Bobington, this week, is a city that waits.
The Copper Review Commission waits for Monday. Sir Duncan Hale waits for Delvaria. Orin Blackshaw waits for his knee. Gerald Ashcroft waits — though he would not use that word, and his solicitor would object to the implication — for whatever comes after four hours in a room with Senior Inspector Frye. Isolde Hargrove, in her farmstead outside Millhaven, waits for the world to stop treating her paintings as share certificates.
I have been thinking about waiting, because it is Thursday, and Thursday is a day that exists principally for the purpose of being neither Wednesday nor Friday. Wednesdays have agendas. Fridays have possibilities. Thursdays have patience.
I am reasonably good at patience. It is the only skill that improves with age, requiring as it does no reflexes, no stamina, and no particular intelligence — merely the willingness to sit in a chair and allow time to do its work. In this respect, I consider myself an athlete.
The commission meets on Monday. Fourteen days to determine the fate of a three-billion-florin tramway that the city approved last Friday in a burst of optimism that now feels, if not naive, then at least insufficiently acquainted with the concept of geopolitical risk.
I have read the three options. I have attempted to understand them. Option One: spend the money and hope. Option Two: build something worse and pretend it’s a choice. Option Three: build half of it and come back later, which is how I approach most household repairs and all ambitious novels.
The honest answer, which no one on the commission will say aloud because commissions are not designed for honesty, is that none of the options is satisfactory. The satisfactory option would be for the Delvarian fleet to return to port, the Kaelmar Strait to reopen, copper to return to seven hundred and forty florins, and the world to behave as it did a week ago. This option is not among those being considered.
Pryce and Voss will sit across a table from each other on Monday — the woman who fought for the tramway for eight years and the man who fought against it with equal conviction. I have heard the pairing described as both inspired and catastrophic, and I suspect it is neither. It is merely necessary. The council tried ideology and the ideology ran aground on a copper price. What remains is arithmetic, and arithmetic does not care about your faction.
I confess to a certain admiration for both of them. Pryce, who will not let the tramway die, and Voss, who will not let the city borrow itself into penury. If they can find the ground between those positions — which is the only ground that exists — they will have done something rather more useful than most parliamentary committees manage.
They wait for Monday. The city waits with them.
I stood outside the Constabulary on Thursday morning, not because I expected to learn anything — the Constabulary is built to resist the curiosity of men like me — but because there is something instructive about watching a man walk into a building where uncomfortable questions are asked.
Gerald Ashcroft arrived at nine. He wore a dark overcoat and the expression of a person who has been advised not to have an expression. His solicitor was beside him. A junior associate trailed behind, carrying what I assume was a briefcase full of things that would be described, in legal terminology, as “documents relevant to the inquiry” and, in common English, as evidence that someone would prefer not to discuss.
He left at a quarter past one. Four hours. Whatever was said in that room, four hours is not the duration of a casual conversation. Four hours is the duration of a conversation in which questions are asked to which the answers matter.
I do not know whether Gerald Ashcroft set fire to a warehouse. That is for Senior Inspector Frye and, perhaps eventually, a court. What I know is that a building burned, a night watchman spoke, an insurance company opened its books, and the man who owned the building spent four hours answering questions.
The city waits for what comes next. The Constabulary, to its credit, is in no hurry. There is a particular kind of patience that belongs to investigators — the patience of people who understand that the truth is not diminished by taking one’s time to find it.
Hargrove published a letter on Thursday. You will have read it elsewhere in this newspaper, and I will not reproduce it here, except to say that it contains the sentence “I did not paint for auction catalogues,” which is as concise a statement of artistic purpose as I have encountered.
I am told that the letter will increase the value of her work, because the market interprets sincerity as scarcity and scarcity as opportunity. If this is true — and the art dealers assure me it is — then we have arrived at a point where an artist cannot criticise the commodification of her work without inadvertently accelerating it. This is the kind of paradox that would have amused Matthias Crane, Hargrove’s teacher, who once said that the art market was “a hall of mirrors built by people who cannot see.”
Hargrove waits for the attention to subside. I doubt it will. But her letter accomplished something more important than market correction: it reminded a city consumed by arithmetic that some things are made to be looked at, not counted.
There is a painting in the retrospective — “Late Afternoon, High Moor” — that I have now stood before on two occasions. It is not large. It depicts a stretch of moorland under a sky that is equal parts gold and grey, with a single dry-stone wall cutting diagonally across the composition. There is nothing in it that demands attention. No drama, no narrative, no argument.
And yet I cannot stop looking at it. The light is wrong, or rather, the light is exactly right in a way that should be impossible to render in oil on canvas. Hargrove has captured the moment — perhaps ten minutes long, in life — when the sun is low enough to illuminate the grass from the side, turning every blade into a filament. It is the light that occurs between afternoon and evening, between warmth and cold, between one thing and the next.
It is, in other words, the light of waiting.
Blackshaw trained on Thursday. I am told he moved well. The knee, it seems, is merely strained and not torn, which is the kind of news that makes forty-eight thousand people exhale simultaneously.
He will play on Saturday, or he will not. Corbett will decide, or his knee will decide for her. These are the small suspenses that a city holds alongside its larger ones — the diplomat’s silence, the commissioner’s deadline, the inspector’s questions — and they are not trivial. A footballer’s fitness matters to the people who care about it, which, in Bobington this week, is approximately everyone.
I have been thinking about knees. They are, anatomically, absurd — a hinge joint asked to bear the weight of an adult body while permitting the kind of lateral movement that nature clearly did not intend. That we run, jump, and play sport on these improbable mechanisms is a testament to either human ingenuity or human recklessness, and I suspect it is both.
Blackshaw’s knee is twenty-eight years old and has absorbed, by my rough calculation, several thousand hours of competitive football. That it has chosen this particular week to remind him of its limitations is, I think, not spite but simple honesty. The knee is telling its owner what Okonkwo told the council: the arithmetic is unforgiving.
But knees, unlike copper prices, generally heal. And Blackshaw, unlike commissions, does not require fourteen days.
The rain stopped on Thursday afternoon and the sun appeared, briefly, over the Docklands. I walked to Rensler’s for a cup of coffee — four florins now, and I have stopped complaining about it, because complaining about the price of coffee is the first step toward becoming the kind of person I do not wish to be.
Rensler was behind the counter. He had milk again. The tram hummed past the window, half-full at four o’clock, carrying people from the Docklands to wherever people go when they are done waiting for the day to end.
I drank my coffee. I read Hargrove’s letter. I thought about Pryce and Voss, sitting down together on Monday, two people who disagree about nearly everything being asked to agree about the one thing that matters. I thought about Hale, in Thessara, waiting for a door to open. I thought about Blackshaw’s knee, which is doing its best.
There is an art to waiting. It is not passive. It is not resignation. It is the recognition that some things cannot be rushed — commissions, diplomacy, ligament repair, the drying of oil paint — and that the interval between the question and the answer is not wasted time. It is the time in which the answer forms.
Bobington waits. It has waited before. It will wait again. The tramway will be built, or it will not. The strait will open, or it will not. Ashcroft will be charged, or he will not. The knee will hold, or it will not.
In the meantime, the city does what cities do: it drinks its coffee, reads its newspapers, argues in its council chambers, and trusts that Thursday will, eventually, become Friday, and Friday will become the future, and the future, when it arrives, will find us ready.
Or at least present. Which, on a Thursday, is enough.