The Glass Ocean(4)
From which it may be seen that he was a little bit in love with her, too. As were they all.
• • •
But I’m getting ahead of myself now. Best reserve her entrance for later. She deserves a good one; such drama.
• • •
My father, of course, is a wholly different matter. Unprepossessing. I imagine him as he was then, a young man, very young—young as I am now—a little older, perhaps—eighteen, nineteen; dressed very properly in a dark suit, yellow waistcoat with small silver buttons, white shirt with a stiffly starched collar. These clothes are of fine quality, evidently expensive, purchased on the eve of his long journey from the north; but he is uncomfortable in them; unaccustomed; see how he pulls at the collar, fiddles with the cuffs, nervously pulling, nervously fiddling, with his pale, small, delicate hands. Small. Yes. He is a small man, my father. Neat and small. A pale man, dark haired, with bright, dark eyes the most expressive feature in a face otherwise unrevealing. Fiddling with his cuffs and collar in a hot, dark room. Pressed close, he is.
I can easily imagine it, the closeness. And the smell: very sour. For it is a very hot day, the hottest of that very hot summer of 1841. Outside the small, dark room wherein my father is contained (wherein I have contained him), close pressed, in his very proper suit, the roads are a steaming clamor of dust and dung, the garbage tips expelling everywhere across the city their noxious gases, cinders carrying thick and hot on a dry, southwest wind. He’s lucky to be indoors actually, on a day like this. Despite the fug.
• • •
It is arbitrary of me, perhaps. I could have chosen differently. But I’ve decided that this unpleasant day is the day on which I will begin. On which they will. He and she. In late August. All the parks burned brown, the leaves on the trees like galvanized metal, uncompromising sky the color of steel. Water in the Long Pond stippled. Crackling. Conducive to chemical reaction.
• • •
My father is in Bury Place. I have contained him upstairs, in the peculiar pink-and-blue confection of a building, so unexpected among all the red brick and whitewash of Bloomsbury, where are located my grandfather’s lodgings.
• • •
Is this precise enough?
• • •
No. I can be more specific yet. The pink building is at the corner of Bury Place and Great Russell Street, just around the corner from Montagu House. On the street level there is a shop, very dark, that bears the placard: A. PETROOK, ANTIQUITIES; COINS; CARPETS; OLD COINS; PAPER MONEY BOUGHT AND SOLD. Small, intriguing objects are contained within this shop, displayed in its windows. A head of Isis, for example. Another of Aphrodite. Greek vases and other odds and ends of pottery. An iron Celtic figure of a horse and rider. A red terra-cotta hand and arm, very roughly made, probably broken off an early Roman figurine. Something Mayan.
Arthur Petrook is there as well, at the back, one among his objects, like them rough, with an unfinished quality, as if poorly cast, by old-fashioned methods. A short man, squat, dark, balding, foreign looking (not unlike my father in this), apparently untouched by the heat (in this very unlike my father indeed), surrounded by old, piled newspapers, dusty bound squares of carpet, a jumble of packing crates and boxes from which straw stuffing protrudes. He sits at—or rather, it seems, crouches over—a desk, though, of course, this isn’t true, he doesn’t crouch, not really, more it’s that he’s leaning over something, leaning avidly over an object that lies before him, on the desk. It’s a page from what must be (have been) a very old book, lettered in Latin, brilliantly colored in the margins in gold and crimson and deep blue, borders illuminated with strange, deformed figures, some human, some not, cavorting, coupling, consuming themselves and each other and the text in an infinite, uncheering roundelay that, from the look of it, Arthur Petrook finds infinitely cheering.