First Impressions

by Charlie Lovett

  Oxfordshire, Present Day

  “OF COURSE YOU CAN come for a visit,” said Uncle Bertram. “You know you’re always welcome.”

  “More than a visit this time,” said Sophie. “I need some advice.”

  Her encounter with Eric Hall yesterday had driven home the fact that she was at a crossroads in her life. So, as the green fields of Oxfordshire slipped past the window of the train bearing her toward Kingham, she had called the person who had always helped her find direction—her Uncle Bertram.

  “Nothing you want to discuss on the phone?” said Uncle Bertram.

  “It’s more of what we’ve been talking about this past year,” said Sophie. “What I’m going to do now that I’ve finished my master’s. But it’s more complicated than that.” She paused for a moment and heard the patient, steady breathing of her uncle. “I met a man yesterday who’s taking a year off and traveling around Europe reading books.”

  “Sounds delightful,” said Bertram.

  “Well, he wasn’t delightful,” said Sophie, “not exactly. But he did make me think.”

  “An essential quality in a man,” said Bertram. “Now, I’m off to a lecture at the V and A, but you come down any day this week and we’ll have a long chat.”

  —

  SOPHIE’S SISTER WAS WAITING for her on the platform at Kingham station. After hugging her, Victoria tossed Sophie’s bag in the back of the Land Rover and pulled out of the car park for the ten-minute drive home.

  Bayfield House, the country home where Sophie had grown up, stood at the top of a hill looking out across a wide valley in which sheep grazed. On the far side of the valley was the dark green of Bayfield Wood. Unlike most of the buildings in the towns and villages nearby, built with the local stone in a warm honey color, Bayfield was a gray stone edifice three stories high, built around a central courtyard, into which Victoria now steered her car. To some visitors it seemed a cold and imposing country house, but to Victoria and Sophie, who had delighted in exploring its mysteries as children, Bayfield was home.

  Although Bayfield boasted an impressive library, her father had always treated books as decor, not repositories of knowledge or stories or inspiration. He kept the library locked, opening it only for monthly tours conducted for the sightseers who stalked the country homes of England and for the annual parties that coincided with what he considered the triumvirate of high holidays—Christmas, Ascot, and Henley. Even on those occasions, the wire mesh doors that covered the bookcases remained locked. When Sophie, at the age of six, had the audacity to ask if she could look in the library for something to read, her father replied, “Those books aren’t for reading.”

  Sophie’s love of books and her father’s apparent resentment of their very presence in his home was just one root of the distance that had grown between them over the years—a distance Eric Hall had sensed and Sophie had refused to discuss. She knew that her own birth had caused complications that meant her mother couldn’t bear any more children; she knew, too, that while her father doted on Victoria, he resented Sophie for not being a boy. More than anything he had wanted a son, and, in ways subtle and not so subtle, he had reminded Sophie of this fact for as long as she could remember. Maybe that, as much as anything, was why she had turned to his younger brother, her Uncle Bertram.

  The only time she had ever seen the bookcase doors of the Bayfield library unlocked was on Christmas, when Bertram visited. Every year, he threw open the doors of the library and withdrew from the pocket of the silk waistcoat he insisted on wearing to Christmas dinner a tiny golden key, with which he unlocked one of the bookcase doors. He never perused the shelves or took his time deciding which door to open. He always seemed to know exactly where to go, and within seconds of entering the room he had pulled a single volume off the shelf, relocked the cabinet door, pocketed the key, and proclaimed, “Merry Christmas to me!” Sophie was the only member of the family who seemed to find this ceremony worthy of attention. Victoria, older by three and a half years, had explained its origins to her one year when they were children:

  “It’s an agreement he has with Father,” whispered Victoria. “Uncle Bertram gave Father some sort of money or inheritance or something to help keep the house, and he gets to take one book out of the library every Christmas.”

  “Father says those books aren’t for reading,” said Sophie.

  “I’ll bet Uncle Bertram reads them,” said Victoria, winking at her little sister.

  —

  “IT’S ANOTHER OF MOTHER’S classic events,” said Victoria now, as they got out of the car. “Good intentions and dreadful sculpture.”

  Sophie laughed. “I’ve missed you, Tori,” she said.

  “Edinburgh is too far away,” said her sister. For the past six months she had been working for an Internet advertising company in Scotland. “But we have all day to catch up. Trust me, you won’t want to spend your time looking at the art.”

  The sculptures were indeed hideous. It looked as if the artist had made plaster casts of the most unattractive people he could find, and then broken off body parts and scattered them around the garden. Arms hung from trees, heads floated in the pond, legs grew up next to the rosebushes. It was supposed to be some sort of social statement. As far as Sophie and Victoria were concerned it was a statement that the artist should get into another line of work.

  “We’re not allowed to say how awful it is,” said Mrs. Collingwood to her girls as they were setting up the refreshments table. “We just smile and pour tea and remember it’s all for charity.”

  “But did you know?” said Sophie. “I mean, how bad it would be?”

  “Oh, my dear, of course not. But we’ll have a good laugh about it in the morning.”

