The Magus of Hay (2 page)

2

Without light

T
HE BEDROOM HAD
fitted wardrobes, floor to ceiling, and lemon walls on which the shadows of trees trembled. It overlooked a garden, well screened with silver birches and larches and woody extras: unnecessary gates, two beehive composters, a Gothic arbour, like a boat stood on end, with a seat for two.

The bedroom had twin beds with quilted bedheads and matching duvets, one blue, one light green. Also, a typist’s chair. Merrily had been shown directly up here. No living room chat, no offer of tea.

Ms Merchant, Sylvia, sat on the side of the blue bed facing the green bed.

‘This is mine. When I awoke in the morning, I’d see the sun over the trees at the end of the garden, and then Ms Nott’s face on her pillow. She tended to awake before me but would not get up in case that disturbed me. When I awoke, her eyes would often be open and looking at me.’

Ms Merchant was what used to be known as a spinster. An early retired secondary school headmistress with a
live-in companion
, who used to be her secretary. Used to be alive.

Rather than go to her parish priest, as was usual, Ms Merchant had made a direct approach to Sophie at the Cathedral gate-house office.

Merrily hovered by the typist’s chair, metal-framed, in the bay window.

Sylvia Merchant nodded.

‘Please…’

‘This was…?’

‘Ms Nott’s office chair. I bought it for her when we retired. From the education authority.’

Sylvia Merchant had moved from Wiltshire to Hereford, the town of her birth, with Ms Nott, on retirement. She had a long, solemn oval face, short bleached hair solid as an icon’s halo.

Merrily lowered herself on to the typist’s chair, the light-green bed between her and Sylvia Merchant.

‘And… she worked for you for…?’

‘Twelve years. For ten of them, we had separate homes.’ Ms Merchant’s soft voice trailed the faintest of Hereford accents which somehow made her sound even more refined. ‘But, as times – and attitudes – were changing, it seemed silly, as well as uneconomical, to pay two lots of council tax, insurance, water rates, all that.’

Merrily nodded. There was a murmur of traffic from the Ledbury road. This was Tupsley, the main southern suburb of Hereford, uphill from the town. Away from the main road it had these secure, leafy corners.

‘Ms Nott managed the garden,’ Sylvia Merchant said. ‘I’ve hired a girl. It’s not the same. Not yet, anyway.’

‘Looks wonderful. I don’t talk about mine.’

The movable backrest of the typist’s chair was fixed at the wrong angle, thrusting her forward. To keep herself steady, she had to push her feet into the carpet and her hands into her knees. Sylvia Merchant didn’t seem to notice.

‘Tell me about yourself,’ she said. ‘I’m sure I must have seen you around the Cathedral. Which we’ve always thought of as… our church, I suppose.’

‘Well, we’re based – Deliverance, that is – in the Bishop’s Palace gatehouse office, as you know. Although I tend not come in more than once or twice a week. I have a parish to…’

‘Ledwardine, yes. Not
quite
as charming as it was when I was a child, though it’s resisted most of the excesses. We park there
regularly, on the square, to walk the lanes on summer evenings. And occasionally have dinner at the Black Swan. Sad to hear about the manager losing an eye. He was quite a pleasant man.’

‘Still is. And handling the situation brilliantly. Sometimes, I suspect he rather likes wearing a black eye patch, although it—’

‘Deliverance,’ Ms Merchant said suddenly. ‘I’m not sure I like that word. In this context.’

She was sitting up, straight-backed. She wore a white blouse and jeans with creases. You could imagine her sitting just like that in her office when some kid was pulled in for smoking in the toilets. Last of a breed, perhaps.

Merrily shrugged.

‘Oh. Well. Nor me, really. I even prefer the term it replaced…’

‘Exorcist.’

‘… in a way.’

‘Although I gather,’ Ms Merchant said, ‘that you don’t perform that function very often these days.’

Sounding as if she’d gone into it. The Internet?

‘Well, that’s true,’ Merrily said. ‘Some of us go through an entire career without once facing a major exorcism. It needs special permission from the Bishop, anyway. And usually the involvement of a psychiatrist.’

‘And may only be applied against evil. A word seldom used these days.’

‘Shouldn’t be allowed to slip out of use, though,’ Merrily said.

Beginning to think she should have worn the full kit. The blue sweater and small pectoral cross… this looked like one of those situations where friendly and casual were inappropriate.

‘So,’ Ms Merchant said, ‘how would you describe your main function?’

‘Well… essentially…’ Never an easy answer to this one. ‘We try to help people deal with problems often dismissed as irrational. Which covers… quite a lot.’

‘You take such matters seriously.’

‘Always.’

Ms Merchant nodded. She was expecting jokes?

‘I have to say you seem quite young for this.’

