by Paul Hazel
shone like gold in the dusk of the shop. “My ship lay over in
the harbor,” he said, “buying herring. Too soon we were
gone.”
Wanting to keep him she said, “It is so far away. You
could not have been more than a boy.”
Someone was shuffling along the dark aisle lined with
books or rather the shadows of books, brown and sour as
leaf-mold, piled high to the ceiling. “Nora,” a man’s voice
called out sharply.
A gray head ending with a grizzled beard thrust itself
into view. It belonged to a short, wiry man of about fifty. He
had on an old sailor’s cap worn to the same indefinite color as
his hair. He glanced about suspiciously. Grown apprehensive
under his gaze, the woman turned from him.
“I will make tea,” she said. “You would like that.”
“Yes.” Wykeham said softly. “That would be kind.”
Wykeham sat in an armchair watching the empty street
fill with rain. In silence they drank the tea from delicate
china cups whose touch made the shopkeeper moody and
uncomfortable. He finished while the tea was still too hot and
put the cup down.
“Well and good," the man said. He made a point of not
looking at his wife. “This is, after all, a business."
Wykeham put aside his cup.
“Is there much of a market for antique books?” he
inquired mildly.
“Ah!” the shopkeeper cried. “Not just old books. I have
everything!” He pointed down at the floor. “Underneath,” he
said, “I have two great rooms. And above.” He raised his
arm, lifting it dramatically. “Six floors, groaning under the
burden.” He smiled inwardly, his impatience forgotten. “One
must try to have everything.”
“Will you have a cake?” asked the woman.
“Yes, thank you,” said Wykeham.
The shopkeeper did not blink.
“There is not a book so awful,” he said, “that it will not
have its adherents. Or a book, however marvelous, that
doesn’t for a time fall out of fashion. Sooner or later, then, I
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17
have them: old books, yes. But new ones as well, picked up
for a song and waiting discovery.”
“You have, I believe,” Wykeham said, “two volumes on
order for the Reverend Mr. Longford.”
The woman stopped. She knew she had no more to offer
him.
“You are n o t. . .” she said.
“Hardly.” Wykeham smiled. “I am merely doing a favor.”
“Perhaps there is something.” She looked around
desperately. “Carl, where is that nice picture book on Norway?”
It was not what she meant to say. She had not wanted to
involve her husband, but she was frightened and the words
fell from her mouth.
Wykeham looked across at her. “I regret,” he began.
The shopkeeper had risen. He walked to the front of the
shop, where he rummaged under the counter. He kept his
back to them but she knew he was listening.
When he stood again before them, two small books
under his arm, she still had not spoken. Yet she reached out
impulsively. Digging between her husband’s shirt and the dry
leather bindings, she took the books into her own fragile
hands. The shopkeeper grunted with surprise.
Ignoring him, she turned back the front cover of the
largest volume, finding a bill resting on a lithograph of a
huge, naked Indian. The bill was marked in her husband’s
clear black letters. Timothy Longford, Greenchurch Parsonage, it read, 8, Paid. She was quite certain Wykeham had seen it.
“That will be ten pounds,” she whispered, looking straight
up at him in terror.
Wykeham paid without protest. When he had gone, she
went upstairs immediately and got into bed, where she lay on
her pillow, listening to the storm. But it was the sound of the
crowded streets she heard and the knock of the herring boats,
rocking in the great distant harbor. Later, when her husband
came into the room, his eyes were watchful. Nevertheless,
thinking of his wife’s cleverness, how with a cup of tea and a
half-eaten cake she had earned him more than double the
price, he gave her a grin.
A strand of her light brown hair lay wet on her cheek.
The years in a different country had made her timid and she
would not look at him. It had been another woman altogeth
1 8
WINTERKING
er, a girl of seventeen who in another place and without
encouragement dared talk with strangers. She had not meant
to remember her. She had put her away. It was for her
awakening, into a world that had no place for her, that
something was owed; for that she had demanded payment.
Wykeham sat at his desk past midnight, under the
yellow light of the one lamp that had not been packed away.
But for a few clothes and a suitcase the room was nearly as
bare as on the day he had first seen it. The furniture had
gone to storage, the odds and ends put into boxes to be
carted off. He loved the feel of the small empty room, blank
as the cell of an Irish hermit, loved it more because he so
seldom chose to live plainly. Wykeham had always been
fascinated and excited by things. As a result the rooms where
he had lived had often had the thick and complicated air of
thirdhand shops where everything is treasured and nothing is
thrown away: bicycle parts had rested in the bath, books in
the foyer. Pots, pictures, and embroideries, the enameled
tooth of an extinct elephant (preserved in the jaw), a chimney
brush without bristles, a shepherd’s crook, several fish scalers, a pair of surgical scissors and a Chinese lacquer screen, among many more such notable items, he had only lately
picked from the clutter, labeled and set out for the movers.
