourselves to anybody: they come crashing in like cows into a garden.

Look, I said –

How did Dostoievsky know, she interrupted me, about that extraordinary vindictiveness, that relish for bitter laughter that comes over women in pain?

What? I said because she had stopped me in my tracks, was standing right in front of me now blocking my way, and because it was the first time I had realized quite how in pain I was. I was actually in physical pain, walking through the park, without you.

Supposing, she said, ones bones were not bone but liquid light.

It was a dead person stopping me on my path, young and wiry and alarmingly lively, alarmingly bright at the eyes.

Back off, I said. I mean it. I don’t know who you are, but I know who you are.

She laughed. She turned on her heel in a little dance, like I was the dead person, compared to her.

I shall be obliged, she said, if the contents of this book are regarded as my private property.

Then she threw me a little look.

Yes! I said. Yes exactly! Because that’s what I was always saying!

I am thinking over my philosophy, she said. The defeat of the personal. And let us be honest. How much do we know of Tchekhov from his letters. Was that all? Of course not. Don’t you suppose he had a whole longing life of which there is hardly a word?

That’s what I told her, over and over! I said.

This is the moment which, after all, we live for, she said, the moment of direct feeling when we are most ourselves and least personal.

You’ve no idea, I said. I mean, one night it was even the genealogy of your cats, for God sake.

She flung her arms into the air and shouted at the sky.

Robert Louis Stevenson is a literary vagrant! she shouted.

Then she burst out laughing. I joined in. Whatever it was she was laughing about, it was contagious.

Fiction, she said when she’d stopped laughing, is impossible but enables us to reach what is relatively truth.

Okay, I said, yeah, I think that’s fair, I mean, if people are reading your stories and enjoying or understanding and analysing them as stories and everything. That’s different. But people who were born, like, decades after you died, writing about pictures of your scissors.

I sat down on a bench. She sat down next to me with a thump and huffed a breath out loud like a teenage girl. She turned towards me nodding, confidential, like we were such friends.

What the writer does is not so much to solve the question, but to put the question. There must be the question put. That seems to me a very nice dividing line between the true and the false writer.

Then she stood up on the bench. She laughed, then got her balance. She spoke generally, to the trees in the park.

As I see it, she said, the whole stream of English literature is trickling out in little innumerable marsh trickles. There is no gathering together, no fire, no impetus, absolutely no passion!

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.

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.