  And so Sophie, in her favorite summer dress, spent the day walking through the garden telling people that cream teas were available in the summerhouse, bringing cups to old ladies too tired to move from the benches around the pond, and talking to her sister while the two of them washed dishes.

  Late in the afternoon, as the crowd was waning, the two sisters were strolling up the garden looking for abandoned teacups when their mother called to Sophie from where she stood chatting with a young man.

  “Sophie, come here. There’s someone I want you to meet.”

  “Good thing I have a boyfriend at the moment,” said Victoria with a giggle, giving Sophie a playful shove in the direction of their mother, whose matchmaking was notorious.

  She didn’t recognize him at first. He had cut his hair and shaved, and although he was wearing jeans, they were new and untattered, and he wore them with a checked button-down shirt that made him look almost civilized.

  “You must be Sophie,” he said, holding out his hand to her as she approached. She was just on the verge of revealing him, of saying, “Eric, I see you’ve met my mother,” but he caught her eye again—how did he do it?—and something in his gaze made her play along.

  “Yes, Sophie Collingwood,” she said, gripping his hand as firmly as she could, wondering if she could cause physical pain.

  “Eric Hall,” he said. “I was just admiring your mother’s viburnum.”

  “I’m sure you were,” said Sophie. “It’s so admirable.”

  Sophie’s mother ignored her daughter’s sarcasm and said, “Eric here is a book lover, like you, Sophie. Although it doesn’t keep him from appreciating a fine garden.”

  “No indeed,” said Eric. “Or fine sculptures. I especially like the pile of torsos next to the rhododendron.” Sophie and her mother glanced at one another and each suppressed a laugh. “I would love to have an escort round the garden, Mrs. Collingwood, but I’m sure you must be much too busy.”

  “Sophie will be happy to show you round,” said Mrs. Collingwood. “Won’t you, Sophie?”

  “Blissfully,” said Sophie. Her parents were constantly trying to force her into an attachment—us
ually with a wealthy young man who might one day be counted on to preserve Bayfield House for the Collingwoods. That her mother was now thrusting the hitchhiking academe Eric Hall on her she found more than a little amusing.

  “So, Mr. Hall, was it?” said Sophie. “What brings you to Bayfield House?”

  “I’ve come to admire the sculpture,” said Eric.

  “Oh come on, you know as well as I do that this stuff is abominable,” she said, turning and walking up the garden.

  “Well, that’s one more thing we have in common.”

  “How did you find us, anyway?” asked Sophie, genuinely curious. Though she found his showing up uninvited a bit annoying, walking with Eric was certainly more pleasant than fetching tea for old ladies.

  “‘Open Garden and Sculpture Show at Bayfield House’—the signs are in every tearoom in Oxford. And I told you I could borrow a car.”

  “But I never told you I lived in Bayfield House.”

  “No, you didn’t. Lucky for me the only other open garden and sculpture show in Oxfordshire today was only forty miles from here. I should’ve known yours would be the house near Adlestrop.”

  “Why Adlestrop?” said Sophie.

  “You must know why,” said Eric. “Jane Austen’s cousins lived there. She visited, what, two or three times?”

  “Three,” she said, smiling. “So how was the other sculpture show?”

  “Well, the sculpture was much better, but the company wasn’t nearly as nice.”

  “You need to work on your lines,” said Sophie, almost instantly regretting her abrasiveness.

  “You know, I’m not a horrible person. And I’m not trying to get you into bed or anything. I just fancied an afternoon in the country and I thought you would make good company.”

  “I know. I’m sorry,” said Sophie. She had promised herself, standing in the Upper Library yesterday, to stop being so defensive, stop assuming—for she had finally admitted to herself that this was what she had been doing—that every man she met would break her heart the way Clifton had. “Maybe we could start over?” she said.

  “Why not? Hi, I’m Eric Hall.” When he held out his hand Sophie felt charmed and, she was surprised to find, a little disappointed (that he wasn’t trying to get her into bed).

  “Sophie Collingwood,” she said, shaking his hand once more, but this time without trying to crush it. “You’ll have to forgive me; university life has made me a bit of a cynic when it comes to men.”

  “Look,” said Eric, “I’m sorry about the other night in the pub. I could claim that I was drunk or something, but the fact is I was an ass, and I apologize.”

  “Apology accepted,” said Sophie.

  “So, what was it like growing up in a grand country house?”

  “The best part was lots of empty rooms to escape to with a good book and lots of woods and fields to tromp round in with my sister. The worst part was listening to Father complain constantly about how there isn’t enough money to replace this roof or rebuild that wall. That, and having people constantly ask, ‘What was it like to grow up in a country house?’” she teased.

  “Another topic, then,” said Eric. “Your mother tells me you’re quite the bibliophile.”

  “My mother used the word ‘bibliophile’?”

  “Not exactly,” he said with a laugh. “She said something about the miracle of pulling Sophie away from her books for an afternoon.”

  “A bibliophile raised in a family that doesn’t know the word,” said Sophie. “That’s me.”

  “So how did you become a book lover?”

  She leaned against the stone wall at the end of the garden and gazed out across the glowing Oxfordshire countryside toward the ridge five miles away, where she could just see the silhouette of the church tower in Stow-on-the-Wold.

