The Librarian

by Salley Vickers

  This, though true, was not for the moment to be admitted.

  ‘What about my landlady, Mrs Bird? She hates me.’

  ‘If anything, Mrs Bird loves you for giving her this chance to be centre stage. She’s an energetic woman without the scope wide enough in East Mole to match her capabilities. She should have been Minister of Transport or something, rather than that blithering idiot they have at present.’

  Although reluctant to accept any reduction in her unpopularity, Sylvia could see the truth of this.

  ‘And there’s Mrs “Packard”?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I mean Mrs Wynston-Jones, who was here just now. She hates me too.’

  ‘She probably feels slighted. I dare say she hoped you would be her friend.’ Sylvia made a face. ‘Ally then. She saw you couldn’t care less about her, and in fact preferred little Ivy Roberts, who in Gloria’s view is a very poor fish. Her nose is out of joint, that’s all. You can put it right.’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘That’s fine but then you must take the consequences. Listen, my dear, you are old enough to be aware that most dislike is envy – you have attracted envy. You are bound to. Call it the shadow side of your gifts. It’s your fate.’

  ‘Do you believe in fate? I didn’t think Christians did.’

  The vicar rotated a stiff shoulder. ‘I wonder at times how much of a Christian I am.’

  ‘But you believe in God?’

  ‘Sometimes. Mostly I do. Maybe even on some days a touch more than some of my colleagues. And I’m too cowardly, or lazy, to abandon my faith. But I don’t believe in a God who has bad moods and tantrums and punishes people. Nor one who puts things right for us. I presume that is what you came in here for.’

  She blushed. ‘I suppose so, yes.’

  ‘People do. And then they are disappointed when Divine Justice appears not to be on their side. I’m with the Humanists on this. It’s human beings who put right human error. Or don’t, more often, I’m sorry to say.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Sylvia said, ‘for the pep talk.’

  ‘I deserve that. But listen, you hang on. The mills of God grind slowly, and all that, but the yeast of collective decency also takes time to rise.’ She got up to go and he added, ‘It’s worth remembering that not everything that happens is about oneself. It seems so when you’re young but most of what seems to be aimed at us is really to do with other people and their own inadequacies.’

  The news from the Hedges when Sylvia finally heard it was dismal. Sam had been subjected to lengthy questioning. A sheet of paper had been produced on which he had drawn a large black spot and made threats to Mr Collins.

  ‘What kind of threats?’ Sylvia asked.

  ‘All nonsense about how he was going to get him, pay him back. The worst thing was a picture he’d drawn underneath of a hangman’s noose with, well, you can imagine.’

  ‘Did Sam admit it was his?’

  June shook her head in despair and Ray said, ‘Mr Collins had it through the letterbox and it’s Sam’s handwriting and signed.’

  ‘It’s that warning he had over that book.’ For the first time, June sounded openly reproachful. ‘That’s why they’re on at him over this, because he’s got a record. I said what it would lead to.’

  ‘Not a record, surely?’ Sylvia attempted.

  ‘As good as, once you’re in the system.’ June was no longer willing to be reassured by one so ignorant of the ways of the world. ‘They’ll want to question you.’

  ‘Yes.’ She had been called by the police at the library. ‘I said I’d go to the police station tomorrow after work.’

  The interview at the station was not as testing as Sylvia had feared. She was posed polite questions by a detective sergeant about the time of the fire and how she had become aware of it.

  ‘You were outside?’

  Sylvia had mentally rehearsed this interview. It was in nobody’s interests to reveal that she had been drunkenly asleep on her lawn.

  ‘I stepped outside for a breath of air.’ This was what people in this kind of situation usually said in books.

  ‘And that was ten o’ clock?’

  ‘The Town Hall clock was striking ten. You can hear it from Field Row.’ This was God’s truth but it sounded so like something in a detective story that even in her own mind it had taken on the quality of fiction.

  The sergeant put down his notebook in order to disclose that his auntie had once lived in Field Row, number 2, and he’d heard the clock himself from there many times.

