Consequences (15 page)

“That’s not very nice,” snapped Jennifer. She did not care for value judgments, where the stock was concerned. A book was a book was a book: a matter of classification and shelf mark.

It sometimes seemed to Molly that the library was a place of silent discord and anarchy, its superficial tranquility concealing a babel of assertion and dispute. Fiction is one strident lie—or rather, many competing lies; history is a long narrative of argument and reassessment; travel shouts of self-promotion; biography is pushing a product. As for autobiography…And all this is just fine. That is the function of books: they offer a point of view, they offer many conflicting points of view, they provoke thought, they provoke irritation and admiration and speculation. They take you out of yourself and put you down somewhere else from whence you never entirely return. If the library were to speak, Molly felt, if it were to speak with a thousand tongues, there would be a deep collective growl coming from the core collection up on the high shelves, where the voices of the nineteenth century would be setting precedents, the bleats and cries of new opinion, new fashion, new style. The surface repose of a library is a cynical deception.

Two or three times a year, the Trustees held a meeting in the Johnson Room, an inner sanctum reserved for silent study (or sleep). On these occasions, there was extra expenditure on flower arrangements, and Miss Clarence wore her best coat and skirt.

Molly was detailed to take in a tray of coffee and biscuits half-way through the meeting. The Trustees were familiar faces to her, for the most part—assiduous library users. But this was the first time that she had again set eyes on Mr. Portland, whom she had to think of as her supporter, according to Jennifer. He sat once more at the end of the table, slightly apart, and as she placed a cup in front of him, and offered milk and sugar, he glanced up: a nod, a flicker of a smile. Molly, too, nodded, but forbore to flicker; inappropriate, perhaps.

She was back behind the issue desk when the meeting ended and the Trustees dispersed. She noted Mr. Portland—tallish, tanned face as though fresh from somewhere far away and hot, and that indefinable whiff of expense: something about the cut of his suit, his coat, she thought of pedigree animals, nurtured only on the best. He was heading for the door, but swerved suddenly and arrived in front of her.

“Did you take my advice about Françoise Sagan?”

Molly replied that she had not done so as yet—she intended to get hold of a French edition of
Bonjour Tristesse.
This was not entirely true, though she had in any case given up on François Mauriac.

“And are you enjoying life as a librarian?”

“Very much,” said Molly. And beamed. After all, this man had apparently done her a favor; the least one could do was to be agreeable.

Mr. Portland seemed to contemplate her. He stood in silence for a moment, then inclined his head. “Glad to hear it—Molly.” The glimmer of a smile, and he was gone.

Jennifer had been pretending to sort request slips, but was evidently provoked by this anodyne exchange. “I thought you said you didn’t even know who Mr. Portland was?”

“I still don’t.”

Jennifer sniffed. “Well, he’s not usually like that with the staff.”

“Perhaps he’s trying to give me confidence,” said Molly demurely.

The library consumed her days. In the evenings and at weekends, she consumed London, finding aspects of the city unknown to her during her growing-up years with Lucas. Two or three college friends were around, to serve as company; she made new acquaintances. They haunted cinemas, cheap theater seats, espresso bars. The occasional trip to an Italian restaurant, when they could afford it. But there was little money to spare for such things; by and large, entertainment had to be free or cut-price—a walk in Richmond Park, a ride in the river boat to Greenwich, a bus up to Hampstead Heath.

This was life as a grown-up, ejected from the nursery of student days. You worked, and then you went forth and did whatever you liked—you enjoyed yourself. Work was the enabling factor: it determined how you could live and, indeed, if push came to shove, whether you lived at all. I am now a wage earner, thought Molly—an entirely grown-up situation. She found this rather exhilarating. It was up to you. You had to navigate as best you could. There would be opportunities, and there would be reverses. Rather like Snakes and Ladders, a game to which Simon had been addicted when younger.

A few days after the Trustees’ meeting she found a package addressed to her at the library. Within was a copy of a French edition of
Bonjour Tristesse,
along with a novel by Rosamond Lehmann. A handwritten card said simply: With the compliments of James Portland.

