Alasdair's Shop

We stopped on the twentieth of December and started again on the sixth of January, and in between there were seventeen days, of which eleven contained nothing at all.

I went to Turin for a week and slept in my old room under a poster of a swimmer from 1994 and ate four meals a day, which is what happens there. My mother asked twice whether I was eating, once whether I had seen anybody, and once, on the last evening, wiping the table in long flat strokes, whether I would still be coming in February.

“I always come in February,” I said.

“Lo so,” she said. I know. And went on wiping the table, and did not ask what she wanted to ask, which is a thing she and I have agreed on without ever discussing it.

On New Year’s Day an email arrived at 11.42 with no greeting and no signature. Subject line: p. 204, “sfiancata”.

It said: Worn out is wrong. Worn through is closer but it’s a coat. I think she means the kind of tired that has taken the shape out of something. No answer needed.

I read it eleven times, which I am going to record without comment, and I did not answer it, because it said no answer was needed, and because I could not construct a reply that was two lines long. Everything I wrote came out either colder than I am or warmer than I could defend, and at twenty to one in the morning I closed the laptop and went to bed in my mother’s flat with the swimmer looking down at me.

On the sixth of January he was at the desk at ten to nine pretending he had just sat down, and beside my coffee there was a packet of the Italian pencils I cannot get in this country, the soft ones, the ones with the grey lacquer that I have used since I was a student.

He did not mention them. I did not mention them. I have been using them ever since and there are four left.

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Alasdair Nesbitt’s shop is down a close off the Royal Mile, two rooms and a cellar, and in January it is heated by a gas fire the size of a shoebox and by Alasdair’s conviction that cold is a state of mind. He had bought a dead clergyman’s library at auction in October — eleven hundred volumes, four of them worth anything — and he was nine weeks behind on cataloguing it and entirely cheerful about that.

I have known him eight years. He sold me a 1907 dictionary I did not need, and then talked me out of a second one I wanted, which is not a thing booksellers do, and I have been going back ever since.

In three years he has never once asked me about Mateo. I trained him not to. I did it with the flatness of my answers, which is a technique, and it worked, and I have been quietly furious with him about it since roughly October.

I went in on a Thursday afternoon at four with a draft in my bag and snow doing the thing it does in Edinburgh, which is to fall without ever arriving.

“You’ve brought something,” he said, before I had my coat off. “You’ve the face.”

“I’ve a punctuation question.”

“You’ve never had a punctuation question in your life. You’ve had punctuation verdicts.” He moved a stack of sermons off the second chair. “Sit down. Tell me.”

So I told him.

It is page two hundred and thirty-one, and it is Corrado’s chapter, the only one in the book where the husband is allowed to give his own account. He is in a hotel in Genoa on business, on the second night, and he is doing the thing people do in hotels, which is to make an inventory of himself.

Ho pagato le bollette, ho parlato con l’avvocato, ho comprato un tostapane; non le ho mai chiesto come stava.

I paid the bills, I spoke to the solicitor, I bought a toaster; I never once asked her how she was.

The semicolon is the whole sentence. I explained this to Alasdair at some length. With a full stop, the last clause becomes a confession — a man stops, and turns, and admits something, and the reader is invited to find him brave for admitting it. With a comma it becomes a list, and the toaster and the not-asking are the same size, and the sentence turns into contempt, and Giulia did not write contempt.

With a semicolon the two halves are held apart and joined at once. The competence and the silence are one action. He is not confessing. He does not know he is confessing. He is listing what he did that year, and one of the things he did that year was not ask.

“So keep the semicolon,” Alasdair said.

“I can’t, because English fights it in a list of past tenses, it reads as a printer’s decision, and because the ho repeats four times in Italian and carries it, and English has no ho. And because Mateo will want a full stop in the Spanish and he will be right, and if we split them the two texts stop agreeing at the precise sentence where they ought to agree most.”

“Why ought they.”

“Because it’s the hinge.”

“Right.”

I then talked about it for a further twenty minutes. I raised the question of whether English can be made to carry an unwitting confession without the machinery of the confession showing. I quoted the four other semicolons in the novel. I described the toaster. I explained why the toaster is the best object in the chapter and why Renzo’s colleague in Valencia had queried it and been wrong. I said the word sfiancata out loud twice for reasons that were not strictly relevant.

Alasdair let me get all the way to the end. He is very good at that. He had his gloves on with the fingers cut out and he was writing prices in the front of somebody’s sermons in a soft pencil the whole time.

