Zadie Smith - NW

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

highest standards of legal representation in today’s fast-changing world.

144. Speed

At some point we became aware of being “modern,” of changing fast. Of coming after just now. John Donne was also a modern and surely saw change but we feel we are more modern and that the change is faster. Even the immutable is faster. Even blossom. While buying a samosa in the filthy shop inside Chancery Lane Station (one remnant of her upbringing was a willingness to buy food from anyone, anywhere) Natalie Blake once again checked the listings. By this point she was checking them two or three times a day, though still as a voyeur, without making a concrete contribution.

145. Perfection

For some reason this proposed picnic was very important to Natalie Blake, and she set about planning it meticulously. She cooked everything from scratch. She determined upon a hamper with real crockery and glasses. Even as she was ordering this stuff online she saw it was really “too much” but her course was set and she felt unable to change direction. At work she was deep into a dispute between a Chinese tech company and its British distributor. At the first video conference the Chinese Managing Director had been unable to conceal his surprise. She should not be going to a picnic. She should be in the office making her way through the other side’s fresh disclosures. Natalie continued along her path. She picked an outfit. Glittering sandals and hoop earrings and bangles and a long ochre skirt and a brown vest and hair in a giant afro puff held off her face by means of one leg of a black pair of tights, cut off and knotted at the back of her head. She felt African in this outfit, although nothing she wore came from Africa except perhaps the earrings and bangles, conceptually. Her husband passed by the kitchen at the moment she was trying to force three extra Tupperware boxes into the gingham-lined hamper she had bought for the occasion.

“Jesus. That’s ours?”

“She’s my oldest friend, Frank.”

“They’ll both be in tracksuits.”

“A picnic is not just weed and a supermarket sandwich. We hardly see them anymore. It’s a beautiful day. I want it to be nice.”

“OK.”

He edged round her theatrically. Doctor avoiding a lunatic. He opened the fridge.

“Don’t eat. It’s a picnic. Eat at the picnic.”

“When did you start baking?”

“Don’t touch that. It’s ginger cake. It’s Jamaican.”

“You know I can’t eat anything with flour in it.”

“It’s not for you!”

He left the room silently, and it was not quite clear whether it was the beginning of a row or not. Probably he would decide later, depending on whether there was a practical advantage to be had in discord. Natalie Blake put her hands on the counter and spent a long time staring at the yellow kitchen tiles in front of her face. Who was it for? Leah? Michel?

146. Cheryl (L.O.V.E.)

“Just move that.” With Carly screaming on her hip, Cheryl bent down to sweep the Barbie and junk mail to the floor. Natalie found a hardback annual of some kind and put the mugs of tea upon it. “Let me try and get this little one down then we can go in the living room.” They sat opposite each other on their old twin beds. Natalie believed she had a memory of lying beside her sister on one of these beds, tracing spidery letters on her bare back, which Cheryl had to then guess and spell out as words. Cheryl gave Carly her bottle. She sat very straight with her third child in her arms. An adult with adult concerns. Natalie crossed her legs like a child and kept her fond memories to herself. Wasn’t there something juvenile in the very idea of “fond memories?”