The Librarian

by Salley Vickers

  ‘Darling girl, you look like a mermaid but with lovely long legs instead of a tail.’

  Imogen, who was thirteen and self-conscious about her appearance, looked pleased. ‘We’ve been swimming. Will you come too tomorrow?’

  ‘I haven’t brought a bathing costume.’

  ‘You could borrow Mum’s.’

  ‘An old bat like me in your mother’s costume?’

  ‘You’re not old, Granny.’

  ‘Darling, I’m seventy. At seventy you have to behave decorously.’

  ‘You’re welcome to borrow mine, Mum,’ her daughter Lucy said. ‘We’re still about the same size.’

  The family met for dinner in the hotel restaurant.

  Alex grabbed the menu from his father. ‘What’s here we can eat?’

  ‘Hey, don’t grab, old son. There’s plenty here for you.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Like pizza or pasta, for instance.’

  ‘Boring. We always have them.’

  ‘When Granny was little,’ his mother said, ‘she was lucky to get spam fritters, let alone pizza.’

  ‘What’s spam?’

  ‘A kind of revolting pink meat that came in a tin.’

  Alex said, ‘Yuk!’ and his grandmother said, ‘I quite liked spam, in fact, and don’t use me to preach with, Luce. We had other advantages.’

  ‘Like?’ Alex was willing to be broad-minded.

  ‘Like being able to play out with no one supervising us. Like green fields and clear streams and very little pollution.’

  ‘That’s not quite true,’ the children’s father put in. ‘The London smog was shocking in the fifties. If you read the stats, plenty died of emphysema.’

  His mother-in-law was aware that her daughter’s husband found her flights of fancy irritating and did her best not to mind. ‘You’re quite right, Jamie, I’m romanticising. It’s the effect of coming back here.’

  ‘Have you written your talk for tomorrow, Granny?’ Imogen wanted to know.

  ‘I’m not a great fan of written talks, duck. I’ll do as I usually do, wait and see how the spirit moves me.’

  ‘Granny’s a medium,’ Alex said. He made as if to rock the table.

  Imogen pointedly ignored her brother. Grandmothers should not have favourites; but if the children’s grandmother had a favourite, it might have been Imogen. ‘Are you looking forward to it, Granny? What are you going to wear?’

  ‘I was hoping you’d help me choose, darling. As to whether I’m looking forward to it, to tell you the truth I’m a bit frightened.’

  ‘Why? You’re always doing talks.’

  ‘It’s different when it’s your home town.’

  ‘They’ll love you, Granny. You’re a star.’

  ‘Maybe. A prophet is generally without honour in his own country.’

  Imogen decided that her grandmother should wear a cream linen shift, her amber beads and heels.

  ‘Must I wear those, duck? I’d much rather wear my comfortable plimsolls.’

  ‘Not “plimsolls”, Granny. Trainers or sneakers, and not for this, they’re not appropriate. When will Gil and Iz be here?’

  Gil was Imogen’s uncle, her mother’s younger brother. His only child, Isaac, was a special friend of Imogen’s whom she didn’t see enough of as Gil worked in Brussels.

  ‘Their plane should have landed, so fairly soon, I imagine.’

  There was a reception party awaiting them at the library. The children’s grandmother was welcomed enthusiastically. She presented the Head Librarian with a book.

  ‘How kind of you. One of your own?’

  ‘No, in fact, it’s a copy of a book that I failed to return to the library before we moved away. It’s rather been on my conscience.’

  The librarian laughingly said she was sure the library could spare their famous guest one book and indicated a large display of the books she had herself written that were to be sold as her contribution to the Library Fund.

  Her family were ushered to the hall, where Gil and Isaac were already seated.

  After a while a middle-aged woman looking nervous in a navy suit appeared and began to speak.

  ‘Can’t hear!’ a voice shouted from the back.

  A young man, hung about with items conveying technical competence, leapt on to the platform and adjusted the mic. The woman introduced herself as the Deputy Mayor. She went on to declare how fortunate they were to have a famous local author come to speak in support of the library and how proud East Mole was to welcome her back to the town.

  ‘She’s Tory,’ Lucy whispered to her husband. ‘It’s entirely thanks to them that there are these fucking awful cuts.’

