More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
August 6 - August 7, 2022
Like museum curators, the librarians were loath to allow anyone to touch anything. It was pretty clear that they felt the whole university would be better off it weren’t full of students.
What in God’s name is a luminiferous ether when it’s at home?’ ‘It’s the substance through which light moves. Like sound in air, or ripples in water. It’s incredibly interesting, actually. It’s one of those things like the missing elements in the periodic table: we know mathematically that it must exist, but no one has yet proved it by experiment.’
It was hard to communicate with somebody who spent every waking hour poring over the linguistic cleverness of men who had been dead for two thousand years. Matsumoto was bad enough, but classicists were honorary Catholics.
She couldn’t tell whether he was charming because he had a deep-seated love of humanity, or because charm always got him what he wanted.
K. Mori. An Italian, probably; Englishmen were rained on too often to come up with anything that imaginative.
‘You weren’t there. Outside, outside. If women ever get the vote, I’m moving to Germany.’ His lip quirked. ‘How very unfeminine of you.’ ‘Have you listened to them? Oh, we can’t support Gladstone, he’s got terribly odd hair, but wait, he’s a lovely man really, even if he does have a queer nose
I’ve always had rather a weakness for swallows. When I was a boy, we used to watch swarms and swarms of them from the castle walls. They fly in enormous numbers sometimes in Japan, and they make the strangest shapes. One can see why people in medieval times thought they were seeing spirits and suchlike. Reminds me of home.’
He had been pleased about that when he heard, then horrified to be pleased, because being pleased with something so boring meant that without noticing, at no particular point that he could see, he had shrunk to fit the job.
‘Still, blowing up would be a change from paperwork.’
There was a cheer, and he took his first deep breath for months. He hadn’t been aware of breathing shallowly. It had happened gradually; someone had put a penny on his chest every hour since November, and now the weight of thousands of pennies had lifted at once.
Thaniel couldn’t think of a country that was known for turning out broken-toy men. Then he shook his head at himself. There didn’t need to be a country for that. A man could have a character independent of his nation.
‘Right. I see. Well, I’d better go.’ ‘No – no. Come and sit down, for God’s sake, before you bleed to death on my floor.’ As he said it, his voice sank low into a red gold that didn’t suit his size.
‘I’ll stick to Mr Steepleton, if you don’t mind.’ ‘Why?’ ‘In Japan, first names are only for who you’re married to, or if you’re being rude,’ the watchmaker explained. ‘It sounds wrong to me.’
He looked at the ceiling in order to have a blank space on which to see the colours, thinking it was an absent-minded mistake of his own, but the shades and the shapes were the same. It was the piece Mori played in the mornings. In the programme, it had said that the sonata was new for the occasion.
‘Do you want to marry Fanshaw?’ he said. ‘I have to marry someone, if I want somewhere I can work properly.
‘Because you’ve been awfully kind, and there’s no reason for you to be. Have you got a scientific sister?’ ‘No, but I’ve got a friend who’s … in the same chemical group, I think.’ She laughed and so did he, until he realised that he had called Mori a friend, despite having spent two weeks taking care not to.
Play it again. I’m sure it’s the same.’ ‘I can’t, I’ve forgotten it.’ ‘You don’t forget something overnight.’ Mori tacked his shoulders back like a bird deciding whether or not to fly away. ‘You might not, but you’ve got middle age to look forward to. Was Miss Carrow on form?’ His smile was paralysed halfway to fading. ‘How did you know that?’ Mori frowned. ‘You just … told me.’ ‘Oh. I’m more drunk than I think. Or middle age is closer than I think.
He ought not to have cared whether or not Mori had a cold. Dolly Williamson would have murmured something, if he could have seen. The old warning bells were sounding tired now, though.
I answer the wrong question, I answer the one that you were going to ask, and not the one that you did.’
‘I’m – I remember what’s possible, and then forget what becomes impossible,’ he said without moving. ‘You’ve just watched me do it. You forgot to buy the music, so I’ve forgotten how to play it. You were about to tell me about the hotel,’ he repeated. ‘You must have been.’
‘What do you mean, remember?’ ‘I mean not seeing or knowing or deducing.’ ‘What’s possible.’
‘Past,’ Mori said, tracing a line in the air with his fingertip, ‘what has been and is. Future.’ He opened his hand to show many lines. ‘What’s possible.’
‘Likely things are very clear, like recent past, which is … why I get them confused so often. Unlikely things are patchy, like things that happened a long time ago, because there are hours or years of more likely ones stacked up before them.’
‘It isn’t a diary. It’s for … ’ He struggled. ‘Of everything that might happen, only one thing does, but I start out knowing all of them. Sometimes what’s unlikely is much better or more interesting than what’s likely. So I write it down so that there’s a record of it, when I forget. The book is for dead memories.
