Making It Up (24 page)

“So we walked by the Nile. Another sunset—the last. She said she still missed the egrets: ‘It seems all wrong without them.' There was construction work all over the place—tower blocks going up, the old buildings coming down. It was all change, in Cairo.

“We had dinner at our favorite café, and then we went back to her flat. A few days later, she got on that plane, and the rest you know.

“I'll finish now. There's no more to say, really.”

 

 

“Do you ever take that locket off?” asked Clare.

“Occasionally. When I have a bath.”

“Well, it suits you. Or something does, these days.”

Sarah had told Clare about John Lambert's letters. “He's finished now. End of story.”

“Sad.”

Except that it seemed also to be a beginning. But she was not going to say that. She had reread all the letters, and thought—fifty years ago, nearly half a century. And something comes full cycle. Love, again.

She found that she had entered some other time sphere, one that she had visited before but had almost forgotten. Its climate was familiar, yet also subtly different. Happiness is never the same twice over.

The days were flavored now by phone calls, by the approach of the weekend. Barry had gone home again, his contract with the museum ended. Then he was off elsewhere, on another job. Each day, there lay ahead the solace of the evening, when they could talk; each week, the hours ticked by until the moment when she would drive up north, or he would come to her.

There was now, and there had been the time before, which seemed like a period of half-life, or unknowing. And yet, she thought, it was all right, or so it seemed; I was not unhappy, I was not discontented—just, I did not know about him, about this. She was losing the solipsism of life alone; she began to think in terms of “we” and “us.” Sometimes, she was alarmed: Is this rash? Is this what he wants? Is this what I want? And then the evening would come, or the weekend, and she would know that in fact rationality did not enter into it—what was bound to happen, would happen.

And so it was that after a while—weeks? months?—he said to her, “This won't do, will it? All this to and fro. I can't be having it.”

“No,” she said. “Nor me.”

“So there's only one thing for it, isn't there?”

 

 

Forgive this tardy acknowledgment of your last letter, wrote John Lambert. I've been unwell. They're not sure what it is, but discouraging noises are made by the men in white coats. All very tedious. I won't bore you with it.

I'm all the more glad that I sent you that stuff about Cairo. About her. At least now there's someone else who has an idea of how it was.

This time I really am signing off. But before I do so, may I offer all my congratulations and good wishes on your forthcoming marriage.

Yours,

John

 

 

I have no half sister. My parents were divorced when I was twelve, and by a subsequent marriage my father had two sons, when I was in my twenties. As a solitary child, my fantasies featured a mythical sister, along with the cast of
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
. Maybe Sarah is the last gasp of this unfulfilled need, in which case it is only natural that I should wish to give her a happy ending.

I
drifted into writing. Today, there is a career structure, it seems:
master of arts degrees in creative writing are available up and down the land from prestigious universities. At a lower level, serious aspirants can cut their teeth in writing groups, or on writing courses. If there was anything like that around in the 1960s and 1970s, I did not know, and would have been alarmed at the idea, I suspect. I was entirely ignorant about publishers and had never heard of literary agents. Writing my first book, I could not imagine that it would arouse any interest, but why not have a go?

You write out of experience, and a large part of that experience is the life of the spirit; reading is the liberation into the minds of others. When I was a child, reading released me from my own prosaic world into fabulous antiquity, by way of Andrew Lang's
Tales of Troy and Greece;
when I was a housebound young mother, I began to read history all over again, but differently, freed from the constraints of a degree course, and I discovered also Henry James, and Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Evelyn Waugh, and Henry Green, and William Golding, and so many others—and became fascinated by the possibilities of fiction. It seems to me that writing is an extension of reading—a step that not every obsessive reader is impelled to take, but, for those who do so, one that springs from serendipitous reading. Books beget books.

 

A house that contains books has concealed power. Many homes are bookless, or virtually so, as any house hunter discovers. And then suddenly there is a place that is loaded—shelf upon shelf of the things—and the mysterious charge is felt. This house has ballast; never mind the content, it is the weight that counts—all that solid, silent reference to other matters, to wider concerns, to a world beyond these walls. There is a presence here—confident, impregnable.