  The children’s grandmother appeared to polite applause. She spoke, without notes, of her childhood and the books she had borrowed from the library and what an impression they had made on her imagination and how they had influenced her subsequent career. She spoke fluently with none of the shyness that Imogen, who knew her best, was aware was a truer manifestation of her nature. ‘You don’t ever sound shy, Granny,’ she had said once and her grandmother had replied, ‘I’ve acquired a patina of poise, darling, but at work underneath there’s a mole ready to bring it all crashing down. I’m constantly amazed that I’m not found out.’

  ‘But what is there to find out, Granny? You’re a humungous success.’

  ‘There’s always something to be found out, darling.’

  Towards the end of her speech her grandmother stopped and appeared to collect her thoughts.

  ‘As you can tell, I am a passionate, a passionate, supporter of libraries, especially for children who might otherwise have no access to the resources of children’s literature. Children are the citizens of the future and what they are fed and nourished on will form the destiny of our world and the destiny of our beleaguered planet. We have a duty, a moral duty, to ensure that not only the stomachs of our children are fed but also their imaginations. We do not’ – here she paused and swept a glance around her audience – ‘we emphatically do not want to find that we have reached such a state of dearth in our society that we must provide food banks for the imagination as well as, as we so regrettably have to do today, for the physical body. Up and down the country there are local libraries, granaries of rich supplies, potential feasts of nourishment, often gifted, as this library was, by benefactors for the good of children, their children and the future of our children’s children and our children’s future children’s children, which it is sheer wickedness to waste and destroy.’

  She paused again to survey her audience. ‘Doing dramatic timing,’ her daughter whispered.

  ‘But we also need guardians of this wealth, to ensure that it reaches those who may not know they are hungry. My own life was transformed by one young woman who worked in this library, Miss Sylvia Blackwell, who, single-handed, helped me to enter worlds and find the words to describe them that I should never otherwise have found. Our librarians are the unsung heroes who have served and protected the very best in our civilisation – a civilisation that is now under threat.’ She allowed her gaze to linger for a moment on the Deputy Mayor, who was sitting in the front row. Then she raised her eyes back to her audience.

  ‘I hope you will join with me in ensuring that we safeguard our librarians and their domains as they once safeguarded these precious domains of my own East Mole childhood.’

  ‘Mum talked a blinder,’ Lucy observed to her brother as they trooped out.

  In the hallway a long queue of adults and children had already formed, ready to buy books to be signed by the famous author. The offspring of the author and their offspring went outside.

  ‘It’s pretty hideous,’ Jamie commented of the library building.

  ‘I quite like that mock-Goth,’ Gil said. ‘It’s quaint.’

  ‘You must have come here as kids?’ his brother-in-law suggested.

  ‘We didn’t, in fact. Mum’s parents moved to Oxford. We visited her parents there.’

  ‘What we
re they like?’

  ‘Not much like Mum,’ Gil said. ‘But you know Mum, she’s loyal.’

  ‘Thank God that’s over anyway,’ his mother said when she had finished signing and pictures had been taken of her and posted on Instagram and Twitter.

  ‘You had plenty of admirers.’

  ‘Yes, the children are always a treat.’

  ‘Is all this very different, Mum?’ her son asked.

  ‘What’s most different is that.’ She nodded towards a Moslem family carrying off copies of her latest books. ‘I think we had one Indian family when I lived here. And looking back, they had a pretty ropy time of it. The rest of us were thoroughly, and I fear unconsciously, white. Imogen, Dragon child, am I allowed to take off these hellishly uncomfortable shoes?’

  Imogen had consented to her grandmother’s plea to be allowed to return to the hotel to change. ‘I want to go and explore my past,’ she explained.

  It was tacitly understood that she preferred only her grandchildren to accompany her on this venture. Alex wanted to play snooker so it was Imogen and Isaac who walked with their grandmother along the towpath by the canal.

  ‘A lock,’ Imogen said delightedly. ‘I love locks, I don’t know why.’

  ‘It’s the two water levels.’ Isaac had been examining them. ‘Like it’s magic. But totally explicable.’

  Their grandmother was looking at the little cottage by the lock, girt about with geraniums and petunias.

  ‘Was that here in your day, Granny?’

  But she seemed lost in thought and didn’t answer.

  The towpath began to run alongside a building site protected by a high fence where yellow notices warned of guard dogs.