  ‘Then you’ll see, Sergeant, why I had an accurate idea of the time.’

  ‘And the fire had hardly got going when you spotted it?’

  ‘I thought it was a bonfire!’ They laughed, united in amusement at her simple foolishness. ‘Then I saw it was in Mr Collins’ house. I tried to wake him up but he was fast asleep. So I knocked up my other neighbours, the Hedges.’

  The sergeant’s tone became circumspect. ‘Did you see anyone about at all when you went round to number 4? Think carefully now.’

  But she didn’t have to think carefully. She had already prepared her answer. ‘There was no one but me.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Absolutely, Sergeant.’

  ‘Because if this comes to court you may be called as a witness.’

  Sylvia had also practised an accommodating smile. ‘I am anxious to help the police get to the bottom of this in any way I can.’

  ‘Now, another thing.’ The sergeant consulted his notes. ‘Mr Collins claims he heard the little Hedges girls tell you how their brother was planning to start a fire.’

  ‘Good Lord, no!’

  ‘They never said that?’

  ‘Absolutely not. I would most certainly have remembered.’ This deviation by Mr Collins from the truth allowed for some extra emphasis.

  But the sergeant wasn’t born yesterday. ‘Or said anything like it?’

  ‘Like that Sam planned to start a fire?’

  ‘Like that he was planning some sort of revenge on your neighbour. I gather there was some to-do about some foxes.’

  This seemed a judicious moment for assuming the thoughtful look she had practised. Sylvia appeared to think deeply and then allowed her expression to brighten. ‘You know, Sergeant, I think what Mr Collins must have heard was the twins telling me that Sam planned to get his own back on his friend Michael O’Malley.’

  ‘Why would he want to do that?’

  ‘It’s a long story.’

  The sergeant, accustomed to hearing long stories from guilty parties, settled down to be suspicious.

  ‘Go on, please, if you will, Miss Blackwell.’

  ‘Sam palled up with a girl in the year above him at school, Lizzie Smith, Mrs Bird’s granddaughter, you know?’

  ‘I know the Smiths.’

  ‘Apparently, there’s some childish habit the boys have of dragging their pals into the girls’ toilets. There was some sort of horseplay around Sam’s friendship with Lizzie which led to him suffering this indignity and he spoke of one of those childish revenges kids get up to – I’m sure you know the kind of thing? – which the little girls found funny.’

  The mention of toilets had mysteriously provided validity to Sylvia’s account. The sergeant was grinning. ‘Afraid we did much the same in my day. Kids don’t change.’

  ‘I introduced Sam to Treasure Island – you’ll know the book by Robert Louis Stevenson?’

  Hearing of the famous book for the first time, the police sergeant nodded.

  ‘There is a scene where an old pirate, well, you’ll remember this yourself, Sergeant, tips the Black Spot to a’ – she hesitated – ‘to a colleague, I suppose you’d call him. Sam was very taken by this and for a while went about tipping the Black Spot to all and sundry, his school friends, me, Mr Collins. It didn’t mean anything.’

  ‘Kids’ games?’

  ‘I’m sorry if it has confused Mr Collins but then he has had a nasty fright with
the fire and I dare say it’s muddled him. I’m afraid it is I, or rather Robert Louis Stevenson, who is to blame. The awful thing is, Sergeant’ – here she became confiding – ‘as the Children’s Librarian, I was feeling rather pleased with myself that the book made such an impact. It’s a classic, as you know.’

  ‘Well, thank you for your time, Miss Blackwell. I’ll have to watch out for the Black Spot in future.’

  Sylvia risked a mild flirt. ‘Not from me, Sergeant, anyway.’

  Although Sylvia was hopeful that this performance would have dented Mr Collins’ allegations, they were not immediately dismissed. A report was being prepared by the fire department. Nothing could be determined until that had been concluded. It was all too possible that June’s fears would be confirmed and that, with Sam’s previous brush with the police, blame would once again fall on him.