Books invade; they arrive, and settle. They are a personal matter, as in book-affected homes, but they are also commercial, archival, official. A map displaying the distribution of books in Hawkford, a historic market town in midland England, would show serious infestation in the High Street (the sites of George Bain Books, the Country Bookshop, and the County Library), with light local occurrences elsewhere, and entire streets and housing estates virtually untouched. The County Library, at this point in the early 1970s, is still in a prelapsarian state. These are the good old days of card indexes, a table with newspapers, and books. No screens; the Internet and the online catalog are a mere gleam in someone's eye. There is a swath of fiction—straight, romance, crime, sci-fi—a respectable cross-section of history, a gesture toward psychology, philosophy, sociology; some photography, upholstery making, tie-dying and quilt making for the hobby-minded, plus all the usual suspects in travel and biography.

The Country Bookshop deals in cookery, gardening, nature, humor, children's picture books, popular fiction, and biographies of sportsmen and actors. This is where you find a Christmas present for an aunt or something for a godchild. The range reflects both local demand and the taste of the proprietor: nothing too taxing, nothing that will sit forever on the shelf, sex and violence in the strictest moderation.

George Bain Books, Antiquarian and Second-Hand, is on the other side of the street and very far away indeed in mood and method.

George Bain himself sits behind a stacked desk at the back of the shop, so screened by books and papers that he is virtually invisible to customers, which is the idea. It is not so much that he does not wish to inhibit browsers as that he is defending himself from importunate chat while still being able to keep an eye on what is going on. At any one time, he is well aware of exactly who is in the shop and what they are doing. Right now, he is inspecting a pile of sale catalogs, but his chameleon eyes keep covered the entire premises; he has noted the chap with the rucksack checking through old Everyman editions, the couple muttering together in Poetry, and the woman in the back room, intent upon the Local History section—a young woman in a long wrap-over cheesecloth skirt, brightly patterned in shades of yellow and orange, worn with a black T-shirt and a rope of brown beads. She has been in once or twice before. He watches her as she pulls books out. She has a way of pushing her glasses up on her nose with one finger.

I know the type, thinks George. Bored, energies smoldering, kids at school, hubby bringing home the bacon. Latter-day blue-stocking, raring to get her teeth into some enterprise. Not canals and railways, dear, they've been done to death, and anyway that's a man thing. Ah, that's better—W.G. Hoskins:
Local History in England
. Torn jacket, scuffed. Thirty pence, if I remember rightly, but I'll probably let you have it for twenty-five. And now you've found Ekwall—
The Place-Names of Oxfordshire
. Quite hard to come by, that—you're in luck. And you know it. I can tell by the expression—quiet exultation. Mind, I see that look quite a lot in here. The smart cookies try to conceal it, thinking they've got a bargain. It's the innocent who come over to the cash register all gushing and chatty: I'm
so
pleased to have found this, been hunting for ages, completes my set, special passion of mine, blah-blah-blah.

People are a necessary evil of this business. George Bain is not mad about people. The occasional drink after a book auction with some chap he knows, Christmas with his sister, and that's about the size of it. The flat above the shop; the dog who spends the day snoozing in the office at the back, occasionally emerging to snarl at a customer. And books.

Books, books, books. George is not awed by books, but he is amazed by them. He does not read a great deal; he dips and samples and is thus intensely aware of this indestructible, apparently self-perpetuating commodity which provides him with a modest living, and which will flow on after he has gone, after his customers have gone, passed from hand to hand, an unstoppable progress through time, these small, eloquent, impervious blocks of matter. He has the measure of them, though. He knows a rarity when he sees it, he knows values, he can gut a sale list with half an eye. He can sieve through the stuff on the shelves of some deceased person and do the heirs a favor; once in a while you hit the jackpot, mostly you don't. The books win, always; they win by sheer numbers, by their dogged diversity. He sometimes sees them as a kind of chronic invasion—a culture that blooms where it can, and grimly proliferates when it gets a hold. The books always have the upper hand: silent, inert, ineradicable.

They also
are
the culture. George Bain Books is a repository, pretty well, for the intellectual heritage of much of the Anglo-phone world, if you care to see its cluttered interior in those terms. For a fiver, you could pick up the entire canon of English poetry—a battered
Complete Works of Shakespeare
for thirty pence. Tennyson at twenty, Keats fifteen, Wordsworth ditto,
The Longer Poems of Robert Browning
a giveaway at a five pence on the odds and sods table. The culture may be tenacious, but it is also a snip; it would cost you a great deal more to equip your kitchen at Cotswold Homes and Interiors along the street.