The Librarian

by Salley Vickers

  ‘It’s honestly no trouble.’ She couldn’t say his name.

  ‘She’s fairly well trained.’ Marigold’s father sat down beside her on the steps. She could smell the tweed of his jacket in the sun. Looking over to where Marigold and Sam were chatting, he said, ‘It’s a responsibility, isn’t it, children?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘But you obviously like them. And they pretty clearly like you.’

  ‘Probably because I’m hardly out of nappies myself,’ said Sylvia, deliberately trying to wound herself. She sprang up and began smoothing down her skirt. ‘I’d better get on.’

  He rose more slowly. ‘I’ll make sure the surgery finishes in good time to collect her.’

  She was wondering if she could suggest bringing Marigold round to the surgery when Sam bounded up. ‘Can Marigold come back to yours after you finish up here?’

  ‘If her father says she can.’

  ‘Oh but –’ Hugh Bell began but Marigold interrupted.

  ‘Please, Daddy?’

  ‘If Miss Blackwell really doesn’t mind.’

  ‘Sylvia won’t mind,’ Sam said. He smiled reassuringly at Hugh.

  It seemed to Sylvia, later that day, that perhaps she was not the only one who had fallen in love. Sam showed Marigold solemnly round the garden, pointing out various points of interest: the best place to feed the donkeys, the hedge sparrows’ abandoned nest containing the fragile fragments of azure shell, and the remains of the den where the fox cubs were reared.

  Marigold, who was ignorant of the foxes’ history, listened to his account of Mr Collins’ villainy. ‘That’s absolutely disgusting. You should’ve called in the RSPCA.’

  Observing his slight frown of puzzlement, Sylvia came to Sam’s aid. ‘I’m not sure the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would be able to prove anything.’

  ‘Don’t need proof,’ Sam said darkly. ‘We know who did it.’

  ‘He sounds like a bastard, that Mr Collins,’ Marigold remarked.

  Sam looked at her with increased respect. ‘A right royal bastard.’

  Sensing that she was an intruder in some modern version of courtship, Sylvia retired to the kitchen to make up a jug of lemon barley.

  When she came out again Marigold was showing off her handstands. Her long legs flashed up against the cottage wall as, with her skirt over her face, she gave chapter and verse on how long she could remain there. Sam, not to be outdone, was balancing on one leg on one of the fence posts that separated the garden from the donkeys’ field. He leapt down from there to demonstrate how he could stand on his head. The two of them vied with each other over their various acrobatic accomplishments and then decided to explore the shed. They went off down to the end of the garden to make a den with some old beer crates and a tarpaulin they had found there.

  Sylvia was reading when a grey Hillman car pulled up in the lane. She buried herself deeper in her book and assumed a look of surprise when Hugh Bell called out, ‘Hello there. Everything all right?’

  ‘Yes, thank you. Marigold and Sam are at the bottom of the garden making a den.’

  He came through the gate, shading his eyes against the sun. ‘A den? Well, it’s a fine evening for it.’

  Sylvia summoned her social courage. ‘Can I offer you a drink?’ Before he had left, her father had presented her with a bottle of Harvey’s Bristol Cream sherry.

  ‘A drink would be grand.’

  Sylvia brought out the still-unopened bottle and two of Mrs Bird’s smaller pub glasses. They sat by the upturned barrel as swallows performed against a harebell sky.

  ‘The swallows will be off back to Africa before we know it,’ Hugh Bell said. ‘I always feel sorry when it’s time for them to leave.’

  ‘Marigold’s been teaching us the difference between swallows and swifts.’

  ‘She’s good at identification.’

  ‘She strikes me as good at everything.’

  ‘It’s being an only child. It has its drawbacks.’

  Tiny flies zizzed round the tangle of honeysuckle and high above the swooping swallows a lone bird hovered in the sky.

  ‘Kestrel,’ Hugh Bell observed.

  Sylvia looked obediently upward while her heart, which seemed to have acquired a life of its own, knocked manically against her ribs.

  ‘Can we get out your dad’s chess set?’ Sam asked, arriving breathless from the bottom of the garden. ‘Marigold wants to learn.’

