The Lion Tamer’s Daughter (4 page)

After tea I'd wash the dishes and pots and we'd play crib, which was an old-fashioned card game for two. I didn't enjoy it that much, but my grandmother did. Then she'd send me up to bed at nine o'clock while she stayed down to listen to the evening news on the wireless. To know how the war was getting on, she told me, but it was really so she could have her nightcap, which was the red-currant wine she used to brew, gin and stuff being difficult to get hold of. I think she didn't want me to know that was what she was up to, but of course I did.

I didn't like going off so early, because I wasn't allowed to read in bed, except for a few months in the summer when it was light enough because of the double summer time we had to help the war effort. They'd never bothered to put any electrics into the attics, so I'd collect my candle off the shelf at the bottom of the attic stairs and light it and use it to go to bed by, but my grandmother was dead scared of the house catching fire and us being trapped up there—quite right about that she was, of course, though it didn't bother me at the time—so she wasn't having me reading in bed, not at any price. Candles were hard to come by, wartime, anyway.

That night I never got right undressed. I took my shoes off and folded my trousers and sweater on the chair and got the rest out of a drawer and put them on top so my grandmother would see them all there when she looked in on her way to bed. Then I got into bed in my shirt and underpants and socks, and pulled the blankets right up and blew out my candle and waited for her. It was still just about light—I'd only needed my candle because of the blackout making everything so dark. Soon as I heard her come limping up the stairs I shut my eyes and pretended I was asleep. She put her head round the door and gave a sniff to check I hadn't only just blown my candle out—leaves a smell, that does—and went out. I heard her pottering about and then muttering her prayers and then the creak of her bedsprings, but I didn't move till she was truly snoring. Then, soon as the walls were shaking with the sound of it I got up and found my sweater and trousers by feel and put them on and crept down in the dark with my candle, picking up the matches as I passed the shelf at the bottom. I didn't know my way from the bottom of the next lot of stairs so I stopped and lit my candle and instead of turning right to get onto the back stairs I turned left along a little bit of corridor and then right again and out onto the main stairs.

By now my heart was really hammering. I was scared stiff of what I was doing but I knew I had to go through with it. Even finding myself out on the main stairs and seeing what they looked like didn't make me turn back. I was creeping along this short bit of corridor with my candle and then I found myself out in this great big cavern of a place, full of shadows and darknesses, all moving around as the candle flame shook in the draft. Two floors up through the middle of the house the stair-hall ran, with a white marble floor and a black star in the middle of it and the stairs, marble too, climbing up round three sides, with a kind of gallery above all round leading off into other corridors. In peacetime there was a glass dome over it to let the light in, but they'd run beams across and fastened the blackout stuff to it, just above my head where I was standing on the balcony, black, of course, and sagging a bit, saying to me—I don't know how—that I wasn't supposed to be there.

I went on, all the same, creeping down the stair and along the passage where I'd been with Kitty, till I came to the library door. I found the key and unlocked it and shut it behind me before I switched on the light. Dazzling bright it seemed, after my candle, far more than what I wanted, but I had to have something because my eyes weren't really good enough for reading by candle more than a little bit, and besides I'd be in real trouble if I used my candle up faster than my grandmother did hers.

I looked under the dust sheets. One of them was a big desk with a desk lamp on it. There was a socket in the floor so I plugged it in and tried it, and it worked. What's more, the hole in the middle of the desk for the writer's knees made a kind of cave where I could wriggle in, so I put the lamp down in there and went and got Volume III of
Ivanhoe
. We'd left the steps out ready for next time, so that was easy. Then I turned off the main light and crawled into my cave and pulled the dust sheet down over the opening and started to read. In a minute or two I wasn't thinking of anything except the unknown knight's assault on the castle of Front de Boeuf.

