As if this extravagant beauty were not enough, there are the eyes. Intensified by some photographic sleight of hand to an inhuman green, the green of glass in a church window, or of emeralds or of boiled sweets, they gaze out over the heads of the commuters with perfect inexpression. I can’t say whether the other travellers that day felt the same way as me about the picture; they had read the books, so they may have had a different perspective on things. But for me, looking into the large green eyes, I could not help being reminded of that commonplace expression about the eyes being the gateway to the soul. This woman, I remember thinking, as I gazed at her green, unseeing eyes, does not have a soul.
Such was, on the night of the letter, the extent of my knowledge about Vida Winter. It was not much. Though on reflection perhaps it was as much as anyone else might know. For although everyone knew Vida Winter – knew her name, knew her face, knew her books – at the same time nobody knew her. As famous for her secrets as for her stories, she was a perfect mystery.
Now, if the letter was to be believed, Vida Winter wanted to tell the truth about herself. This was curious enough in itself, but curiouser still was my next thought: why should she want to tell it to me?
Margaret’s Story
Rising from the stairs I stepped into the darkness of the shop. I didn’t need the light switch to find my way. I know the shop the way you know the places of your childhood. Instantly the smell of leather and old paper was soothing. I ran my fingertips along the spines, like a pianist along his keyboard. Each book has its own, individual note: the grainy, linen-covered spine of Daniels’ History of Map Making; the cracked leather of Lakunin’s minutes from the meetings of the St Petersburg Cartographic Academy; a well-worn folder that contains his maps, hand-drawn, hand-coloured. You could blindfold me and position me anywhere on the three floors of this shop, and I could tell you from the books under my fingertips where I was.
We see few customers in Lea’s Antiquarian Booksellers, a scant half-dozen a day on average. There is a flurry of activity in September when the students come to buy copies of the new year’s set texts; another in May when they bring them back after the exams. These books my father calls migratory. At other times of the year we can go days without seeing a client. Every summer brings the odd tourist who, having wandered off the beaten track, is prompted by curiosity to step out of the sunshine and into the shop, where he pauses for an instant, blinking as his eyes adjust. Depending on how weary he is of eating ice-cream and watching the punts on the river, he might stay for a bit of shade and tranquillity or he might not. More commonly visitors to the shop are people who, having heard about us from a friend of a friend, and finding themselves near Cambridge, have made a special detour. They have anticipation on their faces as they step into the shop, and not infrequently apologize for disturbing us. They are nice people, as quiet and as amiable as the books themselves. But mostly it is just Father, me and the books.
How do they make ends meet? you might think, if you saw how few customers come and go. But you see the shop is, in financial terms, just a sideline. The proper business takes place elsewhere. We make our living on the basis of perhaps half a dozen transactions a year. This is how it works: Father knows all the world’s great collectors, and he knows the world’s great collections. If you were to watch him at the auctions or book fairs that he attends frequently, you would notice how often he is approached by quietly spoken, quietly dressed individuals, who draw him aside for a quiet word. Their eyes are anything but quiet. Does he know of… they ask him, and Has he ever heard whether… A book will be mentioned. Father answers vaguely. It doesn’t do to build up hope. These things usually lead nowhere. But on the other hand, if he were to hear anything…And if he doesn’t already have it, he makes a note of the person’s address in a little green notebook. Then nothing happens for quite some time. But later – a few months or many months, there is no knowing – at another auction or book fair, seeing a certain other person, he will enquire, very tentatively, whether…and again the book is mentioned. More often than not, it ends there. But sometimes, following the conversations, there may be an exchange of letters. Father spends a great deal of time composing letters. In French, German, Italian, even occasionally Latin. Nine times out of ten the answer is a courteous, two-line refusal. But sometimes – half a dozen times a year – the reply is the prelude to a journey. A journey in which Father collects a book here, and delivers it there. He is rarely gone for more than forty-eight hours. Six times a year. This is our livelihood.
The shop itself makes next to no money. It is a place to write and receive letters. A place to while away the hours waiting for the next international book fair. In the opinion of our bank manager it is an indulgence, one that my father’s success entitles him to. Yet in reality – my father’s reality and mine; I don’t pretend reality is the same for everyone – the shop is the very heart of the affair. It is a repository of books, a place of safety for all the volumes, once so lovingly written, that at present no one seems to want.
And it is a place to read.
A is for Austen, B is for Brontë, C is for Charles and D is for Dickens. I learned my alphabet in this shop. My father walking along the shelves, me in his arms, explaining alphabetization at the same time as he taught me to spell. I learned to write there, too: copying out names and titles onto index cards that are still there in our filing box, thirty years later. The shop was both my home and my job. It was a better school for me than school ever was, and afterwards it was my own private university. It was my life.
