The Librarian

by Salley Vickers

  ‘But you don’t have to leave now, do you?’ Dee said when she came in later. ‘The grounds they gave you have all gone.’

  But there were other grounds less capable of reversal.

  ‘I’ve already given notice to Mrs Bird.’

  Sylvia had called at Mrs Bird’s when the letter of dismissal from the Council had come, apologising, hypocritically in the circumstances, for ending the tenancy.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Bird. I had hoped to stay at number 5 for some years.’

  Although Mrs Bird’s face registered that she was receiving this apology as only her due, she seemed unusually distrait. The spruce attire with which she habitually confronted the world was somewhat awry: her blouse had come adrift from her skirt and her lipstick was badly blotched. But her attacking spirit was as vigorous as ever. ‘I’ve had enquiries from prospective tenants already,’ she lied. ‘I’ll come round to do the inventory when you set a final day for going.’

  This sudden introduction of an inventory for the cluttered effects at number 5 was inspired. Surely Mrs Bird had missed her vocation.

  ‘She’ll be more than glad to have you stay,’ Dee said. ‘That place is a licence to grow mushrooms. The rent she’s been charging you is a joke.’

  ‘You know, Dee, I think I’ve shot my bolt here,’ Sylvia said.

  A few nights later she went alone to the Grammar School’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and was pleasantly surprised: the girls spoke the poetry comprehendingly, there were very few stumbles over lines, and the scenery, constructed and painted by the girls in their Art classes, showed an aesthetic awareness of the play’s themes. The only real disaster was when an over-ambitious arrival by Puck, bearing the little purple love flower, led to his declaring his speech to Oberon with his wings caught in the branches of some hawthorn which had been imported to add authenticity.

  Thanks to an accident on the hockey field, which had led to the girl who was cast as Peter Quince breaking her leg, Lizzie had been further elevated to play his part and delivered the lines with authority. Her face, shiny with make-up remover and pink with success, was beaming when Sylvia found her, after the cast had taken several bows, in the dressing room.

  ‘You were the absolute tops, Lizzie. I am looking forward to seeing your name in lights in the West End.’

  ‘I only had a week to learn the lines.’ Lizzie looked understandably pleased with herself. ‘We’re doing Twelfth Night next year. I’m going to audition for Viola.’

  ‘That’s one of my favourites. I always wanted to play Viola.’

  ‘She’s a twin,’ Lizzie explained.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m going to have twins one day.’

  ‘I hope you do, Lizzie. I always wanted to be a twin myself.’

  Lizzie’s parents were there and hurried to greet Sylvia.

  ‘She’d never have got here without you helping,’ Dawn Smith said. She looked awkward. ‘I’m sorry about Mum.’

  ‘Dawn’s had words with her mother over you,’ her husband explained. He and his father-in-law had discussed their respective wives in the bar of the Troubadour and agreed that, within reason, they liked a woman who knew her own mind.

  Lizzie connived to get Sylvia by herself on the pretext of showing her the school library. ‘Did Sam come?’

  ‘He sent his apologies. I’ll be sure to tell him how good you were, Lizzie.’

  As if that will help, she reflected, walking home under a sky spangled with indifferent stars. She stopped when she came to the foundry and looked up into the unfathomed reaches of the night sky.

  ‘You’re not even really there, are you?’ she said, addressing the long-gone relics of light, emblems of all human delusion.

  When she pushed open the gate of number 5 a black shape loomed out of the darkness.

  ‘Christ!’

  ‘Sylvia.’

  ‘God, Hugh?’

  ‘I didn’t mean to frighten you.’

  ‘Well, you bloody well succeeded.’

  Jeanette was with Marigold in London, he explained. He had walked to Field Row, through the dark to be sure that no one would see him, hoping to find Sylvia at home. He’d waited there on the chance of her return.

  ‘There’s no chance Jeanette will suddenly come home and find you missing?’

  ‘Nothing is certain but it’s unlikely.’

  ‘You can come in but I’m not going to bed with you.’

  ‘No. No bed. That’s not why I’ve come.’

