The Absolute Book

by Elizabeth Knox

  ‘Why did librarians burn the books rather than tearing out the offending pages, or crossing out the lines with supposed lies in them?’ Taryn’s chair asked.

  She said, ‘You can see librarians’ failure to try even that as the start of German society’s treachery towards itself. Yes, it’s meaningful that books were piled on bonfires, and what books they were, and who had written them. But that librarians collaborated, and why they did, is more than a fact that bears remembering; it’s a question we should keep asking. Why do we sometimes decide that the things our ancestors have made, and kept, and cared for, are suddenly too many mouths to feed, or of bad character and a menace to society? Why, for instance, is it unremarkable that we have warehouses full of garden furniture and running shoes and bails of bubble wrap, while public libraries are “rationalising their collections” to make space? Why does that happen? Well, one thing I think is that it’s related to the defunding of the humanities in our universities, a refusal of one of the great conditions of history: that today cannot know what tomorrow will need. It’s always better to keep books. In the same way that it’s better not to pollute waterways and cover arable land with asphalt.’

  ‘So it’s the principle of preservation,’ her chair said. ‘Of conservation.’

  ‘Yes. And it’s the practice of not being high-handed towards the past. Or the future.’

  ‘Can’t it also be said that, in a way, books have souls? Here, many of us believe our waterways do. Rivers have mauri: life force. Wairua: spirit.’

  ‘I think we should act as if we have souls,’ Taryn said. ‘Immortal souls we might imperil by cruelty or bad faith or a serious lack of charity. And if imagining that books have souls helps us believe we do, then books absolutely have souls.’

  ‘In your book.’

  She laughed, ‘In my book.’

  ‘And rivers?’

  Taryn said, ‘I was talking to a Welshman a few days ago who spoke quite naturally about the god of a certain river. The Monnow. It flows into the Wye at Monmouth, where my mother’s family are from. I’d very much like to think those two rivers—the rivers of my childhood—have protective spirits.’

  Then, having steered the discussion around the Nazi book-burnings to what they agreed was at least a less predictable place, Taryn’s chair asked for the house lights to come up. ‘Let’s have questions from the floor.’

  The audience became visible. They looked friendly and stimulated. Taryn relaxed and smiled at them. She waited for a question, hoping they had circumvented any dull or hostile ones.

  A man stood up to put a question which Taryn at first found impossible get a purchase on, even though she could hear every word, since he had a BBC version of a New Zealand accent. He said that, in all honesty, he had not read her book, but he’d like her to explain what, from her talk, he understood to be her position. He had an air of faintly indignant surprise. Taryn realised she was frowning at him, purely from the effort of trying to follow his question. He said he had listened to her radio interview; that was why he’d come along to her session. From the interview, and her talk today, he got the sense that her book had the wrong emphasis on certain historical events.

  A minute later Taryn had the gist of his problem, which was that facts he treasured—as despised by others—were known to some young woman, who had written a book, and got to be on stage commanding the attention of an audience, talking about things he’d supposed only he knew and cared about.

  What on earth could she say in response to that?

  Taryn hitched up her eyebrows. She didn’t mean to look quizzical, only to avoid staring at him narrow-eyed.

  Her chair asked for some clarification so she might answer. He appeared to have forgotten his promise to be the brute. Perhaps he knew who the man was—someone who must be given a fair hearing. The man rephrased his question. It appeared he thought Taryn had taken an interest in the subject in the service of fashion. ‘Library fires are suddenly fashionable,’ he explained.

  ‘Oh dear. Everybody’s going to want one,’ Taryn said.

  The audience laughed.

  The questioner looked furious. ‘I’m making a serious point.’

