Public Library and Other Stories by Ali Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

own weight then fall. She caught it in her hand. Waverley Novels. The Heart of Mid-Lothian. She ran her hand over the good spine. The paper of it felt like brushed leather. Maybe it was leather. It looked expensive. It looked like it would never break.
    You could not tell whether there was music inside it just by looking at it.
    The clean closed spines all along the Scott collection, book after book, quiet and waiting, lined three shelves. She shouldn’t even be in the front room. It was kept for the good. It wasn’t used.
    (The boy’s face, surprised by the cold of the water. The dipper’s nest overhanging the river, disguised by leaves in summer, bare to the eye in winter. The carcasses hanging in the butcher’s window with the red and the white where the meat met the fat. The workings of the watch in its box in the dark.)
    She looked at how well the stitching of the binding met the spine on the book in her hand. She gave it a tug with her fingers.
    She went to the kitchen to get the gutting knife.
    Olive Fraser, born 20 January 1909, Aberdeen. Died 9 December 1977, Aberdeen.
    Brought up by her beloved aunt, Ann Maria Jeans, in Redburn, Queen Street, Nairn, on the Moray Firth coast in the Scottish Highlands. Estranged parents leave her there when they emigrate (separately) to Australia, and continue to do so after they come back (still estranged).
    A force of energy and adventure, a headlong kind of a girl.
That lassie lives in figures of speech.
Blue-eyed blonde, so eye-catching that the newly instated Rector of the University of Aberdeen (which is where she goes in 1927 when she’s finished school, to study English), who happens to be driving past in his carriage from his own Instatement Ceremony, turns his head and cranes his neck to catch another glimpse of such a startlingly beautiful girl in the crowd.
    A talker. A livewire.
She was a beauty, but she gave the men a run for it.
Hilariously funny. A poet. Circle of admiring undergraduates at her feet and her lines spilling out of her all Spenserian stanza. Annoying to young men in seminars:
she niver thocht that up hersel, far did she get it fae?
Beloved of landladies (and simultaneously disapproved of):
that Miss Fraser! she keepit awfa ’ours.
Bright, glowing like a lightbulb, ideas flickering like power surges. When trying to string fishing line on a rod and reel in her student
lodgings, tangles herself up so badly that she has to toss a coin out of a window to a passing boy to get him to send a telegram to her friend Helena, a couple of years younger and a writer herself, enthralled by her exciting older poet friend:
imprisoned in digs. Please rescue. Olive.
Recalls, much later in life, this friend’s happy family house in Aberdeen, the welcoming shouts and the laughter, the merriness, the warmth. Recalls her friend’s mother’s singing, and the lucky stone with a hole in it that her friend’s mother gives her before her final exams.
    Outstanding student. 1933: to Girton College in Cambridge on scholarship money, though a couple of years remain unaccounted for in between Aberdeen and Cambridge – poor health? poverty? mental exhaustion? Intermittently ill. Pale. Fatigued for no reason.
    Five days of psychoanalysis in London:
he simply took my mind to pieces and built it up again. I really feel as if I had been presented with a new heaven and a new earth, ten thousand cold showers on spring mornings and a Tinglow friction brush (mental).
    Gains reputation as talented young poet. Wins Chancellor’s Medal for English Verse in 1935, only the second female student ever. Poem is called The Vikings. Senate unused to presenting anything to women:
a kind of quasi academic dress had to be devised
. Takes to calling herself Olave. Makes many new friends. Gets on many new people’s nerves:
she was a pain in the neck.
Strongly dislikes Cambridgeshire, too flat, too dank, too inland. Strongly dislikes Girton (remembers it ten years later, in a poem called On a