The Bookshop (2 page)

‘Hang on, Mrs Green. Don’t you relax your efforts. That’s slippery as sin I know.’

The tongue writhed like a separate being. The horse stamped with one foot after another, as though doubting whether they all still touched the ground.

‘He can’t kick forwards, can he, Mr Raven?’

‘He can if he likes.’ She remembered that a Suffolk Punch can do anything, except gallop.

‘Why do you think a bookshop is unlikely?’ she shouted into the wind. ‘Don’t people want to buy books in Hardborough?’

‘They’ve lost the wish for anything of a rarity,’ said Raven, rasping away. ‘There’s many more kippers sold, for example, than bloaters that are half-smoked and have a more delicate flavour. Now you’ll tell me, I dare say, that books oughtn’t to be a rarity.’

Once released, the horse sighed cavernously and stared at them as though utterly disillusioned. From the depths of its noble belly came a brazen note, more like a trumpet than a horn, dying away to a snicker. Clouds of dust rose from its body, as though from a beaten mat. Then, dismissing the whole matter, it trotted to a safe distance and put down its head to graze. A moment later it caught sight of a patch of bright green angelica and began to eat like a maniac.

Raven declared that the old animal would not know itself, and would feel better. Florence could not honestly say the same of herself, but she had been trusted, and that was not an everyday experience in Hardborough.

T
HE
property which Florence had determined to buy had not been given its name for nothing. Although scarcely any of the houses, until you got out to the half-built council estate to the north-west, were new, and many dated from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, none of them compared with the Old House, and only Holt House, Mr Brundish’s place, was older. Built five hundred years ago out of earth, straw, sticks and oak beams, the Old House owed its survival to a flood cellar down a flight of stone steps. In 1953 the cellar had carried seven foot of seawater until the last of the floods had subsided. On the other hand, some of the seawater was still there.

Inside was the large front room, the backhouse kitchen, and upstairs a bedroom under a sloping ceiling. Not adjoining, but two streets away on the foreshore, stood the oyster shed which went with the property and which she had hoped to use as a warehouse for the reserve stock. But it turned out that the plaster had been mixed, for convenience sake, with sand from the beach,
and sea sand never dries out. Any books left there would be wrinkled with damp in a few days. Her disappointment, however, endeared her to the shopkeepers of Hardborough. They had all known better, and could have told her so. They felt a shift in the balance of intellectual power, and began to wish her well.

Those who had lived in Hardborough for some time also knew that her freehold was haunted. The subject was not avoided, it was a familiar one. The figure of a woman, for example, could sometimes be seen down at the landing-stage of the ferry, about twilight, waiting for her son to come back, although he had been drowned over a hundred years ago. But the Old House was not haunted in a touching manner. It was infested by a poltergeist which, together with the damp and an unsolved question about the drains, partly accounted for the difficulty in selling the property. The house agent was in no way legally bound to mention the poltergeist, though he perhaps alluded to it in the phrase
unusual period atmosphere
.

Poltergeists, in Hardborough, were called rappers. They might go on for years, then suddenly stop, but no one who had heard the noise, with its suggestion of furious physical frustration, as though whatever was behind it could not get out, was ever likely to mistake it for anything else. ‘Your rapper’s been at my adjustable spanners,’ said the plumber, without rancour, when she came to see how the work was going forward. His tool bag had
been upended and scattered; pale blue tiles with a nice design of waterlilies had been flung broadside about the upstairs passage. The bathroom, with its water supply half connected, had the alert air of having witnessed something. When the well-disposed plumber had gone to his tea, she shut the bathroom door, waited a few moments, and then looked sharply in again. Anyone watching her, she reflected, might have thought she was mad. The word in Hardborough for ‘mad’ was ‘not quite right’, just as ‘very ill’ was ‘moderate’. ‘Perhaps I’ll end up not quite right if this goes on,’ she told the plumber, wishing he wouldn’t call it ‘your rapper’. The plumber, Mr Wilkins, thought that she would weather it.

It was on occasions like this that she particularly missed the good friends of her early days at Müller’s. When she had come in and taken off her suede glove to show her engagement ring, a diamond chip, there had been a hearteningly long list of names on the subscription list for her present, and it was almost the same list when Charlie had died of pneumonia in an improvised reception camp at the beginning of the war. Nearly all the girls in Mailing, Despatch and Counter Staff had lost touch; and even when she had their addresses, she found herself unwilling to admit that they had grown as old as she had.

