It was November. Although it was not yet late,
the sky was dark when I turned into Laundress Passage. Father
had finished for the day, switched off the shop lights and
closed the shutters; but so I would not come home to darkness he
had left on the light over the stairs to the flat. Through the
glass in the door it cast a foolscap rectangle of paleness onto
the wet pavement, and it was while I was standing in that
rectangle, about to turn my key in the door, that I first saw
the letter. Another white rectangle, it was on the fifth step
from the bottom, where I couldn't miss it.
I closed the door and put the shop key in its
usual place behind Bailey's Advanced Principles of Geometry.
Poor Bailey. No one has wanted his fat gray book for thirty
years. Sometimes I wonder what he makes of his role as guardian
of the bookshop keys. I don't suppose it's the destiny he had in
mind for the masterwork that he spent two decades writing.
A letter. For me. That was something of an
event. The crisp-cornered envelope, puffed up with its thickly
folded contents, was addressed in a hand that must have given
the postman a certain amount of trouble. Although the style of
the writing was old-fashioned, with its heavily embellished
capitals and curly flourishes, my first impression was that it
had been written by a child. The letters seemed untrained. Their
uneven strokes either faded into nothing or were heavily etched
into the paper. There was no sense of flow in the letters that
spelled out my name. Each had been undertaken separately -- M A
R G A R E T L E A -- as a new and daunting enterprise. But I
knew no children. That is when I thought, It is the hand of an
invalid.
It gave me a queer feeling. Yesterday or the day
before, while I had been going about my business, quietly and in
private, some unknown person -- some stranger -- had gone
to the trouble of marking my name onto this envelope. Who was it
who had had his mind's eye on me while I hadn't suspected a
thing?
Still in my coat and hat, I sank onto the stair
to read the letter. (I never read without making sure I am in a
secure position. I have been like this ever since the age of
seven when, sitting on a high wall and reading The Water
Babies, I was so seduced by the descriptions of underwater
life that I unconsciously relaxed my muscles. Instead of being
held buoyant by the water that so vividly surrounded me in my
mind, I plummeted to the ground and knocked myself out. I can
still feel the scar under my fringe now. Reading can be
dangerous.)
I opened the letter and pulled out a sheaf of
half a dozen pages, all written in the same laborious script.
Thanks to my work, I am experienced in the reading of difficult
manuscripts. There is no great secret to it. Patience and
practice are all that is required. That and the willingness to
cultivate an inner eye. When you read a manuscript that has been
damaged by water, fire, light or just the passing of the years,
your eye needs to study not just the shape of the letters but
other marks of production. The speed of the pen. The pressure of
the hand on the page. Breaks and releases in the flow. You must
relax. Think of nothing. Until you wake into a dream where you
are at once a pen flying over vellum and the vellum itself with
the touch of ink tickling your surface. Then you can read it.
The intention of the writer, his thoughts, his hesitations, his
longings and his meaning. You can read as clearly as if you were
the very candlelight illuminating the page as the pen speeds
over it.
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