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This was the framework of Anna’s life. But it was only alone, in the big room, that she was herself. It was an oblong room, recessed to take a narrow bed. Around the bed were stacked books, papers, a telephone. There were three tall windows in the outer wall. At one end of the room, near the fireplace, was a desk with a typewriter, at which she dealt with letters, and the book reviews and articles she sometimes, but infrequently, wrote. At the other end was a long trestle table, painted black. A drawer held the four notebooks. The top of this table was always kept clear. The walls and ceilings of the room were white, but shabbied by the dark air of London. The floor was painted black. The bed had a black cover. The long curtains were a dull red.
Anna now passed slowly from one to another of the three windows, examining the thin and discoloured sunshine that failed to reach the pavements which were the floor of the rift between high Victorian houses. She covered the windows over, listening with pleasure to the intimate sliding sound of the curtain runners in their deep grooves, and to the soft swish, swish, swish of the heavy silk meeting and folding together. She switched the light on over the trestle table, so that the glossy black shone, mirroring a red gleam from the near curtain. She laid the four notebooks out, one after another, side by side.
She used an old-fashioned music-stool for this occupation, and she now spun it high, almost as high as the table itself, and sat, looking down at the four notebooks as if she were a general on the top of a mountain, watching her armies deploy in the valley below.
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Page 58
About
The Golden Notebook is a collaboration between if:book London and Apt.
Principal funding by Arts Council England.
HarperCollins, the publisher of The Golden Notebook, digitized the book for us and generously gave permission to reproduce it here in its entirety at no cost.
Additional support from The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and New York University
Recent comments:
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