Ali Smith - Public Library and Other Stories

How was this different? It felt different. It felt like it had been nothing to do with me. There’d been no real exchange. More, it somehow made me the suspect. No amount of speaking down a phone to someone in a call centre could restore my innocence.

I got my Barclaycard out of my wallet and folded it in two. I folded it back on itself the other way. I did this several times very fast until the fold gave off heat. When I could no longer put the tip of my finger on it because it was so hot, I ripped the card in two, one half valid from , the other expires end .

Five days later a new card with a new number and my name on it arrived from Barclaycard.

Ten days after that, a form arrived. It asked me to tick a box which confirmed whether I agreed or disagreed that I had made the transaction in question with Lufthansa.

I ticked the box which disagreed. I wrote underneath in capitals: I HAVE NEVER IN MY LIFE CARRIED OUT ANY TRANSACTION WITH LUFTHANSA WITH THIS OR ANY OTHER CARD and I signed the form with my name.

Two weeks after that, a letter arrived from Barclaycard which said they’d credited my Barclaycard with the amount involved while they made further enquiries .

Meanwhile, here’s the story of what maybe happened to the remains of DH Lawrence.

After he died in 1930 at the age of forty-four, his wife, Frieda, married her lover, Angelo Ravagli, and they moved to New Mexico. In 1935 she sent her husband back to Vence in France, where Lawrence had died and was buried, with the instruction that he have Lawrence’s body exhumed and cremated so that she could put his ashes in a beautiful vase.

Ravagli took the vase to Vence. He came back to New Mexico with the vase full of ashes. Frieda sealed the ashes up in a resplendent memorial shrine inside a block of concrete in case of thieves. When she died in 1956 she was buried next to this shrine. There’s a photograph of the shrine on Wikipedia. It has a risen phoenix carved in stone or concrete above it and the letters DHL surrounded by bright painted sunflowers and foliage on the front.

But in the biography I’d been reading, which is by John Worthen, Worthen says that after Frieda died, Ravagli announced: ‘I threw away the DH cinders.’ He’d had him exhumed and burned as instructed, he claimed, but then he’d dumped the ashes — maybe in Marseilles, Worthen thinks, maybe at the harbour, into the sea. When he got back to New York, Ravagli filled the vase with the ashes of God knows what or who. He gave it to Frieda, who buried it with honours and died believing she’d be being buried next to what was left of Lawrence.

Wikipedia, too, seems to suggest that the ashes in that shrine are actually Lawrence’s.

Who knows? Maybe they are.

But whether they are or they aren’t, imagine the husband, faithful and lying, seething, triumphant, steady in deception for twenty whole years till she dies. Imagine his foul understandable need, his satisfaction, changing DH Lawrence to DH cinders.

Imagine the ashes of Lawrence shaken into the air, dissolving in the ocean.

‘Fish, oh Fish, / So little matters!’

That’s from the poem called Fish. In another poem he calls the mosquito he’s hunting ‘Monsieur’, then ‘Winged Victory’. ‘Am I not mosquito enough to out-mosquito you?’ In another he declares that for his part he prefers his heart to be broken, cracked open like a pomegranate spilling its red seeds. In one of his most famous, he watches a snake drink at a waterhole then throws a log at it to show it who’s boss. The moment he does this he understands his own pettiness; he knows he’s cheated himself.

Sexual intercourse began in 1963 because of him. Literary merit went to court and won because of him. Class in the English novel radically shifted because of him. His mother, poor, ruined by work, dirt and poverty, could be delighted by a tuppenny bunch of spring flowers; at least that’s what Frieda says in an article she wrote in 1955 for the New Statesman, where she’s responding to a newly published 1950s biography of Lawrence which, according to her, is full of laughable untruths and inaccuracies. ‘There is nothing to save, now all is lost, / but a tiny core of stillness in the heart / like the eye of a violet.’ That’s from a poem called Nothing to Save. ‘High in the sky a star seemed to be walking. It was an aeroplane with a light. Its buzz rattled above. Not a space, not a speck of this country that wasn’t humanized, occupied by the human claim. Not even the sky.’ That’s from St Mawr, a novel about how human beings will never be able to be fully natural or free while they give in to civilization’s pressures and expectations, also about how women and stallions will never understand each other, especially when the woman is handicapped by being clever.

His clever friend Katherine Mansfield suggested to him that he call the cottage he was living in The Phallus. Her letters and notebooks are full of her anger and frustration at him. At the same time she typically writes this kind of thing in her letters to friends. ‘He is the only writer living whom I really profoundly care for. It seems to me whatever he writes, no matter how much one may “disagree” is important. And after all even what one objects to is a sign of life in him.’ And: ‘what makes Lawrence a real writer is his passion. Without passion one writes in the air or on the sands of the seashore.’

He himself wrote this in a letter in 1927 to Gertie Cooper, a friend and neighbour from his home in the north of England who was about to start treatment for tuberculosis, from which he also suffered and which killed him in the end: ‘while we live we must be game. And when we come to die, we’ll die game too.’ There’s a fury, a burning energy associated with TB suffering. Some see it as one of the driving forces of Lawrence’s temperament and his writing. The same could be said for a writer like Mansfield, who also died far too young of the same condition, a condition completely curable so few years later.

Meanwhile, a little less than a hundred years later, I was sitting at my desk on the one hand pondering hopeless fury and in the other literally holding my latest letter from Barclaycard.

According to Barclaycard, Lufthansa claimed that I had reserved a ticket with them and that they had issued me this ticket, as yet unused, on 21 December last year. So, did I agree with the merchant (Lufthansa) that I had bought this ticket? If I didn’t, I was to write back and tell Barclaycard and I was to do this within ten days of the date at the top of this letter.

The letter had taken eight days to arrive. I had two days left to reply and one of them was a Sunday.

Phish, oh phish. So little matters! Was there even any connection here, between the life, death and dissemination of Lawrence and me battling a fraudulent claim on a credit card statement? All I knew was, it cheered me up to think of Lawrence, whose individualism meant he’d fight anyone with both hands tied behind his back and whose magnetic pull always towards some kind of sympathy meant he’d grant a mosquito formal address in French and even compare it to an ancient work of art in the Louvre before he swatted it.

Imagine Lawrence in the virtual world. The very thought of him railing at an internet porn site, yelling at the net and all its computer games for not being nearly gamey enough, meant I forgot for a moment the letter in my hand from Barclaycard.

But back to Google Earth. I googled the address for the Lufthansa Office in London. I was thinking I could maybe go in, in person, and explain to them personally that it hadn’t been me who’d bought or reserved any ticket with them, used or unused, on 21 December or ever. Google told me that the London office is in Bath Road, at the postcode UB7 0DQ. I looked it up on Google Maps. It’s near Heathrow; Google Street View indicates it’s a huge warehouse or hangar at the back of the airport, off the kinds of street that are practically motorway, the kinds almost nobody walks along.