‘I’ll be forty soon.’

‘Have you
known
bereavement?’

‘I’m a widow.’

Don’t ask, Ms Merchant. Really, don’t ask
.

‘Bereavement is a challenge,’ Ms Merchant said.

Ms Nott, Alys, had died a month ago following a stroke. She’d been cremated at Hereford, her ashes sprinkled on the garden, below the arbour. Telling Merrily about this, Sylvia Merchant had displayed no emotion, as if the ashes had been seeds. This was unusual. Normally, helping someone with this particular problem, you’d be faced with an uneasy mix of gratitude and the most gentle form of fear.

‘Erm, when did you first…?’

Ms Merchant extended her long legs, in surprisingly tight jeans, to the base of Ms Nott’s light-green bed.

‘Three days after the funeral, I awoke, as usual, at seven prompt. The sun was shining, much like today, but it was a cold morning. The winter wasn’t letting go. I’d look down, as I forced myself to, every morning, at Ms Nott’s pillow.’

Each of the beds had a pillow in a fresh white pillowcase.

Pushed unnaturally forward by the typist’s chair’s tilting back-support, it was hard not to look towards the pillow on the light-green bed. There was a shallow dent in it, as though a head had recently lain there.

‘She was smiling at me,’ Ms Merchant said. ‘As usual.’

Merrily nodded carefully.

‘Although her eyes were without light.’ Ms Merchant took a considered breath. ‘And I wasn’t sure she could see me.’

3

The crown

B
ETTY SAID
, ‘No, hold it.’

Watching Robin trying not to lean on his stick at the top entrance to Back Fold. His wild black hair was not so wild any more and not so black.

He was still in recovery. It would be a long recovery, never a full recovery, but he was not going to accept that. There was a jerky electricity in his movements and he kept looking all around him, his eyes collecting the sights the way a magpie crammed its beak full of the bread put out for all the birds. The sloping streets, the patched-up castle.
His
images.

As if he thought the town could help heal his bones: the idea of living in an old stone town under a medieval fortress. Right
under
the castle
, part of
the castle. Fused into a fairytale.

‘You know what?’ Betty said. ‘This pisses me off.’

It had been her idea, after they’d walked away from Nunne, actually to give some serious thought to starting a bookshop.

OK, it was crazy. They were closing down on every high street in the country. Like Nunne had said, e-books were strangling the second-hand trade. But e-books were boring, and a sufficiently seductive shop, given over to a particular theme, in the right location, was always going to pull people in.

And also – she wasn’t telling him this – it could be a showcase for Robin’s paintings. After the commercial work dried up, all he’d had left had been the paintings and, in a recession, original paintings by unknown artists were among the first items to
vanish from wish-lists. Especially paintings like Robin’s graphically brilliant but slightly skewed, spiritually-disturbing landscapes, streetscapes, stonescapes. But in Hay, with its international tourists… in the kind of bookshop they’d talked about… well, who knew?

‘What I think,’ Betty said, ‘is we should go and talk to some of the others.’

‘The other what?’ Robin glanced sideways at her. ‘Other damaged bastards?’

‘Booksellers. Other booksellers.’

Crazy, but the thought of talking to other booksellers gave him cold feet.
Forget Nunne
, he’d said on the way here,
booksellers are not like grocers and ironmongers. Booksellers, there has to be a hierarchy
.
Maybe subdivisions for philosophy and anthropology and like that. We’ll need to tread carefully.

His ideas could only have been confirmed by Mr Oliver, peering at him over those academic glasses. Betty really hated it when Robin got treated like the thick, naive American. But, more than that, she hated being used by people pursuing personal agendas.

‘There could be another shop available,’ Betty said.

‘With living accommodation? Near a castle?’

The alley was quiet. The remodelled red chimneys from the castle’s second incarnation jutted into the luminous grey sky like cigars from a packet. They walked down past Oliver’s darkened window and the next shop they came to had giant cricket stumps painted either side of its doorway and bails over the top, below the name P. T. Kapoor. In the window was an archaic-looking biography of Denis Compton, priced at thirty-five pounds.

The name would mean nothing to Robin, who shook his head in wonderment. Even after years living with an Englishwoman born in Yorkshire, he still didn’t get it about cricket.

‘All I can say, if
this
guy can make a living…’

‘Let’s find out how,’ Betty said.

Before he could argue, she was between the stumps.

*  *  *

Robin figured the guy was around his own age, maybe a little older. Stocky, with a dark-stubbled face, deep-set sparky eyes and what Robin figured was an East London accent. His blue and white T-shirt said MUMBAI INDIANS.

