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.
The woman in the long cheesecloth skirt has completed her browse and is approaching the cash desk. George comes out from his lair to attend to her. She has collected five books. George tots up the total, knocks five pence off the Hoskins, pointing out the torn jacket (always impresses a customer, that gesture of superfluous honesty). She makes suitable acknowledgment, says that she was so glad to have found the Ekwall, and writes out the check. He notes that she is a Mrs. P.M. Lively, puts the check in the drawer, she leaves, and within the hour he has forgotten her, except that all customers are filed away in some recess of the mind, along with every book that has passed through his hands.
A market town has fluctuating populations: resident, intermittent, transitory. This one earned much of its keep then by way of tourism, with a celebrated church on offer, a museum, a fine array of oolitic limestone buildings dating from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, and a substantial infrastructure of antique and gift shops. It was doing what a market town does—lure the punters. The number of occupants rose and fell, hour by hour, season by season—swarms of people on an August afternoon, just the inhabitants on a January night. The place could be gridlocked with traffic; drivers in search of a parking space circled like stacked planes.
Most of the day visitors tended to perambulate the High Street, check out the shops, and maybe dip into the church and the museum. The more adventurous would explore the side streets, with their substantial stone houses from the days of the town’s commercial prosperity. This was once a center of the wool trade; number twelve Sheep Street, one of the more impressive survivors, is picked out by Pevsner: “C16 refronted 1730, five bay front, keystoned windows, doorway with pedimented hood on brackets approached by semicircular steps. Inside, stairway with fluted balusters and carved handrail. C16 stone fireplace with a molded lintel and quatrefoils in the spandrels.” The discriminating tourist would have admired the exterior of the house, but also deplored its present condition, the stonework crumbling, the steps cracked and broken, the front door in dire need of a coat of paint. Nobody is putting on a show here, not anymore. Number twelve Sheep Street may be one of the most impressive houses in Hawkford, but it has lost its clout; wealth has moved elsewhere.
Hester Lampson, aged eighty, was born here and has found no reason to leave. Her parents bought the house in the 1890s. That speculative map of book distribution in the area would show a serious concentration at number twelve Sheep Street; here it was that Hester’s father assembled his remarkable collection and lived as a man of leisure, cushioned by private means. These had diminished alarmingly by the time of his death, though he appeared not to have noticed. The house was full of good furniture and small valuables, acquired over the years by Hester’s mother, while the books occupied every available space. There was not much rhyme or reason to the collection; Walter Lampson liked old books, attractively bound books, interestingly illustrated books, books on quirky themes. He read a great many of them. He was not a bibliophile but a man who found books irresistible. He saw; he bought; he read. Gradually, the house filled up; books covered the walls, overflowed onto landings, squeezed into cupboards and alcoves. Marian Lampson protested from time to time, but was herself entirely occupied with her garden, a fine walled space in the heart of the town which became her life’s work, and which would in due course be taken over, with equal fervor, by her daughter Hester.
Thus, number twelve Sheep Street, on the doorstep of which there arrived one afternoon a young man called Max Binns. Shortly before, he had paused outside George Bain Books to ask a woman in a long orange-and-yellow skirt who had just come out of the shop if she could direct him to Sheep Street. As it happened, she could. Max thanked her nicely; he had been well brought up, though some might be surprised to hear this. His long, unwashed hair hung to his shoulders, his flared jeans were torn at the knees and brushed the pavement, his shirttails were knotted around his midriff. He carried a rucksack.
Hester Lampson opened the door, and contemplated her great-nephew without enthusiasm. She had last seen him as perky ten-year-old and would not have recognized him had he not been quick to explain himself. The explanation was somewhat confused, but the gist of it seemed to be that he had found himself in the area, had been seized with a desire to see his dear aunt again, and, not to put too fine a point upon it, was proposing himself as a houseguest. There he stood, wearing a begu
iling smile.
