In England second-hand booksellers still travel round the country visiting ancient bookshops in obscure towns and remote villages, turning up at country houses owned by the illiterate descendants of some late but lettered man, snapping up bargains at shabby local auctions, never missing even a makeshift or spur-of-the-moment provincial book sale (often held in such places as the local fire station, the foyer of a hotel with no guests, or a church cloister). Since their lives are an endless round of travelling, researching and hunting things down it makes sense to tell them what you're looking for, because the chances are they can find it for you. Amongst the booksellers whose acquaintance I cultivated was a married couple by the name of Alabaster, who made a major contribution to my stock of eccentric acquisitions. Their shop was small, dark and comfortable, simple and insalubrious, a cross between a cosy nook and a haunted house, with beautiful fine wood shelves all of them warped and barely visible beneath the weight and inconceivable disorder of the thousands of books that did not so much fill the shelves as crush and bury them. The Alabasters must have made a reasonable living for inside that dark, stuffy, dusty place, lit even at the brightest hours of the day by a couple of lamps with glass shades, was the additional glow of a television screen which, in the closest of closed circuits, allowed them to see what was going on beneath the one flickering bulb of the shop's basement without their having to keep going up and down the stairs every time a prospective buyer ventured down there to explore its depths. As if wishing to participate in a modernity with which their merchandise was so at odds, the couple seemed to spend their days watching on television (in black and white) what could be seen only a few yards away, right under their noses (in colour). Mrs Alabaster was a smiling, authoritarian woman, with one of those very English smiles that you see adorning the faces of famous stranglers in films as they're about to choose their next victim. She was middle-aged with greying hair, fierce eyes and capped teeth and, wrapped in a pink woollen shawl, she would sit at her desk, writing incessantly in an enormous accounts book. To judge by her constant activity, which she interrupted only (but frequently) to gaze with intent interest via her screen upon the lower levels of the bookshop (almost always empty, always uneventful) the amounts of money handled by the Alabasters must have been vast and the accounts accordingly complex. Mr Alabaster, the husband and original bearer of the name, was equally smiling but his smile was more like that of the strangler's anonymous victim just before he realises his fate. He was a good-looking, well-groomed but casually dressed man still blessed with a thatch of immaculate grey hair and with the slight air of an ageing, theoretical Don Juan (of the type prevented by social class or by an early, rock-solid marriage from ever savouring the charms of the role), who still retains a suggestion of the coquetry and cologne of his less hypothetical years. But, despite the fact that he too was almost always in the shop, I can't recall him ever once answering my questions or queries. He would smile and greet customers in the manner of an energetic, lively man (his whole bearing was intrepid) but he delegated anything requiring a reply, however insignificant, to the greater knowledge and authority of his wife. He would turn to her and repeat with great vivacity and exactitude the question he'd just been asked - appropriating it as his own, as if he were the one interested in knowing the answer: "Have we had anything in by Vernon Lee, darling?" - adding only that one word, "darling". While she enjoyed the benefits of the desk and a comfortable armchair, he had to content himself with sitting on one of the stepladders from which I myself, not without a twinge of guilt, would often dislodge him in order to browse along the more neglected and less accessible upper shelves. He would remain standing until I'd finished up above and then, after wiping down with a cloth the one step that was his seat, he would sit down again without even a hint of impatience. Every time I went into the shop, I found them there, in the same immutable places and positions, she scribbling numbers in a huge ledger or scanning the television screen with her fierce eyes, he leaning back a little on the ladder, his arms crossed (I never saw him reading a book or leafing through a newspaper, still less talking to Mrs Alabaster) in an attitude of expectation, his most strenuous activity (which he shared with his wife) being that of (indirectly) surveying the basement. The cheerfulness and urbanity with which Mr Alabaster greeted any customer entering the shop indicated that, in his role as passive subaltern, the mere appearance of someone through the shop door was the highlight of his day, and his effusive greeting of that customer its most glorious and sociable moment. For, as I have said, the fact is that subsequently he was incapable of answering the simplest question or even of indicating the shelf the buyer was looking for ("Have we got a travel section, darling?") Their absorption in the televisual observation of their basement made me wonder if the Alabasters were not perhaps empowered to see something invisible to other mortals. Often, when inspecting the basement, I would spend less time examining the books than peering into corners and at the floor in the hope of discovering some tiny animal they kept there or of hearing the tenuous breathing of a ghost. But I never saw or heard anything and when I descended to that cobwebbed basement to rummage around in the half-shadows, I imagined that the appearance on their boring screen of my figure — seen in the flesh upstairs only seconds before - would have the Alabasters catching their breath with excitement and more than once I was tempted to perform some prank or steal a book just to provide them with a little entertainment or to arouse alarm. In fact I did neither but I would try to loiter there as long as possible and move about the basement swiftly, randomly, unexpectedly, or repeatedly take my gloves off and put them on again, button and unbutton my coat, smooth my hair, make a lot of noise blowing the dust off books then leaf through them ostentatiously or with exaggerated slowness, take notes in my diary, tap my foot in feigned impatience or doubt, cough, sigh, mutter and exclaim in Spanish and generally lend as much variety as possible to the meagre spectacle I doubtless presented for those four eyes (two childlike and two perverse) observing me in my hunt for books.