Deep in the evening, before he had finally sunk back
into the desk chair, turning at last to the letters, he had swept
the floor. Under the single electric light the plain, tea-colored
boards, now dull and grim, had reminded him of the thin
brown layers of hardened silt he had sometimes seen in the
exposed rock in the hills above Ohomowauke. There were
millions of years in the stone but almost none of it barren. In
the dry beds of ancient streams he had found the remnants of
the changing but never-ending abundance of life, bred generation upon generation, outdated and puzzling but seemingly imperishable. Only now and then there had been a brief
gritty band, a patch empty of bone and shell, as though for a
season even the gods, wearied of their hosts and retainers
and with a momentary sigh of relief, had ordered them gone.
The open window looked out onto the common. The storm
had gone and with it the last smoke-like rags of clouds, blowing
eastward over the sea. The air that crept under the sash,
The River
19
stirring the sheets of white paper, was no longer bitter.
He finished printing the address on a thick package tied
with cord, then set it aside. On a fresh sheet he wrote ther />
name of a girl. He had been careful. There had been nothing
promised between them but he felt he owed her an explanation. They had said good-bye rather formally at the entrance of the library where she worked behind the order desk on the
main floor. She had stood quietly watching him descend the
stairs. When he had turned, she had waved.
“It doesn’t make sense,” she had told him.
“I know that.” But he knew that it did.
She spoke Latin and German, had studied Greek, but
had never been out of the city. They met in the evenings,
after her work, in a room in the King’s Hotel. He had talked
to her of ships and of all the places they had taken him.
“How have you gone so far?” she had asked.
“I started early.”
But she had never been content with that. “I will make a
covenant between you and m e,” she had laughed, baiting
him. “You will tell me everything about all the great, sweet
places that ever were and I will show you the mysteries
sailors dream of when they are far from land.”
She was nearly thirty, ten years older than she guessed
he was. Some mornings there were puffy circles under her
brown eyes. Often, as though troubled, she said his name
with her lips only. Now she had turned on her side, her
slender legs curled up and rubbing his. He had told her of
Antioch and Alexandria, the Canaries and the westward bulge
of Africa, of camels and the Greenland ice, the Shoulders of
Jupiter, the docks at Spithead and Madeira and the channel
towers at Dover burning lime. But he had never promised.
He sealed the letter and took another sheet. Across the
way a few cold lights glittered. After a long time even these
winked out. Two more letters lay carefully folded at his left
hand. It was very late but he did not move from the chair. He
felt no weariness. Once again the world stood before him. He
looked out over the common, its darkness made blacker by
the fissured shadow of a grove of elms.
The crow alighted on the window ledge. Its sly head
twisted around on its neck.
“Why are you not asleep?” Wykeham asked it.
“Like you,” the crow answered, "I am waiting for dawn.”
3.
In those years the mails, delivered throughout the city by
postman on foot, moved more rapidly than is now the
custom. On Saturdays the first delivery was completed by
eight-thirty. In the outer districts, where the houses were
spread apart, and on a few of the larger plots, where there
were bams though there was no livestock, the second occasionally dragged on toward evening. But along the congested streets of the center city the second post arrived no later than
noon. At twelve-thirty Harwood’s blonde wife brought the
package in from the porch and left it on the kitchen table.
When she came in once more from the back for the wash
and found the package still there, she called out to her
husband.
Harwood emerged from his study where despite the
howls of his daughter he had been trying to rearrange his
notes on the Dutchman. His skin was white and dull and he
was wearing suspenders over yesterday’s shirt.
“No one sends me things,” she said in that tone that told
him she was making no special claim, only speaking the
truth.
A streak of sunlight fell across her faded skirt. Her
knuckles were red and her forearms were wet to the elbows.
He sat down at the table and began fumbling with the
taut cord fastened with sailors’ knots. She stood at his back,
looking over his shoulder in silence. Inside the heavy paper
there was a coat of new, thick bog-smelling tweed. He made a
vague gesture, as though apologizing because his good fortune excluded her.
“You had better go thank him,” she said.
