Ali Smith - Public Library and Other Stories

There was the orchard nobody went to. How could anything touch it? It was all blossom right now. There was the whole meadow full of flowers, wild ones, all the bright faces, out that window beyond this house only a couple of streets away. She sat low on the old nursing chair and the Fraser books sat on the shelf right next to her eye. Fraser. Olive. O LIVE. I LOVE. O VILE. EVIL O.

She reached and took out the first book. She didn’t even look at it, she threw the book. She just threw it.

And that’s how, when the spine fell off it and she picked it up to look at the bad damage she’d done, she saw — music.

Inside, behind the spine, the place where the pages were bound was lined with it, notes and staves all the way down the place where the name of the book had been. There’d been a music inside it all the years the book had been in the world. And that was a fair few years, for on one of its first pages was the date 1871. So that made it fifty-four years, near sixty, there’d been music nobody’d known about in the back of — she looked at the broken piece of spine — Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. And the paper with the notes on it looked like it might be a good bit older than the book whose spine it was hidden in, for there was a quality to the way the staves and notes were formed that didn’t look like these things looked nowadays.

That was an e, but she didn’t have the beginning of the stave so she didn’t know what key. C#, f, e, c#, b, b, f#, a. Then the piece of music ended where the paper had been cut to fit the spine. On the surviving bit of stave below: a, a, e, g, b, e, b.

She went to the space on the shelf that Ivanhoe had left empty. She put her finger to the top of the spine of the book next to the space, tipped the book out, watched it balance on its own weight then fall. She caught it in her hand. Waverley Novels. The Heart of Mid-Lothian. She ran her hand over the good spine. The paper of it felt like brushed leather. Maybe it was leather. It looked expensive. It looked like it would never break.

You could not tell whether there was music inside it just by looking at it.

The clean closed spines all along the Scott collection, book after book, quiet and waiting, lined three shelves. She shouldn’t even be in the front room. It was kept for the good. It wasn’t used.

(The boy’s face, surprised by the cold of the water. The dipper’s nest overhanging the river, disguised by leaves in summer, bare to the eye in winter. The carcasses hanging in the butcher’s window with the red and the white where the meat met the fat. The workings of the watch in its box in the dark.)

She looked at how well the stitching of the binding met the spine on the book in her hand. She gave it a tug with her fingers.

She went to the kitchen to get the gutting knife.

Olive Fraser, born 20 January 1909, Aberdeen. Died 9 December 1977, Aberdeen.

Brought up by her beloved aunt, Ann Maria Jeans, in Redburn, Queen Street, Nairn, on the Moray Firth coast in the Scottish Highlands. Estranged parents leave her there when they emigrate (separately) to Australia, and continue to do so after they come back (still estranged).

A force of energy and adventure, a headlong kind of a girl. That lassie lives in figures of speech. Blue-eyed blonde, so eye-catching that the newly instated Rector of the University of Aberdeen (which is where she goes in 1927 when she’s finished school, to study English), who happens to be driving past in his carriage from his own Instatement Ceremony, turns his head and cranes his neck to catch another glimpse of such a startlingly beautiful girl in the crowd.

A talker. A livewire. She was a beauty, but she gave the men a run for it. Hilariously funny. A poet. Circle of admiring undergraduates at her feet and her lines spilling out of her all Spenserian stanza. Annoying to young men in seminars: she niver thocht that up hersel, far did she get it fae? Beloved of landladies (and simultaneously disapproved of): that Miss Fraser! she keepit awfa ’ours. Bright, glowing like a lightbulb, ideas flickering like power surges. When trying to string fishing line on a rod and reel in her student lodgings, tangles herself up so badly that she has to toss a coin out of a window to a passing boy to get him to send a telegram to her friend Helena, a couple of years younger and a writer herself, enthralled by her exciting older poet friend: imprisoned in digs. Please rescue. Olive. Recalls, much later in life, this friend’s happy family house in Aberdeen, the welcoming shouts and the laughter, the merriness, the warmth. Recalls her friend’s mother’s singing, and the lucky stone with a hole in it that her friend’s mother gives her before her final exams.

Outstanding student. 1933: to Girton College in Cambridge on scholarship money, though a couple of years remain unaccounted for in between Aberdeen and Cambridge — poor health? poverty? mental exhaustion? Intermittently ill. Pale. Fatigued for no reason.

Five days of psychoanalysis in London: he simply took my mind to pieces and built it up again. I really feel as if I had been presented with a new heaven and a new earth, ten thousand cold showers on spring mornings and a Tinglow friction brush (mental).

Gains reputation as talented young poet. Wins Chancellor’s Medal for English Verse in 1935, only the second female student ever. Poem is called The Vikings. Senate unused to presenting anything to women: a kind of quasi academic dress had to be devised . Takes to calling herself Olave. Makes many new friends. Gets on many new people’s nerves: she was a pain in the neck. Strongly dislikes Cambridgeshire, too flat, too dank, too inland. Strongly dislikes Girton (remembers it ten years later, in a poem called On a Distant Prospect of Girton College, like this: Here does heavenly Plato snore, / A cypher, no more. / … / Here sits Dante in the dim / With Freud watching him. / … / Here does blessed Mozart seem / Alas, a sensual dream.). Girton, in turn, strongly dislikes her: she wasted the time of promising young scholars.

Bad headaches. Grey skin. Nosebleeds. Concentration lapses. Unexplained illness. Fatigue.

Drifts from job to job. Back north to help on farm. Trains polo-ponies in Oxfordshire. Assistant to archaeologist in Bedford. Wartime: applies to cypher dept in Royal Navy WRNS in Greenwich. Posted to Liverpool, junior officer on watch, witnesses blitzing of maternity hospital near Liverpool docks. Went out of her mind … thought the enemy were after her, trying to get in touch with her . 1945: Poultry worker. 1946: Bodleian librarian (gets the sack, leaves under a cloud). Solderer. Assistant nurse. Cleric. Shop girl (Fortnum’s, among others). 1949: living in Stockwell Street, Greenwich (now demolished), then Royal Hill, Greenwich. Made most of the furniture myself, being employed by a firm that had its own sawmill and was very generous in a thoughtful kind way to its employees and even to people who lived around . The death of the mother. The death of her aunt. The death of her dog, Quip, an Irish terrier. Drawn to Roman Catholicism; poetry becomes devotional. Poverty. One new outfit in the last twelve years .

1956 in London: onset of severe mental illness. I was walking along and I just blacked out and when I came to, I found myself up a tree. Diagnosed with schizophrenia. Hospitalized. I cannot write any literature. It is as though I had lost a limb . Medication: chlorpromazine. Like she’s been hammered down in a box and dropped below the Bermuda Deep . Unrecognizable, changed from the gallant, yellow-haired, rosy-cheeked girl. Grossly overweight, disfigured . Medication brings on painful sensitivity to sunlight. Puffy eyes. Skin grey, leathery. Stuffs enough hospital teddy bears (paltry sum per bear) nearly to ruin her hands. Buys herself ticket north.