Then he put the pencil down.

“Elodie,” he said. “You’ve been telling me about a semicolon for forty minutes. It was never about the semicolon.”

The gas fire went on doing its four square feet of work.

“That’s a cheap thing to say to a translator,” I said.

“It is. I’ve been saving it since about minute nine.” He turned the sermon over. “Go on then. What’s the book about?”

And this is the part I have come back to about nine times since, because I have said what that book is about to at least four people since September — to Morag, in a summary; to my mother, in Italian; to a man at a party in November who publishes non-fiction; to Renzo, who did not want a summary, he wanted a promise — and every single time I described the plot.

“It’s about a marriage where nobody lies,” I said.

“That’s not a book.”

“It’s about a man who did everything and said nothing, and a woman who described everything accurately and about four years late, and they were both extremely good at what they were doing, and what they were doing was the thing they did instead of each other.” I heard my own voice doing something it does not do in that shop. “It’s about two people with the same skill. That’s the whole engine of it. If he’d been careless or she’d been vague they’d have had a row in 1998 and stayed married. They couldn’t. They were too good. He organised and she articulated and between them there was nothing left over that needed saying, and the book is three hundred pages of the space where the saying should have been.”

Alasdair did not say anything.

“And she wrote it about—“ I said, and stopped.

He waited. He is a bookseller. He has an enormous professional capacity for waiting while somebody decides whether to buy something.

“She wrote it about us,” I said.

It came out quite small. The shop did not fall down. A man came in behind me, looked at the theology, made a noise, and went out again.

“Right,” Alasdair said, in exactly the voice he uses when somebody hands him a book he has been looking for and he does not want to show them what it is worth.

“Not all of it. She was sixty-one, she had her own marriage, she had four novels’ worth of other people. But the kitchen is ours. The silence is his. The woman who has a beautifully constructed position on forgiveness is mine, and she cut that paragraph out in April and put something true in its place, and I have been translating the true thing since October with the man it is about sitting two feet away from me, and I have not said one word to him about it.”

“Have you not.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because he’d manage it,” I said. “He’d be very good. He’d say something exactly right and then he’d go away and rearrange himself where I can’t see it, and I would rather have the argument than the arrangement.”

Alasdair got up and did something to the gas fire that made no difference.

“Can I ask you one,” he said, with his back to me. “Three years, I’ve not asked you anything.”

“I know. I noticed. I trained you.”

“You did.” He sat down again. “What happens in March?”

“We hand it in.”

“Aye. And then what?”

I opened my mouth to answer him, in the way you do when a question has an obvious answer, and discovered that there was nothing in the space where the answer goes.

The codicil says six months. It says the same room and the same pages and it says what happens if we fail, and it is extremely detailed about failure, and there are eleven lines in it about the Ferro Literary Trust. There is not one word in that document about what happens if we succeed. Morag has never raised it. Renzo has never raised it. Mateo has a flat in Madrid that he has kept and a short let in Stockbridge that runs, I happen to know, because I saw the papers on the desk in November, to the fourth of April.

Nobody had asked. In three and a half months, with two lawyers and an executor and a son and a German translator in and out of that room, not one person had asked the question, and neither had I, and I am a woman who reads contracts for pleasure.

“That’s an answer,” Alasdair said.

“It’s not an answer.”

“Elodie. It’s an answer.”

I bought a dictionary I did not need. He let me. He was right about that as well, and I carried it up the close in the snow that never arrives, and it weighed about two kilos, and I was glad of it.

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I gave him mine the next morning at twenty past nine, before the pages were out.

“I have spent four months,” I said, “describing this book to other people in a way that does not require me to say your name, and yesterday it took me forty minutes and a bookseller to notice that I was doing it.”

Mateo had his hand on the box lid. He took it off the box lid and put it flat on the desk.

He did not translate it. He did not ask who the bookseller was, although he knows perfectly well who the bookseller is, and he did not ask what I had said instead of his name, which was the question, and which he did not ask because that is the rule and because he is better at obeying a rule than any man I have ever met.

He said, “Page two hundred and thirty-one.”

“What about it?”

“The semicolon stays,” he said. “In both. I worked it out on Tuesday and I’ve been waiting four days for you to tell me you’d got there.”

And we did nine pages, and nobody mentioned March, and I went home at seven and put a dictionary I do not need on a shelf it does not fit, and understood that I had been asked a direct question by a bookseller in a cold shop and that I still, twenty-six hours later, had nothing whatsoever to give him.