  Taryn regrouped. She set off in her most gracious manner. ‘Well, of course my book isn’t a work of scholarship. It’s for the general reader. That means it’s less inclined to be exhaustive with the evidence, and more inclined to expand in what I hope is a thought-provoking way on its arguments. A book for the general reader on an esoteric subject has to argue for its own interestingness by being interesting. And never argue for its own importance, which a work of scholarship may do. I consider the balancing act of “being accessible” a discipline, rather than a limitation. What I hope is that I’m inviting people to think about libraries, and what they mean to us. To think about what’s kept, what’s lost, what’s destroyed. My book has to be welcoming, like a public library, rather than an archival collection.’

  The audience applauded.

  Taryn smiled at the man and he sat down, his jaw tight.

  Another man was already waiting at by the microphone in the far aisle. He began, ‘I have yet to hear you make a distinction between . . .’

  He thought that her correlation of books, buildings and human bodies meant she didn’t put people first.

  Two minutes later Taryn had sweat running on her back and was wondering if this third degree she was getting was because she was a woman, or English, or had red hair, or whether she had walked into some current public tussle about the worth of libraries, in which case someone should have filled her in.

  Next, a woman approached the microphone to compliment Taryn, rather than ask a question. ‘I love your way with stories,’ she said. She was red in the face. ‘I enjoyed your book. And I found your talk illuminating.’ The woman retreated to her seat while everyone clapped.

  Taryn thanked her. So, it wasn’t the audience as an entity. It wasn’t Auckland or New Zealand. It was just that man, and that man and—oh, God—this one shambling along the aisle to the microphone, big, with a grey ponytail and a shapeless coat, and, on his head, something like a stockman’s hat.

  His tone was not censorious, not accusatory or querulous. But he didn’t like the microphone, and he whispered into it, his voice soft and deep.

  ‘You have spoken of efforts to preserve precious books and manuscripts in times of trouble. But in answering a question you say, “What is kept, what is lost, what is destroyed.”’

  ‘You mean I forgot to say who chooses what’s kept or destroyed?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘You mean I forgot to mention what is hidden?’

  He nodded, the shadows flowing in and out of the hollows under his stark browbone. ‘Things are not hidden, and are destroyed. And things are hidden and forgotten, so lost.’

  This she could talk about. ‘In times of trouble the decision to move a library often comes too late. Almost always because the librarians’ sense of duty to scholars outweighs their caution. Even in settled times there’s a tension between the necessity of making books available to researchers, and of conserving them for the future. When someone gifts their collection to a library the gift usually comes with conditions. Either because the material is sensitive, or because it’s precious and fragile, and shouldn’t be put into the hands of the merely curious. The manuscripts must be like maidens in a parlour with librarians as their chaperones.’

  More laughter.

  ‘Of course now many libraries with manuscripts are putting them online. The British Library has a wonderful blog about its medieval collection. I think that kind of curated availability is the future of collections. Instead of an archive being open to scholars, who bring their scholarship in, the archive comes to the public, mediated by the people who care for it.’

  ‘Everything will be open and to hand?’ her questioner said.

  Taryn nodded. ‘An idea strong in our culture is that information should be available and transparent. So is the opposi
te idea—that the Secret Services, or whoever, are concealing vital things from us, yet at the same time poking their noses into all our business. But if you mean whether the availability of precious materials online will make us forget the back room, the vault—yes, I think it will. There is a school of thought which claims that, because of the internet, we are awash in uncurated information, and that has made us lose our appetite and judgement. I’m not sure that’s true. But I do think we forget what’s not there. Which is a tautology. I mean, we forget what isn’t on the internet. We even neglect the idea of what’s not there. Or we acknowledge what’s been destroyed, while not trying quite as hard as we might to find what’s lost, or misfiled.’

  ‘What is lost? What is not there?’

  ‘You want an example?’

  Again he nodded, darkness sliding about like liquid in the hollows under his brow.

