The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

by Tom Rachman

  She kept perfectly still on the sidewalk, studying the faces of pedestrians, her cold hands balled, her pulse increasing. She had the urge to run from here, and did.

  2011: The Beginning

  AFTER THE MONKS had abandoned Llanthony Priory hundreds of years before, the Norman-Gothic complex crumbled gradually, the cathedral walls left without a roof, the stonework patched with mustard lichen, naked to centuries of drizzle, raindrops striking where once an altar had been.

  Behind the ruins rose the Black Mountains and, this morning, a thick mist. She hiked as if into clouds, over grassland spiked with thistles, past grazing sheep, straight up the hillside. The mist dissipated as she ascended, her green rubber boots squelching, the muscles in her feet gauging rocks under her slippery treads, the ache in her thighs a pleasure, strength flagging but pace increasing.

  At the top, a wild wind pulled and pushed her, fluttering the cable knit tied around her waist. The plateau widened, its edges lost to sight, a chalky path banked by heather and bracken for miles, the spine dividing two nations. To the right lay England: quilted countryside seamed by hedgerows and trees, every field fenced in and farmed. To the left was Wales: a tangle of rambling green, flinty farmhouses, forbidding woods.

  The sunlight shifted and mottled the land. She paused under its rays, closed her eyes, absorbing the warmth. When the sun shone—and days passed without a glimpse of it—she hurried beneath. But it was rain that exhilarated her, watching through the bookshop window, the world hushing, sidewalks vacant. It wasn’t feeble drips that thrilled her but torrents—when raindrops exploded off leaves, choked drainpipes, drummed the attic roof at World’s End. Once, a thunder-clap sounded in the afternoon and Fogg gasped, though he masked it by noisily turning the page of a book on Mongol hordes.

  “Storms are beautiful,” she’d said.

  “Storms are wet.”

  “Come on, you softie. When nature does something strong, dramatic like that, it’s exciting. Don’t you think?”

  “Would you consider an earthquake exciting?”

  “Well, if you could just watch it—imagine—if no one got hurt and nothing of value was destroyed, then yes, it’d be incredible. Like when you see pictures of molten lava.”

  “Nothing nice about molten lava when it’s shooting at you.”

  “It never has shot at me.”

  “Nor me, to be brutally honest.”

  From behind her closed eyelids, she perceived a darkening. The sunlight had migrated along the moorland. A speck of rain hit her cheek. The drizzle fell noiselessly, the wind shouldering thin raindrops into diagonals that darted one way then another, like shoals of fish in a nervous mass. She watched wet dots multiply on her blouse; the cotton clung to her small breasts and belly. Back in her twenties, she had considered her body parts irrelevant to the whole of herself, as if she lived in a container unrelated to the contained. When she caught sight of herself today, thinner than once, she thought less of shape than of time, which had arrived, its incursions marked by the coarsening of her. She gazed at her rubber boots on wet stalks of grass, vision blurred by beads of rain that hung from her eyebrows, shivering at each step.

  A crow flew overhead. Needs a trench coat, that crow. Do they mind the rain, birds? Paul would’ve known. But only thoughts of this place and this time were allowed: her legs marching beneath her. She inhaled. The joy of empty thoughts, occupied by senses alone. If she were ever to write a book (and she’d never consider it), it would be on the satisfaction of thinking nothing. What a dullard I’ve become! And what a book that would make! It would cure insomniacs, at least.

  The trail descended through woods, across farmers’ fields, over a stile, past the ruins. Back in the Fiat, she flung her wet cable knit into the backseat and adjusted the rearview mirror, amused at the sidelong image of her bedraggled self. The drive home was twenty minutes down a one-lane road, her toes curling as onrushing lorries appeared around each corner, she swerving into hedges to let them pass. Her car was a spine-jarring contraption lacking shocks, seatbelts, or a passenger-side window, the missing pane covered with plastic sheeting that flapped furiously as she drove. Through holes in the rusted floor, she glimpsed asphalt rushing beneath.

