Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [92]
If Ford could write five such masterpieces, he tells himself, surely there must be further masterworks, as yet unrecognized, among the sprawling and only just catalogued corpus of his writings, masterworks that he can help bring to light. He embarks at once on a reading of the Ford oeuvre, spending entire Saturdays in the Reading Room of the British Museum, as well as the two evenings a week when the Reading Room stays open late. Though the early works turn out to be disappointing, he presses on, excusing Ford because he must still have been learning his craft.
One Saturday he falls into conversation with the reader at the next desk, and they have tea together in the Museum tea room. Her name is Anna; she is Polish by origin and still has a faint accent. She works as a researcher, she tells him; visits to the Reading Room are part of her job. She is at present exploring materials for a life of John Speke, discoverer of the source of the Nile. For his part, he tells her about Ford and Ford’s collaboration with Joseph Conrad. They talk about Conrad’s time in Africa, about his early life in Poland and his later aspiration to become an English squire.
As they speak he wonders: Is it an omen that in the Reading Room of the British Museum he, a student of F. M. Ford, should meet a country-woman of Conrad’s? Is Anna his Destined One? She is no beauty, certainly: she is older than he; her face is bony, even gaunt; she wears sensible flat shoes and a shapeless grey skirt. But who is to say that he deserves better?
He is on the point of asking her out, perhaps to a film; but then his courage fails him. What if, even when he has declared himself, there is no spark? How would he extricate himself without ignominy?
There are other habitués of the Reading Room as lonely, he suspects, as he. An Indian with a pitted face, for instance, who gives off a smell of boils and old bandages. Every time he goes to the toilet the Indian seems to follow him, to be on the point of speaking, but then unable to.
At last, one day, as they stand side by side at the washbasin, the man speaks. Is he from King’s College? the man asks stiffly. No, he replies, from the University of Cape Town. Would he like to have tea, asks the man?
They sit down together in the tea room; the man launches into a long account of his research, which is into the social makeup of audiences at the Globe Theatre. Though he is not particularly interested, he does his best to pay attention.
The life of the mind, he thinks to himself: is that what we have dedicated ourselves to, I and these other lonely wanderers in the bowels of the British Museum? Will there be a reward for us one day? Will our solitariness lift, or is the life of the mind its own reward?
Seven
It is three o’clock on a Saturday afternoon. He has been in the Reading Room since opening time, reading Ford’s Mr Humpty Dumpty, a novel so tedious that he has to fight to stay awake.
In a short while the Reading Room will close for the day, the whole great Museum will close. On Sundays the Reading Room does not open; between now and next Saturday, reading will be a matter of an hour snatched here and there of an evening. Should he soldier on until closing time, though he is racked with yawns? What is the point of this enterprise anyway? What is the good to a computer programmer, if computer programming is to be his life, to have an MA in English literature? And where are the unrecognized masterpieces that he was going to uncover? Mr Humpty Dumpty is certainly not one of them. He shuts the book, packs up.
Outside the daylight is already waning. Along Great Russell Street he trudges to Tottenham Court Road, then south towards Charing Cross. Of the