The Worlds Within Her (36 page)

THE BOOKCASE IS
of dark walnut, the books behind its glass doors hard-covered and jacketless, and so neatly arranged their value appears contained in display rather than in usefulness. Yasmin presses in close, trying to see beyond her own reflection. The titles printed on the spines have faded, and the imposed twilight of the living room reduces them to a hieroglyphic illegibility.

Her concentration is such that the first she knows of Amie's presence is her soft “Here, miss.” She feels the press of a palm on her lower back, sees Amie's reflection stretching up, on the tips of her toes, her other arm reaching to the top of the bookcase for the key.

The lock opens soundlessly, the doors swinging out under their own weight. Amie steps back as Yasmin edges into the release of settled dust and musty paper. Without the barrier of her reflection, the titles assume shape in flecks of silver and gold. Greek philosophers — Sophocles, Plato, Epictetus — familiar to her only through a university course in the humanities two decades ago.
The Iliad
unaccompanied by
The Odyssey.
She eases out
Utopia
and on the inside of the cover — the spine cracking — reads her father's name scrawled in faded blue ink. “Were they all his?” she asks, replacing it.

Amie nods.

Beside
Utopia
is a three-volume set of
War and Peace,
an Everyman's Library edition bound in cloth of dusty red. A blemish on the spine of Volume II — a streak of dry white paint — arrests her eye. And unexpectedly the paint turns liquid in her mind; falls through darkness with the swiftness of a shooting star, splatters onto the spine, streaks briefly, coagulates, hardens …

BOOKS TO MY
husband, my dear Mrs. Livingston, were not merely bound pages with words printed on them. They weren't like magazines, which were disposable, or newspapers which could be used for wrapping parcels in stores. No. Books were icons! My husband valued learning, you see, not for its own sake but for its usefulness; the more you understood, the more finely you could plan.

He read very few modern books, because of his belief that the world contained nothing new, that new wisdom was merely old wisdom draped in finery. And as for fiction — well, my dear, I need hardly tell you! He was always dismissive of the books Celia and I read on our lazy afternoons or at the beach. Pearl S. Buck. Anya Seton. Marie Corelli. Part of me resented it at the time. In dismissing the books he was somehow dismissing us, but I see now that he had little space in his life for romantic reverie. He couldn't afford it, you see. His ambitions required that he harden his emotions. He never knew that I knew what a great effort of will that took — and it was through Celia, Cyril and Count Leo Tolstoy that I found out.

His birthday was coming up, I don't remember which one, but it hardly matters. I know you disagree with me, Mrs. Livingston, but I do believe you are being excessive when you claim that each and every one of your husband's many birthdays is clearly demarcated in your mind. What a lot of clutter your mind must contain, my dear …

In any case, his birthday was approaching and I had little idea of what to get him. Clothes were of little interest to him. He dressed well, if unimaginatively — that was political, you see. He had to dress impeccably — not expensively, or visibly better
than his followers — but his clothes had to be just so. What else was there? A bottle of good whisky, perhaps, but that was the sort of thing his political people got him. It was Celia who suggested Count Tolstoy, not the work about that foolish woman, which was her favourite, but
War and Peace,
which she said was a man's book. I thought it an intriguing idea.

We found a lovely edition at a bookshop in town, three volumes, if my memory does not betray me, with red dust jackets on which was a photograph of the author as a young man — sideburns, moustache — and not the elderly sage with the beard one usually sees.

I gave him the gift the morning of his birthday, before he set off, and he seemed delighted. He thanked me, gave me a brief peck on the cheek, and then proceeded to do an extraordinary thing. He removed the dust jackets and shredded them. I was appalled, but Celia found her voice before I did. What in the world was he doing? He explained that, to his eye, dust jackets cheapened the appearance of books, as did paper covers. Neither of us knew quite what to make of this, but then something intervened — the telephone rang, perhaps, or he was called away — and there was no opportunity to pursue it.

I remember Cyril picking up the books, weighing them in his hand and saying to me, “He won't read them, you know.” He was certain about this, but I gave him no chance to explain. It was not something I wished to hear, and so I cut him off by insisting that he would.

And he did. With surprising speed. Volume one. Volume two. And then out of the blue, some way into volume three, he slammed the book shut. I remember the moment, a Sunday morning, sitting on the back porch after breakfast. A sudden, violent
thwack
that startled everyone. He put the book down on the floor and stood up in great agitation. And looking at me
but speaking to us all, he said, “He thinks people like me are useless.”

I was upset, naturally, and wished to be alone with him, to calm him. But Cyril stepped over to me and advised that I let him be. I thought him impertinent. This was my husband, he was unhappy, it was my duty to comfort him. But Cyril was insistent. He asked me to come inside with him, there was something he wished to show me.

The moment we were out of earshot, Cyril chose to remind me that he knew his brother better than I did.

I pointed out that he'd been wrong about his not reading the books.