  Tooly pulled in at the church parking lot, and sparrows—battling over scattered rice from a weekend marriage—took flight. For nearly two years she had lived in the village, yet she had no friends here. Reserve was the norm in these parts, which suited her. The place let her be, and she’d grown fond of it. The newsagent, the village doctor, the solicitor, the police constable, the butcher’s apprentice in red-striped apron smoking on his delivery bike. The pie-and-chip shop on Unicorn Street, the village clock, the monument to “those sons of Caergenog who fell in the Great War 1914–1918,” with a wreath of plastic poppies.

  To the locals, she was known as the bookshop lady, seen hiking on public paths, a little foreign—she was “from away,” as they put it. In her defense, she wasn’t English. The Welsh were much concerned with “the English,” a term uttered curtly, as of neighbors who barge into one’s living room on a Sunday, monopolizing the cakes and conversation. Worse still, the English language had supplanted their own, whose wondrous native words were still extant on traffic signs—CERDDWYR EDRYCHWCH I’R CHWITH—but unpronounceable to many of the Welsh themselves. At least their lilting accent held fast in English, words articulated as if there were spaces between every syllable.

  She entered the shop and took the staircase up past the inn rooms, each furnished with a four-poster bed and a hay-stuffed mattress, every chest of drawers smelling of lavender. In the kitchen, the floorboards bore the impression of a now departed range, its border outlined in caramel stains. The bathroom contained a clawfoot tub, while the water closet had a wooden-seat toilet, which flushed with a cold chain, the tank trickling.

  Rather than lodging in one of the inn rooms, Tooly had settled in the attic. She’d evicted the spiders, disposed of the broken furniture and the gramophone, then scrubbed the splintery floor and wiped the porthole windows to transparency. Up the attic ladder, she had shoved a double mattress, leaving it on the floor. She slept under the rafters, her nose cold by morning.

  Clothes still damp from her walk, she undressed and stood nude at the window, only her head visible from the street. She preferred not to hang curtains, and it was too high for anyone to spy. On the floor were piles of her clothing, plus a canvas bag large enough to contain everything. This was all she owned. Over the past decade, she had discarded anything of value.

  Once dressed, she went down to the shop, counted out the float, entered yesterday’s sales into the computer (this never took long), reversed the OPEN/CLOSED sign, and unlocked the front door. Opening time was 10 A.M., but she was always early. By contrast, Fogg was always late.

  “Caught in traffic,” he explained, dropping a folded newspaper from under his chin, placing his cappuccino on the bar counter. His house was a four-minute walk from World’s End, so “traffic” was understood to mean a queue at the Monna Lisa Café. It was his habit to arrive every morning with a hot beverage and a cold periodical. He bought a different publication each day, and they took turns reading it, holding a discussion in the afternoon. Till then, or at least noon, he tried to limit his jabbering, disappearing behind shelves, his location perceptible by coffee slurps emanating from Geography or Political Thought.

  When the morning was quiet like this, she read up on her latest hobbies, tried books that customers had recommended, and dusted. Formerly, she’d played music from a cassette player on the servery, the same few tapes she’d been addicted to for years. But those cassettes were gone. Weeks earlier, a crotchety old couple had entered, both in identical anoraks and looking so alike that it was nearly impossible to say which had once been groom and which bride. They walked around single file, then returned to the servery, where one of them gathered a handful of Tooly’s mixtapes. “We need something to play in the camper van.”

  “Those aren’
t for sale,” Fogg said.

  “They can be,” Tooly interposed. Any income was worth accepting at this point. “Don’t you want to see what they are first?”

  “Prefer music. Doesn’t matter what kind.”

  “You prefer music? To audiobooks, you mean?”

  “Prefer music to conversation.”

  They agreed on fifty pence per tape, and the couple counted out the coins while Tooly stared at the stack of cassettes, with titles like “Year 2000 Mix by D-Mac.” They’d been produced years before by her then boyfriend, Duncan McGrory, and included extensive liner notes about the musicians (Fiona Apple, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Tori Amos, Bob Dylan, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Tom Waits), written in lettering that shrank as space ran short, asterisks added to asterisks. Tooly regretted the sale before it had concluded, but refused to reverse herself. That had been weeks earlier. No point dwelling on it. “Shall we put on the radio?” she asked Fogg, handing back a novel he’d lent her.

