I heard Mum’s voice:Excellence is the only thing he values. People are commodities to him. They’re disposable.
Diana went on: “We found you, Anya. Your eidetic memory,your linguistic knowledge, the breadth of your learning and experience. It’s exceptional. Was I less than honest about the situation to bring you together? Yes, because I didn’t think you’d agree to meet otherwise. Am I sorry? I don’t know yet.”
I was very angry with her, but part of me admired her honesty.
Magnus said, “I don’t know if it helps to hear this, but I felt the same as you when Diana first proposed this. But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed right. At the very least, my hope was,is, that we can have a fruitful working relationship that helps your career and helps us get to know one another.”
“You’ve never been interested in helping me.”
“Is that what your mother told you? Did she tell you how often I tried? And how often she knocked me back?”
I bit my lip.
“I hurt her,” he said. “I own it. The way I treated you both was unforgivable, but I was very young and very stupid. I can’t change the past, but I can try to improve things for us now.”
Don’t believe a word that man says.
I couldn’t hear it. “I want to leave,” I said.
He messaged his driver. I didn’t want to use his car, but my foot was throbbing, and I knew I couldn’t walk far on it. When it arrived, Diana got in with me.
“No,” I said.
“Give me one more chance,” she said. “You don’t know everything, and I owe you the full picture.”
I didn’t know what to say or whether to trust her. I still felt ambushed, angry, used. She saw my indecision and leaned forward to talk to the driver.
“Could you please take us to Cecil Court.”
We got out of the car near the National Portrait Gallery. We were in the heart of London’s theater district, busy with billboards and traffic, on the roads and on foot. I followed Diana down a short,pedestrianized street leading toward Covent Garden. It was lined with small, independent bookshops, specializing in first and rare editions. A book lover’s paradise.
She entered one of the smallest, and I followed. Barely more than a shop front, where a handful of books were displayed on a pyramid-shaped stand, it felt cramped inside. A woman with mussed gray hair and tortoiseshell reading glasses on a chain sat behind a small desk in the corner. She took one look at Diana, then at me, and said, “Downstairs is free.”
The steps to the basement were narrow and precipitous. Diana flicked a switch, and a strip light came on overhead, bright and with a persistent hum. The space was home to piles of cardboard boxes. Some had been opened and were packed with books. Two stacks of folding chairs leaned against a wall, as if meetings regularly took place down here. The only natural light came from a frosted window set high up, through which we could see the blurred silhouettes of a security grille and the feet of passersby. In the back corner was a tiny cloakroom beside a small kitchenette. The walls were painted white and plastered with posters advertising bygone literary events.
Diana took two chairs and unfolded them with a deft shake. She placed them in the middle of the room, one facing the other. “Coffee?” she asked. “Cup of tea?”
I shook my head.
She sat in one of the chairs, and after a moment’s hesitation I took the other. She said, “I’ll get straight to the point, because I appreciate that this morning came as a shock. For what it’s worth, I didn’t want to introduce you to Magnus that way, but here we are.”
I started to speak, but she held up a finger. “Let me finish, if you don’t mind. Then I’m happy to hear whatever you want to say. I know you must be feeling used.”
I nodded.
“What do you know about your father’s manuscript collection?”
“It burned,” I said. It was a story I’d heard many times from my mother.
There was no one in your father’s house that night. They were all staying in London. I saw the neighbors interviewed on the news. They had smelled the smoke first and called the firefighters, but by the time the fire trucks arrived, the flames had taken hold and it was too late to save the library. The neighbors spoke vividly about how horrible the smell of burning vellum was and how the ashes of the burnt manuscripts floated through the smoky dawn like fireflies. Your dad and your granddad, who was still alive then, rushed back from London and in the papers the next day there was a photograph of them looking stricken in front of the charred remains of the library.
“It did,” Diana said. “What else do you know about it?”
“He has people scouring auctions and collections around the world looking for manuscripts important enough to replace the ones he lost.” Just like Ashurbanipal, just like the other men throughout history who’d made it their life’s work to create libraries.
“What do you know about the contents of the collection?”
While my parents were dating, my mother had only been allowed to see the collection once, a source of bitterness to her.
