In the City of Love's Sleep by Lavinia Greenlaw

Author:Lavinia Greenlaw [Lavinia Greenlaw]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571337644
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2018-12-08T16:00:00+00:00

a small green space

The city is full of trees, reinforcing the idea that it’s not a city at all but a series of villages. Who can feel they belong in a place that is almost a thousand square miles? It breaks down out of necessity. You are not in the city but in a district or street. You can’t see everything at once or keep all you know in mind, just as you can’t arrange to meet someone in the city. You have to contrive a smaller place.

When Iris tells the story of this love she likes to make clear that they ran away together and that this caused someone else great pain. It is how she makes sense of what she allowed him to do to her. She met Adam when she spent the summer after graduation working with a team assessing a town hall for conservation while it was being prepared for sale. The team took note of every original feature: the skirtings, escutcheons, bathroom tiles and drawer handles. Iris couldn’t tell what was original or not. Something was identified and she went round the building recording it. She had already decided that she wanted to be a conservator and had a place to study for a masters degree that autumn.

A shop opposite the town hall was being refitted and one day she passed the open door and saw a man building a spiral staircase. Had he been building anything else – a cupboard, shelves, plain stairs – she would not have lingered. But a spiral staircase! He was not only a carpenter but a mathematician and artist as well!

Adam was huge and he shaved his head so that his face, which looked as if it had been hewn from stone, was all the more fierce. When he spoke he sounded Danish, South African, Irish … It turned out that he’d lived in all those places.

It was a brief time of golden evenings and when Iris finished work she didn’t hurry back to her studio flat. She took to sitting in a disused Quaker cemetery filled by an ancient capsized fig. The cemetery’s low brick walls leant against the offices that had grown up around it. It was one of those small green spaces to be found all over the city, where people think themselves unobserved, especially on golden evenings. You will see them, lovers in office clothes who have waited all day to hold hands and who must soon go home, only for now there is a small space in which what they do doesn’t count and isn’t wrong. It’s such a small space. Why do you think they look so sad?

One evening Adam appeared (had she mentioned the cemetery?) and sat down beside her. They talked a bit and then she set off home. The next day Iris went there again and so did he. After a week of this, Adam took her hand and told her that he was about to get married. He kept hold of her hand, something she couldn’t reconcile with what he was saying.

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