The novel has been on the arm of the chair since the middle of November. I am two-thirds through it – or I was two-thirds through it in November, and I’m perhaps three-quarters now, and if you asked me this morning what happened in the last chapter I read I’d have to think carefully before answering. It’s a good book. That isn’t the problem.
The problem, if it’s a problem at all, is January. Something about this month flattens the will to finish things. You would think it would have the opposite effect – the long evenings, the fire lit by half four, nothing much pulling you out of the house except the messages and the occasional need to prove to yourself that you still exist in the world beyond the lane. You would think a person would get through books at a ferocious rate in January. And yet.
The fire is going fine but the book has been open at the same page since Thursday.
There’s a letter to Bríd I’ve been meaning to write since before Christmas. Not a card – an actual letter, the kind you fold and put in an envelope. Bríd sends them occasionally, three or four pages in her cramped left-handed writing, and they sit on the kitchen table for days while I think about what to say back. We spoke on the phone in December, twice, but that’s different. The letter she sent in November is still on the windowsill, under the bowl I put on top of it so it wouldn’t blow away if I opened the window, and I haven’t opened the window in weeks so the bowl is just sitting there for no reason. I could write back today. There’s nothing stopping me except the particular inertia that settles over unfinished things – the way they acquire a kind of weight the longer they stay unfinished, so that by the time you sit down to address them, the weight alone is discouraging.
And then there’s the tile behind the Stanley range. One of the small white ones, cracked along the bottom-left corner since sometime in October. I noticed it around the same time I was cutting back the fuchsia. I meant to buy grout in Castlegregory, and then I forgot, and then I didn’t forget but I was tired, and now we’re into January and the crack is still there and I’ve largely stopped seeing it the way you stop seeing any small damage that doesn’t get worse.
Donal would have an opinion about all of this. He rings on Sundays and asks what I’ve been doing, and I give him a reasonably accurate account, and he tends to receive it without judgment – he’s a practical man, Donal, not given to commentary on how other people spend their time. But I can imagine what he’d say about the tile. He’d say it’s a ten-minute job. And he’d be right, it probably is. That’s not the point.
I was thinking about this last week while I was sitting with the book open on my lap, not reading, watching the light come off the apple tree – bare now, nothing on it, just the shape of it against the grey – and I tried to figure out whether this tendency to leave things unfinished was laziness, or something else. I didn’t come to a satisfying answer. It’s not exactly laziness because I’m not doing nothing. I made soup on Wednesday, a good pot of it, and I tidied the press properly for the first time since November, and I went for a walk up the lane as far as Tom’s gate three days in a row. Bess was at the gate on two of those days, which was company of a sort.
Maybe it’s that some things need a specific kind of attention, and that kind of attention comes and goes. The novel needs me to be actually in it, not just holding it. The letter needs me to know what I want to say. The tile needs me to care enough about a small piece of broken ceramic to drive to Castlegregory on a cold morning, buy grout, come home, clean the area around the crack, apply the grout carefully, let it dry, and consider the job done. That is a lot of caring for one tile.
Bríd would understand, I think. She once told me she had a sympathy card on her hall table for four months – addressed, stamped, ready to go – and the person it was for died of something unrelated before she’d managed to post it. She said she still felt guilty. I told her I had letters on my windowsill from Kenmare that I still hadn’t posted, and she said that was completely different, and I said was it, and we went back and forth on it for a while over tea, the way you do, and arrived nowhere in particular.
The novel is good. I think about it between reading sessions, which is probably a sign it’s doing its job. I’ll finish it when I finish it, and then I’ll have finished it, and that will be that – one thing less on the arm of the chair. The letter I could write this afternoon if I sat down at the table before the light went. I even know what I want to say to Bríd. Something about January and the specific quality of not finishing things.
I might go to Castlegregory on Friday. I need bread flour anyway.