  ‘Why then? Why have you come, Hugh?’ she asked, showing him into the cold sitting room.

  ‘I only want to talk.’ Silently, she indicated the sofa but he stood there. ‘I hope you’ve a corkscrew. I’ve brought a bottle of Chianti.’

  ‘Why? To get me drunk?’

  ‘I don’t know, Sylvia. I just …’

  ‘I don’t want a drink, Hugh.’

  ‘I think I do. Would you mind?’

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Hold on, I’ll look.’ He stretched across the bed over her body to where he had left his watch and she smelled the distinctive slight must of his armpits. ‘Hang on, I can’t find my specs.’

  ‘Do you know, I’ve shared this bed with two other people. No, four. Four other people beside you.’

  ‘You don’t mean that?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘To take revenge on me?’

  ‘Got you!’ She was laughing uncontrollably until laughter collapsed into delirious weeping. ‘It was only the Twins and Monkey and Susan Semolina,’ she sobbed.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Carrot and potato people.’

  ‘Sylvia, Sylvia, darling, come here.’

  Towards dawn she said, ‘You should go,’ to be the one to say it first.

  ‘Not yet. Let me hold you a little longer.’

  Then, all too soon, it was he who said, ‘I should really go or I’ll be seen.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And –’

  ‘I know. I know. Shut up.’

  ‘It’s –’

  ‘I know, Hugh. It’s Marigold. I do understand.’

  ‘I had no idea she’d take the possibility of us breaking up so hard.’

  ‘It is what the child experts supposedly say.’

  ‘It’s why she and Jeanette are in London. To see a so-called “expert”.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Was she sorry? Some of her was.

  ‘It was the fire that convinced me. I told him, the expert, I had to tell him, I could hardly leave that out, and he clearly took that very seriously.’

  Sylvia sat up. ‘Hang on, the report said –’

  ‘I know what it said. Listen, only you can ever know this. Please?’

  ‘OK,’ Sylvia said, unsure what she was about to let herself in for.

  He felt across her again for his cigarettes. As he lit them, she saw by the light of the match flare his face, vulnerable without his glasses.

  ‘When I pressed her, after your diatribe at the foundry – no, listen, I know it was deserved – she hinted to me obliquely that she had started it. I couldn’t get out of her why she should have done such a mad thing and then she clammed up and I couldn’t get anything out of her. I know a chap in the Fire Department, he was a POW like me and there’s honour among POWs. The report was ambiguous. It could have been the electrics, they were definitely dodgy, but there was still a possibility that it could have been human malice. And you have to believe me about this, it wasn’t only Marigold I was concerned for. It was what you said about Sam. Of course I was concerned for him. I couldn’t betray Marigold but I didn’t want him perceived as a likely suspect. I knew what all that stupid trouble over that bloody book had meant to you, so I intimated to my friend that, given there was no major harm done, if there was any ambiguity, he might slant the report in the direction of the failed electrics. I’m afraid I used Sam as my reason but what I did tell him, I hope you’ll give me credit for this, was that the reason I was asking was because Sam had nob
ly taken the blame for a silly joke of my daughter’s that had backfired. He has teenage children himself so he understands …’

  ‘Christ, Hugh.’

  ‘But, you see, I had to tell the child therapist Jeanette has rustled up for Marigold. That was what I came to say tonight. To explain why I might have seemed to be behaving like a bastard all this time but it wasn’t because I didn’t care – and we got distracted …’

  ‘I accept my part in the distraction.’

  ‘Was it worth it, Sylvia? Not just tonight, I mean all of it? It has been for me. Even, God help me, with what it seems to have done to my daughter.’

  Was it? At the moment it was worth anything, everything. Tomorrow she would have to see.

  ‘Hugh.’

  ‘Yes, darling. I’m calling you “darling” while I still can.’

  ‘Yes. Did you read that book I recommended?’

  ‘I Capture the Fortress?’

  ‘I Capture the Castle.’

  ‘Sorry, “castle”. I told you how much I liked it. The girl made me think of you.’

