The Librarian

by Salley Vickers

  ‘Don’t try to tell me that this was your doing, young lady. I know fine well who took that book. You keep that up and the school hears you’ll be out on your ear and it’ll be the biscuit factory, or worse, for you.’

  But it wasn’t Sam who took the book. It was Marigold. She had always been sure it was Marigold.

  ‘What about you, Jem? Where did you go after primary school?’

  ‘We were among the first lot to go to the Comprehensives, Pam and I. It suited us and it was best after what had happened to Sam. We did OK there after they split us up. Mind you, we kicked off like hell about being parted. My God, the ructions we were capable of. We used to make up stories about the poor old caretaker who gave us Rolos. What was his name, Mick?’

  ‘Mr Jones. Poor bloke. Looking back, I’d say he was on the spectrum.’

  ‘We could have got him arrested with our silly talk,’ Jem said. ‘He would have been these days. God, we were awful.’

  ‘They can still make ructions, those two.’ Her husband smiled fondly. ‘Thank God for the Atlantic. If it weren’t for that I’d have run a mile.’

  ‘He loves saying that,’ his wife said equably.

  ‘What did – or does – Pam do?’

  ‘A speech therapist working mostly with stammerers. She still does a bit part-time, though kids don’t stammer like they used to, have you noticed? I trained as an actress but mostly I only got bit parts in bad telly so I retrained as a landscape gardener. His idea.’ She nodded towards her husband.

  ‘And you, Micky? Sorry, Michael? What did you …?’

  ‘I’m still Micky to my friends. I ended up a headmaster at the school.’

  ‘The primary?’

  ‘The local Comprehensive, the one she went to. No cane by then, thank God. Plenty of other things I could have done without, though. These days it’s mostly admin. I was glad to retire.’

  ‘He’s brainy,’ his wife said. ‘He got to Birmingham. A first in Chemistry. He could have stayed on there but he had a vocation, more’s the pity.’

  Her husband accepted this rebuke as his due. ‘It was a good school, our primary. All the A stream did well, but none of us was brainy like Sam.’

  ‘And Sam?’ Elizabeth felt finally able to ask.

  ‘He’s done all right. He’s in Australia, Melbourne.’

  Somewhere in Elizabeth Pattern’s chest something contracted. Cautiously she said, ‘Funnily enough, I shall be in Melbourne in October, on a tour for my latest book. Maybe we could hook up?’ In her confusion she reached for a phrase she would never otherwise have used. ‘That is if you think he wouldn’t mind.’

  Elizabeth Pattern, on her fourth book tour in Australia, remained astonished that the country’s reputation was still for a boorishness which seemed to her these days more characteristic of the UK. The Melbourne hotel was exceptionally comfortable. On Sunday she was flying to Perth for the last stage of the tour but now she had a couple of days of free time. There was a concert she might go to and the art galleries – Melbourne had a fine collection of paintings – and there was Sam.

  She had emailed him after hearing from Jem, with whom she had checked that he was happy for her to contact him, and they had corresponded with a civility that made no acknowledgement of any difficulty in the past. With a casual politeness she had suggested meeting, and with, she suspected, an equal caution he had agreed.

  ‘I am not really free until the Friday,’ she had written. ‘On Sunday eve I fly on to Perth but any time before then it would be very good to see you and catch up.’

  She read this anodyne message through and then deleted the last three words.

  It was she who recognised him at the restaurant where he had suggested they meet. He would have walked past her.

  ‘Sam.’

  ‘Lizzie? I didn’t …’

  ‘I’m told I’ve changed.’

  ‘We all have.’

  ‘I knew you at once.’ Slight still, grey hair but brindled with traces of the original black, sunburned face with a ring of white showing just below his collar, but then he’d always been brown-skinned. Even his hands she recognised, skilful hands. The gold band on his ring finger was of course new.