  Thrilled to discover an area of superior expertise, Sam drilled Marigold over the various chess moves until June came to summon him for supper.

  ‘Marigold is welcome to come and have some too. It’s only bangers and beans …’

  ‘Can I?’ Marigold asked. ‘They’ve got a TV.’

  Her father said she could of course have supper at the Hedges’ and it was very kind of Mrs Hedges but he would be eating later. He sat by Sylvia in the garden as the sun began a regal descent towards the far hills.

  Sylvia began to slap at her forearm. ‘Here.’ He offered her a cigarette. ‘Keeps the biters at bay.’

  ‘I still feel guilty doing this,’ she said, hoping to account for her hand shaking as he lit her cigarette. ‘My parents still don’t know I smoke. It sounds absurd but I found myself smoking surreptitiously when they were staying recently.’

  ‘I take it they do themselves? We expect one law for us and another for our children. I’d be horrified if Marigold started and yet she sees me puffing away like a chimney.’

  ‘Perhaps she won’t smoke. She seems very independent-minded.’

  ‘Sometimes too much so, her mother says.’

  They sat and smoked and Sylvia felt grateful for the cigarette with which to manage the silence.

  ‘My wife’s gone to her sister’s because we can’t agree about Marigold,’ Hugh Bell said suddenly.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I’ve often thought couples should be required to take a test before marrying to see in advance where the future incompatibilities are likely to be.’

  Not knowing how she should handle this confidence, Sylvia suggested, ‘Like the 11+?’

  ‘Rather more discerning than the 11+, one would hope. Speaking of which, your name is being vaunted through town by a woman who claims you got her granddaughter through the exam.’

  ‘That’s my landlady. I wish she wouldn’t. Lizzie, that’s her granddaughter, should have the credit. And Sam. He was the one who helped her with her arithmetic.’

  ‘He seems a nice boy.’

  ‘The whole family’s nice. I’m glad Marigold’s taken up with him.’

  ‘I’m glad too. I worry that she’s not really palled up with anyone in her class.’

  Sylvia could guess why. His daughter would seem to other children a know-all. But Sam was too, in his way.

  ‘Sam’s exceptionally bright and they’re of an age.’

  ‘She’s quite a tomboy so he suits her. She could do with some sibling substitutes.’

  Fearful of trespassing, Sylvia said, ‘I’m an only child.’

  ‘You seem to have turned out all right.’

  ‘I was lonely,’ she volunteered.

  He seemed to study her face and she willed herself not to colour. ‘How did you cope with that?’

  ‘I read. The local library was at the end of my street and I used to go there every Saturday morning and read till they closed. I’d come home with three books and by the next Saturday I’d read them all and couldn’t wait to go back to the library to take out new ones. In the end the librarian let me have double rations.’

  ‘That explains why’ – he was polishing his glasses and paused a fraction – ‘why you are as you are. Why you became a librarian, I mean.’

  ‘Really, it was she, Miss Jenkins, that was the librarian, who educated me – or the books she recommended. I wasn’t much cop at school.’

  ‘Cop enough to become a librarian yourself.’ He glanced down at the book she had been reading. ‘You didn’
t want to work with adult books?’

  ‘I like children’s books.’ She spoke a little defensively. ‘And poetry,’ she added. Poetry sounded more sophisticated. ‘I still read children’s books, mostly. I, I suppose I just prefer them.’

  ‘Why? I mean, why do you prefer them?’

  Never having articulated this to anyone, Sylvia looked down at the book she had been reading. It was a strange book, one Miss Jenkins had introduced her to, but it was a strangeness that had spoken to something deep inside her and it had become an old friend.

  ‘Maybe,’ she said hesitantly, ‘maybe it’s because children’s authors can write about magic, other worlds, and be taken seriously. I mean, suggest that somewhere, even if hidden, there’s another reality as real as the everyday world we take for granted that enlarges our sense of ordinary reality, gives it more meaning, if you see what I mean?’ It was the longest speech she had ever made to anyone.

  ‘I’d never have thought of that. But boys aren’t encouraged to read about magic. Or I wasn’t. I had a pretty public-school kind of an education.’

  ‘Wasn’t that …?’ but she didn’t want to presume.

