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Emotionally Weird(12)

By:Kate Atkinson


‘ . . . the autonomous work of art brings into question— ’

‘But don’t you think, Archie,’ Professor Cousins said mildly, ‘that really all literature is about the search for identity ?’ He made an expansive gesture, ‘From Oedipus Rex onwards it’s about the search of man –’ he reached out and patted my hand ‘– and the fairer sex, of course, for the true understanding of himself – or herself – and his – or her – place in the universe, in the whole scheme of things. The meaning of life. And God,’ he added, ‘does He – or She – exist and if so why does He – or She – leave us bereft in a cold and lonely world, spinning endlessly through the black infinity of space, whipped by the icy interstellar winds? And what happens when we reach the end of infinity? And what colour is it? That’s the question. What do we see when we stand on the terrace of infinity?’

Everyone sat in silence, staring at Professor Cousins. He smiled and shrugged and said, ‘Just a thought, do carry on, dear boy.’

Archie ignored him. ‘ Not only the role of the creator of the fiction but also his relationship to the work itself— ’

‘Excuse me,’ Kevin said to Professor Cousins, ‘did you mean “What is the colour of infinity”? Or did you mean “What is the colour of the end of infinity”?’

‘Is there a difference, do you think?’ Professor Cousins said eagerly. ‘How intriguing.’

‘ End of infinity?’ Andrea puzzled.

‘Oh, everything has an end,’ Professor Cousins said reassuringly, ‘even infinity.’

Infinity, I happen to know, is the colour of sludge and dead seals, of sunken battleships and their crews, the dregs of Monday mornings and the lees of Saturday nights and of small harbours on the north-east coast in January. But I kept that knowledge to myself.

‘ . . . represents the distance between the world and phenomena, not to mention the— ’

Archie was interrupted again, this time by a neat rapping at the door and Martha Sewell walked in without waiting for an answer. Martha was the recently appointed tutor in creative writing. After one year, Archie had declared the creative writing paper such a success that he had persuaded the department, for the sake of prestige, to appoint ‘a real writer’ to the post of tutor. Bostonian Martha, an Amherst type, was a poet in her forties whom no-one in the department had ever heard of. She wrote poetry with impenetrable syntax about a life where nothing ever happened. Her poems had titles like ‘Abstraction Or [#3]’ (and your hair, blurred with/rain makes me think/of the obliquity of existence) and had just published a new collection called Cherry-Picking in Vermont , which she carried around with her everywhere like a passport, as if she might be asked to prove who she was.

Martha was still in culture shock, having come to Dundee thinking that it was part of a Scotland that was built out of lochs and mountains and decorated with moorland and waterfalls, and every so often you could see a pained look cross her face when she had to negotiate a piece of shoddy modern architecture, a gas-lit close, or a hollow-eyed and abandoned jute mill. She was not convinced when Dundee’s many good points were pointed out to her – the glorious parks; the municipal observatory; the view from the Law; the beautiful bridges; the Tay; a radical and seditious history; the almost unnatural friendliness of Dundonians, their concomitant violence; the curiously Dundeecentric press; the inhabitants’ benign indifference to idiosyncratic behaviour (the way, for example, that you could walk down the street in nothing but a pair of baffies with a budgerigar on your head and no-one would think twice of it).

Tall and thin and as sensual as a cod, Martha had large beloafered feet that were designed for pounding the paths and trails of New England. She gave the impression of being extraordinarily clean and groomed, as though she curried herself thoroughly every morning. Her smooth hair, somewhere between blond and grey, a colourless colour, was worn in a tidy bob, kept in order by a black velvet Alice band.

Martha had been accompanied to Scotland by her husband, Jay – a professor at Ann Arbor and a Whitman specialist – who had taken a sabbatical to accompany his wife. The Sewells spent a lot of time – certainly more than the average Dundonian – visiting Edinburgh, where they purchased cashmere tartan travel rugs, Caithness crystal, and rare malt whiskies and daydreamed about renting a house in Ramsey Gardens.

Martha and Jay belonged to the class of people who run economies and design legislation, who arrive alive in the polar regions and survive in the equatorial, who invent chronometers and barometers, and mend clothes and darn stockings and never run out of milk or clean underwear. They led the kind of life I could never hope to, especially if I stayed with Bob.