How We Met (25 page)

They’d once gone, come to think of it, to visit Wordsworth’s home, Dove Cottage in the Lake District; it was one of the best places Fraser ever went with Liv – being a city kid from the outskirts of Manchester – and he remembers being amazed,
awestruck
, by the scenery – how ridiculously idyllic it was, like nothing he’d ever seen – so much so that he was moved to put down some lyrics in a fit of inspiration.

Ah, that was the Fraser Morgan of old, he thinks, ruefully, as he stands in the queue. The one who was inspired, occasionally, who had the peace of mind to
think
about stuff.

Anna seems to insist on having her back to him, and Fraser has no option than to amuse himself by people-watching. He is transfixed by the students – they are everywhere: sitting on the marble steps with a pile of books, working on their laptops in the armchairs up on the first floor. How come they look so
young
?
It’s offensive. They don’t look more than twelve, any of them. Mind you, he must have looked like that one day, before the fags and the booze and the worry set in. What had he thought of people pushing thirty, back then? Old, that’s what – what was the point of life past thirty?

They register at the computers. ‘Now what is your purpose for study, today?’ asks the woman at the desk: quite pretty, save for an unbecoming bowl-cut.

Fraser blows air out through his mouth. Oh, my dead girlfriend’s wishes, he thinks. And he gets that knotted feeling in his stomach again. It feels like hypocrisy.

Still, he is here now and he must concentrate on the job in hand. He remembers the note he wrote to Mia: how he would try not to make any of this about him, by which really he meant about their kiss that neither of them will ever know for sure if Liv saw. ‘Guilt,’ someone once told him, ‘is a selfish, useless emotion.’ No, this was for Olivia, for the things she didn’t get to do and the life she didn’t get to live.

Eventually, after what seems like an hour of the sort of security procedures that wouldn’t look out of place at a Category A prison, they make it to the Humanities Reading Room on the first floor. Fraser is carrying only the designated plastic bag allowed; with pencils, laptop, mobile phone turned on silent and a notebook. He is still reeling from being told that he won’t be allowed to take in even a bottle of water, in case, you know, he tears a page of
War and Peace
into tiny pieces and makes a snow-shaker out of it, so he intends to be taking a coffee break, very soon.

‘Right, so are we decided, then?’ whispers Anna, as she holds the door of the Reading Room open.

Fraser narrows his eyes at her.

‘You look at
The Prelude
, OK? I’ll look at
Lyrical Ballads
, because I love
Tintern Abbey
– Liv and I both loved that poem – then we’ll read them, make a few notes, go and discuss somewhere and learn say, ten lines off by heart?’

Fraser pauses then bursts out laughing – he doesn’t know why, it’s just Anna’s serious face and those fake glasses and the fact he suddenly feels like he’s joined an intensely intellectual poetry book club. But Anna’s face falls; she looks hurt and, without thinking, Fraser throws his arms around her. She cares about the List, she cares about Liv; she has a good heart underneath it all, does Spanner. It was a shame she had to be such a pain in the arse sometimes.

The Reading Room is huge and pretty darn impressive. Fraser has never seen this sort of studiousness en masse, except perhaps in
Dead Poets Society
, and he is surprised to find himself feeling intimidated. Anna goes to the help desk to request some books and he stands there for a second, leaning back on his heels before righting himself again, unsteady with a sudden fit of vertigo. The room is vast, with a high, vaulted ceiling. At row upon row of long wooden desks, people are heads down, over books and laptops, their faces illuminated by the study lamps. Some of these dudes look as though they’ve been in here for
weeks.
The walls of books, so many old books! It fries his head to think of the people who have passed through here, the scholars who have sat in these seats. It is silent, save for the odd cough or rustle of paper, which echo and reverberate around the cavernous space.

They are given a shelf number for the books they need, by a woman so mousy and librarian-looking that Fraser wonders how she copes in the outside world.