  He guided her through the menu, though by this time she was familiar with Antipodean fish. But she let him make recommendations uninterrupted while they found a common ground.

  ‘I had no idea you were you, if you know what I mean?’ A faint Australian timbre to his voice. ‘My grandchildren are crazy about your books. I’ve even read some to them.’

  ‘I’d gladly give you a signed copy or two if they’d like them?’

  ‘They’d be over the moon. I still can’t …’

  ‘I know. I feel the same.’

  ‘No, it’s that you’re different.’

  He meant, she guessed, that she had turned out better-looking than he would have predicted but to spare him embarrassment she pretended to misunderstand. ‘I always wanted to write from the day Miss Blackwell sent me off into Narnia.’

  ‘I never got those books. I was always more one for the non-fiction until lately. Now I belong to a book group and we read all sorts. Here, this is a fine Kiwi wine.’

  He filled her glass and she said, ‘In America if you down two glasses they think you’re an alcoholic and here if you don’t consume at least a bottle over lunch you’re a wimp.’

  He laughed. Good teeth still. ‘Sole reason for coming here.’

  ‘That can’t be the only reason.’

  ‘No.’

  Backing off, she relayed information about her children and her grandchildren.

  ‘I remember your grandmother,’ he said when she had run out of newsworthy relatives.

  ‘Don’t remind me!’

  ‘She was something else.’

  ‘It was because of her we left East Mole.’

  ‘I thought it was because your dad got work at Cowley.’

  ‘Only after my mother said we had to leave. She had a massive row with my grandmother which led to a major rift and I only saw my grandmother again just before she died. She wasn’t at all as I remembered her. Dementing and rather pathetic. I have a feeling that she never got over our going.’

  And it was she who’d been the cause of that. Crying her eyes out over the proposed library closure, finally succeeding in turning her mother against her grandmother. ‘It was Miss Blackwell that got me into the Grammar, Mum. They can’t close the library. It isn’t fair.’ Even her mild grandfather had rebuked his wife. ‘My God, the worm’s finally turned,’ her mother had said.

  ‘Your grandmother gave me the biggest dressing-down I’d ever had in my life. Over that book. Remember?’

  ‘Tropic of Cancer? Of course. It was my fault you got into such trouble.’

  ‘That’s water under the bridge.’

  ‘I’ve spent the best part of the last sixty years feeling guilty about it.’ Lightly as she said it now, it was true.

  He frowned. ‘There was no call for that, Lizzie.’

  ‘Wasn’t that, I mean, didn’t that set everything else off for you?’

  ‘On the primrose path of dalliance?’ She flushed, conscious that she might seem patronising, but he only grinned and said, ‘It did for a while. But I got back on to the strait and narrow. As you see – no visible bones broken.’

  ‘And the invisible ones?’ she felt able to risk.

  As if in answer Sam set aside the bones from the fish he had expertly filleted. ‘How about coming back to my place? I’ve an excellent dessert wine, better than they’ll have here.’

  ‘If that’s all right, I’d love to.’

  ‘I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t.’

  ‘Sorry.’ She was bespectacled Lizzie Smith with the greasy hair again and he was the boy she had worshipped and adored.

  Setting out from the restaurant, she observed he was limping slightly and slowed her pace. ‘My hip,’ he explained. ‘Over-enthusiastic running when I was younger.’ It was odd, like trying to f
ocus stiff binocular lenses, reconciling the bright spark of a boy whose image she had carried so clearly within her all those years and the elderly if still youthful-looking man she was strolling beside.

  On the way to his apartment he told how he had come to the university as a postgraduate to research into cell formation and then sidestepped into genetics.

  ‘So you went to university –’

  ‘In spite of the Secondary Mod? Yep, in the end.’ Again she flushed, detecting a taint of bitterness.

  They had reached his apartment and he was showing her into a light uncluttered room.

  ‘I can offer you apricot tart. Baked by my own hand. Or cheese.’