  He went behind the computer and live-streamed Radio 4. “Did you enjoy that book?” he asked. “Utter rubbish, I thought.”

  “Terrible. Why did you recommend it?”

  “It was so awful, I thought: Tooly has to read this.”

  “You’re the only person, Fogg, who recommends a book because you hate it.”

  “Hang on.” He scurried away, voice drifting back through the stacks, overlaid by radio chatter. “If you didn’t like that book,” he called back, “you have to try this one.”

  “Does it involve an alien playing the saxophone?” she asked. “If there are aliens playing the saxophone, or any other instruments, or even just being their alien selves without any musical inclination—if there are aliens, Fogg, I’m banning you.”

  “That’s a bit rough,” he said, returning with a paperback.

  “Okay, I won’t ban you. But I ask one final time—aliens?”

  “No aliens,” he promised, adding, “There may be an orc.”

  “Is there or is there not an orc?”

  “There’s an orc.”

  Fogg’s most salient quality as an employee was his ability to be present while she fetched a sandwich. Beyond this, he contributed little that could be quantified. But she would not have wanted to continue without him. World’s End earned nothing, meaning she paid him from her personal savings, a small and diminishing sum. Within a couple of years, she’d be insolvent. Yet she observed her bank balance nearly with impatience for bankruptcy. This was the most fixed abode she’d known, and she couldn’t shake an urge to lose it.

  A person like Fogg was so different from her, formed in considerable part by his location. He was inextricably from here, this village, a place findable on Google Earth (how he loved spinning the digital globe from Paris to Caergenog, zooming down to the roof of the shop). His continued residence in the village, he said, was because staying here was “la pièce de least résistance.” That was ungenerous. He remained partly out of decency, because his family had a devastating summer when he was fifteen, his elder brother paralyzed from the waist down in a car accident, his father’s affair uncovered through credit-card charges at a hotel, his mother suffering a breakdown. The father left, and the family had not recovered, Fogg holding them together since. Four years ago, he’d nearly married. But his girlfriend went to do theater in London and met a new man there. They’d stayed friends, till she sent photos of her newborn. “When you open the baby-photo email,” Fogg said, “it’s like your friends waving goodbye.” He and his ex exchanged messages once in a while, she inviting him to visit, he responding, “Would love to—when?,” and she taking months to reply. He didn’t even know what she looked like anymore: on her Facebook profile was a picture of the baby.

  Stuck in Caergenog, he had developed an imaginary parallel life, one in which he’d done an undergraduate degree in French literature at Durham University, a master’s at Cambridge, two years’ research in Paris, living in a garret on the Left Bank, or, as he called it, “the West Bank.” Central to his persona was the conviction that Caergenog was wrong for him, that he and his friends were a class above their context, that any setbacks or rejections were due to the backwardness of this place. One day in a month, he arrived at work in a black mood. Otherwise, he was touchingly buoyant.

  “Do you feel more English or more Welsh?” she asked him.

  “French,” he answered. “How about you? Do you feel French?”

  “Why would I? I’m not remotely French.”

  “You feel English, then?”

  “I’m not English.”

  “How about Welsh?”

  “I’m not Welsh. You know that, Fogg.”

  “We’re like a lost tribe, people like us,” he mused. “No traditions, no birthright, to be brutally honest. All of us have an acorn of sadness,” he continued, pressing the magnifying glass to his eye. “You notice our tristesse only in passing, like a door to a small room in a house where outsiders may not enter.”

  “You’re very poetic today, Fogg.”

  “Into which you get but a passing view,” he went on, mistaking her irony for encouragement. “An acorn of sadness,” he said, proud of the phrase, which he muttered on his way to organize Pirates, Smugglers & Mutiny.