  ‘That was a foundry,’ their grandmother said. ‘It was a ruin even in my day. We used to play there, though we weren’t supposed to after a boy drowned.’

  They skirted the wire fence and turned on to a tarmacked road.

  ‘This was a muddy track when I was little. There were so many flowers then.’

  Finally they came to a terraced row of redbrick houses.

  ‘This has been smartened up no end.’ Their grandmother sounded disappointed.

  The three of them walked round to the road that fronted the terrace and their grandmother stopped by one of the houses. ‘Why are we here, Granny?’

  A bird feeder was hanging by the fence and a woman was engaged in refilling it with seeds. A slight woman in her sixties with a sharp intelligent face. ‘Can I help?’

  ‘I –’ their grandmother began and halted. ‘Pam?’ she asked.

  The other woman blinked. ‘No, Jem.’

  ‘Do you remember me?’

  ‘I know who you are,’ the woman said. ‘I recognise your face. I would have come to hear you today but my husband is ill. My grandchildren were there, though. They love your books.’

  ‘No,’ the children’s grandmother said. ‘You don’t know me. Or rather you do but you don’t recognise me.’

  ‘And you are?’ the woman said.

  ‘Guess.’

  The woman stared at her. After a minute she said, ‘Well, I’m blowed. I see it now. Bloody hell. Of all things and all those years. Bloody hell. But you’ve changed your name.’

  ‘Pattern’s my married name. I took my husband’s name because my own was, well … The first name’s the same.’

  ‘I can’t get over it,’ the other woman said. ‘Of course, we were only titchers when you left. To be honest, I don’t remember your surname then.’

  ‘It was Smith,’ Elizabeth Pattern said. ‘I was Lizzie Smith.’

  ‘It was amazing,’ Imogen told the rest of the family. She, her brother and her cousin and their three parents were dining back at the hotel. Their grandmother had stayed behind to eat with her childhood friend Jemima O’Malley.

  ‘She was one of twins,’ Imogen explained. ‘And she, this twin we met, married a schoolfriend of her brother’s, her brother’s the one Granny says helped her pass the 11+. Granny was hopeless at maths and their brother helped her. The librarian she talked about lived next door but one. That’s why Granny wanted to go back there.’

  ‘Sounds like she had the hots for the brother,’ Alex volunteered.

  ‘Don’t be disgusting, Alex. You can’t see Granny having the hots.’

  ‘She did cry when she was talking about him,’ Iz supplied.

  ‘They were both crying,’ Imogen said.

  Her uncle put in, ‘Mum’s quite cagey about all that period in her life. Does she ever talk to you about it, Luce?’

  ‘Not much. The main thing I’ve gleaned, but you know this anyway, was that we are named after the people in the children’s books that her librarian introduced her to.’

  ‘Who’s Dad named for?’ Iz asked.

  Lucy laughed. ‘Don’t you know? Not a book or books that would suit you, Iz. It’s Gilbert, from Anne of Green Gables. I’m Lucy from Narnia.’

  ‘Narnia!’ Alex said. ‘Narnia’s Christian.’

  ‘Until you know more about Christianity, old son,’ his father elected to advise, ‘you should maybe keep your opinions to yourself.’

  Alex made a face and his mother chipped in. ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’s not too bad. It’s only later in the series that it gets proselytising.’

  ‘It’s very badly written,’ Gil said. ‘I had to stop reading it to Iz when he was little.’

  ‘Didn’t matter,’ Iz said. ‘Granny read it to me and Im when we were staying with her. I didn’t know that’s why you’re Lucy, Aunt.’

  Lucy and her nephew grinned at each other. Lucy had never permitted ‘aunt’.

  ‘It goes to show,’ Gil said, ‘how much those childhood books affected her.’

  ‘She was crying,’ Imogen said again. ‘She hardly ever cries.’

  ‘What I remember most about you, Michael,’ the woman who had been Lizzie Smith was recollecting, ‘is that you had the cane.’

  ‘I don’t remember that. Are you sure?’

  They were eating supper in the kitchen of what had been number 3, now a bright open-plan incorporating what had been the old sitting room and a new staircase.

  ‘I remember watching The Flower Pot Men with you on a sofa over there.’ Elizabeth nodded towards a Welsh dresser decorated with pottery. ‘Bill and Ben. You loved them.’