  The Hedges remained locked in a state of terror about their son’s future. Sam’s once-incontestable place at the Grammar School was now an irrelevance: he had point-blank refused to take the remaining two 11+ exams. He was not openly rude to Sylvia but he avoided her. She spent much time with the twins, who attached themselves like leeches to her legs whenever they saw her, begging to be allowed to spend the night.

  And very gladly she would have had them to stay, for her nights were made insufferable with anguished thoughts of Hugh.

  There had been more silence from him and no news of Marigold. Lizzie, whose mother, in defiance of her own mother, had relaxed the veto on the library, came often to borrow books. Her taste was moving on apace.

  ‘Do you like his books, Lizzie?’ Lizzie was returning T. H. White’s The Ill-made Knight.

  ‘I feel sad for King Arthur. But he loves them both, doesn’t he, Miss? Guinevere and Lancelot.’

  One afternoon Lizzie shyly produced an announcement about the forthcoming Grammar School production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  ‘You said you’d come, Miss.’

  ‘I will certainly, Lizzie.’

  ‘Do you think Sam would like to see the play?’

  ‘I’ll ask him.’

  Sam, when this suggestion was put to him, said, ‘Who wants to see a load of poncey fairies?’

  ‘Did you ask Sam?’ Lizzie’s face as she returned The Witch in the Wood was eager.

  ‘He promised to come if he could,’ Sylvia said. Among her so-called gifts listed by the Reverend Austin, she appeared to have acquired a talent for lying.

  The days passed, heavy with nebulous foreboding. She read more library publications in search of jobs and applied for a position in York, which had the merit of being, of the available posts, at the greatest distance from East Mole. Surprised to be offered an interview, Sylvia decided she might as well stay the night with her parents en route – she had to change trains in London and they, or her father at least, had been haunting the edges of her conscience.

  It was then that she remembered her father’s letter which she had in her irritation set aside.

  ‘Ray, I’m so sorry to knock you up so late but I need to use your phone.’

  ‘I’m afraid the tests show it is cancer,’ she had read when she opened the letter. ‘It was a shock but Mummy is being a trooper and holding up bravely. I’m sure she would like to hear from you when you can spare a moment to write.’

  31

  Sylvia had rung Dee from the Hedges’ to explain the situation and asked her to inform Mr Booth.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll settle his hash. You concentrate on your mum, bless her heart.’

  Her father’s assertion that her mother was bearing her mortal illness like a trooper was, as Sylvia had suspected, wishful embroidery. The oncologist had been frank, and her father had decided, and when consulted Sylvia agreed with him, that it was best his wife remain as ignorant of the prognosis as she had been of the diagnosis. As far as Hilda Blackwell was aware, she had a pain which went right through to her back and clogged up her insides, for which, under the National Health, she was receiving home treatment.

  ‘She’s on morphine,’ Sylvia’s father told her. ‘Nurse Godling has given her an enema. She comes morning and evening like clockwork. She’s a little gem.’

  Almost most painful for Sylvia was the degree to which her father was affected by this calamity. For years his daughter had nursed the notion that secretly her father would be glad to be free of his wife and she was appalled at the extremity of his sorrow.

  ‘I don’t know what I’ll do without her,’ he sobbed when he met Sylvia at Paddington. He had bought a second-hand Austin shortly before her mother’s condition had been diagnosed, in which they had planned, he told her, driving with lethal slowness through Shepherd’s Bush, to take trips into the countryside.

  ‘She had a fancy to see Box Hill after that book you gave her she liked so much.’

  This too was a revelation. Sylvia had given her mother a copy of Emma one birthday and would have sworn her mother had never opened it.

  She stayed for ten days, reading her mother The Wind in the Willows, another surprising preference on her mother’s part, and trying to buoy up her father’s spirits. Occasionally, she wounded herself by imagining how her mother would have welcomed a doctor for a son-in-law.

  ‘When I’ve finished at East Mole I’ll come back here and help with Mother,’ she promised.