  ‘It got me to Oxford and then to medical school. And the music was first rate; that I am grateful for. But it was a culture I disliked. I was seemingly very reserved but underneath I suppose you could say I was sensitive, if that doesn’t sound too absurdly self-absorbed and mealy-mouthed. Hence my reservations about Marigold’s schooling.’

  Another silence enveloped them. Sylvia tried hopelessly to think of something else intelligent to say. She was about to say, ‘At least Marigold has a dog,’ but Hugh spoke again.

  ‘What children’s book, then, would you recommend?’

  ‘For Marigold? She hardly needs my recommendations.’

  ‘I meant for me. What children’s book would you suggest I read now?’

  ‘You don’t really want me to?’

  ‘I do, yes. How about that one?’ looking down at her book.

  ‘At the Back of the North Wind? Not that one, no,’ Sylvia said.

  ‘Why not?’ He looked amused and began a half-laugh.

  But she was serious. ‘Books have to be a fit. That one isn’t right for you.’

  15

  As August petered out the East Mole parents began to make preparations for a new school year. Sylvia met Mrs Bird with Lizzie walking to the bus stop. Her landlady was wearing her hat with the feathers, which meant business.

  ‘Say good morning to Miss Blackwell, Lizzie. We’re off to Salisbury to buy her uniform. There’s a list as long as your arm, right down to green gym knickers.’

  Sam was to begin his final year at the primary. Sylvia dropped by the Hedges’ one evening and found him lying on the living-room floor on his stomach.

  ‘What are you reading, Sam?’

  ‘A Tale of Two Cities.’

  ‘Heavens!’

  ‘It’s by Charles Dickens,’ Sam explained. ‘Marigold said to read it.’

  June and Ray were watching the news. Crowds of angry youths with greased-back hair and snarling expressions could be seen throwing bottles and cans at windows and kicking down doors while lines of helmeted policemen struggled to haul them back.

  ‘Terrible, these race riots,’ Ray said. ‘I’ve nothing against coloureds but if they come over here and there’s our own people can’t get housing, it’s asking for trouble.’

  ‘I don’t know, it reminds me of Cable Street,’ June said. She saw Sylvia looking uncertain. ‘The big fight in the East End. I was only a tiddler but I remember how scared we all were. Fascist hooligans! It was why Dad had us move here.’

  ‘He’s a Socialist, June’s dad,’ Ray said. ‘All fine and good, I say to him, but you have to keep law and order.’

  The twins emerged in pyjamas. ‘SYLVIA!’ They rushed at her, clamping her round the knees.

  ‘Get back to bed, you two,’ June said. ‘You’ve school starting next week and you don’t want Mrs Tate seeing you with black rings under your eyes.’

  ‘We can’t sleep. It’s too light.’

  ‘There’s a poem about that,’ Sylvia said.

  ‘In winter I get up at night

  And dress by yellow candle-light

  In summer quite the other way

  I have to go to bed by day.’

  ‘It’s NOT FAIR!’ they shouted. ‘We have to go to bed BY DAY!’

  Sylvia had called at the Hedges’ on her way to the Troubadour to meet Gwen and some of her colleagues before the start of the new school year. She found when she got there that she had become a quite a celebrity.

  ‘I’d never have predicted Lizzie Smith would pass,’ a weary-looking middle-aged man who introduced himself as 4B’s teacher told her. He looked into his head of beer as if it might reveal the secret of Lizzie’s success. ‘Not in a month of wet Sundays, I wouldn’t.’

  ‘It’s all wrong, isn’t it?’ Gwen suggested. ‘Sorting them out at this age. But what can you do?’

  ‘There might have been any number of Lizzie Smiths in 4B,’ a young woman who had introduced herself as in her probationary year volunteered.

  4B’s teacher began to look defensive and Sylvia said, ‘What about the C stream? Mightn’t they have undisclosed talents too?’

  The others rolled their eyes and a woman who had so far not spoken said, ‘You can forget that. 4C are animals!’

  Sylvia’s success with Lizzie had fostered a feeling of camaraderie among the East Mole primary staff and they became quite passionate over her plans to start an after-school reading group.

