As brunch tipped into lunch, Imran ordered pancakes like an American. After decades of disappointment, the coffee was finally real coffee. Wouldn’t it be cruel to leave, now, when they’d come this far? They were all four of them providing a service for the rest of the people in the café, simply by being here. They were the “local vibrancy” to which the estate agents referred. For this reason, too, they needn’t concern themselves too much with politics. They simply were political facts, in their very persons. “Polly not coming?” asked Frank. All four checked their phones for news of their last remaining single friend. The smooth feel of the handset in one’s palm. A blinking envelope with the promise of external connection, work, engagement. Natalie Blake had become a person unsuited to self-reflection. Left to her own mental devices she quickly spiraled into self-contempt. Work suited her, and where Frank longed for weekends, she could not hide her enthusiasm for Monday mornings. She could only justify herself to herself when she worked. If only she could go to the bathroom and spend the next hour alone with her e-mail. “Working the weekend. Again,” said Imran. He had the fastest connection. “Shame,” said Natalie Blake. But was it? If Polly came she would only sit down and speak of her good works — police inquests and civil litigation and international arbitration for underdog nations; recently published opinions on the legality of the war. Headhunted by a new, modern, right-on set, where she was both very well paid and morally unimpeachable. Living the dream. It was the year people began to say “living the dream,” sometimes sincerely but usually ironically. Natalie Blake, who was also very well paid, found having to listen to Polly these days an almost impossible provocation.
136. Apple blossom, 1st of March
Surprised by beauty, in the front garden of a house on Hopefield Avenue. Had it been there yesterday? Upon closer inspection the cloud of white separated into thousands of tiny flowers with yellow centers and green bits and pink flecks. A city animal, she did not have the proper name for anything natural. She reached up to break off a blossom-heavy twig — intending a simple, carefree gesture — but the twig was sinewy and green inside and not brittle enough to snap. Once she’d begun she felt she couldn’t give up (the street was not empty, she was being observed.) She lay her briefcase on somebody’s front garden wall, applied both hands and wrestled with it. What came away finally was less twig than branch, being connected to several other twigs, themselves heavy with blossom, and the vandal Natalie Blake hurried away and round the corner with it. She was on her way to the tube. What could she do with a branch?
137. Train of thought
The screenwriter Dennis Potter was interviewed on television. Sometime during the early nineties. He was asked what it felt like to have a few weeks to live. Natalie Blake remembered this answer: “I look out of my window and I see the blossom. And it’s more blossomy than it’s ever been.” Once she got within network she would check the year and whether or not that was the correct wording. Then again, perhaps the way she had remembered it was the thing that was important. The branch lay abandoned outside a phone box at Kilburn station. Sitting in her tube seat, Natalie Blake moved her pelvis very subtly back and forth. Blossom was always intensely blossomy to Natalie Blake. Beauty created a special awareness in her. “The difference between a moment and an instant.” She couldn’t remember very much about the philosophical significance of this distinction other than that her good friend Leah Hanwell had once tried to understand it, and to make Natalie Blake understand it, a long time ago, when they were students, and far smarter than they were today. And for a brief period in 1995, perhaps a week or so, she had thought that she understood it.
138. http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=kierkegaard&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
Such a moment has a peculiar character. It is brief and temporal indeed, like every moment; it is transient as all moments are; it is past, like every moment in the next moment. And yet it is decisive, and filled with the eternal. Such a moment ought to have a distinctive name; let us call it the Fullness of Time.
139. Doublethink
Commercial barrister Natalie Blake did pro bono death row cases in the Caribbean islands of her ancestry and instructed an accountant to tithe 10 percent of her income, to be split between charitable contributions and supporting her family. She assumed it was the remnants of her faith that made her fretful and suspicious that these good deeds were, in fact, a further, veiled, example of self-interest, representing only the assuaging of conscience. Acknowledging the root of this suspicion did nothing to disperse it. Nor did she find any relief in the person of her husband, Frank De Angelis, who objected to her actions on quite other grounds: sentimentality, wooly mindedness.
140. Spectacle
The Blake — De Angelises started work early and tended to finish late, and in the gaps treated each other with an exaggerated tenderness, as if the slightest applied pressure would blow the whole thing to pieces. Sometimes in the mornings their commutes aligned, briefly, until Natalie changed at Finchley Road. More often Natalie left half an hour to an hour before her husband. She liked to meet early with the pupil with whom she shared a room, Melanie, to get the jump on all the business of the day. In the evenings the couple watched television, or went on-line to plan future holidays, itself an example of bad faith for Natalie hated holidays, preferring to work. They only truly came together at weekends, in front of friends, for whom they appeared fresh and vibrant (they were only thirty years old), and full of the old good humor, like a double act that only speaks to each other when they are on stage.
141. Listings
It was around this time that Natalie Blake began secretly checking the website. Why does anyone begin checking a website? Anthropological curiosity. The statement “I have heard that people are on this site” is soon followed by “I can’t believe that people really visit this site!” Then comes: “What kind of people would visit this site?” If the website is visited multiple times the question is answered. The problem becomes circular.
142. Technology
“I have it for work.” “It’s for work — I don’t pay for it.” “I’ve got to have it for work, and actually it makes a lot of things easier.” “It’s my work phone, otherwise I wouldn’t even have one.”
143. The Present
Natalie Blake, who told people she abhorred expensive gadgets and detested the Internet, adored her phone and was helplessly, compulsively, adverbly addicted to the Internet. Though incredibly fast, her phone was still too slow. It had not finished fully downloading the new website of her chambers before the doors closed on the elevator in Covent Garden station. For the length of a twenty-minute tube ride the screen in her hand obstinately froze on the sentence