Over the kitchen Nescafé that evening, she said to Glenda, “If a man sends you books, what would that suggest? An older man.”

“Books! It’s normally flowers, or perfume. Books I find definitely odd. How old?”

Molly pondered. “Fortyish, maybe.”

“Who is he?”

Molly explained.

“Well, generally speaking, you’d say he could only be after one thing. It’s the books that are out of step, as it were.”

“Couldn’t he just be being kind?”

“I suppose he
could
…”

Molly wrote a decorous letter of thanks to the expensive address at the top of the card. And it was several weeks before James Portland appeared in the library again. On this occasion, there was one of the lectures that took place in the main reading room out of opening hours. On such evenings, either Molly or Jennifer was required to attend, in order to arrange and then put away the battalion of folding chairs kept in the storeroom. The lecture was over, and Molly was about to start the process of chair removal, when she noticed him at the door to the room, talking to someone. She stacked chairs, briskly, and then saw him coming toward her.

“May I help?”

“Oh no, please don’t. Miss Clarence would be horrified. I mean—thank you so much, but really I can manage perfectly well.”

“And was Mademoiselle Sagan to your taste?”

“I liked the way it’s written, but I found the emotional part a bit—intense. Perhaps you need to be French.”

“Personally,” he said, “I didn’t care for it at all. I assumed that in my case I was the wrong age and the wrong sex.”

“It was very nice of you to send the books.”

“Not at all. I am in the trade, so I like to promote reading. Though I suspect you need no encouragement.”

Molly said that she had always read quite a lot.

“And are you now all set as a career librarian?”

“Gracious, no.” Molly hastily backtracked. “That is—I mean—I haven’t been doing it for long enough to be certain.”

“Quite so. Well—keep reading. Good-bye.”

Later, she said to Glenda, “It’s all right. That man. It was sort of in the line of business—the books.”

“If you say so.”

Glenda had a boyfriend in the accounts department at John Lewis. The courtship proceeded at a leisurely pace because the plan was for eventual marriage when they had saved enough for the deposit on a house, with an engagement staged at the half-way post, whenever that might be. “When we’ve got about two hundred and fifty quid each,” said Glenda. “Around next Easter, with any luck, if we go easy on Christmas. Then we’ll get the ring.”

It seemed to Molly that passion thus contained by economic expediency was rather sad, but Glenda appeared to be quite content with things as they were. She made lists of eventual requirements by way of furnishings and equipment, which were to be tied in with the wedding-present list: “That’ll cover quite a lot of it, bar the big stuff.”

Molly thought of her mother’s two weddings. The second she could dimly remember; Lucas had spoken once or twice of the first, and she had this pale image of her young parents in a bleak register office—made reckless by love. The antithesis of Glenda’s pragmatic approach. In fact, the two experiences seemed unrelated. The difference, she thought, was that her parents had refused to allow their circumstances—her mother’s family, their combined lack of money—to dictate what they did, whereas Glenda and her boyfriend were complying cheerfully with social expectations. They were being good citizens, and not doing anything rash in the name of love. In due course they would have two-point-five children, maintain their mortgage and pension payments, and retire into a tranquil old age.

Well, you cannot know how you will deal with things yourself until they happen. A good deal had happened to Molly in childhood—too much, indeed—but she reckoned that since then she had not met with any major challenges. She had picked her way through the thicket of higher education, but that was more a question of doing things right. So I don’t know, she thought, if I am a potential Glenda, or the other sort.

The year flowed from winter to autumn. Suddenly, or so it seemed, Molly had been at the library for nearly twelve months. She was an established figure, an old hand, settled into a state of armed neutrality with Jennifer, and occasional bouts with Miss Clarence, who was appreciative of her efficiency but clearly thought her a potential subversive element: too ready with an opinion, too much a favorite with some of the members. It had been noted that whenever Mr. Portland was in he made a point of having a few words with Molly. It was evident that he took some sort of interest in the girl, and of course it was perfectly proper for him to do so in his capacity as a Trustee of the library, but it did not do for the degree of interest to be—well, overly apparent. Miss Clarence observed, reserving judgment.