  ‘Tart, please, if it’s home-made. I’m impressed.’

  ‘You’d better try it first before the compliments.’

  They chatted idly, both too wary to plunge too rapidly back into the past. It was he who reverted to their earlier conversation. ‘It was mainly thanks to Sylvia – or through her, I should say – I finally made it to university. Do remember a grand old lady called Flee Crake?’

  ‘She was rather out of my league.’

  ‘She wasn’t grand, really. Actually very down to earth. She took me up when Sylvia left. She was a geneticist, a pretty high-powered one in her day and she got me interested in the subject and now that’s what I work on, have worked on since I came out here.’

  She hoped it didn’t seem mere politeness when she asked, wanting to know, ‘What aspect of DNA?’

  ‘The short answer is that what was thought extraneous, the so-called junk DNA, turns out to be a treasure trove of resource which may allow for what’s known as hypercommunication of information. There are some well-attested examples of people intuiting stuff they haven’t consciously acquired, but it might work between people too. Is this boring you?’

  ‘No,’ She said. ‘No, please go on.’

  ‘The funny thing is, Flee had read a book that Sylvia put her on to which seemed to illustrate this theory which she’d proposed and everyone then thought sheer moonshine.’

  ‘What was the book?’

  ‘It’s a children’s book. You probably know it.’

  He went into another room and came back and handed her a hardback, still with its jacket. ‘Flee gave me this copy, though I took ages to read it because I considered it beneath me. In fact, when I came to look, I remembered that Sylvia had already tried to interest me in it, but I thought it looked “girlie”.’

  Elizabeth had recognised the cover. ‘Tom’s Midnight Garden. My very favourite children’s book.’

  ‘Mine too now, bar yours of course.’

  ‘Oh, come on! I’m not even second fiddle to Philippa Pearce. This is excellent tart, by the way.’

  ‘My grandchildren cook with me when they’re here.’ It was strange to hear he was a grandparent – which was daft because of course she was a grandmother herself. But time and its local inhabitants stand still in memory. She glanced at his left hand and he said, ‘Their grandmother and I parted way back.’

  ‘Was she, is she, I mean, Australian?’

  ‘English. Cathy and I came out here when I got the Melbourne job. She hated it at first, until she fell in love with a visiting anthropologist. She lives in Brisbane now. We manage a fairly civilised relationship.’ He topped up her glass. ‘And you?’

  ‘Two children, a girl then a boy. Three grandchildren. The children’s father and I divorced.’

  ‘It’s a sign of our times. No one divorced back then, did they? I don’t know of any divorces among the folk we knew.’ He turned the book round in his hands, apparently studying the picture of the boy on the cover. ‘Except the Bells.’

  ‘The doctor and his wife?’

  ‘Marigold’s parents. You remember her?’

  How could she forget Marigold? ‘What happened to her? Do you know?’

  ‘She went off the rails, a whole lot worse than even I did.’

  ‘That, I would never have predicted.’ Fearful of betraying a curiosity which after all this time felt a little humiliating, she asked tentatively, ‘How?’

  ‘She had some sort of breakdown when her parents split up. But she was always a bit unstable, at least I would say so now.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I ought to have guessed there was something awry when she got me to nick those keys.’

  ‘Which keys?’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘It’s a long story. More tart?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ she said, not in truth wanting more but wanting to please.

  Frowning, he began to brush crumbs from the coffee table. Then he said, ‘One time we were round at Sylvia’s she got me to pinch the library keys from her bag. Then she insisted we go into town and get them copied. I went along with it out of bravado but I felt terrible because Sylvia had been, well, you know how she was.’

  A lifesaver, for me anyway, she thought, but said, ‘How did you get the keys copied?’

  ‘Cato’s, the hardware shop in the High Street, remember? Nobody bothered what we were doing with them, but children were more trusted then, weren’t they? We did all kinds of things which would be frowned on nowadays.’