  Taryn had a moment of light-hearted daring. She said, ‘Well, for example, there is a scroll box known as “the Firestarter”, since it survived at least six documented conflagrations, going back to antiquity. For a short time it resided in my grandfather’s library at Princes Gate, a manor house in the Wye Valley, having found its way there accidentally, or illicitly, or perhaps even superstitiously, since it came through a bombing raid that damaged part of the British Museum, when other things in its vicinity did not come through. The curators might have superstitiously refused to take it back when the war was over, since it’s certainly not in the British Museum now. That’s my example. The Firestarter isn’t anywhere. Or it’s nowhere we can find it.’

  The audience made a hum of awe and pleasure.

  Her questioner thanked her with a nod, returned to his seat, and sat placidly—unlike those two other men, whom Taryn was trying not to look at, who had by now understood the extent to which they had been betrayed by their eagerness and egos.

  The chair wound up by telling everyone that Taryn would be available at the signing table if people had further questions, and to ‘put your hands together’. As the audience applauded, that last man continued to gaze at Taryn, looking like someone who had come down out of the bush just to hear her, untamed, weathered, with the rigours of a landscape she didn’t understand shining in his eyes.

  No. In his eye. His remaining eye. An eye of awful intelligence, the colour of thin ice over deep water.

  20

  Green Pressure

  On a day in late May, Jacob was walking to court to give testimony in a case he’d wrapped up eight months before. He cut into Kensington Gardens to escape the traffic fumes. He’d been back at work for two weeks and had heard nothing from Taryn Cornick, or from Raymond Price. He was feeling left out of something he’d like to be part of. Sure, he’d been instrumental. Phones had passed through his hands. He’d got to read documents and listen in on discussions and even have his say. But he’d never get to see the whole shape of the story, or understand what was happening, or lend a hand, or even be touched by any of it. Gates would stay closed to him.

  Jacob came to a standstill on the path, suddenly so dizzy with misery that he nearly fell over. A cyclist coming up behind swore and swerved. Jacob was on the wrong side of the shared track. The cyclist’s lean face and fly-eye shades turned back his way. The man mouthed more obscenities.

  Jacob stood under the oaks in Hyde Park, reasoning with his sadness. But it went on in its own voice under his blandishments. His world was a fold filled with sheep, and he was only a sheep dressed in a wolfskin. His world was just one walled garden in a series of walled gardens, like that last Narnia book. Higher up and deeper in.

  A little gaggle of women with strollers went by. Two of them were blond, two veiled. The configuration of these different people—one of civil accord—seemed to be part of Jacob’s sadness. My sadness, he thought. Which is stupid. Who am I to hope for a bird’s-eye view of the walled gardens?

  The leaves on the trees were still, but the canopy was collapsing, pressing greenly on him. The trees shared his feelings and were trying to tell him so.

  Jacob closed his eyes, balled his fists and spent a minute pushing thoughts from his head and feelings from his body. It was time to leave the park and plunge back into the traffic fumes. And his own life.

  Real life.

  He’d been back beside the road for five minutes when a car pulled into the bus stop beside him and he heard his name called. It was Raymond Price. When Jacob got in beside him Price said, ‘Goodness—your face. What are you thinking, Jacob? I’m convinced you’re thinking things I’d be interested to hear.’

  ‘I’m thinking I’m due in court in forty minutes,’ Jacob said. And thought, Why must it be Price asking me what I’m thinking? Why not someone else?

  Price said that Taryn Cornick had returned from her trip down under.

  ‘Thank you for letting me know.’

  ‘Do you not expect to hear from Ms Cornick?’

  ‘I expect to talk to her. I have unanswered questions,’ Jacob said. Taryn was still a person of interest in his cold case and that could be represented straightforwardly.

  Price said, ‘I’ll drop you at court. The Old Bailey.’

  ‘I guess you asked Hemms where I was and she told you I was on foot,’ Jacob said. But he thought, He’s tracking my new phone. He buckled his seatbelt.

  Price didn’t immediately pull out into the traffic. He said, ‘When Ms Cornick gave her talk in New Zealand, she mentioned an item from her grandfather James Northover’s collection. A scroll box known as the Firestarter. We know Khalef and Tahan asked her about it.’

