My Lover's Lover by Maggie O'Farrell

Author:Maggie O'Farrell [O’Farrell, Maggie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781101644744
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2004-07-27T04:00:00+00:00

My birthday fell almost exactly half-way between the Christmas and Easter vacations, when post-grad students like me had a break from the carousel of giving lectures and tutorials, and had a chance to catch up on the supposed real matter in hand – the thesis. February in that city was the worst time, the fog rolling for miles over the flat, ditched fields to collect in the hollow where the city cowers. Icy moisture hung in the air. It rained constantly, the streets wet and polished like sealskins, the sky getting dark at half past four. I lost my gloves and my bare hands would ossify round my bicycle handlebars in the freezing damp air as I cycled from my house to seminars, tutorials, the faculty. I had to insulate my books in layers of plastic bags to keep them dry on my rides to the library. When I arrived, I headed for an out-of-the-way wing, piled my books into a towering ziggurat beside me and risked chilblains by resting my wet feet on the tepid, vibrating pipes. As I flexed my back up from the desk, I could see my face thrown back at me in the window opposite, teeth biting the inside of my cheek, left index finger twirling my hair.

I was, at this time, bored with my life. I was teaching two days a week, giving three lecture courses, and I was, on and off and usually more off than on, seeing an art historian called Antony who lugged great A3 illustrated books around everywhere he went, and refused to cycle because he couldn’t buy a bicycle basket big enough to fit them in. It was the second year of my Ph.D. I’d given up the freedom, and the mind-crushing tedium, of an underpaid job to come to this insular city to study. At that very moment I couldn’t think beyond or around the five-thousand-word chapter I had to write by the beginning of March. Thesis hand-in, in two and a half to three years’ time, seemed like a distant, mystical grail. This annoyed me. I wanted to be able to project myself beyond these lodestones, which sucked all my thoughts towards them and repelled any others from my head.

I wasn’t sure about this city, about this university, about this library, about the people who taught me or the ones I taught, about being here among stacks and stacks of spine-indexed, recorded, catalogued books that smelt of mice and rotting leaves. Could I see myself here for another two years, maybe more? Was this what I wanted when I’d vaulted that blind hurdle of my thesis?

I didn’t know. All I knew was that when I read the late-medieval texts I was studying for my Ph.D., my mind latched on to something: it caught and sent a fly-wheel spinning somewhere, which then cranked another movement, slow at first, then bigger and bigger until it filled all space with noise and momentum until there was no space left at

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