Shortly after informing them of my interest in any book by Machen they might come across (although the truth is they never seemed to stray even a mile outside Oxford) and over a period of several days of forays into bookshops, I observed a man who seemed to be following almost in my footsteps. I saw him nosing around in Waterfield's vast antiquarian bookshop, in the mysterious upper floor of Sanders the engravings shop, in Swift's and in Titles, both in Turl Street, in the secondhand section of Blackwell's monumental and comprehensive emporium, on every one of Thornton's three floors, in out-of-the-way Artemis and even in the tiny Classic Bookshop that specialised in Greek and Latin texts. I consider myself to be a fairly observant person but it took no special talent to notice that particular man: he himself was fairly remarkable, but what most drew the eye was the dog he always had with him and that waited for him outside. It was a nice little mahogany-coloured terrier with an intelligent face but with one leg missing — its left back leg had been nearly amputated. That's why it always lay down while it waited, though it stood up as soon as it heard anyone leaving the shop at whose door it was tied, in the hope, I imagine, that it would be his bibliomaniac master. Since I usually arrived at the bookshops before the latter, I also left before him and each time the terrier would hop to its feet and reveal its small polished stump like an atrophied wing. I'd stroke its head and the dog would sit down again. I never heard the dog bark or growl even when it was raining or blustery outside; it never seemed disgruntled. Its owner, who was more or less my age, was still in possession of both his legs, but he complied with the old saying that owners always look like their dogs in that he was rather lame in one of them, his left. Although during those two or three days I never actually saw them together (the man inside the shop, the dog outside), the association was easy enough to make, their two recurring presences rendering it unequivocal. The man dressed in good albeit rather threadbare clothes, wore a hat as to the manner born and, judging by his complexion and hair colour, w
as Irish. Inevitably, though I'd paid him little attention, I had noticed him inside the bookshops, for even in the most extensive and labyrinthine of establishments I had at some point found myself perusing the same bookshelf as him, but we'd only exchanged the most fleeting of neutral, that is veiled, glances. At no point did it occur to me that he could have any connection with the path traced by my own random footsteps, still less that he might be following in them, although it did seem odd that I'd never before noticed such an immediately identifiable couple, not even whilst walking round the town, and yet now I met him often enough to find their maimed figures, his and the dog's, slightly and momentarily troubling, however little notice I took of them. Perhaps they were strangers passing through, a bookseller and his dog up from London on a recce to Oxford.
On the morning of one of those Sundays exiled from the infinite, I was working in my distinctly uncosy pyramid of a house and, as was my custom on that particular day of the week, kept looking up from time to time to gaze out of the window at the pleasant young gypsy flowerseller in her high boots, jeans and leather jacket, who on Sundays and bank holidays - come rain or snow - used to set up her stall on the pavement opposite. Sometimes, in the midst of my exile, I would go out and buy a bunch of flowers from her simply to exchange a few words with another living soul. Looking up for the nth time in only a brief period, I saw the man and the dog coming down St Giles', the former clearly exhibiting his handicap and the latter his conspicuous lack. They were walking along the opposite pavement and I watched for some time as they hobbled up to the flower stall. I thought: "So the man goes out on Sundays too, even when all the bookshops are closed." I saw him take off his hat to buy something or just to chat to the girl and went back to my boring university tasks. Some seconds later the doorbell rang and I thought it was probably the flowerseller come to ask me for a glass of water, as she did sometimes, receiving instead a Coca-cola or a beer, but when I looked up before going downstairs, I saw that she was still there on the other side of the road. I went down and opened the door and the man who owned the dog with the missing leg stood smiling timidly up at me from the bottom of the front steps, holding his brown hat pressed against his chest.