  ‘It was Pam who really loved them,’ Jem said. ‘She liked Little Weed. She drove our parents round the bend going, “Weed, weed.” I was keener on Sooty and Sweep.’ She raised her voice to a squeak. ‘God, we were terrors. I don’t know how our poor parents survived.’

  ‘They loved you to bits,’ Elizabeth said.

  ‘Drove them nuts, more like,’ Michael said. He beamed at his wife.

  Pam, Jem explained, lived in Canada, where she had four children and eight grandchildren. ‘She married a farmer who came over here to study and took her back with him. They’ve done well.’

  ‘We’ve only the three grandchildren so we’re considered inferior breeders,’ Michael said. ‘She keeps on at our kids to produce a few more. But there’s only so much I can do these days.’

  He’d been diagnosed with a heart problem, he explained, and it was a slight twinge of angina that had prevented their going to hear the talk at the library.

  ‘But this is much nicer,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I can’t believe that after all this time you’re still here.’

  ‘Dad never moved out,’ Jem said. ‘We were on at him to move into town when Mum died but he wouldn’t leave. We bought number 4, next door, when it came up for sale, partly to be near him, and when Dad died we bought number 3 from our old landlord’s son and extended sideways.’

  ‘We were lucky,’ Michael said. ‘We got it before the insane rise in house prices. I’d hate to say what it would cost now.’

  Number 4 was where the fire was, Elizabeth thought.

  Jem had lost none of her childhood vitality. She began pulling out drawers and standing on chairs to ferret in cupboards until finall
y she located a collection of old photo albums.

  ‘I knew I’d got them somewhere. That’s you, isn’t it? From recollection, Sam took it with your Brownie camera and you gave him the picture.’

  Even at this distance in time she felt it was not tactful to confide that their mother had had to fish the snapshot out of the wastepaper basket.

  ‘God, I was plain.’ Elizabeth was embarrassed to have been the child with the badly cut hair and round glasses squinting self-consciously at the camera. In the smudgy little black-and-white photograph two donkeys were visible behind the gate on the top of which she was insecurely perched.

  ‘That was Miss Blackwell’s gate. And the donkeys. I was frightened of them.’ She had been somewhat frightened of the twins, too, as it happened.

  ‘Remember how she liked us to call her by her first name. Mum didn’t approve but she didn’t know how to tell her.’

  ‘I was too shy to, anyway,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I felt awkward calling her Sylvia.’

  ‘Here’s Sam,’ Jem said. ‘And that girl he was so crazy about.’

  Elizabeth Pattern, former Children’s Laureate and author of many acclaimed books, felt her whole system jolt with something resembling pain at the sight of the blurred image of the boy she had not seen for almost sixty years. Small and dark, recognisably at least to her now of Jewish lineage, he stood with the defiant expression she recalled so well, screwing up his eyes against an invisible sun. By him, against the gate on which she had just observed her own young self, lolled a girl with long hair and long legs. The girl was looking into the camera with what to Elizabeth Pattern still seemed an unconscionable sense of superiority.

  ‘Marigold,’ she said. ‘Whatever happened to her?’

  ‘A little madam, that one,’ Michael observed. ‘I blame her for Sam missing the Grammar. We all got into the Grammar in our class bar Sam and he was the brightest of us by a mile.’

  ‘By a country mile,’ his wife said. ‘They tested his IQ and it was over 150.’

  Elizabeth was tasting again the anguish she had experienced when Sam, having failed the 11+, refused to speak to her, crossing the road to avoid her faltering attempts at approach. Even then she had been conscious he was avoiding her because she had succeeded where he had failed. He had coached her to pass the exam to the school he should by rights have walked into as one of the lords of creation. Instead, he had gone ignominiously to the Secondary Modern with boys who, released from any obligation to respect him, jeered and beat him up. Sam had fought back savagely. Even before she and her family had left East Mole he had acquired a reputation for delinquency. And it was she who had betrayed him first, over that book which had led to all that awfulness that had then led to their separation – even now she pushed away the full recollection of the sore place in her past. If he had only known how she would have cut out her own tongue rather than give him away; but her grandmother, with her sharp intuition, had plucked out the secret from her best attempts at silence.