  ‘My impression,’ Sylvia said, bucked by this show of support, ‘is that the children, some of them, anyway, enjoy quite adult books. Sam Hedges, for example, has taken A Tale of Two Cities out of the library. I saw him only this evening reading it.’ She was aware that this development had more to do with Marigold than any influence of hers, or the library’s, but it seemed a good card to play.

  ‘My God,’ Sue Bunce said. ‘I haven’t read that myself. What’s it about? Sam’s in my class next year and he’s bound to test me.’

  ‘It’s about the French Revolution,’ 4B’s teacher explained. After his failure with Lizzie he was anxious to recover his intellectual credentials.

  ‘It’s really about loyalty and friendship and being noble,’ Sylvia said, and then, seeing 4B’s teacher’s face, added hastily, ‘but it’s true that it’s set in the time of the French Revolution.’

  ‘I’m not sure I want to encourage any revolutions,’ Sue Bunce said. ‘Not till the 11+ is out of the way.’

  Sylvia went to bed that night feeling well satisfied. Her plans were working out better than she could have wished. The WI was on board and now the schoolteachers seemed to be allies and Sam, ‘her’ Sam, as she privately thought of him (for unlike parents, unmarried young women are allowed favourites), was reading Dickens. Just as well she and Dee had not thrown them out. She lay back contentedly on the hard mattress. Above her, Mrs Bird’s coloured text promised, ‘Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.’

  Sylvia was waiting on the station platform for Mrs Bird when an express train rushed through, blowing her backwards into an ice-cream vendor’s cart. She was struggling out of her coat, with ice cream dripping down her neck, when the train began to scream. Unable to put her hands over her ears to block out the sound, she awoke in a freezing draught.

  There was a sound of something untoward. Water. Somewhere, surely, water was dripping loudly, and the bedside light was refusing to respond. Trying to recollect where she had seen a supply of candles, she sprang out of bed, stubbed her toe on the pile of books and made her way gingerly towards the stairs.

  She went carefully down the steep flight to the kitchen. No luck with the lights there either.

  Outside, she could hear branches of the ash tree being thrashed about and crashing on to the roof, and the wind was screaming like a trapped animal. There was a mighty clap of thunder and almost at onc
e lightning flashed so brightly she could see that the downstairs windows had been blown in and water was gushing through the ceiling.

  There was a knocking and she opened the door to Ray holding a bicycle lamp. ‘Looks as if your roof’s gone.’

  ‘The windows seem to have blown in too.’

  ‘You’d best put on your wellies and get round to ours. I’ll sort out some buckets from the shed here to catch the worst of it.’

  As she picked her way through the wet darkness, another sheet of lightning revealed the figure of Sam, torch in hand, signalling her up the Hedges’ garden path. Behind him, wild screeches could be heard. She went through to a kitchen lit by candles, where she found June with a pair of excited twins.

  ‘It’s raining, it’s pouring, the old man’s snoring,’ they chanted, capering round the kitchen in their pyjamas.

  ‘Has your roof held up?’ Sylvia asked. ‘Mine seems to have been blown off.’

  ‘Be quiet, Twins, you’re upsetting the dogs. Ray got ours seen to last year. Yours hasn’t been touched since Mrs Bird’s grandparents passed on.’

  Ray returned to report that he’d placed strategic buckets to catch the rain in number 5 but there was no way Sylvia could spend a night there. The dogs were shepherded into the linen cupboard and bedded down with biscuits. The humans drank cocoa, discussing where Sylvia should sleep. Finally, Sam was relegated to the floor of the twins’ tiny room and Sylvia was allocated his bedroom, where the floor was mostly taken up by a railway track.

  ‘That’s my Hornby,’ Sam said. ‘I’ll show you how it works in the morning.’

  ‘It’s morning now,’ June said. ‘Off to bed, the lot of you!’

  No one got much sleep and the following day there was a move from the children to be allowed off school.

  ‘We is tired,’ the twins wailed.

  ‘They’re tired! What about me kept awake all night by their bloody natter?’

  ‘Samuel, language! You’re none of you poorly and everyone else at school’ll likely be tired too.’

  Before breakfast Sylvia and Ray went to inspect number 5.