I never heard Miss van Deering come in. The first I knew was when the dust sheet was lifted aside and there was this face, all weird shadows in the light of my lamp, staring in at me from the mouth of my cave. I just gaped. My specs fell off—that lot of sticking plaster had been getting old. She didn't say anything, just crouched there, staring. I don't know how long it was before she said, in a strange, gasping voice, “I hope your hands are clean.” Then she stood back and let me crawl out.

I was usually far too unadventurous to get into this sort of trouble, but when it did happen I always clammed up. “Dumb insolence,” somebody said once, but it wasn't like that. My mind stuck and my tongue wouldn't work, which was what happened now. All I could do was show her my hands, which weren't too bad after the washing up.

“What are you reading?” she said in a more ordinary voice, but still gasping a bit.

I'd hung on to
Ivanhoe
, so I gave it to her. She looked at the spine. Her eyebrows went up.

“You are aware that there are two earlier volumes?” she said.

I nodded.

“You have read them? You have been coming in here like this for some time?” she said. She still didn't seem to be accusing me of anything. She just sounded surprised.

I shook my head. She waited.

“It was at the orphanage,” I blurted. “Only the end was gone. I just wanted …”

I stuck.

“I see,” she said at last. “So you have almost finished?”

I took the book and tried to show her, but I'd been holding my specs on with one hand and I needed two to turn the pages. In the end I managed somehow. There were only about ten pages to go.

“Very well,” she said. “You may finish now. When you have done so please put everything back as you found it and then come and knock on the office door, and I will close up and check the lights. I'm afraid I must ask you not to come in here again. Some of these books are valuable. That one you are reading comes from a complete set of the first edition of the Waverley novels in the original bindings, which are rarer than you might think, as few people collected them all and those who did often had them rebound.”

I had no idea what she was talking about, so I just nodded.

“In any case,” she went on, “I think few of the books in here are likely to interest you, but at the further end of the West Passage on the second floor you will find some books which may be more to your taste. You may read those if you wish, provided you take only one at a time, and look after it, and put it back before you take another. I will tell your grandmother that you have my permission to do so. I will not, incidentally, tell her that I have found you here.”

I was still struck dumb and couldn't even say thank you, so I nodded again and stood there, staring. She stared back, ooh, for a long while, and then she said in the same gasping sort of voice she'd used at the beginning, “I'm not much of a reader, myself, you know.”

Then she jerked herself round and left. I did as she told me and went to bed.

So that was the one time I met Miss van Deering properly, to talk to. Next evening my grandmother said to me, “Miss van Deering says there's some books upstairs you can read, if you've a fancy to, and you'd better have new specs to read them with. She's given me the money. Funny old thing, some ways.”

The only other thing I noticed different was that coming out of church Miss van Deering didn't look at us and give her little smile anymore. She just walked straight past, as if we weren't anything to do with her.

3. Mr. glister

On Thursdays, like I've said, Benjie Prior would harness up a willful dark pony called Starlight and take my grandmother into Worcester in the trap, to get the rations and anything else she could find worth cooking. School holidays I'd go along too, to help fetch and carry my grandmother said, but really it was because Thursday being market day the pubs were open all afternoon, and Benjie and my grandmother wanted me to keep an eye on Starlight while they went into the Royal Oak for a glass or two. That meant I could go to the oculist next Thursday, to have it sorted out about my specs, and he said I'd got to have two pairs, one for distance and one for reading. There wasn't enough money for that, so my grandmother paid for the other pair and I had to start paying her back out of the three shillingses I got for helping Mr. Frostle.

Now the best thing about going with them into Worcester was that next door to the Royal Oak there was a secondhand bookshop with a rack of cheap books outside, nothing over sixpence, like Woolworths used to be. That's what I'd been spending my three shillingses on. I used to hitch Starlight to a lamppost and stand out there, under the awning if it was raining, and read until Benjie and my grandmother were about due out, and then I'd slip into the shop, still keeping half an eye on Starlight, and buy something, more to pay for my reading than because I really wanted it. Paying for the specs I couldn't do that anymore, and I didn't think it was right, reading and reading and then not buying anything, so I just hung around, but the very first Thursday I tried that the fellow who owned the shop spotted me and came out and asked, joking, if I'd given up on the reading. A bit embarrassed, I told him about the specs, but he just laughed and said it was better for business if he had someone out on the pavement who looked interested in his books.

