kept on getting in the way. You shone during your journalism degree but were never quite hungry enough for a newsroom. You dreaded the cold calling, of intruding so much on people’s lives. You did an MA and drifted into teaching and were always doubting your abilities: said shouldn’t it be someone else when your colleagues urged you to apply for a higher post, asked me? Really? when offered a promotion, never pushed for a pay rise. You settled. Shunned creativity, flight, risk, never had the courage to give a dream, any dream, a go.
And now you hold the envelope to your lips and smile and kiss your husband on the forehead. You’ll go to the Library tomorrow, you say it’s the perfect gift. You don’t tell him you’ll be looking for a man in a very neat suit, with a beautiful nape. For Cole is seducing you with thoughtfulness and you want him to know how grateful you are.
But something is all skittery within you and there’s the light and the guilt of that.
You know what Theo would do in this situation. You wonder about your Elizabethan wife. If she ever acted on her words, if she was that courageous, or stupid. Indulgent. Selfish. Bold.
God helps those who help themselves
The London Library arrests time, it drags you into its rich dark depths and holds you there, captive and absorbed and lost. You find a space to write in the old encyclopaedia room; it has discreet plugs for laptops embedded in the floor. Your little volume sits demurely on your desk, with its shiny coffee-coloured leather cover and broken clasps. And its shocking declarations in their firm, neat hand.
Eve be more excellent than Adam. Eve be less sinful than Adam.
A husband they desired to have, not so much to be accounted wives, as to be made mothers. For they know that woemen should be saved by childbearing.
Where, know yee, shall we finde a man be he ever so old, barren, weak and feeble that hathe been so kind and curteouse to his wife that was willing to substitute another more able man in his place, that his wife might have issue.
Woemen bare rule over men.
Why was the author compelled to write such things? What is the remoteness, the chafing within you? Why do you always do things you don’t want to, now that you’re embedded in this relationship? You tolerated so much before, within the glow of new love, now you don’t. Why do you feel stronger and more serene when you’re by yourself, that you don’t want your husband around too much? Everyone’s always considered you an excellent candidate for the role of wife; you’re compliant and companionable, you endure, with feigned enthusiasm, in-law dinners, action films, client drinks. If only they knew of the restlessness within you, the tapping at your elbow, the tugging at your skirt.
You’re not sure what to do with the book, it’s like walking under water when you try to find a way in. But it will come. And there are many distractions – magazines and newspapers and the Internet and the looking for Gabriel, always that.
Especially in the Reading Room, at lunch hour, just in case.
The space is joyous with light from tall windows and hushed with cerebration, thick with an atmosphere of scholarship and sleep. Several old leather armchairs are in a line, in stately repose, their bellies now grazing the floor. You get to know the regular visitors. The beautifully dressed elderly man who places a white linen handkerchief on a seat before taking a very long time to lower himself into it. The large man always asleep, head thrown back, mouth agape, hands crossed protectively over a book on his chest like a dead man’s Bible placed by a widow. The mousy woman who arrives promptly at noon every day and kneels on the floor by a reading man and rests her head on his knees. His fingers sift, absently, through her hair and they don’t speak for half an hour and then they leave and your heart fills with tenderness for what they have together as a couple – for you had it once – and then tightens for what, perhaps, they’ll become.
The Library gives you a feeling of industriousness, props your life. You dress as if going to work; you’re not the only one doing this. A middle-aged man in a pinstriped suit does nothing but read The Times every day from cover to cover and you guess an unsuspecting wife is behind the creamy stiffness of his collars and cuffs, and wonder how long he can sustain it.
Soon you’re frequenting the Library ravenously, you want it every day, just as you needed your cafe, once. In the cram of London, amid its grubby, muscular energy, the narrow building is a refuge and a tonic. And always, you’re searching. For you’re infected by the idea of Gabriel and you feel, with an odd certainty, that he will come.
lazy, stay-indoors persons frequently have diseases
The Library’s computer room, where you write e-mails to your friends and trawl the newspapers for show business gossip: the latest marriages that have crumbled, the best and worst gowns from recent award ceremonies, Hollywood pregnancies, arrests. You’re sitting at a desk with your shoes flipped off and knees drawn up – it has something to do with wanting to be young again, with living a more vivid life.
A man peers playfully over your shoulder, trying to read what you’re reading and you look up, startled. He asks if you’d like to come for a drink with some of the regulars after work. You look around the room, at the six other people in it and realise they all know each other, it’s a gang. Instinctively you begin to say no, it’s always your way to refuse the second cup of tea, the seat on the tube, the drink after work. But something, this time, makes you stop.
Yes, I’d love to.
The man smiles. He glances at your wedding ring, perhaps, among your jumble of rings. You look at him as if for the first time. Prematurely balding, with his hair clipped close to his scalp. Wearing luxurious black velvet trousers that sit oddly with a striped shirt. Younger than what you’d first imagined, weeks ago, from a distance, better-looking than what you’d dismissed him as. You know in a second you’d never sleep with him, it’s a mental game you play with every man you meet. It’s not just the velvet, he’s not your type. He won’t make your lip tremble, won’t draw a blush, won’t make you seize up. You smile at him warmly; you can relax.
every girl can dance and should learn to do it well
There are three men and a woman at the pub and swiftly you’re telling them more than you ever intended, eager for contact, slightly drunk. They know nothing of you. It’s exhilarating, like moving to a foreign country where no one knows of your past; you can make yourself up as you go. As you explain your book you become authoritative, confident, witty, brisk, and plans for the project spark as you speak. You talk of the obedient wife writing secretly, late at night, galloping her pen through page after page and hiding it away when she hears her husband at the door and opening her Bible and stilling her face with her fingertips on her flushed cheeks. Hinting to her lover that she’s writing a book, for she has to have a lover; yes, yes, she must.
Her husband finds out. He drags her by the hair to the cupboard and locks her in, he shuts his hands over his ears at her cries; she begs him for mercy, he does not speak. Eventually, over many days, her