‘Bleedin’ Gareth Nunne, eh?’ he said. ‘What is it wiv these guys? Truth is, he don’t know if Oliver wants to sell. Nobody in the trade here knows, on account of Oliver don’t talk to them. Well, me, sometimes, to show he ain’t racist, but not often. He finks he’s been dissed, is what it is.’

‘What’s that about?’ Betty said.

‘How long you got?’ He looked at Robin’s stick, pulled out a stool for him, looked around for somewhere for Betty, but she shook her head. ‘Fing is, he’d never had a bookshop before, new or second-hand. College librarian or somefing academic. Told everybody who’d listen that he’d moved to Hay to be
close to literature
. Yeah, right.’

That was frowned on? Robin looked around the store. The spotlit walls and ceiling were painted different shades of green, the window frame white. A cricket bat hung on chains over the counter which you reached through an alleyway of book-stands, the books displayed face-up. Peeling dust-jackets with guys in caps, killer balls coming at you. Didn’t appear to be too much in here that wasn’t cricket-related.

‘He got fixed ideas on what’s literature. Imposes his own value-judgements. No crime novels apart from Danish, no romance post Jane Austen. Who’s he bleedin’ blame when his business bombs? Everybody but himself.’

‘Robin Thorogood.’ Robin jabbing a thumb into his chest. ‘This is Betty Thorogood.’

‘Jeeter Kapoor. Listen, Oliver ever lets you in, whatever rent he’s asking, offer him half and make him pay for repairs. He quibbles, tell him you’ve spent the last few hours talking to half a dozen suicidal booksellers.’

‘How do you know we haven’t?’ Robin said.

‘You’re still here.’

Robin nodded.

‘So how long
you
been here?’

‘Erm… free years, just over? Man and boy.’

Betty said bluntly, ‘Would you tell us about the suicidal booksellers?’

Robin frowned. His wife tended to skip the pleasantries.

‘Not
all
suicidal,’ Kapoor said. ‘Prozac does it for a few.’

‘You’re saying the book trade’s in what looks like terminal decline?’ Betty said. ‘Even here?’

‘Even
here? Where do I start? Internet sales? E-books? Yeah, let’s start there. Back in the day, if you couldn’t find a book on account of it being out of print, you came to Hay, had a fun day combing fousands of shelves, and even if you didn’t find it, you’d come away wiv another half-dozen what took your eye. Now… almost noffing is out of print, and one click delivers it to your device for peanuts. Ain’t even second-hand. No germs.’

Robin sighed.

‘So you think we may be taking a… small risk?’

‘Depends how desperate you are, mate.’

Kapoor strolled over to a coffee machine, began messing with it.

‘Look, can I…’ Robin fished around for a tactful question, then his hip twinged. ‘How do you make a living from, like…all this?’

Kapoor tweaked a smile. Robin put up his palms.

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean—’

‘Nah, nah, fair question. Answer is, this is
niche
. You prob’ly wouldn’t know, coming from a baseball nation. Don’t need whole books to explain baseball, pamphlet, maybe.’ Kapoor nodded at the computer on the desk. ‘Good portion of my trade’s in there. Mail order. Internet sales. Autographed copies. You get test cricketers passing frew town, none of ’em gonna walk past this shop. And I know what they all look like and I’m ready wiv
the pen. You ain’t got their book, you get ’em to sign old programmes, anyfing.’

‘So how much value’s a signature put on a book?’

‘Varies from a couple of quid to a hundred. Depends who it is. How often they sign. Or if they’re dead by now. Lot of my stuff goes abroad – all the big cricketing nations.’

‘You’re the only cricket bookshop?’

‘Only one in Hay, mate, and masses of stuff to go at. Biogs, real and ghost-written, back copies of Wisden, facsimile back copies. Then you got the specialist stuff, scientific analysis of bowling techniques, spin ratios. Also cricket novels, cricket poetry, vintage cricket annuals for kids. And cricket video on the side. No end to it, mate.’

Robin surveyed the racks.

‘
A Hundred Great Cricket Jokes
?’

‘Volume One,’ Kapoor said. ‘Ran for fifteen years until nineteen eighty. Full set, depending on condition, can fetch up to ninety quid. Another seventeen sets in the stockroom, job lot, firty quid. Small tip: only display one. Suggests rarity value.’

Kapoor stood back, looking at Robin.

‘You’re gonna be feeling your way, yeah? You need advice, you ask anybody. Well, almost anybody. What I’m saying, Hay ain’t about competition. Not that kind. Not now. Even the old-timers’re well pleased to see a new bookshop, long as it ain’t too shit or too cheap. Your visitors’re buying into the whole package. What’s left of it. Used to be over forty book dealers in Hay, back in the day. And that was only yesterday. Am I telling you stuff you know already?’

‘Uh…’

Kapoor peered into Robin’s face.