  ‘Did you read it to the end? I don’t mind if you didn’t.’

  In the greenish dawn light she could see his face clearly. He had found his glasses but he took them off again and rubbed his eyes. ‘Yes, I read it to the end.’

  ‘The very end?’

  ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘I suddenly wanted to ask.’

  Sylvia sat alone in the bed trying to make sense of her sorrow. Hugh had dressed and gone. Gone for good. Finally, she put on a dressing gown and went downstairs and stood in the chilly kitchen, looking out. Hedge sparrows, chaffinches, wrens, blue tits, coal tits, maybe a linnet, were flitting and threading through the brambles once tamed by Mr Bird, now with nature’s incremental stealth fighting back. The guerrilla war waged by the universe against all human effort. She was glad that humankind so far still seemed to be the losers.

  The little plum-tree vase was on the windowsill; in it the jay feather she had found by the canal in the days when she stood at the gates of Paradise. She took the feather and went outside and laid it gently by the stump of the plum tree, unsure what she was doing or why.

  Beneath her dressing gown she was naked. She opened it and let it fall from her shoulders and stood for a moment facing the rim of crimson sliding up over the hills. The grass was wet and cold to her bare feet and she stepped over the dressing gown and went inside to put on the kettle for tea.

  32

  Sylvia left number 5 without Mrs Bird appearing there to do the inventory. There was next to nothing that she took that she had not brought with her when she first came. Only Sam’s plum-tree vase, the silver leaf brooch and a package she had found outside her front door when she came back from her last day at the library. Even her books she had decided to leave behind. ‘My legacy to the children,’ she said to Dee, who had promised to buy book plates to inscribe with her name so she would be remembered.

  ‘That’s kind of you, Dee, but I shouldn’t think anyone will remember me.’

  ‘I shall,’ Dee said staunchly.

  This exchange took place at the end of an evening during which many gin and tonics were drunk and promises to stay in touch, each aware that neither would do so, were exchanged. Sylvia did not ask about Mr Booth, who had shaken her hand quite heartily and wished her ‘all the best’ in her new employment.

  Her farewells to her other East Mole friends and acquaintances had been few. Only with Ned had it seemed heartfelt. He had squeezed her shoulder and told her to look after herself. Their friendship had been too genuine for either to pretend that they were likely to remain close.

  Ivy had sent a card with ‘Good luck in your new job’ signed ‘Best wishes from Ivy and Len’. The vicar had surprised her by dropping by the library with a book, Wild Flowers of the Chalklands. Inside was a note which read, ‘Consider the lilies of the field …’ and under it a further note advising her that the ‘lilies of the field’ were thought by scholars to be wild anemones.

  Gwen, it transpired, was moving from East Mole anyway. Chris had decided to leave her job as games mistress and become an air stewardess. ‘She was born restless,’ Gwen explained. ‘And it’ll give us more freedom.’ She was applying for jobs near Heathrow so she and Chris could live together. ‘It’s only a step and a hop from Ruislip on the bus. Chris says to tell you you’ll be welcome any time.’

  The most painful farewell was to the Hedges, who had withdrawn from their old open neighbourliness. Ray shook her hand and June kissed her cheek but Sylvia was aware they were glad for her to go. Sam gave her a scant ‘’Bye’ for which he was not corrected by his parents. Only the twins expressed real regret.

  ‘WE’LL MISS YOU, SYLVIA!’ they roared as the taxi reversed past them while they tore alongside trying to race it, bashing against the windows the farewell flags they had mounted on garden canes.

  ‘I’ll miss you too, Twins!’ she shouted back, and for minutes after the taxi rounded the corner she could still hear their wild young sanity-saving laughter.

  Miss Crake promised to meet her in London to take her to the Old Vic, where ‘a friend’, a Miss Robson, was playing in a well-reviewed production of Ibsen’s Ghosts, so that was a connection that would not dissolve. She offered to drive Sylvia to the station in the Wolseley and nodded when Sylvia declined the offer, as if aware of her need to leave in solitude.