He finds
The Prelude
nestling among the Coleridge and Byron and the Keats. It is an unimaginably old book, with
THE BRITISH LIBRARY
stamped on its brown leather front – a proper book, as books should be. He smells it, that fusty, leathery, charity-shop smell, and has an immediate olfactory-induced memory: him, in the May of 2000, revising for his finals in Lancaster Library – a somewhat less inspiring, low-ceilinged building, eventually losing his fight to stay awake and dribbling over Plato’s
Symposium
. Ah, happy days …

‘OK, let’s sit here,’ whispers Anna, and she takes her place at one of the benches, switches on her reading lamp, opens her copy of
Lyrical Ballads
, seemingly exactly where she needs to, and starts reading. Fraser stands there for a moment. Wasn’t she going to tell him which part of
The Prelude
to start with? It looks bloody lengthy, that’s for sure – if this is
The Prelude
, he dreads to think how long the main poem is.

He looks around him for a few seconds, as if checking nobody is watching, then he slides his plastic bag containing all his belongings onto the desk next to Anna and sits down, slowly, trying not to make a sound.

There is a woman next to him, obviously with a cold or a chronic case of hay fever because she is surrounded, on all sides, by balled-up, snotty tissues, forming a sort of paper-and-snot barricade. She blows her nose, for a long time and very loudly, and Fraser uses these few seconds to get everything out of his rustling plastic bag and arranged on the desk in front of him, before leaning purposefully to the left to see what she’s reading:
The Odyssey
– Now, there’s a book! he thinks. By her side are reams and reams of elaborate, pencil-written notes on yellow A4, like the scribblings of a serial killer.

Fraser gives a short, sharp cough as if he means business, and turns on his laptop, but he’s forgotten to put that on silent so it chimes, excruciatingly loudly, as it starts up, and he squeezes his eyes shut, silently cursing, waiting for it to stop. ‘
For God’s sake, Fraser
,’ hisses Anna, and then she tosses her hair dramatically, swiping Fraser in the eye so that it starts watering and he has to hold his hand over it for a good few seconds.

Eventually, after at least ten minutes of doing everything possible to put off the inevitable, he opens his copy of
The Prelude
. This poem is so long it is split into separate books, for crying out loud – wasn’t the whole point of being a poet that you didn’t have to write so much? He decides to start with the Preface, which gave an overview of Wordsworth’s life. Yes, the best way to understand poetry was definitely to start with the poet. To say that this guy was fond of nature and the Lake District was something of an understatement. Liv loved the Lakes too and was often arranging mini-breaks and camping trips with everyone. Fraser has one particular fond memory of a rainy afternoon in Bowness, buying camping equipment whilst drunk on Bluebird bitter.

He reads on; he imagines old Willy Wordsworth in his ruffled shirt and his britches, awestruck by the host of golden daffodils.

‘“I wandered lonely” is a poem about nature and memory”, he reads, “Unity between man and nature. Daffodils are personified, the speaker is part of the scene, wandering lonely as a cloud …”’

There seems to be a lot about this concept of ‘a unity between man and nature’, and about the ‘sublime’, and Fraser, a philosophy graduate, after all, is quite taken with this. It sounds transcendental and psychedelic, possibly a drug-induced state. Weren’t they all on drugs, these Romantic poets? Off their tits on opium?

He looks up ‘sublime’ on
Wikipedia
:

‘A form of expression in literature where author refers to things in nature which affect the mind with a sense of overwhelming grandeur …’

Mmm. Sounded a bit vague.

He leans over to Anna. ‘Hey, what’s this sublime business I keep reading about? … It sounds, well,
sublime
!’

Anna looks at him blankly; across the bench, someone tuts. Then, Anna leans in, adjusts her glasses, as if about to impart ground-breaking, intellectual wisdom.

‘I think it just describes a state when he was really, really happy,’ she says, looking intently into Fraser’s eyes. ‘You know that feeling when you see something really beautiful, when everything just feels really right and good in the world, and words can’t really describe it?’

Fraser is impressed. Perhaps he spoke too soon when he assumed Anna didn’t know anything about Wordsworth, because he gets that, he really does. He can remember being rendered speechless by the scenery up there in the Lakes; it’s just he can’t remember the last time he actually felt like
that
, like everything was right and good. Has he ever?

‘Look,’ whispers Anna, sliding her book across the desk. ‘This poem is famous for explaining the whole “sublime” thing.’

