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
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
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