Today was a nearer miss than usual. I wrote it ten years ago when I never thought I would leave Japan.’
Miss Carrow will wear green, and there will be tulips on the table. You don’t like tulips.
soulmates!!!!
What’s the husband do? I’m trying to find a relative you don’t like so you understand my mother.’
‘Tomorrow evening at seven, will that be too early?’ ‘No, that’s good; I’ll be at home by six,’ he said, and then caught his tongue between his back teeth. He couldn’t remember when he had started to think of Filigree Street as home.
just accept that you’re soulmates and love each other!
‘Can I come in?’ ‘Yes?’ Thaniel opened the door, then shut it again. ‘You’re in the bath.’ ‘What did you think I was doing?’ ‘Cleaning.’ ‘I’m not talking to you through the door. Come on. I’m not a girl.’
gayyyyy
Ditte and 3 other people liked this
Mori let his hand slide from the edge of the bath and back underwater. ‘You will, of course, be buying the good cocoa from Harrods, since you forgot the music, and you locked me in all night, and I don’t like Miss Carrow.’ Thaniel hitched. He had meant to squeeze his wrist. ‘Yes. Of course. Then – tomorrow at seven?’ ‘Mm. And not that Brazilian
gayyyy. what a good boyfriend
‘Where’s your chaperone?’ He had exactly Thaniel’s accent. He must have learned his English from him.
Thaniel was coming back with the tea. He pushed the door gently shut with his elbow, his hands occupied with the tray and the backgammon case under his arm. She watched him and liked his quietness, then stopped when she realised that Mori was watching her.
jealous mori
When a sign says don’t walk on the grass, one hops.’
‘He’s a fraud,’ she said to the chalk. ‘Thaniel is living with a bombmaker who can do card tricks. Magnificent.’
‘No, I’m an idiot. We’re all idiots. I don’t understand how anything is ever discovered in physics if we keep on like this. Motion is relative. You can stand still on earth without feeling that you’re spinning at a hundred and fifty thousand miles per hour and hurtling round the sun, which in turn moves … and chalk dust can hang almost still, despite all that.’
‘The fact is that there are two possible scenarios. One, my friend lives with a bombmaker who has very convincingly pretended to be a clairvoyant—’ ‘Bombmaker!’ ‘—to the point that he must have been spending hundreds of pounds on it. Or he … well, he’s living proof of a static ether.
‘Ether is to light as air is to sound, but far more efficient. You will have noticed that when fireworks ignite, you hear the bang after the flash? That is because sound travels more slowly, much more slowly. So we can say that the medium of air conducts sound at a certain speed. As does ether. It conducts light at a speed of about two hundred thousand miles per second.
‘Light can go anywhere, so ether must be everywhere. Everything moves through it. I always thought that the movement of the world would be measurable, but movement is relative within a closed system, like a planet, as any monkey with a basic understanding of thermodynamics would have guessed if we hadn’t all been so busy trying to measure the wretched stuff.
People shouldn’t be throwing away their history when it’s still doing archery practice forty miles up the road.’
As soon as they were sitting, he thrust at Mori a sheet of paper with the story written on it and told him to get on with it by himself. Thaniel frowned, but before he could tell him not to be rude, Mori touched his arm. ‘Enough crusading for the one day,’ he said.
The safest way to success is to write according to the capacity of the stupidest member of the audience.
He was on the edge of refusing when he saw Mori watching him and understood suddenly what it all was. Mori had changed the note, weeks ago. It was Mori’s version of a present. A strange warm feeling prickled down his arms. ‘Yes, why not?’
‘Especially if it’s the kind of nationalism where Japanese boys go to hear Irishmen speak in London and make friends to bring home.’
gayyyy
‘Nakamura’s Flower Fires,’ Thaniel read. He looked at Mori. ‘What does that mean?’ ‘Fireworks.’
‘No, I’ll take your word for it.’ ‘Bet your life on it?’ Mori said ruefully. ‘Yes.’ The truth of it had a helium lightness.
As they started back to the village gate, he took Mori’s hand to see what damage Yuki had done. There was a long cut across his knuckles where the sharp edge had just caught him, and a red stripe from the flat that would bruise later. Mori watched him look, not for long, then pulled his hand back and folded his arms. It was a lonely thing to do, Thaniel thought. He wanted to ask what the matter was, but he saw Mori’s shoulders stiffen at the approach of that future, then ease again when he stopped intending it.
gayyy
‘You left this for me, didn’t you? Why?’ ‘You’re my friend and you would have died. You wouldn’t have listened to a stranger in a coffee house. It had to be something you were wondering about for a long time.’
‘You can be unsettling.’