Molly had begun to rather like James Portland. He was never other than courteous and friendly, and was given to the occasional sardonic remark that made her smile—some tempered swipe at the library’s determined resistance to change, or quick savaging of a vaunted new popular title. He liked esoteric books, recherché authors. Indeed, she began to follow his reading tips, and discovered Henry Green and Ivy Compton-Burnett.

The library was not given to innovation. Certain practices had been followed for decades, and would apparently remain enshrined forever: the magazines in the reading room should include the
Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator, The New Statesman, Punch,
but not
Vogue, Which?
or
Country Life;
new applicants for membership must supply the names of two referees; Trustees served for ten years; the list of proposed acquisitions was scrutinized by a subcommittee of Trustees; a further subcommittee supervised the lecture list.

The lectures. Monthly events for the membership. Mostly, they featured an author talking about his or her latest publication—some biography of an eighteenth-century aristocrat, or travel writer’s account of a bold foray into jungle or desert or insightful encounter with a primitive people. Occasionally, local history was the topic; at other times someone had been roped in to talk about ceramics or bookbinding. When on chair duty, Molly would attend the lecture, and was sometimes interested, but mostly rather bored. She felt that the library failed dismally to engage with contemporary issues of any kind. Books were the prompt for many lectures, but they were not allowed to provoke debate or dissension.

Other things struck her as unprogressive or downright impractical. Why allow Trustees to serve for ten years, which meant that you were stuck with people like that garrulous old fellow of whom everyone complained? Equally, why allow a self-perpetuating oligarchy to impose its taste upon the acquisitions list? Why not expand the intake of magazines? Why enforce the referee rule for new members, which implied some sort of social scrutiny, when all you needed to know was whether they were in a position to pay the subscription? From time to time she went so far as to voice these ideas to Miss Clarence and Jennifer, and was rewarded with some coolly dismissive remark. When, occasionally, a radical-minded member would raise one of the same points, she would concur warmly, if unwisely.

It was
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
that triggered the crisis. Along with all other up-to-the-minute readers, Molly had bought a copy of the Penguin edition when the outcome of the trial made these available. You couldn’t not. The papers had made much of it for weeks; the confrontation between the posse of bright, young, articulate people, some of them academics, who trooped in to give evidence for the defense, and this archaic judge, who apparently thought that people still had servants: “Would you want your family or your servants to read this book?” So she had bought the book, and thought “Gosh!” here and there, and had found it not really to her taste, but that was Lawrence rather than the sex—I mean, the business with the flowers was too fey for words, you could only laugh. And the paperback was still in the holdall that she brought to work, when, one day, Jennifer spotted it. She said nothing, but her sudden frozen posture electrified the cloakroom, where she and Molly were hanging up their coats.

Molly followed her gaze. “Have you read it yet?”

“Certainly not,” said Jennifer, scandalized.

Molly smiled sweetly. “You really should. It puts into perspective everything that was said at the trial. And after all that was what the trial was all
about
—that people should be able to read what they want to read and make their own judgments. Actually…I’ve just had a good idea. It would be a brilliant subject for a lecture here—a discussion of the whole issue of book censorship, get that Richard Hoggart or someone to come…” She checked herself in the mirror, tidied her hair, and sailed out into the day’s work, leaving Jennifer in a condition of speechless outrage.

Subsequently, Molly would wonder what on earth came over her that day. Was it a fit of evangelical highmindedness or—and she had a sneaking feeling that this was the truth—the spirit of sheer mischief? She was a trifle bored at the library, irritated by its stubborn conservatism, increasingly footloose. It was a devil-take-the-consequences moment.

During the lunch hour, she drafted a letter to the chairman of the Lectures Committee. The letter was phrased with careful diffidence, saying how much she personally appreciated the opportunity to hear such interesting speakers, but wondering if the committee had thought of introducing an element of discussion, prompted perhaps by contemporary issues. For instance, the current debate on the legalization of homosexuality and the reform of the abortion laws—both of these matters extremely pertinent to literature, and indeed informing the work of various writers of the twentieth century. And then, of course, there was the recent trial and the publication of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover,
a most fruitful subject.