Fraser takes the book, ‘Tintern Abbey, Lines composed a few miles above, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour,’ it reads. (Ten out of ten for a catchy title …)

‘It’s this line.’ She points to it. ‘Read this, this is what he meant.’

‘…
of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood/In which the burden of the mystery/In which the heavy and weary weight/Of all this intelligible world/Is lightened.
’

Contentment, perhaps? It sounds pretty nice whatever it is, thinks Fraser. I’ll have some of that. He is just about to say as much to Anna when his mobile phone (at least this is on silent) starts to vibrate. Fraser looks at the number.
KAREN
flashes up in capital letters and at first he ignores it, but then twenty seconds later, she rings again. Fraser looks around him. He could walk outside, but they are at the far side of the library, as far away from the exit as it is possible to be and he doesn’t know, maybe it’s important – freak accidents do happen after all – and it would be just his luck that the day he decides to ignore her call is the day she gets mugged or run over by a bus.

So he picks up, cupping his hand around the phone and cowering beneath the desk in an effort to be as quiet as possible. ‘I’m in the British Library, Karen, is it important?’

‘Yer in a LIBRARY?!’ It always surprises Fraser, how northern, how ‘from
Hull
’, Karen sounds on the phone. ‘What the monkies are you doing in a library, hun?’

‘Helping Anna. Anyway, can I call you back? I’ll call you back. OK, OK, gotta go,’ and then he hangs up before waiting for her to do the same since, clearly, Karen Palmer is alive and well.

He puts his phone on the desk and is aware of Anna’s disapproval next to him, as well as that of the woman reading
The Odyssey
– not that she can talk with her constant farmyard snuffling – and he is just about to settle back to
The Prelude
when he hears a familiar American drawl:

‘Excuse me, you are not allowed to use your mo-bil phone in the library …’

It booms and reverberates and Fraser looks up to see the man from the shop queue standing up, a smug look slapped all over his annoying moon face. What was wrong with this idiot? Lurking all over the library, suddenly showing up to tell him off like a child? Fraser can deal with the likes of Darren – mindless scrapping doesn’t really rile him, it’s just inconvenient and unnecessary – but authority or, worse, this sort of misplaced authority from a pompous goon with a fucking anorak on. Nah, he’s not letting this one go.

‘Look, I had it on silent, mate, OK? But I thought it might be an important call and I was too far from the exit to take it outside.
Jesus
.’

Fraser goes back to his book, head dramatically in hands, but can feel the man glaring at him.

‘Shut up,’ Anna hisses, but no, why should he shut up? This man has humiliated him in front of a whole reading room, when all he’s done is whisper, for all of four seconds.

‘You are SO selfish,’ snarls the man.

‘Selfish?’ Fraser laughs. ‘I think you’re the selfish one, don’t you? Embarrassing me in front of everyone, for no good reason?’

And with that, Fraser switches his lamp on studiously because, as far as he’s concerned, this matter is closed. Anna gives a short, humourless laugh of disbelief and the woman reading
The Odyssey
has her face in a tissue, embarrassed, or possibly not in any fit state of health to deal with a revolt in the British Library of a Saturday afternoon.

Anna nudges him, hard.

‘What?’

‘For fuck’s sake, Fraser. You’re going to get us thrown out.’

‘Oh, shut up, Anna.’ Fraser is irritated now, that double espresso kicking in, making him feel agitated. Where was the backing up? The support? Liv would have backed him up – and Mia? Yeah, well, she would have joined in.

American anorak in London stands up.

‘You are unbelievable
,’ he spits. ‘This is the British Library!’

So pompous! So. Fucking. Pompous.

Fraser gets up, and then, very calmly, walks around to his side of the desk and leans in – in a possibly intimidating fashion – right up to his big moon face, which looks as if it’s been punched in the middle already.

‘You’re acting like I committed a crime,’ he breathes in his face. ‘You just cannot help yourself, can you? Just
cannot
get enough of your own pompous voice?’

‘Excuse me?’ drawls the man, with the sort of shaking, barely concealed rage that tells Fraser he now means WAR.

But Fraser shows no signs of leaving the man’s side of the desk. Across the way, Anna is panicking, shoving her stuff into her bag.