It was not that she was short of acquaintances in Hardborough. At Rhoda’s Dressmaker’s, for example, she
was well liked. But her confidence was hardly respected. Rhoda – that is to say, Jessie Welford – who had been asked to make her up a new dress, did not hesitate to speak about it freely, and even to show the material.

‘It’s for General and Mrs Gamart’s party at The Stead. I don’t know that I’d’ve chosen red myself. They’ve guests coming down from London.’

Florence, although she knew Mrs Gamart to nod to, and to be smiled at by, after various collections for charity, had never expected to be invited to The Stead. She took it, even though none of her stock had arrived as yet from London, as a compliment to the power of books themselves.

As soon as Sam Wilkins had fixed the bath to his own satisfaction, and the tiles were re-pegged on the roof, Florence Green moved out of her flat and boldly took up residence, with her few things, at the Old House. Even with the waterlily tiles firmly hung, it was not an altogether reassuring place to live. The curious sounds associated with the haunting continued at night, long after the ill-connected water pipes had fallen silent. But courage and endurance are useless if they are never tested. She only hoped that there would be no interruption when Jessie Welford brought the new dress in for a fitting. But this particular ordeal never arose. A message came, asking her to try on at Rhoda’s, next door.

‘I think perhaps it’s not my colour after all. Would you call it ruby?’ It was a comfort when Jessie said that it was more like a garnet, or a deep rust. But there was something unsatisfactory in the red, or rust, reflexion which seemed to move unwillingly in the looking-glass.

‘It doesn’t seem to fit at all at the back. Perhaps if I try to stand against the wall most of the time …’

‘It’ll come to you as you wear it,’ the dressmaker replied firmly. ‘You need a bit of costume jewellery as a focus.’

‘Are you sure?’ asked Florence. The fitting seemed to be turning into a conspiracy to prevent anyone noticing her new dress at all.

‘I dare say, when all’s said and done, I’m more used to dressing up and going out in the evening than you are,’ said Miss Welford. ‘I’m a bridge player, you know. Not much doing here – I go over to Flintmarket twice a week. A penny a hundred in the mornings, and two-pence a hundred in the evenings. We wear long skirts then, of course.’

She walked backwards a couple of steps, throwing a shadow over the glass, then returned to pin and adjust. No change, Florence knew, would make her look anything but small.

‘I wish I wasn’t going to this party,’ she said.

‘Well, I wouldn’t mind taking your place. It’s a pity Mrs Gamart sees fit to order everything from London,
but it will be properly done – no need to stand and count the sandwiches. And when you get there, you won’t have to bother about how you look. Nobody will mind you, and anyway you’ll find you know everyone in the room.’

Florence had felt sure she would not, and she did not. The Stead, in any case, was not the kind of place where hats and coats were left about in the hall so that you could guess, before committing yourself to an entrance, who was already there. The hall, boarded with polished elm, breathed the deep warmth of a house that has never been cold. She caught a glimpse of herself in a glass much more brilliant than Rhoda’s, and wished that she had not worn red.

Through the door ahead unfamiliar voices could be heard from a beautiful room, painted in the pale green which at that time the Georgian Society still recommended. Silver photograph frames on the piano and on small tables permitted a glimpse of the network of family relations which gave Violet Gamart an access to power far beyond Hardborough itself. Her husband, the General, was opening drawers and cupboards with the object of not finding anything, to give him an excuse to wander from room to room. In the 1950s there were many plays on the London stage where the characters made frequent entrances and exits out of various doors and were seen
again in the second act, three hours later. The General would have fitted well into such a play. He hovered, alert and experimentally smiling, among the refreshments, hoping that he would soon be needed, even if only for a few moments, since opening champagne is not woman’s work.

There was no bank manager there, no Vicar, not even Mr Thornton, Florence’s solicitor, or Mr Drury, the solicitor who was not her solicitor. She recognized the back of the rural dean, and that was all. It was a party for the county, and for visitors from London. She correctly guessed that she would find out in time why she herself had been asked.