  Her unselfish father’s ready acceptance of this offer told her more than anything the depth of his grief. And there was her own grief to contend with. She scarcely knew her mother – and now the chance for gaining that knowledge was to be cruelly axed. Too late, she caught a harsh sense of her mother’s probable inner loneliness, married to a man with a larger understanding and with a daughter who she had perhaps believed despised her.

  Did she, she wondered, despise her mother? The honest answer was yes. The thought was bitter to her for she had also as a child loved her mother passionately and craved her affection. ‘Hell and damnation,’ Sylvia said to herself, alighting from the train at Swindon. ‘Why does everything come too bloody late?’

  In the gap of time she had been away, East Mole and its doings had grown more remote to her. The larger anxiety over her parents had dwarfed, if not obliterated, her worry over Sam and the Hedges. Only the pain over Hugh seemed to have amalgamated with and been sharpened by the pain of her mother’s approaching death.

  The first sign that something had shifted in the collective mood of the town struck her when she alighted from the bus from Swindon and found herself face to face with Mrs Brent.

  Mrs Brent seemed eager to offer condolences. ‘I heard about your mother. I lost mine only last year so I know how you’re feeling. Not a day passes that I don’t miss her. Not that yours has gone yet, of course, unless …’

  Sylvia said that, happily, her mother was still in the land of the living. At Field Row, as she passed number 3, June met her, smiling.

  ‘They had the report back and they reckon it was the electrics started the fire. Nothing to do with Sam.’

  ‘That’s wonderful news, June. My God, what a relief!’

  ‘You can say that again. My only wish now is that next door doesn’t show his face here in a hurry or I’ll be hard put not to slap it.’

  ‘Sam must be relieved.’

  ‘He’s sulking still but he’ll get over it.’

  ‘He must be feeling sore about the exams. I was thinking, June. I am sure Mr Arnold would write and explain the situation to the examiners –’

  She halted, sensing June draw back. ‘Samuel’s all set to be an electrician like his grandfather. It’s a good job and Dad’ll help him through the apprenticeship. You can go on to the technical from the Secondary Modern so we think it’s maybe the best place for him after all and no harm done.’

  ‘Of course. We need good electricians.’

  June collected her manners. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t ask about your mum.’

  Sylvia explained the situation. ‘It’s right you should go to be with your dad till the end. But you
’ll come back when … You heard about the library?’

  But she hadn’t. June accompanied her to number 5 and while Sylvia unpacked brought her up to date.

  A change of opinion had been slowly forming in East Mole which had culminated in an unscheduled visit to the Library Committee from Emily Thorneycroft, the Trustee. There the Tillotson sisters’ letter of wishes, attached to the will and with if not legal clear moral status, had been read out. The letter included a list of books that were being left by the sisters, prefaced by a sentence that read: ‘The following shall become part of that part of the library that is to be set up in perpetuity for the greater good of the children of East Mole, this being our especial wish and reason for our legacy.’

  ‘So the Children’s Library is spared?’

  Oh Lord, Sylvia thought, recalling the books she and Dee had cheerfully weeded out. I bet the list included The Joys of Obedience.

  ‘Your Mr Booth had more or less bullied them into making the savings through axing your part of the library and, with Mr Collins off at his sister’s convalescing, Dad was able to put in a word with some of the Library Committee. To be honest, they were sick to death of our neighbour. So now there’s a move to sell off the Assembly Rooms to pay for the repairs. They’re a bit of a white elephant and the vicar has promised the WI can meet any time in the church hall.’

  ‘I wonder how Mr Booth is taking all this?’

  If Mr Booth was embarrassed by this change of policy, he showed no sign of it when Sylvia returned the next morning to work. On the contrary, he seemed almost friendly. ‘I hope there is better news about your mother, Miss Blackwell.’

  ‘Much better, thank you, Mr Booth.’ She was damned if she was going to suffer any counterfeit condolences from him.

  There was no restraining bar on the swing doors and no Dee in the library. Everything was in apple-pie order. Sylvia surveyed the room filled with the books she had brought so lovingly to the shelves.