My father never put a book into my hands, and never forbade a book. Instead he let me roam and graze, making my own more and less appropriate selections. I read gory tales of historic heroism that nineteenth-century parents thought were suitable for children, and gothic ghost stories that were surely not; I read accounts of arduous travel through treacherous lands undertaken by spinsters in crinolines, and I read handbooks on decorum and etiquette intended for young ladies of good family; I read books with pictures and books without; books in English, books in French, books in languages I didn’t understand, where I could make up stories in my head on the basis of a handful of guessed-at words. Books. Books. And books.
At school I kept all this shop reading to myself. The bits of archaic French I knew from old grammars found their way into my essays, but my teachers took them for spelling mistakes, though they were never able to eradicate them. Sometimes a history lesson would touch upon one of the deep but random seams of knowledge I had accumulated by my haphazard reading in the shop. Charlemagne? I would think. What, my Charlemagne? From the shop? At these times I stayed mum, dumbstruck by the momentary collision of two worlds which were otherwise so entirely apart.
In between reading, I helped my father in his work. At nine I was allowed to wrap books in brown paper and address them to our more distant clients. At ten I was permitted to walk these parcels to the post office. At eleven I relieved my mother of her only job in the shop: the cleaning. Armoured in a headscarf and housecoat against the grime, germs and general malignity inherent in ‘old books’, she used to walk the shelves with her fastidious feather duster, her lips pressed tight and trying not to inhale. From time to time the feathers would stir up a cloud of imaginary dust, and she recoiled, coughing. Inevitably she snagged her stockings on the crate that, with the predictable malevolence of books, would just happen to be positioned behind her. I offered to do the dusting. It was a job she was glad to be rid of; she didn’t need to come out to the bookshop after that.
When I was twelve Father set me looking for lost books. We designated items lost when they were in stock according to the records but missing from their rightful position on the shelves. They might have been stolen but, more likely, they had been left in the wrong place by an absent-minded browser. There were seven rooms in the shop, lined floor to ceiling with books, thousands of volumes.
‘And while you’re at it, check the alphabetization,’ Father said.
&nb
sp; It was a job that would take for ever; I wonder now whether he was entirely serious in entrusting it to me. To tell the truth it hardly mattered, for in undertaking it I was serious.
It took me a whole summer of mornings, but at the beginning of September, when school started, every lost book had been found, every misplaced volume returned to its home. Not only that, but – and in retrospect this is the thing that seems important – my fingers had made contact, albeit briefly, with every book in the shop.
By the time I was in my teens, I was giving my father so much assistance that on quiet afternoons we had little real work to do. Once the morning’s work was done, the new stock shelved, the letters written, once we had eaten our sandwiches by the river and fed the ducks, it was back to the shop to read. Gradually my reading grew less random. More and more often I found myself meandering on the second floor. Nineteenth-century literature, biography, autobiography, memoirs, diaries and letters.
My father noticed the direction of my reading. He came home from fairs and sales with books he thought might be interesting for me. Shabby little books, in manuscript mostly, yellowed pages tied with ribbon or string, sometimes hand-bound. The ordinary lives of ordinary people. I did not simply read them. I devoured them. Though my appetite for food grew frail, my hunger for books was constant. It was the beginning of my vocation.
I am not a proper biographer. In fact I am hardly a biographer at all. For my own pleasure mainly I have written a number of short biographical studies of insignificant personages from literary history. My interest has always been in writing biographies of the also-rans, people who lived in the shadow of fame in their own lifetime and who, since their deaths, have sunk into profound obscurity. I like to disinter lives that have been buried in unopened diaries on archive shelves for a hundred years or more. Rekindling breath from memoirs that have been out of print for decades pleases me more than almost anything else.
From time to time one of my subjects is just significant enough to arouse the interest of a local academic publisher, and so I have a small number of publications to my name. Not books. Nothing so grand. Just essays really, a few flimsy pages stapled in a paper cover. One of my essays – The Fraternal Muse, a piece on the Landier brothers, Jules and Edmond, and the diary that they wrote in tandem – caught the eye of a history editor and was included in a hardback collection of essays on writing and the family in the nineteenth century. It must have been this essay that captured the attention of Vida Winter, but its presence in the collection is quite misleading. It sits surrounded by the work of academics and professional writers, just as though I were a proper biographer, when in fact I am only a dilettante, a talented amateur.
Lives – dead ones – are just a hobby of mine. My real work is in the bookshop. My job is not to sell the books – my father does that – but to look after them. Every so often I take out a volume and read a page or two. After all, reading is looking after in a manner of speaking. Not old enough to be valuable for their age alone, nor important enough to be sought after by collectors, my charges are dear to me even if, as often as not, they are as dull on the inside as on the outside. No matter how banal the contents, there is always something that touches me. For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down.
People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humour, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.