Grudgingly, she let him in. She made it clear that this would have to be a brief visit. She indicated one of the several spare bedrooms, where Max dumped his rucksack on the bed and followed her downstairs again, talking effusively. Hester could hardly understand a word. His diction sounded most peculiar, and much of what he said did not seem to her to be English, or at least not English as she knew it. She suggested that he look round the house and the garden, to get rid of him for a while, but he then caught up with her in the kitchen, where—in some annoyance—she was putting together a meal of tinned spaghetti hoops in tomato sauce followed by Edam cheese and cream crackers.
Max noticed the books only as a pervasive form of furnishing. He did not read. He could count on the fingers of one hand the books that he had read from end to end. Books were a bore—who needed them? They reminded him of school, which he had considered the most appalling imposition on a free spirit. Having left at the earliest opportunity, without any discernible attainments, he was now free to realize his potential, and had been doing so for several years now, notching up a dozen brief spells of employment, rather longer on benefit, and a few run-ins with the police, who did not seem to understand his preferred lifestyle. He did not like to be tied down anywhere for too long, and had a taste for hanging out in unoccupied buildings with like-minded souls; he needed to smoke a joint most days, and if funds were short, well, you have to be resourceful, don’t you? From time to time he went home, where his parents would receive him with resignation and routine strictures. After a period of rest and recuperation, and a clandestine handout from his mother, who was always susceptible to a bit of sweet talk, he would be off again to see what might come up.
It was his mother who had mentioned Aunt Hester, in conversation with his father over supper one night.
“The old girl must be worth a packet,” his father had said. “That house . . . Crammed with valuable stuff.”
“Who’s Aunt Hester?” demanded Max.
“Oh, Max,” scolded his mother. “You know perfectly well. We’ve been there several times. I’ve always tried to keep in touch. Goodness, I wonder who she’ll leave it all to. . . .”
Max had pricked up his ears. Some thoughts were prompted, and thus in due course he knocked on Aunt Hester’s door, wearing his most winsome smile.
Max’s attention was not on the books, as he toured the house, thinking that it would be a great place for a squat. He had been more interested in various small ornaments and knickknacks that he spotted. It was Hester who alerted him, telling him crossly not to lean against the bookcase in the drawing room. He was giving her an extended account of a visit he had made recently to a rave in north Wales, hitchhiking there in five hours flat, which he considered a feat. Carried away by his narrative, and made a touch unsteady by the half bottle of sherry he had found in the dining-room sideboard, he had rested against the nearest vertical surface. “Don’t do that,” said Hester. “Those books are valuable, or so I’m told.”
And so it was that when Max left the next morning, Hester having made it clear that this was the limit of her hospitality, an ivory fan, a silver cigarette box and the Nonesuch Press edition of the poetical works of John Milton, with illustrations by William Blake, left with him.
Hester was not aware of this, though she had not been fooled by her great-nephew. There was only one reason why a young man should suddenly start to display concern and fondness for an elderly relative he scarcely knew. She had considered him, over the breakfast table, and had thought: I wasn’t born yesterday, you know, my lad. She had long since made her arrangements, in any case: a clutch of legacies (from which he was excluded, along with his parents), the bulk of the estate to be divided between the Canine Defence League and the Gardeners’ Benevolent Association.
George Bain knew when Max came into the shop that this was someone you kept tabs on. In the event Max merely cast a cursory eye around before approaching the desk. He had remembered this place from the evening before, and realized that it was probably just what he needed right now. He presented the Milton, with the explanation that he was disposing of it for a friend. Since this is the standard ruse under these circumstances, George Bain was not taken in for one moment. He examined the book briefly, and said that he would need to work out a price, if Max cared to return in an hour or so, this being a routine stalling procedure, where there seems to be doubt about the provenance of an item.
Max went off to check out the antique shops, in the interests of the fan and the cigarette box, while George set about a more leisurely inspection of the Milton.
The invoice from a London bookstore was folded between the pages, dated 1926, and with a price that George found to be highly gratifying, knowing as he did what Nonesuch Press editions fetched these days. There was also a name and an address: Mr. Walter Lampson, 12 Sheep Street, Hawkford. George stared hard at this, and reached for the local telephone directory.
