In the Margins

Chapter 1: I. Page Nine

In Reykjavik, in November, the sun comes up at a quarter past ten and goes down again before four, and in between it makes only a brief, apologetic appearance low in the south, like a guest who has looked in at the wrong party. By half past three, the sky over the harbor is the color of a bruise. By four, the whole city has switched on its lights. Embla Sigurðardóttir had learned to love it. She was a weather observer at the Icelandic Met Office, thirty-three years old, with a small apartment on Hverfisgata, a stack of wool jumpers, and a professional conviction that you could not hate a thing you measured every day. She knew the wind speed at the harbor mouth. She knew the exact angle of the sun at noon. And on the second Thursday of November, at ten past four, in the Grófin branch of the city library, with sleet hammering against the tall windows, she knew only that she wanted to read something old. She found it on a low shelf near the back, between a biography of Churchill and a book of Faroese recipes. A fat, battered, tea-brown paperback of Persuasion. She had read it at nineteen and remembered almost nothing, except that it was sad, and that everyone in it was very polite. She checked it out, carried it home through the sleet, made a pot of tea, got into bed with a hot-water bottle and two pillows, and opened it. There was a pencil mark on the first page. It was small and neat, in the margin beside the opening paragraph, which describes, at length, a vain baronet who loves nothing so much as the book that lists his own title. Next to it, in a slanting, rapid hand, somebody had written: Sir Walter is an idiot. Vanity is not a personality. Embla laughed out loud, alone in her bedroom. She read the line again. She turned the page. There was another note on page three, and another on page six, and by page nine, where the heroine's old friend informs her that she has lost her looks, a whole small conversation was going on in the margins, like the murmur of a person sitting beside her in the dark. Anne is too nice. She lets everyone walk on her. I want to shake her. Lady Russell is NOT her friend. I'm sorry. I've decided. She sat up. The handwriting was a man's, she thought, or at least a person who pressed hard and did not bother with the loops. The pencil had gone in deep. Here and there the paper had been dimpled where he had underlined something twice. On page forty, there was a small gray crust at the edge of the page. She touched it with her fingertip. She brought it to her nose. Salt. Who, thought Embla, reads Jane Austen near the sea? She fetched a pencil from the kitchen drawer. She sat for a long time with it hovering above page nine. And then, because the room was warm and the sleet was loud and she had been, for some months, a little lonely in a way she had not quite admitted, she wrote, beneath the stranger's note, in her small square weather-recording handwriting: Agreed on Lady Russell. Disagree about Anne. She isn't nice. She's patient. Those aren't the same. Also: why is there salt on page 40? She looked at it for a moment. She had no idea what she was doing. It was ridiculous. It was an act of vandalism, in a public library book, addressed to a ghost. She left it there.