The Book of Weights

There was, in the small library at the back of the local hall — three streets from Edith’s house, kept open by a roster of volunteers who took turns being kind to the public — a single, stained, slim volume that she had borrowed twice before and was about to borrow for the third time. It was called The Book of Weights, by a man whose name she could never remember; and it was, by any reasonable account, almost completely useless.¹

The book purported to catalogue the weights of things. Not weights in the technical sense — Lemmon was not a metallurgist, nor a grocer — but weights in the older, looser sense: the gravity of an object, or a phrase, or a person’s regard. He had organised the chapters by feeling: there was a chapter on the weight of unanswered letters, a chapter on the weight of names you have not used in some time, and an extraordinary chapter near the end on the weight that one cup of tea bears, when made for a person who is unwell.

The relevant passage, the one that Edith had marked with her thumb on her last reading, ran like this:

We err, almost always, on the side of underestimation. The objects of our attention are heavier than we suppose. A name, said out loud after several years, has the weight of all the years. An apology, even a small one, has the weight of every unstated apology that came before it. The cup of tea brought to the bedside has the weight of every cup not brought; that is, the weight of the asking that did not occur, and the weight of the absence noticed.

The remedy, if one can be said to be required, is not to say nothing — silence has the worst weight of all — but to say small, true things, and to say them often. The trade is one of distribution: many small acknowledgements, frequently spaced, against the impossible mass of the unsaid.

Edith had not understood the passage on her first reading. On her second, in the third year after her father had died, she had understood it well enough to mark it with a sliver of paper she could not now remember tearing from. On this third reading — sitting on the bench in the hall library, which was a hard bench and a discouraging colour — she found that what had been theoretical had become almost embarrassingly literal: she did not, she now realised, owe Marta anything as large as a letter; she owed her, instead, the equivalent of one small thing said, frequently. A telephone call had been the start. There would have to be others.²

She closed the book. She put it back on the shelf — she did not, this time, borrow it. The volunteer at the desk, a man called Simon who had once been a primary school teacher and now wore three soft cardigans at all times, looked up, raised his eyebrows in inquiry, and accepted the silent return with the small dignity of a man who understands that books, like people, sometimes need to stay where they are.