  ‘I did half the washing and ironing for our family.’ She didn’t add that if she hadn’t seen to it no one would have done.

  ‘Marigold’s plan was for us to break into the library one evening, just as a kind of dare, I think. When we finally did break in we found that cupboard, whatever it was called, full of supposedly “naughty” books.’ And, well, you remember the rest.’

  So I was right, Lizzie Smith inwardly exulted. I knew it. I knew it was Marigold.

  The adult Elizabeth Pattern said, ‘It was called Restricted Access. I wonder when that went out?’

  ‘In the sixties, I would guess. Did you ever read Tropic of Cancer, really read it, not skip through the obscenities like we did that time?’

  ‘I never did. Did you?’

  ‘No. It was too …’

  Too painful, she thought.

  ‘Too dense,’ he finally came up with. ‘I might suggest it to my book club now. That would make them sit up.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘I thought Marigold was the bee’s knees. But she turned out to be more like the bee’s arse and I landed up being stung.’

  ‘But you got over it?’

  ‘Oh yes, in the end.’

  He hasn’t, she thought, not entirely. ‘My cousin Ned – remember him? – used to say that you don’t get over things, you get used to them.’

  ‘What happened to Ned? I liked him.’

  ‘Yes, he’s a duck. I always thought he had a thing for Sylvia. I used to hope they’d marry so I could go and live with them.’

  ‘I assume they didn’t.’

  ‘He was, is, I should say, gay. Remember the boy who drowned in the canal?’

  ‘Do I? Our parents were always on about it.’

  ‘He was Ned’s secret, his great love. They had some sort of bust-up and this young man, he was only nineteen, went off and drowned. Ned blamed himself. He never knew if it was because of him that his friend drowned.’

  ‘God, all the things that were going on under the surface then.’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed. Herself too ashamed to let on that her mother was a slut who rarely washed her clothes. Ned keeping his sexuality under wraps, petrified of the effect the truth might have on the family. ‘They, we, our family were Catholics,’ she reminded him.

  ‘I’d forgotten you were Catholic. But you say “were” …?’

  ‘Oh, you cured me of that! You were so scathing about it I threw away my cross. I thought I’d be ostracised at school.’ But she had still gone to the Catholic church to pray for him. Kneeling by the blue plaster statue of Our Lady begging her to make right what she, Lizzie, had made so wrong.

  ‘I’m sorry, Lizzie. What a little varmint I was.’

  ‘Oh, look, it’s all so long ago.’

  A silence fell. A bad fairy’s passing over, Elizabeth said to herself and to change the
subject gestured at a painting. ‘You’ve some good pictures.’

  ‘Painting’s one of the many things I’ve acquired a taste for over here. That’s one of a series called Dream Life by a young Aboriginal artist.’

  ‘It’s impressive.’

  She got up to inspect it more closely and he got up too so that she smelled the warm, slightly vanillaish scent of his skin.

  ‘Didn’t I come to see you as a fairy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream?’

  ‘Mustardseed. I was Peter Quince too. Peter Quince was my star turn. But you didn’t come.’

  ‘I did. I swear I did.’

  He was looking at her too intently so she went to sit down again. ‘You didn’t, I assure you. I was devastated.’

  ‘Oh Christ, Lizzie. How do we know really what went on or what the hell happened to us then?’

  She started to say, We are such stuff as dreams are made on, but stopped herself. He, their meeting, was worth better than to be treated to an overdone quotation.

  ‘I don’t know, Sam,’ she said instead. ‘It changes, doesn’t it? What happened back then, in the past, changes all the time.’

  At the appointed hour the following morning a young man with a neat ponytail delivered a tray of coffee to Elizabeth’s hotel room. She drank the coffee, reading her emails.

  Soaking her limbs in the deep bath, she rang her publicist.

  ‘Christine, good morning. I wanted to ask, is there any chance of changing the flight to Perth?’