That, he replied, only proved my husband's loyalty to me. Such a gift from anyone else would have been relegated to the bookcase in the living room. “Fiction, you see,” he said. “It's a problem for him.

But he doesn't take fiction seriously, I pointed out. Why should that be a problem?

“But that's where you're wrong,” he said. “He takes fiction very seriously. Too seriously.”

And he told me a little story that has always struck me as both far-fetched and comforting. I will tell you that story with the warning that part of me suspects it of being a publicity man's confection.

He handed me a large book he had taken from the bottom shelf of the bookcase. It was
Oliver Twist,
beautifully bound, with a leather spine and corners, and covers that resembled wood grain marbled in gold. It was from a special edition of Dickens' works, as I recall, and had been given to the island's libraries as a gift by a shipping line, I believe. They came into my husband's possession in the usual way — a friend of a friend who worked for the library …

Cyril let me examine the book for a moment — it was a fat volume, with some weight to it — and then told me how, some years before, when he was a much younger man, my husband had spent days and nights devouring the books. He used the word “obsession” to describe the intensity my husband brought to the enterprise, and confessed that he himself had found Dickens' thicket of words too demanding to be pleasurable.

One evening he was sent by their mother to call his brother to dinner, and to his great surprise found him face in hands, weeping. Yes, weeping! Real tears! he said. And it was that book,
Oliver Twist,
that had caused it. On seeing Cyril, my husband grew furious. He threw the book at him, seized him by the shirt and made him swear he would tell no one about what he'd seen. Cyril promised — and he kept that promise for years, until the day my husband exploded at Tolstoy and so, in a way, at me. “Fiction speaks to both his head and heart,” Cyril said in conclusion. “But he accepts only the first.”

Do you know, Mrs. Livingston, my husband later threw out the Dickens with no explanation, but he did not have to explain his actions to me. I understood, you see, that he did so not because they were not precious to him but because the books were too precious.

You say that is not possible, Mrs. Livingston? It is not logical, I will grant you that, but possible — I am here, my dear, to tell you that it is. It was the only way, in our context, in the context of the times and of his ambitions, that he could survive.

As for the Tolstoy, he kept them, among his other books. But I understood he'd done so only out of consideration for me, not for
War and Peace.
During the fever of one of his campaigns, his people were preparing placards by pasting election posters onto cardboard. The paste was homemade — flour and water — and not very good. They needed heavy objects to hold the
posters in place until they dried. I remember spotting among the bricks and stones and tools several books, including the three volumes I had given him. So in a way, you see, my gift turned out to be useful after all.

Now, if you will forgive me, my dear, I really must visit the conveniences. All this tea, you know.

“DO YOU THINK
he read all these books, Amie?”

“Sure, miss. He was readin' all the time, you know, when he wasn' workin'.”

Yasmin quickly surveys the other titles. “He didn't read much fiction, did he?”

“Pardon, miss?”

“This.
War and Peace.
It's the only novel.”

“Is a special book, miss. A birt'day present. I remember him unwrappin' it —”

“Who from?”

“From Miss Penny, I think, miss.”

“Oh. Penny … ” She is vaguely disappointed, the drops of dried paint losing its magic, becoming just a spill with no sparkle to it.

Amie says, with concern, “Everything okay, miss?”

Yasmin slips the book back into its slot, closes the doors on the bookcase. “Everything's just fine.” But she lets Amie turn the key.

THE WEEK BEFORE
, Ariana had got it into her head to change the part in her hair from the centre to the side. The change was small, yet sufficient to alter the fundamental balance of her face — this face now puffy and powdered and shaded in a way that looked lifelike only to morticians.

Yasmin stared endlessly at that face now barely recognizable, searching for familiarity. When someone — she knows not who — hugged her and whispered how beautiful her daughter looked, she had barely been able to restrain herself. No, her daughter did not look beautiful, she was ugly in a way she had never been …

Yasmin reached out to touch the face: her fingers fled immediately, singed by its unnatural coldness.

As she pulled her hand back her mother, sitting by her, took it and warmed it in hers.

She sat, staring, seeking true recognition: an acknowledgement that went beyond words of this new reality.

Hours passed.

Jim had seen to the arrangements: the pastor, the church, casket, candles, flowers. It was in this way that he was beginning to piece himself back together.

Grief led to exhaustion, exhaustion to numbness, and out of that numbness rose anger at the mortician's attempt to give the corpse an appearance of vitality — an anger which in a distant part of herself she knew to be irrational but which another part of her recognized as the beginning of her own reconstruction. This cosmetic dressing was, she thought with bitterness, an attempt to transcend that succeeded only in making the ugly look uglier, the next logical step being to prop the corpse up
in a chair. And Jim, in selecting a burial outfit, had chosen a dress recently bought and never worn — she remembered, with a mind suddenly seething, the day she chose it, the moment she paid for it: remembered with stabbing pain the joy she knew it would give her daughter.