The General, relieved to see a smallish woman who did not appear to be intimidating or a relation of his wife’s, gave her a large glass of champagne from one of the dozen he had opened. If she was not a relation of his wife’s there were no elementary blunders to be made, but although he felt certain he had seen her somewhere before, God knew who she was exactly. She followed his thoughts, which, indeed, were transparent in their dogged progress from one difficulty to another, and told him that she was the person who was going to open a bookshop.

‘That’s it, of course. Got it in one. You’re thinking of opening a bookshop. Violet was interested in it. She wanted to have one or two of those words of hers with you about it. I expect she’ll have a chance later.’

Since Mrs Gamart was the hostess, she could have had this chance at any time, but Florence did not deceive herself about her own importance. She drank some of the champagne, and the smaller worries of the day seemed to stream upwards as tiny pinpricks through the golden mouthfuls and to break harmlessly and vanish.

She had expected the General to feel that his duty was discharged, but he lingered.

‘What kind of stuff are you going to have in your shop?’ he asked.

She scarcely knew how to answer him.

‘They don’t have many books of poetry these days, do they?’ he persisted. ‘I don’t see many of them about.’

‘I shall have some poetry, of course. It doesn’t sell quite as well as some other things. But it will take time to get to know all the stock.’

The General looked surprised. It had never taken him a long time, as a subaltern, to get to know all his men.

‘“It is easy to be dead. Say only this, they are dead.” Do you know who wrote that?’

She would dearly have liked to have been able to say yes, but couldn’t. The faltering light of expectancy in the General’s eyes died down. Clearly he had tried to make this point before, perhaps many times. In a voice so low that against the noise of the party that sipped and clattered round them she could only just hear it, he went on:

‘Charles Sorley …’

She realized at once that Sorley must be dead.

‘How old was he?’

‘Sorley? He was twenty. He was in the Swedebashers – the Suffolks, you know – 9th Battalion, B Company. He was killed in the battle of Loos, in 1915. He’d have been sixty-four years old if he’d lived. I’m sixty-four myself. That makes me think of poor Sorley.’

The General shuffled away into the mounting racket. Florence was alone, surrounded by people who spoke to each other familiarly, and some of whom could be seen in replica in the silver frames. Who were they all? She didn’t mind; for, after all, they would have felt lost in their turn if they had found their way into the Mailing Department at Müller’s. A mild young man’s voice said from just behind her, ‘I know who you are. You must be Mrs Green.’

He wouldn’t say that, she thought, unless he was sure of being recognized himself, and she did recognize him. Everybody in Hardborough could have told you who he was, in a sense proudly, because he was known to drive up to London to work, and to be something in TV. He was Milo North, from Nelson Cottage, on the corner of Back Lane. Exactly what he did was uncertain, but Hardborough was used to not being quite certain what people did in London.

Milo North was tall, and went through life with
singularly little effort. To say ‘I know who you are, you must be Mrs Green’ represented an unaccustomed output of energy. What seemed delicacy in him was usually a way of avoiding trouble; what seemed like sympathy was the instinct to prevent trouble before it started. It was hard to see what growing older would mean to such a person. His emotions, from lack of exercise, had disappeared almost altogether. Adaptability and curiosity, he had found, did just as well.

‘I know who you are, of course, Mr North,’ she said, ‘but I’ve never had an invitation to The Stead before. I expect you come here often.’

‘I’m asked here often,’ said Milo. He gave her another glass of champagne, and having expected to be left indefinitely by herself after the retreat of the General, she was grateful.

‘You’re very kind.’

‘Not very,’ said Milo, who rarely said anything that was not true. Gentleness is not kindness. His fluid personality tested and stole into the weak places of others until it found it could settle down to its own advantage. ‘You live by yourself, don’t you? You’ve just moved into the Old House all by yourself? Haven’t you ever thought of marrying again?’

Florence felt confused. It seemed to her that she was becalmed with this young man in some backwater, while louder voices grew more incoherent beyond. Time
seemed to move faster there. Plates that had been full of sandwiches and crowned with parsley when she came in now held nothing but crumbs.

‘I was very happily married, since you ask,’ she said. ‘My husband used to work in the same place as I did. Then he went into the old Board of Trade, before it became a Ministry. He used to tell me about his work when he came home in the evenings.’

‘And you were happy?’

‘I loved him, and I tried to understand his work. It sometimes strikes me that men and women aren’t quite the right people for each other. Something must be, of course.’