  ‘She told me they asked her about a footnote in her book.’

  ‘A footnote in her book that concerned the Firestarter.’

  Jacob kept his mouth shut.

  ‘Khalef and Tahan visited Agile Media, who are housed in the former seat of the Northovers, Ms Cornick’s mother’s people.’

  ‘Those aren’t leads. Leads lead somewhere.’

  A bus pulled up behind them and honked its horn. Price performed a U-turn in front of it, forcing the traffic in his own lane to reverse to make room for him. Or rather Jacob made them by pulling out his ID, pressing it on the windshield, and eyeballing everyone with his most frosty, no-nonsense stare.

  Price accelerated away through the traffic. He said, ‘I’m making your workday easier so your evening will be free, and you can catch up with Taryn Cornick.’

  ‘How thoughtful.’

  ‘And, Jacob, what of your other friend? Do you expect to see him sometime?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The person in the Pale Lady.’

  ‘Oh,’ Jacob said. Then, ‘I couldn’t think who you meant. He isn’t my friend. And he wasn’t memorable.’

  ‘It’s your reaction to him I’m finding hard to forget,’ Price said.

  ‘What reaction?’

  ‘It was as if you’d found yourself on stage in a farce, and the script required you to shove him in a cupboard.’

  Jacob laughed. ‘What did the publican at the Pale Lady have to say when you made inquiries? I’m sure you made inquiries.’

  Price said he’d spoken to the pub’s proprietor over breakfast. The man had hemmed and hawed then squared his jaw and said the person Price was asking about was one of the Tilwith Teaig, who was often seen in Alwinton and Princes Gate Magna and had been for more than a century.

  ‘Huh,’ said Jacob, with no expression.

  Price glanced at him, clicked his tongue against his palate like a displeased old lady, and didn’t say anything further before dropping Jacob at the Old Bailey.

  That evening Taryn called. Could Jacob meet her at Alan’s house in Norfolk? Could he get away? She couldn’t give him a lift because, once there, she meant to stay a time and at least think about her bloody book proposal.

  ‘I have my grandfather’s papers,’ Taryn said. ‘Including his unfinished history of Princes Gate. I thought you might like to help me go through them. And, you know, catch up. I realise you’re probably busy, but
. . .’

  ‘You are part of my business, Taryn.’

  ‘Great,’ Taryn said, apparently very pleased he’d accepted her invitation and completely unperturbed that he was clearly referring to his cold case. ‘My agent wants a personal debrief about my festival triumphs. It might end up being breakfast tomorrow. I can text you when I’m sure what time I’ll be at Alan’s.’

  ‘Don’t sweat it,’ he said, ‘I’ll be there.’

  ‘Do you mean to be so terse?’ she said.

  ‘I’m giving it a go.’

  ‘Are you mad with me?’ she cooed, clearly enjoying herself.

  ‘Yes.’

  He hung up and then had an unnerving realisation. This playing at being romantically involved was all very well and good, but Taryn was often in danger and if she did happen to turn up dead, then he’d be in the kind of trouble he’d not be able to lie his way out of.

  Part Five

  Carelessness

  It is well for an island of the great sea:

  flood comes to it after its ebb;

  as for me, I expect

  no flood after ebb to come to me.

  Today there is scarcely

  a dwelling place I could recognize;

  what was in flood

  is all ebbing.

  —The Hag of Beare, Anonymous, tenth century

  21

  Two Graves

  Taryn got to Alan’s house at eleven the following morning. She pulled in behind a car she recognised as Jacob’s. She was late—she’d spent most of that morning talking to a distraught Carol. (Ignace’s citizenship application had been refused, and Carol couldn’t imagine finding work for herself in Poland.) Taryn had texted Jacob to tell him she’d be late, and why, and that maybe Carol and Ignace’s troubles were another thing about which he could give her advice. He hadn’t replied, but she figured he was on the road.