The Café, Again

The café had not changed.

This was the first thing Iyla noticed when she pushed through the door on Saturday morning, and it was the thing she kept noticing for the better part of an hour, in the way a person notices a room they have not been in for a while and then realises they have been in it the whole time. The espresso machine still made the noise it made, which was the noise of a small industrial argument being settled in steam. The man behind the counter still wore the apron with the rust-coloured stain on the left hip that Iyla had decided, in some October of her life, was either pomegranate or something she did not want to think about. The table by the window — her table, by the small private convention of repeat customers and the slight wobble of its third leg — was free. She took it. She set down the paperback she had brought with her. She set down the pencil, sharpened that morning at her kitchen table with the small knife she kept in the drawer with the matches. She ordered the tea she always ordered, because she had decided, somewhere in the last week, that ordering the same tea was one of the small things she was going to keep.

She opened the book.

It was Jane Eyre. Not the paperback on her shelf — that one was now, in the literal sense, a switchboard, and she had decided to leave it at home, partly out of practical care and partly out of a small superstition she did not feel like examining. This was a different copy, a hardback she had bought on Friday at Behr's for two pounds fifty because Mr. Behr had pretended, with the small dignity of a man pretending nothing, not to notice that she was buying a book she already owned. He had wrapped it in brown paper anyway, which was his habit with books he thought a person was going to be serious about. She had unwrapped it that morning at her table. She had written her name on the flyleaf, which she did not always do. Then she had brought it to the café, because she had wanted to find out what reading was, now.

She found Chapter One. She read the first paragraph.

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.

She read it again. It was, she thought, still one of the best opening sentences in English, and it had been one of the best opening sentences in English the first time she had read it in this café, six years ago, at a different table, on a Tuesday afternoon she could not now reconstruct in any detail except that she had been wearing the green cardigan and had finished the chapter before her tea arrived. She remembered the green cardigan because she had put it on her anchor list on Tuesday. She did not remember the tea. The tea had been taxed, in the small way teas were taxed, and she had decided to be philosophical about it.

She picked up the pencil.

This was the part she had been curious about. She had wondered, walking over, whether she would still want to. She had wondered whether the marginalia habit — the habit of arguing back, of putting yes and no and really? in the white space beside a sentence that had walked into the room expecting to be agreed with — would feel, now that she knew what margins could do, like a different thing. She had wondered whether she would be afraid of her own handwriting. She had wondered, more honestly, whether the habit would be spoiled, the way a private joke is spoiled by being explained, and whether she would sit at her table with a pencil in her hand and discover that the small daily pleasure she had built her interior life on had been converted, in the conversion of everything else, into a tool she could no longer use lightly.

She put the pencil to the margin of the first page. She wrote, in the small hand she had been using since she was sixteen: good. trust her.

She looked at it. It was, she thought, exactly the note she would have written six years ago. The handwriting was the same. The judgement was the same. The pleasure, when she let herself notice it, was the same — the small private pleasure of having said a true thing in a place where the only person who would ever read it was, almost certainly, herself. She felt, for a moment, the relief of a person who has gone back to a house she lived in as a child and found the kitchen still in the kitchen.

And then, because she was now the person she was now, she noticed the differences.

She noticed, first, that she was sitting with her back to the wall, which she had not done six years ago. She had sat, six years ago, with her back to the room, because the room was full of people who did not look at her and she had liked it that way. Now she sat where she could see the door. She had not decided to. She had simply, on entering, walked to the table and sat in the chair that faced outward, and only realised, halfway through the first paragraph, that she had done it. She wrote in the margin: I sit facing the door now. She underlined facing. It was not, she thought, a tragedy. It was a fact. It went, like the crooked stamp, into the list.

She noticed, second, that she was reading more slowly. Not because she was tired, and not because the prose had become harder — Jane Eyre was, if anything, easier on the second decade of reading it, because she now knew which sentences were carrying the weight and which were merely keeping the floor under them — but because she was, she realised, listening for something. She was listening, she thought after a moment, for the thinning. She was listening for the small drop in the room temperature, the small fading of the espresso machine, the small glow at the edge of the page that had, six years ago, been her first signal that something was happening she did not have a name for. She listened, and the room stayed the room, and the page stayed the page, and after a while she realised she was relieved. She wrote in the margin: the room is staying a room. good. She thought about that, and added: I am allowed to just read.

She noticed, third, that the marginalia she was writing was, for the first time in her life, addressed to somebody. Not anybody specific. Not Saroya, and not Tomas, and not the careful hand that had answered her notes in The Master and Margarita four months ago and started all of this. Just — somebody. A reader. A person who might, in some year she could not see, pick up this hardback in some shop and open it and find her notes and decide whether to answer. She had not, six years ago, written for a reader. She had written for the book, and for the small private argument between her and the book, and the possibility that anyone else would ever see it had been so remote as to be uninteresting. Now the possibility was not remote. Now she had been the person who had picked up the book and found the notes, and she knew what it had felt like, and she knew she was not going to write as if no one was reading ever again. It was not, she thought, a loss. It was the end of a kind of solitude she had not, until this morning, understood she had been living inside.

She drank her tea. It came in the cup it always came in, which was thick and white and slightly too small, and she drank it slowly because she had put the cup on her anchor list and she wanted to give the cup its due. She read a chapter. She wrote four notes in the margin. One of them was Reed deserves nothing and one of them was the red-room is the whole book in a room and one of them was the small star she used when a sentence had got past her defences, and the last one was good. trust her, again, because Jane had said something brave on page nineteen and Iyla had wanted, for reasons she did not entirely examine, to say it twice.

At some point she looked up. The café was full now, in the late-morning way, and nobody was looking at her, and the man with the apron was making the same noise with the same machine, and outside the window a woman was trying to fold a pushchair with one hand while holding a baby with the other and was, Iyla noticed, succeeding. She watched for a moment. She put the woman folded the pushchair one-handed on the list, because it had been a small competent thing and she wanted to keep it.

She thought, briefly, about who she had been the last time she had sat in this café before any of it began — before the moor and the apple and the dust-gold afternoon and the letter and the bend in the river and the margin in the back of the book. That woman had been, she thought without much sentiment, lonely in a way she had not known how to name, and clever in a way that had nowhere to go, and had been holding the pencil mostly because the pencil was the only thing in her hand that talked back. She did not, sitting here now, miss that woman. She did not, either, look down on her. The woman had been doing the only thing she had known how to do, which was to argue with books in the margins of books, and the thing she had been doing had turned out — Iyla could see this now, with the clean small surprise of seeing it — to have been the right thing all along. The margins had been the door. They had been the door before she had known they were a door, and they had been the door after she had known, and they were, this morning, still the door, and the door was now hers in a way it had not been when she had not known what it was.

She wrote in the margin, on the bottom of page twenty-three, in the smallest hand: same table. different reader.

She looked at it. She did not underline it. She drank the last of the tea. She turned the page.