The Library at Castlemartyr may be my home from home: there are six sprinklers and one smoke alarm in the ceiling, the sofa fabric is fifties green and pale sateen, the flowers are white carnation with baby breath, one flask per table.
I had saved The Pole for our stay at Castlemartyr. J.M. Coetzee, in portrait as in pages, is forbidding, and so is the narrative; we ease into it, unwillingly at first. We accompany Mr Coetzee's gradual acceptance of the story he tells, his easing into it by numbering short paragraphs, then longer pages, till the numbers are no different from chapter headings, and the chill gives way, at the last, to tenderness.
The Pole is a Polish pianist with an unpronounceable name, a Chopin specialist. The woman is Beatriz. Likened, and not, to Dante's Beatrice.
Where do they come from, the tall Polish pianist and the elegant woman with the gliding walk, the banker's wife who occupies her days in good works? All year they have been knocking at the door, wanting to be let in or else dismissed and laid to rest. Now, at last, has their time come.
The books in the library at Castlemartyr are faded Dickens, book club Daphne du Maurier, a little Shakespeare (and I saw a mentor's Macbeth by a table in the hall) (our room has a softened hardback Irish Civil War on the table under the tv). There are coffee table books about baking and preserving, a florid volume of Dangerous things for Boys. The only other person there that afternoon was a young man, recently a boy, at his laptop who never looked up. I wonder who had the task of fitting out The Library with books.
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