Bertie became aware that something was amiss. Stuart was leaning back against the banister, staring at him.
“Are you feeling all right, Daddy?” asked Bertie, the concern rising in his voice. “Are you sure that you didn’t have too much shortbread?”
“No, I’m all right, Bertie,” Stuart stuttered. He leaned forward so that his face was close to Bertie’s. On the little boy’s breath 170 So Many Books Unread and Bikes Uncycled he could smell the Irn-Bru, an odour of sugar, and violent orange, an odour of a whole Scotland that would disappear one day, along with the Broons and Oor Wullie, a whole culture, things so loved, so taken for granted.
He recovered, but only to the extent of being able to say to Bertie: “I don’t think that you should talk about that, Bertie.
That sort of thing is a bit sensitive. People are funny about it.”
“I know,” said Bertie. “You should have seen how Dr Fairbairn looked when I asked him.”
51. So Many Books Unread and Bikes Uncycled The following morning, Domenica Macdonald took slightly longer over her breakfast than usual. This was not because there was more to eat – her breakfasts were always the same: a bowl of porridge, made from the cut oats she obtained from the real-food shop in Broughton Street and two slices of toast, one spread thinly with Marmite and one with marmalade. This breakfast never varied, at least when she was at home, and it was accompanied by whatever reading was current at the time – Mankind Quarterly, with its earnest anthropological papers, rubbed shoulders with the toast as easily as did the daily newspaper or an interesting letter set aside for leisurely perusal. Not that there were many of those: Domenica still wrote letters, by hand, but received few back, so depleted had the ranks of letter-writers become.
She had read somewhere that the vast majority of boxes of notelets that were sold in stationery shops were never used.
They were bought with good intentions, or given as presents in the same spirit, but they remained in their boxes. But that, she reflected that morning, was a common fate for so many objects which we make and give to one another. Exercise bicycles, for example, were not designed to go anywhere, but the wheels, at least, were meant to go round, which they rarely did.
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Exercise bicycles in gyms might be used, but this did not apply to those – the majority – bought for use in the home. They stood there, in mute affront to their owners, quite idle, before being moved to a spare room and ultimately to an attic. Then they were recycled, which did not mean, in this case, that they had been cycled in the first place.
She poured herself a cup of coffee and stared out of the window. And then, she thought, there were those books bought and not read. Somewhere there might be those who read each and every book they acquire – read them with attention and gravity and then put them carefully on a shelf, alongside other books that had received the same treatment. But for many books, being placed on the shelf was the full extent of their encounter with their owner. She smiled at this thought, remembering the anecdote about the late King George VI – she thought, or V
perhaps, or even Edward VII – who was presented with a book by its author and said: “Thank you, Mr So-and-So, I shall put it on the shelf with all the other books.” This was not meant to be a put-down to the author – it was, by contrast, a polite and entirely honest account of what would be done. And one could not expect one who was, after all, an emperor, to read every book given to him, or indeed any. Although – and this thought came to Domenica as she took a first sip of her coffee – even those whose office makes them too busy to read are never too busy to write their book when they leave office – a book which, by its very nature, will be most likely to appeal to those in similar office, who will be too busy to read it.
Some books, of course, were destined not to be read, largely because of their unintelligibility to all except a very small number of people. Domenica could think of several examples of this, including the remarkable books of her friend Andrew Ranicki, a professor of mathematics at the university. She had once asked him how many people in the world would understand his highly regarded but very obscure books from cover to cover, and he had replied, with very little hesitation: “Forty-five.” He had said this not with an air of resigned acceptance, as might be shown by an 172 So Many Books Unread and Bikes Uncycled author reporting on the public’s failure of taste, but with the air of one who knows from the beginning that he is writing for forty-five people. And surely it is better that forty-five should buy the book and actually read it, than should many thousands, indeed millions, buy it and put it on their shelves, like George VI (or V, or Edward VII, or possibly somebody else altogether). That, she remembered, had been the fate of Professor Hawking’s Brief History of Time. That was a book that had been bought by many millions, but had been demonstrated to have been read by only a minute proportion of those who had acquired it. For do we not all have a copy of that on our shelves, and who amongst us can claim to have read beyond the first page, in spite of the pellucid prose of its author and his evident desire to share with us his knowledge of . . . of whatever it is that the book is about?
And then, she thought, there were those novels that went on forever. Readers in a more leisurely age may have stayed the course, but not now. Domenica herself had tried to read Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy four times, but on each occasion had got only as far as page eighty. This was not because of any lack of merit in the novel – it was very fine – but because of its sheer scale. Such a fat book, she thought, in her defence, so many pages and marriages and family relationships. Almost like Proust, whom she had never finished, and whom she accepted she now never would. À la recherche du temps perdu was on her shelves –
and in a prominent position – and every so often she would dip into it and wander away into a world of dreamy reminiscence, but she would never finish it; she knew that. The sentences were too long. Modern sentences are short. In Proust, we encounter sentences which appear interminable, meandering on and on in a way which suggests that the author had no desire to bring a satisfying or intriguing line of thought to any form of conclusion, wishing rather to prolong the pleasure, as one might wish if one were an author like Proust, who spent most of his time languishing in bed – he was a chronic hypochondriac – rather than experiencing life – an approach which encouraged him to produce sentences of remarkable length, the longest one being
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that sentence which, if printed out in standard-size type, would wind round a wine bottle seventeen and a half times, or so we are told by Alain de Boton in his How Proust Can Change Your Life, a book which has surely been read by most of those who have bought it, so light and amusing it is.
Domenica stopped. She had been gazing out of the window, allowing her thoughts to wander. But there were things to be done that day, and Proustian reverie would not help. One of these things was to remind Antonia that it would be her turn to sweep the common stair next week, not an onerous duty perhaps, but one of those small things upon which the larger civilisation in which we live is undoubtedly based.
52. It Was a Pity That Things Had Come to This When Domenica went out of her flat onto the landing, she noticed immediately that the pot plant which grew beside the banister had been damaged. It was a large split-leaf philodendron, which she had bought some years before and which she had nurtured to its current considerable size. In this task she had received, she observed, very little support. When Bruce had occupied the other flat on the landing, he had professed an interest in the plant’s welfare, but had rarely, if ever, raised a finger in support. Such a narcissistic young man, Domenica 174 It Was a Pity That Things Had Come to This thought; had the leaves developed reflective surfaces, of course, it might have been different. Pat, who had at that point shared the flat with Bruce, had been more conscientious and helpfully had washed the leaves from time to time, something which the plant appeared to appreciate and which it rewarded with fresh sprouts of growth. But Antonia, in spite of having been very specifically asked to ensure that the plant was well-watered while Domenica was in the Far East, had proved to be an indifferent guardian at best, and Domenica was convinced that it was only as a result of Angus having come in to water it discreetly that the plant had survived her absence.