‘So, your niche. Trust me, a niche helps. Nobody wants their nice cricket library in a bit of plastic tat you gotta keeping charging up.’

The coffee machine started to babble and hiccup.

‘OK,’ Robin said. ‘We have a niche.’

Kapoor smiled.

‘Weird stuff, yeah? Witchy books, Teach Yourself Cursing.’

Robin felt himself going red, also felt Betty’s tension, which was rare. They’d told nobody.
Nobody.

‘Hey…’ Kapoor lifting up his hands, like in some Indian benediction. ‘No cause for panic. Bloke here seen you hanging round Oliver’s shop and recognized you. You got some sympaffy, mate, leave it at that.’ He looked down at Robin’s stick. ‘You still do that stuff?’

‘Like, you’re saying if we open a pagan bookstore we’re gonna encounter fundamentalists waving their crosses and calling down reprisals from a vengeful God?’

‘Here? Unlikely.
Highly
unlikely.’

‘I mean you’re Indian, right, you’d know all about this stuff. Sacred cows, elephant gods? Ganesh, Kali the destroyer with all the arms?’

‘Born in Brentford, mate, but, yeah, my people have many indigenous gods.’ Kapoor did a little guru-type bow, gestured at a framed and signed photo of an Indian-looking guy in shades and a white cap. ‘But while I’d be the last to diss the deities of my ancestors, when did Ganesh get a hundred test centuries?’

The card underneath the picture said
Sachin Tendulkar.
Robin had never heard of him, but he was getting the point.

‘Coffee?’ Kapoor said.

‘Thanks. Thanks, um, Shiva. You did say your name’s Shiva?’

Kapoor threw up his hands.

‘Stone me, you can’t get away from it, can you?
Jeeter.
Short for Paramjeet. Try fitting that over a bleedin’ shop doorway.’

Robin seemed happier. Danger sign. He’d just been told the second-hand book trade was in possibly terminal crisis and they’d be gambling on a niche, but he looked happier.

He’s found a possible mate, Betty thought warily. A guy who, on a slow day, he can walk out of the shop and trade insults with.

‘You knew he wasn’t called Shiva, didn’t you?’

‘Who, me? A naive cripple from a land where they play baseball and chequers instead of chess?’

They were walking along Castle Street, the main shopping thoroughfare in Hay. Betty saw food shops, fashion shops, an antiques’ shop and an outdoor pursuits shop selling canoes. A chemist and a jeweller’s which had a long-established look about it.

Robin, meanwhile – he gave Betty a commentary on all this as they walked – saw streets laid out like the fingers of a grey glove below the castle. A marketplace that sloped away from its curtain wall. A small statue with a crown high up on the gable end of a bookstore. A little structure with stone pillars like a Greek temple. Everything crowded, intimate. Once a walled town, most of the walls gone now, but still a town that was all old, just different periods of old.

And a handful of bookshops, of course, though possibly fewer than either of them remembered.

And one Betty didn’t remember.

‘Hey.’ Robin started to cross the narrow street, calling back over his shoulder. ‘Lemme just check this out.’

It was, at first glance, another bookshop, but it had more than books in the window. Behind the guides to the town and the castle were posters and certificates. One said
Hay Order of Chivalry
beside a picture of a man on a horse. A small flask was labelled
Royal Tipple
. There was also a picture of Henry VIII with no beard, a different face and glasses.

A red robe hung in the window. It had a fleece trim, like the one around the rim of the crown, which seemed to be made of thin, bevelled copper with a scattering of what looked like glass scabs. Robin pointed at the orb below the crown.

‘That’s gotta be out of a toilet! Am I right?’

‘It’s an old ballcock, Robin.’

Betty glanced up at the sign. The shop was called The King of Hay. In the centre of the window was the King’s autobiography.

Richard Booth,
My Kingdom of Books.

The man on the book cover wore the robe and the tin crown and carried the orb made out of a cistern component. Books were piled around him. In the background you could see part of the castle and the foothills of the Black Mountains.

‘I’m going in,’ Robin said.

‘
No…’

Betty was grabbing for his arm, but it was too late. She stood uneasily in the open doorway, listening to him talking to a woman and a bulky man of mature years who occasionally grunted. Robin was nodding at the crown.

‘It really safe to leave that in the window? All those jewels?’

‘Hmph,’ the bulky man said. ‘Could be right. Might not be easy to find another poodle collar.’

His laugh was the kind of laugh you rarely heard any more.
It’s a guffaw
, Betty thought, as Robin took down a copy of
My Kingdom of Books
.

‘This second-hand?’

‘Bugger off,’ the bulky man said.

Robin came out grinning, cradling the book he’d bought at full price, and the future was spinning in Betty’s inner vision and not all of it – she’d have to admit this – was optimistic.