The World According to Bertie - Alexander Hanchett Smith [77]
He recovered, but only to the extent of being able to say to Bertie: ‘I don’t think that you should talk about that, Bertie. That sort of thing is a bit sensitive. People are funny about it.’
‘I know,’ said Bertie. ‘You should have seen how Dr Fairbairn looked when I asked him.’
51. So Many Books Unread and Bikes Uncycled
The following morning, Domenica Macdonald took slightly longer over her breakfast than usual. This was not because there was more to eat – her breakfasts were always the same: a bowl of porridge, made from the cut-oats she obtained from the real-food shop in Broughton Street; and two slices of toast, one spread thinly with Marmite and one with marmalade. This breakfast never varied, at least when she was at home, and it was accompanied by whatever reading was current at the time – Mankind Quarterly, with its earnest anthropological papers, rubbed shoulders with the toast as easily as did the daily newspaper or an interesting letter set aside for leisurely perusal. Not that there were many of those: Domenica still wrote letters, by hand, but received few back, so depleted had the ranks of letter-writers become.
She had read somewhere that the vast majority of boxes of notelets that were sold in stationery shops were never used. They were bought with good intentions, or given as presents in the same spirit, but they remained in their boxes. But that, she reflected that morning, was a common fate for so many objects which we make and give to one another. Exercise bicycles, for example, were not designed to go anywhere, but the wheels, at least, were meant to go round, which they rarely did. Exercise bicycles in gyms might be used, but this did not apply to those– the majority – bought for use in the home. They stood there, in mute affront to their owners, quite idle, before being moved to a spare room and ultimately to an attic. Then they were recycled, which did not mean, in this case, that they had been cycled in the first place.
She poured herself a cup of coffee and stared out of the window. And then, she thought, there were those books bought and not read. Somewhere there might be those who read each and every book they acquired – read them with attention and gravity and then put them carefully on a shelf, alongside other books that had received the same treatment. But for many books, being placed on the shelf was the full extent of their encounter with their owner. She smiled at this thought, remembering the anecdote about the late King George VI – she thought, or V perhaps, or even Edward VII – who was presented with a book by its author and said: ‘Thank you, Mr So-and-So, I shall put it on the shelf with all the other books.’ This was not meant to be a put-down to the author – it was, by contrast, a polite and entirely honest account of what would be done. And one could not expect one who was, after all, an emperor, to read every book given to him, or indeed any. Although – and this thought came to Domenica as she took a first sip of her coffee – even those whose office makes them too busy to read are never too busy to write their book when they leave office – a book which, by its very nature, will be most likely to appeal to those in similar office, who will be too busy to read it.
Some books, of course, were destined not to be read, largely because of their unintelligibility to all except a very small number of people. Domenica could think of several examples of this, including the remarkable books of her friend, Andrew Ranicki, a professor of mathematics at the university. She had once asked him how many people in the world would understand his highly regarded but very obscure books from cover to cover, and he had replied, with very little hesitation: ‘Forty-five.’ He had said this not with an air of resigned acceptance, as might be shown by an