Ten minutes later he was knocking on the door of number twelve. He did not know Hester, but recognized her when she opened the door as that large woman in brown clothes whom one saw pulling a shopping basket on wheels. Hester, needless to say, had never been into George Bain Books, but had seen George around and also reacted to a vaguely familiar face. She was marginally less frosty than she would otherwise have been, and allowed George into the house.
In the drawing room, they considered the Milton. Hester acknowledged her father’s invoice. She said she didn’t recognize that particular book, there were so many, after all, but she had a feeling there were some like that in the case over there. George crossed the room to have a look, found more Nonesuch editions, and a most suggestive gap. He returned to Hester, tutted, and asked if she knew the young man concerned. At this point he mentioned the going rate for an edition such as this.
Hester was astonished. She gave only a passing thought to Max—shifty little blighter—and focused entirely upon this matter of price. She knew little about money, having been brought up in the understanding that it is vulgar to display an interest in income, or the value of possessions. She had been aware that elements of her father’s collection were “valuable”; the word knocked about the house during her youth, a familiar local sound that made little impression. Equally, some of her mother’s ornaments and trinkets were “precious”; there was a fuss if something got broken. For most of her life, money had been something that the bank supplied according to need. However, over recent years this process had become less straightforward. The bank manager kept writing tiresome letters. He had drawn her attention to the dwindling balance in her account, and to the diminishing sums paid in each quarter from securities. For some while now she had been in the red, a condition mysterious to her until the bank manager had explained. He was becoming more and more pressing; it was all a confounded nuisance.
She eyed the Milton, and asked George Bain if he would care to buy it.
Now George was startled. Fortunately, he had somewhat understated the going rate, so there could still be a respectable profit. He said that he would be happy to oblige. He inquired what he should say to the young man, when he returned. Did Miss Lampson want the police involved?
Hester had entirely lost interest in Max. She felt no great rancor; indeed, she realized that he could be seen to have done her a favor. She would not miss the fan and the cigarette box for several weeks, by which time they seemed like water under the bridge. She told George to get rid of Max in whatever way he saw fit, graciously accepted George’s check, and parted with the Milton, which she had never been aware of in the first place.
When Max returned to the shop, George gave him a terse account of his visit to Hester Lampson. After a brief moment of dismay, Max smiled sweetly and remarked that he must have entirely misunderstood his aunt, he had been under the impression that she wanted the book valued, old people can be a bit confusing, can’t they? He then left, rather hurriedly.
George had not had an opportunity to inspect the bookshelves at number t
welve Sheep Street, but he had been intensely aware of them. They had glimmered at him from all sides; he had felt as though he had walked into an Aladdin’s cave. And it was clear that the old girl hadn’t got the foggiest interest in them. He pondered.
When her doorbell rang again two days later, Hester felt as though she were under siege. This time there was a young woman on the step, wearing one of those ridiculous skirts down to her ankles that girls wore these days. Apparently she had written Hester a letter, some while back, asking if Hester was in possession of the deeds to the house, which would be valuable source material for a history of the town on which this woman was working. A search at the County Record Office had failed to locate them.
Hester’s expression indicated that if people would insist on writing her letters, that was their problem. Her instinct was to close the door firmly in this person’s face, but the woman was quite insistent, nattering on about the age and interest of the house. If Hester was not in possession of the deeds, never mind—but would it be at all possible to have a look round? That would be such a help to her project.
Unwillingly, Hester said that she supposed she could manage a few minutes. She stumped ahead; the woman followed, making noises of appreciation. She took an interest in the books, lingering in front of the cases, which irritated Hester, who wanted to get back to the long border. “They’re good wall covering,” she said. “You don’t need to repaint a room that’s got plenty of books. Not that I go in for repainting.”
At this point the front doorbell rang—a delivery of coke for the Raeburn, which required supervision by Hester. When she returned, the woman was still scrutinizing the books, moving from shelf to shelf. “I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “I took the Camden Britannia down for a moment, just to have a look. And the Leland. What an amazing collection . . .”