OXFORD2009
The alarm goes off.
A small spider, sitting in a corner of the dark room, would see her stir in bed, and her hand slow and uncomplaining reach over to the clock. The alarm stops.
She makes a low noise in her throat. Feels carefully for the lamp switch and clicks it. Everything in the room gives a jolt, being lit: as if she didn’t do this six mornings a week, exactly like this.
She sits up in bed, takes hold of her glass, and swallows a few mouthfuls of stale water.
Six o’clock in the morning, Sunday, at the worn-out end of January.
Taking a deep breath she lowers her feet out of the bed and gets up: stands for a second. Then goes into the bathroom. She sits there, feeling her pelvis drain itself. Out again with a rush of water.
She twists the window catch, pushes the window open, and puts her head out into the dark frozen morning. It smells cold. A small secret, to open the window before first light. Like the beginning, or maybe the end, of a novel: somewhere, high up in the college, a light came on and the curtains were drawn aside and a window was opened. No one was awake to see a plaited head lean out and breathe deeply, looking down into the dark garden. No one saw her give one last shiver like a flourish and pull the window shut.
She collects her water glass and takes it over to her desk. Switches on the second lamp, which settles the room: to be lit from two angles, this is a system of lighting.
On the shelf is a stack of books. She takes the top one, a small red book, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and lays it in the middle of the desk. Then goes to put the kettle on.
She puts a mint teabag into the waiting mug, then stands there in the building roar of the kettle until the switch pops up in triumph. Lifts the kettle and carefully lowers the spout over the mug. Her bare feet tingle slightly, imagining being splashed and scalded. The teabag is lifted up in the hot water and begins to move, finding its buoyancy, releasing its flavour.
For now she ignores the radiator. She wants the room cold and dim and full of quiet. Eventually she will open the valve, when the cold has soaked through all the layers she starts to pull over her body, sweatshirt and cardigan and thick socks and fleecy slippers, as well as her bright blue blanket, which will take up various relationships with her body throughout the morning: strategically round her waist and thighs, then bunched hanging over the back of the chair when she goes to make breakfast, then wrapped tight around her whole body after she’s eaten a bowl of muesli in cold milk.
Right: a calm look at the desk, the room. Has she forgotten anything.
Actually what she wants is to open the window again, she wants to know exactly how the cold blue light feels when it begins to appear, she doesn’t want to miss a single detail of the slow dawn, the reluctant winter morning—
‘Stop it Annabel’ she says softly, out loud. In her world-voice she reminds herself: these phrases don’t come from anywhere, they take no responsibility for anything. In a couple of hours there will be daylight and bells clanging languid and far away, and eventually there will be doors opening and shutting in the corridor and people embarking on their own Sundays, and she can just be very quiet here, working steadily into the morning.
She shakes out the blanket, wraps it around her middle, and sits down. Takes her marker out of the book: Sonnet 49. Against that time (if ever that time come). Against that time do I insconce me here. That time being, for her, tomorrow afternoon when the essay is due. Soon she will have to make conversions, into propositional knowledge. But for now she will read, and continue to read, without hurry, searching herself for a theme. When an idea begins to inflate itself she will become purposeful, but until then she will just read.
Copyright © 2024 by Rosalind Brown
Copyright © 1997 Katherine Duncan-Jones and The Arden Shakespeare, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
Copyright © 1985, 2016 Columbia University Press
Copyright © 1994 The American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