  Around noon, their first visitor arrived, a regular who couldn’t be termed a customer, for she used World’s End Books only as a showroom for online purchases. This was increasingly common, the practitioners identifiable by their note-taking on prices and ISBNs, and their failure to ever buy anything. Some openly consulted Web prices on smartphones and, hand on the doorknob, lamented how few good bookshops remained. Tooly wasn’t indignant: you couldn’t stop a tidal wave by wagging your finger at it. She considered bookselling to be a terminal vocation. More discouraging to her was that the heavyweights on these shelves held such puny sway. No matter their ideas and worth, they lived as did the elderly—in a world with little patience to hear them out.

  If few people came to buy books, many came to sell. Everyone was clearing their shelves these days. The question was no longer what she could pay (a pittance) but whether she had space. Her areas of personal interest included vintage cookbooks, especially outmoded advice for the young lass, such as Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861) or Saucepans & the Single Girl (1965) by Jinx Morgan and Judy Perry. She had also built up the Zoology section, adding tragic histories of the bison, rare volumes on rare birds, oversized editions of nature photography. As with all coffee-table books, she bought first, then wondered where to put them.

  Mr. Thomas made the first purchase of the day. A man in his late fifties possessed of multitudes of Welsh-speaking grandchildren, he visited World’s End once a month. Back when he attended school, education was viewed as an irksome delay before farm employment—an attitude that produced two varieties of citizen: those who scorned book learning and those who revered it. Huw Thomas—scar on the tip of his nose, head like an upright loaf, always in homespun cardigans—was among the reverential autodidacts. But he’d sooner not talk about it, and deflected her conversational gambits, standing at the servery counter with a volume in each hand, like a child before the librarian’s desk. (She never found a pattern in his selections. Today, it was a history of the Boer War and Alice in Wonderland.)

  “Get all you wanted, Mr. Thomas?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Can I help you find something else?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “See you again, Mr. Thomas.”

  “Very well, then. Best be off.”

  The bell on the door tinkled after him, a false calm before a dozen schoolkids swarmed in. Hardly a feral pack of readers, these were junior shoplifters testing their skills, glancing around furtively as if they’d invented the art. Impressive how much a schoolbag swallowed. Sometimes she let them get away with it, unless a previous haul had been discovered in the rubbish bins on Roberts Road, in which case she stopped the culprits on their next foray, speaking discreetly at the door and sending them a
way. The rude ones—there were a few—she crushed with choice words. One brazen boy had kicked the door when he left, giving her the finger as he ran backward until, most pleasingly, he fell flat into a puddle.

  She checked the time—had a lesson this evening. “Mind if I …?”

  “Say no more, say no more,” Fogg responded. “Off you go.”

  Since her arrival in Caergenog, she had engaged in an adult-education frenzy, taking classes in sewing, home repairs (unexpectedly gripping), music. For a spell, she’d driven every Tuesday night to Cardiff for an art course, where she did life drawing in charcoal, acrylic, and oil. Each medium confirmed her lack of talent: every arm came out longer than its leg; ears were tea saucers; fruit resembled basketballs. Lousy though she was, Tooly adored it, and even improved in a plodding way.

  “Will we be doing a class on noses?” she’d asked the instructor, an irritably failed sculptor.

  “What?”

  “Can you help me with drawing noses?”

  “What?”

  When the course ended, she sorted through her work and couldn’t justify conserving a single piece. Nevertheless, she drove home with a still life, called “Apples—I Think That’s What They Were,” and nailed it up in her attic quarters. The sight of that canvas, its comical terribleness, still made her happy.

  Now and then, a classmate invited her for a friendly drink and a gossip. Prue, a recent divorcée taking the home-repairs course in Hereford, asked what Tooly did besides work at a bookshop, and heard of her daily hikes. “Should get a bit of a walkabout myself,” Prue said. “Lazy since the kids.”

  She arrived at World’s End one morning, buying a romance novel to be polite. Tooly drove them to the priory and marched upward, her acquaintance keeping up only till the foothills, then battling bravely in the middle distance. Tooly waited at the top, admiring the countryside, as a human dot clomped closer, expanding into a woman. “Brought the.” Wheeze. “Brought the wrong.” Wheeze. “Brought the wrong shoes.”