  As the taxi passed the bus stop Sylvia recalled the day Hugh had picked her up in the grey Hillman, and their supper at the inn and The Dream of Gerontius, and the time she had mentally composed her brave letter resigning from the affair which had not even started.

  The package at the door had contained a recording of some Schubert songs. One song was marked with an asterisk on the record sleeve. By it she read, ‘The text of the lied is a German translation of the poem “Who is Sylvia?” from Act 4, Scene 2 of the play The Two Gentlemen of Verona by William Shakespeare.’ Some time, no doubt, she would play it; but it was the memory of the song he had twice sung to her by the canal that brought harsh tears.

  I found my love where the gaslight falls,

  Dreamed a dream by the old canal …

  A dream, certainly. Not The Dream of Gerontius; more like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which – and with no one to share this with she rather revelled in the wounding cleverness of her own wit – she had once again played the ass, picked up and then dropped by superior beings from another world.

  Even without her mother’s illness, her father’s need for her, the sense of the Hedges’ dereliction, she would have had to go. Hugh had lied to her. She knew this as surely as she had ever known anything. He had not bothered to read, or not all through, I Capture the Castle, with its bittersweet ending, where a girl’s love in the end comes to nothing.

  It was not only the glint of fear in his eyes when she had asked him, the truth had exuded from his pores; but the harder truth was this: she had known it from the first. Had he said, ‘I’m sorry, darling, I lied to impress you,’ or ‘to please you,’ or ‘I’m sorry, it’s not really my kind of thing but I didn’t want to say,’ or almost anything; but for him to have lied then, for some reason – in time she would work out the reason – this was intolerable to her. One day, possibly, this fact – for, incontrovertibly, it was a fact, however unprovable – would maybe make all that had happened between them better for her. But that was one day; and now she had to dig deep in her courage and return to Ruislip to stand by her father and help to see her mother, who had brought her into the world, out of the world and then find the resolution to find a new – or another – world for herself to try to live in.

  Part Two

  * * *

  ‘What’s so special about this place we’re going to?’ Alexander asked.

  It was the start of the holidays and he and his sister Imogen were packing for a journey.

  ‘It’s an old library,’ his sister said. ‘Granny used it when she was young.’

  The idea
of a library bored Alex. ‘Are we staying there?’

  ‘We’re meeting Granny at a hotel. You love hotels. It’s got a pool and a spa and everything.’

  ‘Has it got TV? Barcelona’s playing.’

  ‘Of course it’s got TV. There’ll be one in your room, plus there’ll be Wi-Fi so you can take your iPad.’

  On the drive down the M4 the children’s mother explained, ‘When Granny was a girl she lived for a time in East Mole –’

  ‘East Mole? What a weird name.’

  ‘It’s not “weird”, Alex. There was a move to close the Children’s Library and Granny was all mixed up with it somehow. Now it’s threatened with closure again so she’s agreed to speak at an event which they hope might help to keep the library open.’

  ‘I don’t see why we need libraries,’ Alex said. ‘You can get anything you want off the internet.’

  His sister, who was of an age to enjoy going against a popular tide, sighed audibly and their mother said, ‘Yes, but how do you know what to look for? That’s why libraries are so important. Without the library, Granny might not have become a writer herself.’

  The children’s grandmother was an author of children’s books, famed not only for the words but also for the illustrations which she drew herself.

  ‘My friends at school don’t believe me when I say she’s my grandmother.’ Imogen had just completed her first year at secondary school and was having ‘issues’ with friends.

  ‘I’m sure Granny would write a special message in one of her books for you to prove it,’ her mother suggested. ‘Now shut up, you two, please. It’s the proms with Barenboim conducting and I want to listen.’

  The hotel, boasting historic credentials as an old coaching inn, had been made over in a slick contemporary style and now offered a swimming pool, a gym, a beauty spa and a games room. Alex went off with his father to play snooker and Imogen and her mother put on fluffy white dressing gowns to sample the pool. On their way back to their rooms they met Lucy Pattern’s mother in the hotel lobby.

  ‘Granny!’ Imogen rushed to her grandmother, who hugged her.