The following is an excerpt from Rosalind’s debut novel Practice published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson and reproduced with permission.
Oxford, 2009
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 worldvoice 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.
*
This is the silence of no phone and no computer, which are both switched off and kept well away from her desk so they don’t frizz her thinking so early in the morning. Next to them on her shelves are a row of essential and non-essential books, her files of notes, coffee-making equipment, a small teapot and some loose-leaf tea. She would say the things she does, she does properly. Dried camomile buds in an airtight jar. No posters on the wall, just a couple of small prints they sell to tourists in Italy. Also a small cactus with a precise pattern of white needles over green flesh, in a pot she brought from home.
*
For basic sense you can read each of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in a minute or two. For a little more chewiness and analysis, five or six minutes. The trouble is keeping them apart. Each one seems to annul the previous one: no longer that, but this. They dissolve into a mass of little qualifications and turns and particularities and withholdings and accusations and escapes. To make some speciall instant speciall blest. Let this sad interim like the ocean be. Nor dare I chide the world without end houre. Like the small wheels of a great mechanism, always clicking into new relationships. Intricate is the word. Exhausting is also the word. The little packed blocks of text. He wrote them over many years, probably, and here she is trying to rustle up a theory in two days and hook it convincingly on.
She takes a sip of the hot clear brownish water: tasting grimly of good health.
*
Last year their tutor Sara, a medievalist, advised them to spend as many hours as they could simply sitting with the text. Don’t keep your pen in your hand, just pick it up when you really need, or else your pen will get ahead of your thoughts. Look away from the text and out the window if you have to, try and pause your mind on the one thing. Focus on the experience of you reading this text now. But always remind yourself, it was written, some time, by someone.
Afterwards when they mentioned this to one of the grad students he said Oh yeah well she’s a phenomenologist at best. At best she thought was interesting: she wrote the whole phrase down on a Post-it and stuck it on the wall above her desk.
Anyway so she is spending time with these poems: which are better company than people, they take your shape willingly, but still lightly, like a duvet does. She lets them work on her mind, entering wholeheartedly into the spirit of them, hardly writing anything down: just reading.
On another Post-it is written Find the edges and breathe into them, but that was from a yoga teacher.
*
She turns another page and reads. Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth, And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow.
Sonnet after sonnet after sonnet of iambic pentameter: which has raged like a virus through the English canon so it begins to feel like the original metre, the only metre, the sole mode of reasonable speaking. How it shifts its weight slightly to accommodate things. Her eyes go to the notes: to transfix meant to pierce, parallels could be military trenches.
This man. She tries to picture him at some sort of table, cogitating. His sharpened pen. Or did he stroll whistling through Southwark letting each poem evolve in his head. All day long striding across the stage, making cheerful business decisions, laughing with a hand on a fellow actor’s shoulder, a slurp of ale, you’re right I’ll take another run at that scene, et cetera. Behind all this, the obsession beginning to build in his chest, shredding him from the inside. Then home. Muttering onto the page. The ornament of beauty is suspect. Why is my verse so barren of new pride. It is my love that keeps mine eie awake. It is so grounded inward in my heart.
Four hundred years later, she keeps on reading.