  “My Uncle Bertram,” she said.

  —

  SOPHIE HAD ALWAYS LIKED Uncle Bertram. He told her stories and engaged her in conversation in a way that other adults at Bayfield House rarely did. She had been eight years old when her uncle brought her to London for a weekend to see a Christmas panto. “He took me when I was eight,” said Victoria, by now a sage of eleven and a half. “You won’t like it. His flat smells funny and there aren’t any toys and there’s no garden.” Sophie was unimpressed with the panto—it all seemed rather silly to her. When Uncle Bertram asked her afterward what she wanted for dinner she couldn’t think of anything, so he took her for pizza. She didn’t particularly care for pizza.

  She gritted her teeth as she stood on the doorstep of his flat in Maida Vale, prepared for the odor Victoria had warned her of, but as they walked in and Bertram busied himself turning on lights, Sophie found she quite liked the smell. It was something like dust and candle wax, and if she took a deep breath it burned her nose the tiniest bit. It seemed almost alive. Only when she had stepped into the sitting room did she begin to suspect its origin. The walls were lined with books from floor to ceiling. Stacks of books stood neatly arranged on every horizontal surface—tables, windowsills, even the top of an unplugged television. Since Sophie had been forbidden to explore the library at home, her only real experience with books had come at school and from the few children’s picture books that lay on the bottom shelf of a cabinet in the nursery. She sensed immediately that this was something altogether different. It was a library, yes, but she knew these books had been read. They weren’t arranged in long lines of matching bindings like the ones in Bayfield House, and almost every volume had slips of paper protruding from the top. She wondered if Uncle Bertram had marked all the best bits.

  “Shall we have a story?” said her uncle, when he had hung up their coats.

  “Yes, please,” said Sophie.

  “What would you like?” he asked.

  “You pick.”

  And so he did. They settled onto the couch, Bertram with a cup of tea and Sophie with a mug of cocoa. He began to read and Sophie’s world was transformed—this was not like the insubstantial children’s stories her mother read to her at bedtime. This was ever so much more.

  “The Wind in the Willows,” read Uncle Bertram. “Chapter One, The River Bank. The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home.” Sophie closed her eyes and fell into the story.

  After every chapter, Uncle Bertram said, “Perhaps that’s enough for now,” but chapter after chapter, Sophie pestered him for more, until finally he said, “I think it’s time we switched to another book. I do believe it’s past your bedtime.” And only because he promised to keep reading once she was tucked up in bed, Sophie brushed her teeth and put on her pajamas at lightning speed. She discovered that not only the sitting room but every room of the flat had book-lined walls. Even the narrow corridor was made narrower by tall shelves of books.

  “What’s this one called?” she asked when Uncle Bertram drew a small fragile-looking volume from the shelf next to her bed.

  “The Odes of Horace,” he said. But this time when he began to read, the words made no sense to Sophie.

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “It’s Latin,” replied Uncle Bertram. “Think of it as music, and just listen.”

  And so she fell asleep to the musical sound of Uncle Bertram intoning Horace, with visions of Rat and Mole and Toad dancing around her. She didn’t wonder until much later whether it had been the kind attentions of Uncle Bertram and his gentle voice or the story itself that had so delighted her. She only knew, then, that she had never been happier.

  They did not leave the flat for the rest of the weekend. The next morning Uncle Bertram finished reading The Wind in the Willows while Sophie had tea and toast for breakfast. After that, she explored every room and every shelf, climbing on a stepladder to reach the rows of books that towered over her eight-year-old head. Uncle Bertram’s books were not arranged by author or title or, more
perplexing to little Sophie, by size or color. “You have to read a book to understand its place on the shelf,” said Uncle Bertram. And he showed her how The Wind in the Willows (“a book about life on the river”) sat next to Three Men in a Boat (“a book about a journey on the River Thames”), which sat next to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (“a story that was first told on the banks of the Thames”), which sat next to Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (“because Alice is a dream story”), and so on. Sophie longed to read every book, to understand every relationship. If other books were as exciting as The Wind in the Willows, she could not imagine a better way to spend her life than unlocking the puzzles of her uncle’s bookshelves. She found it mystifying that this library was so alive, while the library back at Bayfield House seemed so dead.

  “Why does Father never look at the books in his library?” asked Sophie as she and Uncle Bertram sat at the kitchen table eating tomato soup for dinner.

  “Your father has always resented that library,” said Uncle Bertram. “I think he feels like he’s its prisoner at times.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, you see, Sophie, our father died when we were young, and since your father was the older brother he inherited the estate—that’s the house you live in and all the gardens and fields around it. And that also included the books in the library.”

  “You didn’t get any books?”

  “Not exactly,” said Uncle Bertram. “You see, our father made a sort of rule before he died that none of the books or the furniture in the house could be sold or given away unless your father and I both agreed.”

  “And you wouldn’t agree to sell all those books!” said Sophie gleefully.

  “Exactly. Your father thought he needed money and the easiest way to get it would be to sell the books. And since he didn’t care for books, especially old dusty books, that didn’t make him very pleased with me.”