*
*
*
2 0
The River
21
At one o’clock a dozen letters lay unopened on the
counter of the empty shop on Abbey Street. Out of idleness
Nora took them up. Her husband, mumbling to himself, was
unpacking cartons. His voice rumbled loudly but without
meaning. Her thoughts took no notice. With skillful indifler-
ence she sorted the letters, bills into one pile, orders into the
next, a third for the private correspondence that went back
and forth between dealers with rumors of acquisitions, estate
sales not listed in the papers, quiet inquiries and lies. She
spread the unopened letters in front of her like a gypsy
woman, alone in a booth reading the cards out of habit.
During the night she had dreamt she had fallen asleep in
a tower. When she awoke, still knowing it was a dream, that
she had only dreamt of waking, she had found that an
immense hedge of thorns had grown up around her. She had
gone to the window and opened it. The cold, raw morning air
streamed in. But the din she had expected, the sounds from
her father’s stables, the clatter of carriages in the yard below
her, had gone. In the hallway outside her door she discovered
her little maid, her smock, and her flesh as well, turned to a
fibrous dust. The tiny gold ring that had been her own gift to
the girl was hanging loose on the narrow bone of her finger.
Toward morning Nora had awakened in her bed, next to
her husband. The delicate pink color of the sky had told her that
the rain was over. Something was within my reach, she thought,
but I have not touched it. She placed the last letter down on the
counter. In a small, spidery old-fashioned script she read her
name. Within the envelope there were several folded pages and
a steamer ticket on the Konge. H arald for Bod0.
The Duke, who had known Wykeham rather better than
the others, anticipated the letter and had directed his butler
to bring the post in to him as soon as it came. There was a
single, deferential knock on the door of the solarium. The
man entered briskly, bearing a square silver tray on which the
creamy white envelope rested. When he had set it down,
the man stepped aside and waited discreetly.
“There will be no answer,” the Duke said. The man
prepared to go but the Duke leaned back his head. It was a
smooth, dark, aristocratic head, not the sort of a head of a
man of business. Nonetheless His Grace had had his start in
business and had given his life to it. The title had come late
2 2
W IN TER IN G
and had seemed to him both unnecessary and humorous. Yet
he had never protested. He suspected, though nothing had
been said directly, that Wykeham was somehow behind it.
Fortunately, the title was not hereditary. He had never
married and had no children to be disappointed. Nevertheless, the prospect of its eventual mortality pleased him.
While, over these last months particularly, he had felt his
days shortening, he had never cast a covetous eye on more of
life than God, in whose affective agency in human affairs he
maintained a guarded disbelief, had allo
tted him. Unlike most
men, unlike Wykeham himself, he was certain, the Duke
wished no more of the world when he died than it bury him.
“Your Grace,” the man said.
“If you will, John,” said the Duke, “have my driver
ready at six.”
When the man departed the Duke unsealed the letter
and found exactly the blunt, authoritative expression of gratitude he had expected. He had been single-minded in his devotion to Wykeham. That their relationship consisted almost exclusively of the contents of the letters between them, his own, of which he still preserved copies, all bearing the same
postmark, Wykeham’s sporting stamps of almost infinite color
and variety, stamps of green mangoes and Spanish kings,
cathedrals and gardens in Burma, coming to him from every
longitude and meridian on the face of the globe, that his
devotion was the product not of smiles and handshakes but of
written words did not matter to him. Letters, if one took the
time, could be made clear and definite and might, with
appropriate care, escape the imprecision which so characterized the shifting, haphazard life he saw about him. Of course the relationship would have gained no footing at all had
Wykeham not responded in kind. The Duke remembered his
pleasant shock of surprise when he had read Wykeham’s first
letter, now thirteen years ago, when Wykeham ought to have
been a boy of seven.
The letter had come by steamer from Egypt. The Duke
had expected some childish babble about pyramids or perhaps, because children so rarely notice what adults take for granted, nothing about pyramids and in its place a great deal
more than he cared to hear about the ship’s monkey. Instead
Wykeham had written about women— and not the women of
the bazaar, leaning over their boxes of figs and shouting to
The River
2 3
buyers, but rather the wave of young English women who
had come out with their engineer husbands, women in heavy
skirts despite the climate who spoke tirelessly of their Queen’s
setting a formidable example and sent home for dogs.
He writes as if he were a Roman emperor, the Duke
remembered he had thought, as though the boredom of the
long voyage had sharpened the boy’s perceptions and given