Most days after that he'd pop out for a chat, not about anything much, the weather or the war and so on. His name was Mr. Glister.

I left school when I was fourteen, which a lot of us did those days, and my grandmother said I had to do something by way of a job. She'd teach me to cook, she said, but I wasn't interested, any more than I was in starting with Mr. Frostle as a full-time garden boy. For once, I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and next Thursday I went into Mr. Glister's and asked if I could help him in his shop. I didn't think he'd say yes, because I'd hardly ever seen anyone else going in there so I didn't think there could be any money in it, but I thought he might give me an idea where to start. He said yes, straight off, and he'd pay me a pound a week, and one pound ten when I'd learnt the ropes. You could have knocked my grandmother down with a feather, she said when I told her.

I was in my seventh heaven. I used to bicycle the five miles into Worcester six days a week, rain or shine, and out again in the evenings. Wednesdays was early closing and I could have gone home dinnertime, but I mostly stayed on reading until Mr. Glister told me to clear out because he wanted to shut up. He lived over the shop.

I couldn't make him out for a long while. I mean, here he was, with several rooms crammed with old books and nothing much to do with his time, but he hardly ever read a word. He wasn't interested in books the way I was, what was in them, how exciting the story was, that kind of thing. Books weren't voices to him, the way they were to me, speaking to me in my head while I read them. To Mr. Glister books were
things
. How old were they? What kind of shape were they in? Were they by anyone famous? That sort of thing. I'd been right about not much trade coming in through the door. He couldn't have afforded my pound a week on the money he got that way. No, he made his living from the books he kept up in his office.

I remember one of the times he went off for the day to a sale and left me to mind the shop. Middle of the afternoon he telephoned, saying I'd got to shut up early and meet him at the station with the barrow, because he'd bought three cases of books. I helped unpack them. He was absolutely purring with glee.

“You see if you can spot what I've found,” he said.

He never bought just the one book at a sale, in fact the more interested he was in something the more books he'd buy which he wasn't that interested in, so no one would spot there was something tucked in among them that was really worth having. That's where most of the stuff in the shop came from. This time a lot of them looked really nice, with shiny leather covers and their titles in gold on the spines. Three of them were volumes of
Rob Roy
by Walter Scott, the same fellow who wrote
Ivanhoe
.

“I don't know if that's the first edition,” I said. “But anyway it's not the original binding.”

His little gold specs almost jumped off his nose.

“What do you know about original bindings?” he said.

I told him, and his eyes really glistened at the thought of a complete set of the Waverley novels, first edition, in the original bindings.

“Out of my league,” he said. “Out of my league. Not but what I haven't done pretty nicely today, thank you. Carry on. Five bob to you if you spot it.”

In the end I chose a big volume of sermons because it looked really old and really boring, so I knew nobody would want it for what was in it.

“Not bad,” he said. “It's a second edition, but Donne was a very popular preacher so there were a lot of them printed, and quite a few around still. Still, we might get a few quid for it. I thought you were there for a moment.”

He picked up another one I'd thought about because it looked boring too. It was poems by three people called Bell with silly first names, in just a green cloth binding.

“Ever heard of the Brontës?” he said. “Charlotte, Emily, and Anne?”

“I'm reading
Jane Eyre
to my grandmother, evenings,” I said.

“Are you now? Are you now?” he said. “Well, this is their first published work. They called themselves Acton, Currer, and Ellis Bell so that people wouldn't know if they were men or women, but it didn't do very well, even so. I doubt if there's more than a few dozen in existence today. The auctioneers ought to have spotted it and sent it up to London, but that's wartime for you.”