As one tends the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. I clean them, do minor repairs, keep them in good order. And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head. Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so. For it must be very lonely being dead.
Although I have touched here on my very private preoccupations, I can see nonetheless that I have been putting off the essential. I am not given to acts of self-revelation: it rather looks as though in forcing myself to overcome my habitual reticence, I have written anything and everything in order to avoid writing the one thing that matters.
And yet I will write it. ‘Silence is not a natural environment for stories,’ Miss Winter told me once. ‘They need words. Without them they grow pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.’
Quite right, too. So here is my story.
I was ten when I discovered the secret my mother was keeping. The reason it matters is that it wasn’t her secret to keep. It was mine.
My parents were out that evening. They didn’t go out often, and when they did, I was sent next door to sit in Mrs Robb’s kitchen. The next-door house was exactly like ours but reversed, and the backwardness of it all made me feel seasick so, when parents’ evening rolled round, I argued once again that I was old enough and sensible enough to be left at home without a babysitter. I had no great hope of success, yet this time my father agreed. Mother allowed herself to be persuaded with only the proviso that Mrs Robb would look in at half past eight.
They left the house at seven o’clock, and I celebrated by pouring a glass of milk and drinking it on the sofa, full of admiration at my own grandness. Margaret Lea, old enough to stay home without a sitter. After the milk I felt unexpectedly bored. What to do with this freedom? I set off on a wander, marking the territory of my new freedom: the dining room, the hall, the downstairs toilet. Everything was just as it had always been. For no particular reason, I was reminded of one of my baby fears, about the wolf and the three pigs. I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down! He wouldn’t have had any trouble blowing my parents’ house down. The pale, airy rooms were too insubstantial to resist, and the furniture, with its brittle delicacy, would collapse like a pile of matchsticks if a wolf so much as looked at it. Yes, that wolf would have the house down with a mere whistle, and the three of us would be breakfast in no time. I began to wish I was in the shop, where I was never afraid. The wolf could huff and puff all he liked: with all those books doubling the thickness of the walls Father and I would be as safe as in a fortress.
Upstairs I peered into the bathroom mirror. It was for reassurance, to see what I looked like as a grown-up girl. Head tilted to the left, then to the right, I studied my reflection from all angles, willing myself to see someone different. But it was only me looking back at myself.
My own room held no promise. I knew every inch of it and it knew me; we were dull companions now. Instead I pushed open the door of the guest room. The blank-faced wardrobe and bare dressing table paid lip service to the idea that you could brush your hair and get dressed here, but somehow you knew that behind their doors and drawer fronts they were empty. The bed, its sheets and blankets tightly tucked in and smoothed down, was uninviting. The thin pillows looked as though they had had the life drained out of them. It was always called the guest room, but we never had guests. It was where my mother slept.
Perplexed, I backed out of the room and stood on the landing.
This was it. The rite of passage. Staying home alone. I was joining the ranks of the grown-up children: tomorrow I would be able to say, in the playground, ‘Last night I didn’t go to a sitter. I stayed home by myself.’ The other girls would be wide-eyed. For so long I had wanted this, and now that it was here, I didn’t know what to make of it. I’d expected that I would expand to fit the experience automatically, that I would get my first glimpse
of the person that I was destined to be. I’d expected the world to give up its child-like and familiar appearance to show me its secret, adult side. Instead, cloaked in my new independence, I felt younger than ever. Was there something wrong with me? Would I ever find out how to grow up?
I toyed with the idea of going round to Mrs Robb’s. But no. There was a better place. I crawled under my father’s bed.
The space between the floor and the bed-frame had shrunk since I was last there. Hard against one shoulder was the holiday suitcase, as grey in daylight as it was here in the dark. It held all our summer paraphernalia: sunglasses, spare film for the camera, the swimming costume that my mother never wore but never threw away. On the other side was a cardboard box. My fingers fumbled with the corrugated flaps, found a way in, and rummaged. The tangled skein of Christmas tree lights. Feathers covering the skirt of the tree angel. The last time I was under this bed I had believed in Father Christmas. Now I didn’t. Was that a kind of growing up?
Wriggling out from under the bed, I dislodged an old biscuit tin. There it was, half sticking out from under the frill of the valance. I remembered the tin: it had been there for ever. A picture of Scottish crags and firs on a lid too tight to open. Absently I tried the lid. It gave way so easily under my older, stronger fingers that I felt a pang of shock. Inside was Father’s passport and various, differently sized pieces of paper. Forms, part printed, part handwritten. Here and there a signature.
For me, to see is to read. It has always been that way. I flicked through the documents. My parents’ marriage certificate. Their birth certificates. My own birth certificate. Red print on cream paper. My father’s signature. I refolded it carefully, put it with the other forms I’d already read, and passed on to the next. It was identical. I was puzzled. Why would I have two birth certificates?