Yet winter seemed pointlessly long that year, and the fact that he woke up early in the morning, sleepless, in darkness, began to offend him.
One day, when it was cold and raining, he was sitting in the waiting room of a clinic, a number in his hand. He had persuaded the doctor to prescribe some tests—he claimed he didn’t feel well. A woman with a full shopping cart and a soaking-wet umbrella that kept falling down came and sat beside him. An old woman, with a rain scarf on her head. She took it off at some point, and in the way she smoothed her hair there was something like the remains of a seduction interrupted many years earlier. The umbrella, however, continued to fall in every direction.
“May I help you?” asked Jasper Gwyn.
The woman looked at him, then said that they ought to have umbrella stands in the clinics on rainy days. Someone, she added, had only to remove it when the sun returned.
“It’s a sensible argument,” said Jasper Gwyn.
“Of course it is,” said the woman.
Then she took the umbrella and laid it down on the floor. It seemed like an arrow, or the edge of something. Slowly a puddle of water formed around it.
“Are you Jasper Gwyn or just someone who looks like him?” the woman asked. She did it as she searched for something small in her purse. As her hands rummaged in it she looked up to be sure that he had heard the question.
Jasper Gwyn wasn’t expecting it, so he said yes, he was Jasper Gwyn.
“Bravo,” said the woman, as if he had answered a quiz question correctly. Then she said that the scene on the wharf, in Sisters, was the best thing she had read in recent years.
“Thank you,” said Jasper Gwyn.
“And also the fire in the school, at the beginning of the other book, the long one, the fire in the school is perfect.”
Again she looked up at Jasper Gwyn.
“I was a teacher,” she explained.
Then she took two candies out of her purse, they were round, citrus-flavored, and offered one to Jasper Gwyn.
“Thank you, no, really,” he said.
“Come on!” she said.
He smiled and took the candy.
“The fact that they’re lying in the bottom of my purse doesn’t mean they’re disgusting,” she said.
“No, of course not.”
“But I’ve noticed that people tend to think so.”
Jasper Gwyn thought it was just like that, people are suspicious of a candy found at the bottom of a purse.
“I think it’s the same phenomenon that causes people to be always slightly distrustful of orphans,” he said.
The woman turned to look at him, astonished.
“Or the last car in the Tube,” she said, with a strange happiness in her voice.
They were like two people who had been at school together as children, and now were reeling off the names of their classmates, bringing them back from enormous distances. A moment of silence passed between them, like a spell.
Then they began talking, and when a nurse came and announced that it was Mr. Gwyn’s turn, Jasper Gwyn said he couldn’t right then.
“You’ll lose your turn,” the nurse said.
“It doesn’t matter. I can come back tomorrow.”
“As you wish,” the nurse said coldly. Then in a loud voice she called a Mr. Flewer.
The thing seemed totally normal to the woman with the umbrella.
In the end they found themselves alone in the waiting room, and then the woman said that it was really time to go. Jasper Gwyn asked if she didn’t have to have a test, or something like that. But she said that she came there because it was a warm place, and it was exactly halfway between her house and the supermarket. Besides, she liked looking at the faces of people who had to have blood tests, and hadn’t eaten anything. They seem like people who’ve been robbed of something, she said. Yes, Jasper Gwyn confirmed, convinced.
He took her home, holding the umbrella open over her, as she didn’t want to give up the cart, and on the way they continued to talk until the woman asked what he was writing now, and he said Nothing. The woman walked for a while in silence, then she said, “A pity.” She said it in a tone of regret so sincere that Jasper Gwyn was grieved by it.
“No more ideas?” the woman asked.
“No, it’s not that.”
“Then what?”
“I’d like to have another profession.”
“Like?”
Jasper Gwyn stopped.
“I think I’d like to be a copyist.”
The woman thought for a bit. Then she started walking again.
“Yes, I can understand,” she said.
“Really?”
“Yes. It’s a fine profession, copyist.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“It’s a clean profession,” she said.
They said goodbye on the steps that led to her house, and to neither of them did it occur to exchange telephone numbers or mention a next time. Only she said that she was sorry to learn that she wouldn’t read any more books by him. She added that not everyone is capable of entering into people’s heads the way he could, and that it would be a pity to lock up that talent in the garage and polish it once a year, like a vintage sports car.
She said just that, “like a vintage sports car.” Then she seemed to have finished, but in fact she still had something left.
“Being a copyist has to do with copying something, doesn’t it?” she asked.
“Probably.”
“There. But not legal documents or numbers, please.”
“I’ll try to avoid it.”
“See if you find something like copying people.”
“Yes.”
“How they’re made.”
“Yes.”
“You’ll see them well.”
“Yes.”