"Good morning," he said. "My name's Alan Marriott. I should have phoned first. But I haven't got your number. Just your address. And anyway I'm not on the phone. I'd like to talk to you for a moment. If you're not too busy. I waited until Sunday, that's when people tend to be freer. Generally speaking, that is. May we come in?" He spoke as if punctuating each phrase, rarely using conjunctions, as if his speech too were lame. Although he wasn't wearing a tie he looked as if he was, perhaps the effect of the hat, perhaps because he wore his dark blue shirt buttoned to the neck. He could never have been mistaken for a university man, but neither did he look like someone indigent or unemployed. He wore two rings - he lacked taste - on the hand clasping his hat. There was something mean and unfinished about him, though that may just have been the impression left by his lameness.
"Would you mind telling me what this is about? If it's anything to do with religion, I've no time."
"Oh, no. It's nothing to do with religion at all. Unless you consider literature to be a religion. I don't. It's about a literary matter."
"What happened to your dog?"
"He was in a fight."
"OK. Come upstairs and tell me about it."
I ushered them in and led them towards the spiral staircase, but before going up, as if he knew or could imagine the house, the lame man took a step towards the kitchen and asked politely: "Shall I leave the dog in the kitchen?"
I looked down at the poor three-legged beast, so obedient and peaceable. "No, bring him up, he deserves our respect, and he'll be better off upstairs with us."
On the next floor up, the second floor, in the room that served me as both living room and study, the man could not resist an immediate glance at the few books I kept in Oxford (every so often I despatched bulky packages to Madrid containing the books I'd already collected) and which barely occupied two shelves. With the Latin hospitality I never managed to rid myself of, I asked if he wanted anything to drink, to which he said no, more because he was taken aback by the offer than because of any genuine disinclination to have a drink. He obviously felt he was intruding. I sat down on the chair I normally worked in and left the sofa to him. He didn't take off his raincoat when he sat down, it was already extremely creased. The dog lay down at his feet.
"What happened to him?"
"Some hooligans at Didcot station. They started having a go at me. The dog came to my defence. He bit one of them. He hurt the fellow. Badly. Between them, they caught him and put him on the railway line of the train we were waiting for. Somewhere beyond the platforms. They held me down too. They covered my mouth. It was late at night. They intended the train to cut him in half. Lengthways. But when the train came they weren't brave enough to hold him there right till the end, with their hands so near the line. The train didn't look as if it was going to slow down. In fact it didn't stop. It wasn't our train. He managed to roll over and so only lost his leg. You can't imagine the amount of blood he lost. The hooligans took fright and ran off across the fields. I got off lightly with just a few blows with a stick. My own lameness is due to polio. I contracted it as a child."
"I had no idea Didcot station was so dangerous."
"Only on match days. Well, it was when Oxford United got into the First Division. Not something that's likely to happen very often."
I couldn't resist giving the dog a few pats on the back. It received them with total indifference.
"Was he a hunter?"
"Yes, but not any more."
"A hunter of books, perhaps," I said, uncertain as to whether or not I should mention it.
The man smiled slightly. He had a friendly face and very large, pale blue eyes with a slight squint. When you looked at them it was difficult to determine exactly the direction of their gaze.
"Yes. I'm sorry about that. Mrs Alabaster told me about you. She gave me your address."
"Mrs Alabaster? Ah, yes, I gave it to her so that she could let me know if she managed to find some books I'm interested in. I'm not sure she should have given it to you."
"Yes, I know. Don't be cross with her. You must forgive her. She knows me well. She told me about you and I wanted to meet you. I did rather insist. I've spent the last few days following you around the bookshops. I didn't want to approach you in the street. You probably realised."
"Following me? But why?"
"To see what you bought and how you went about it. How much time you spent perusing the shelves and how much you spent. What you spent it on. You're Spanish, aren't you?"
"Yes, from Madrid."
"Do people there know Arthur Machen?"
"A few things by him have been translated. Borges wrote about him and spoke very highly of him."
"I don't know who Borges is. You must give me the reference. It's Machen I've come to see you about actually. Mrs Alabaster told me you were looking for some books by him."
'That's right. Can you get hold of any for me? I haven't found many up till now. You're a bookseller, are you?"
"No. I was for a few years. It's not easy finding anything by Machen these days. I've got nearly everything by him. Well, not everything. But if you find some title you're not interested in or that you've already got, buy it for me anyway. If it isn't too expensive. I'll always find a buyer for it. I've never found Bridles and Spurs. That's a book of essays. It was published in America." Alan Marriott fell silent and, when I said nothing, he seemed suddenly embarrassed. He began turning his hat round and round in his hands. He looked down at the floor, then over at the window. I wondered if he could see the flowerseller from where he was sitting. He couldn't. He loosened his raincoat. The dog yawned. At last Marriott said: