Sapwood is the lighter, outer wood of a trunk, bound round the darker inner heartwood — which is formed of dead used-up sapwood. It’s how trees grow.
Then there’s always a first day in February when the daylight has so banked itself up against the dark that you can’t not notice.
Then it’s spring, March about to be April, the gardens throwing off a swath of winter-spring flowers, and then it’s the first Monday after the clocks go forward, and it’s light at seven o’clock. Who am I talking to? Who am I telling this to, the story that this year on that first light evening I was sitting in the front room watching a dvd of Oliver! and when Mark Lester, who’s been sold by Harry Secombe to Leonard Rossiter the undertaker, gets locked in a roomful of coffins, when he sits among the coffins singing the song about where is love, does it fall from skies above, is it underneath the willow tree that I’ve been dreaming of, when he goes to the barred window high in the wall of the cellar, sings his song leaning against it and then suddenly, unexpectedly, it gives — at that moment, this year, I realized that it was past seven o’clock and it was light outside again?
Off he goes to Covent Garden, to find all its fruits, all its flowers amazing to the eye after the workhouse and the undertaker’s, but above all to coincide with Jack Wild, the Dodger, who works out it’ll probably be to his advantage to befriend this runaway, so he steals a bread roll from a passing baker’s tray, breaks a bit off for himself and throws the bulk of it to the hungry boy. Then the Dodger offers him accommodation, tells him to consider himself at home, one of the family, and leads him in such a merry dance that at the end of it the whole of London is up on its feet in an open festival of color and choreography.
This song and dance was, I knew when I was a child and saw this film, what happiness looked like, what happiness would be. Even now whenever I saw it again, moments of it still happened fresh to the eye, as if for the first time, though I’d seen the same thing so many times over. Like when the Dodger welcomes Oliver into the song, encourages him by singing the first half of a line and waiting to hear the new boy sing back the other half, which he does, like a question — like an answer met with a question: I knew this scene by heart but I’d never quite noticed that before.
You could so write about Oliver! I’d said to you when you were writing the last couple of those talks — well, when you were trying to, but were, you said, stuck, blocked. It wasn’t surprising you were finding it hard, you weren’t very well, and I’d come through to tell you to go easy on yourself. But saying that would have been like saying — well, I stood in the doorway and instead I said: you could so write about Oliver! in On Offer. He’s on offer, in the film. There’s a whole song about it. Boy for Sale. The price keeps coming down because nobody’ll take him, and in the end when the undertaker gets him he’s a bargain.
You were sitting at your desk. You didn’t turn round. You shook your head.
You could, I said, they positively like it if you talk about stuff like that at universities these days. There are whole courses, now, devoted to things like the Carry On films, or Coronation Street, or the changing orientation of Tom Cruise’s hair in consecutive Mission: Impossible films.
That last one was true; I wasn’t making it up. I actually had met a girl on a bus once who’d told me it was her PhD topic. I’d come home and told you and you’d laughed. Now it made you laugh again. Ten points to me.
Thanks, you said. I just want to concentrate, I just want to get these done.
You turned towards me, you looked pained. No, it wasn’t pained you looked, it was in pain. You were pale with it.
You could so write about the marketplace in Oliver! I said. The Consider Yourself scene.
You waved me back with your hand.
You could write about Nancy singing As Long as He Needs Me, I said. That’s all about generosity. She’s all about sacrifice. God, when you think about it, that whole film’s about generosity and sacrifice.
Have you ever thought of reading the actual novel? you said.
I did, I said. Years ago.
You might like to read it again, you said. If you do, you’ll find that there’s not much singing, that Fagin’s gang of boys is dark as can be, that Fagin’s as close to talking about a child pornographer as a Victorian writer can come, and Dickens’s sense of mercy, his generosity, is astonishing in the light of the dark he creates. And it’s good about mirroring characters, Rose and Nancy, Oliver and the Dodger, Oliver and Dick—
Who’s Dick? I said. There’s no character called Dick in the film.
Really busy here, you said.
I could look up some of the lyrics for you, I said coming further into the room.
You held your hand up flat like a traffic policeman. With your other you covered the screen of your computer. You meant: get out.
Okay, I said. Call me if you need anything.
Now I had paused Oliver! on the dvd machine, Mark Lester staring with astonishment at the barred window giving.
I looked out my own window. The sycamore was rude with opening buds. There were two young collared doves sitting close on a single branch.
I remembered something I’d read in that book I’d lifted from the charity shop in Brighton, about birds’ eggs, how the egg of a bird is crystalline, made of layers lined with minuscule air canals so the chick inside can breathe; how the thickness of each egg’s shell meets exactly the pressure each incubating bird will bring to bear on it.
Imagine me going into a shop and taking a book, taking two books and not paying. I must have been in a very bad way back then.
The collared doves out there were mates, they were doing a mating dance facing each other, pressed close to each other, mirroring each other’s movements. Up went one head, up went the other. Down went one head, down went the other.
I left Oliver on freeze-frame, went through to the study desk. I moved my work records and the mess of envelopes I kept my accounts in; I shifted the old hard drive covered in dust. There they were, piled under it. Maybe I hadn’t read the last of them on purpose, so there’d still be something of yours I hadn’t. Certainly I’d sorted and filed and decided about and thrown out and given away pretty much everything else by now. (That thought made me feel a bit better — charity shops had done very well out of us, I’d given them stuff of yours worth much much more than the couple of old books I’d taken.)
I peeled off the pages above On Time, the pages I’d not read yet, On Offer and On Reflection. I left the rest on the desk and went and sat under the anglepoise in the armchair I’d moved across the room last summer. Imagine, I’d actually felt bad about moving it, like I was being disloyal. But it was good here. See? It worked here.
Who was I talking to? Who was I telling all this to? Who cared what I did or didn’t do, where I sat or didn’t sit?
1. Putting the Art in Bartering
Offer: From the Latin, ob, towards, and ferre, to bring.
To present as an act of devotion, homage, charity, etc. To express willingness. To hold out for acceptance or rejection. To lay before someone. To present to the mind. To propose to give, pay, sell, or perform. To attempt (violence, resistance, etc.). To make a show of attempting. To make as if. To give the enemy an opportunity for battle. To present itself. To be at hand. To incline or tend. To make an offer, i.e., of marriage. The act of offering. The state of being offered. Something which is offered. The first advance. A proposal made. An attempt or essay. A knob on an antler.
So offer involves rejection as well as acceptance. It involves everything between giving, selling, and merely thinking about either. It seems to be about both marriage and violence, and since an antler’s involved — antlers being studded with offers — there’ll probably be issues of both mating and territory. Offer means money, and the hope of money. There’s an unanswered question at the heart of the word, the possibility of what won’t materialize. In joinery, to offer something up means to position something loosely or unfixedly, to see whether it’ll work before you fix it into place; in more usual usage, if you’re offering something up, it’s in the hope of persuading something to happen. So the notion of offer involves hope, a certain flexibility round acceptance or rejection, and the likelihood of both.