The Arrival
Everyone in San Ireneo de Arnois remarked on Miss Prim’s arrival. On the afternoon they saw her walking through the village she was just another job applicant on her way to an interview, but the inhabitants knew the place well enough to realize that a vacancy there was a rare and precious thing. Many still remembered what had happened a few years earlier when they were looking for a new primary school teacher: eight applicants had showed up, but only three had been given the opportunity to set out their talents. This did not reveal a lack of interest in education—educational standards in San Ireneo de Arnois were excellent—but rather the inhabitants’ conviction that greater choice did not increase the likelihood of getting it right. The proprietor of the stationer’s, a woman quite capable of devoting an entire afternoon to decorating a single sheet of paper, described the idea of spending longer than a morning selecting a teacher as extravagant. Everyone agreed. In that community, it was the families themselves, each according to their background, ambition, and means, who were in charge of their children’s intellectual development. School was considered supplementary—undesirable but necessary—though certainly many households relied on it. Many, but by no means all. So why devote so much time to it?
To visitors, San Ireneo de Arnois looked like a place that was firmly rooted in the past. Old stone houses with gardens full of roses stood proudly along a handful of streets that led to a bustling square full of small shops and businesses, buying and selling at the steady pace of a healthy heart. The outskirts of the village were dotted with tiny farms and workshops that supplied the local shops. It was a small community comprising an industrious group of farmers, craftsmen, shopkeepers, and professionals, a retiring, select circle of academics and the sober brotherhood of monks who lived at the abbey of San Ireneo. Their interlocking lives formed an entire world. They were the cogs of a human engine that was proud of being self-sufficient through trade and the small-scale production of goods and services, and of its neighborly courtesy. Those who said that it seemed to belong in the past were probably right. Yet only a few years earlier, there would have been no sign of the thriving, cheerful market that now greeted visitors.
What had happened between then and now? Had Miss Prim, going to her interview, asked the proprietor of the stationer’s, the latter would have replied that this mysterious prosperity was the result of a young man’s tenacity and an old monk’s wisdom. But as Miss Prim, hurrying to the house, did not notice the pretty shop, its owner was unable to reveal with pride that San Ireneo de Arnois was, in fact, a flourishing colony of exiles from the modern world seeking a simple, rural life.
PART I
The Man in the Wing Chair
1
At exactly the moment young Septimus was stretching awake after his nap, sliding his eleven-year-old feet into slippers made for those of a fourteen-year-old and crossing to his bedroom window, Miss Prim was passing through the rusty garden gate. The boy watched her with interest. At first glance, she didn’t appear nervous or afraid in the least. Nor did she have the threatening air of the previous incumbent, who always looked as if he knew exactly what kind of book anyone daring to ask for a book was going to ask for.
“Perhaps we’ll like her,” Septimus said to himself, rubbing his eyes with the heels of both hands. Then, moving away from the window, he quickly buttoned his jacket and went downstairs to open the door.
Miss Prim, just then making her way calmly along the path between banks of blue hydrangeas, had begun her day convinced it was the one she’d been waiting for all her life. Over the years she’d dreamed about an opportunity such as this. She’d pictured it, she’d imagined it, she’d pondered every detail. And yet, that morning, as she came through the garden, Prudencia Prim had to acknowledge that she felt not the slightest quickening of the heart, nor even the faintest tremor of excitement that would indicate that the great day had arrived.
They would observe her with curiosity, she knew. People tended to look at her like that, she was well aware of it. Just as she knew that she was very different from the people who examined her in this hostile fashion. Few could admit to being the victim of a fatal historical error, she told herself proudly. Few people lived, as she did, with the constant feeling of having been born at the wrong time and in the wrong place. And fewer still realized, as she did, that all that was worth admiring, all that was beautiful and sublime, seemed to be vanishing with hardly a trace. The world, lamented Prudencia Prim, had lost its taste for beauty, harmony, and balance. And few could see this truth; just as few could feel within themselves the resolve to make a stand.
It was this steely determination that had prompted Miss Prim, three days before she walked down the path lined with hydrangeas, to reply to a small ad printed in the newspaper.
Wanted: a feminine spirit quite undaunted by the world to work as a librarian for a gentleman and his books. Able to live with dogs and children. Preferably without work experience. Graduates and postgraduates need not apply.
Miss Prim only partly fitted this description. She was quite undaunted by the world, that was clear. As was her undoubted ability to work as a librarian for a gentleman and his books. But she had no experience of dealing with children or dogs, much less living with them. If she was honest, though, what most concerned her was the problem posed by “graduates and postgraduates need not apply.”
Miss Prim considered herself a highly qualified woman. With degrees in international relations, political science, and anthropology, she had a PhD in sociology and was an expert on library science and medieval Russian art. People who knew her looked curiously at this extraordinary CV, especially as its holder was a mere administrative assistant with no apparent ambitions. They didn’t understand, she said to herself peevishly; they didn’t understand the concept ofexcellence. How could they, in a world where things no longer meant what they were supposed to mean?
“Are youhisnew librarian?”
Startled, the applicant looked down. There, on the porch of what appeared to be the main entrance to the house, she met the gaze of a little boy with blond hair and a scowl.
“Are you or aren’t you?” pressed the child.
“I think it’s too soon to say,” she replied. “I’m here because of the advertisement your father placed in the paper.”
“He’s not a father,” the boy said simply, then turned and ran back inside.
Disconcerted, Miss Prim stared at the doorway. She was absolutely sure that there had been specific mention in the advert of a gentleman with children. Naturally, it wasn’t necessary for a gentleman to have children: in her life she’d known a few without them. But when a paragraph contained both the wordsgentlemanandchildren, what else was one to think?
Just then she raised her eyes and took in the house for the first time. She’d been so absorbed in her thoughts as she came through the garden that she hadn’t paid it any attention. It was an old building of faded red stone, with a great many windows and French doors leading onto the garden. A solid, shabby edifice, its cracked and creviced walls were adorned with climbing roses that seemed never to have encountered a gardener. The front porch, supported by four columns and hung with a huge wisteria, looked bleak and imposing.
“It must be freezing in winter,” she murmured.
She glanced at her watch; it was almost midafternoon. All the windows were wide open, their curtains fluttering capriciously in the fresh September breeze, as white and light as sails. It looks just like a ship, she thought, an old ship run aground. And coming around the porch, she went up to the nearest French door, hoping to find a host who had, at least, reached adulthood.
Looking in, Miss Prim saw a large, untidy room, full of books and children. There were many more books than children, but somehow the way they were distributed made it look as if there were almost as many children as books. The applicant counted thirty arms, thirty legs, and fifteen heads. Their owners were dotted about on the rug, lying on old sofas, curled up in dilapidated leather armchairs. She also noticed two gigantic dogs lying on either side of a wingchair that faced the fireplace, its back to the window. The boy who had spoken to her on the porch was there on the rug, bowed conscientiously over a notebook. The others raised their heads from time to time to answer a speaker whose voice seemed to spring straight from the wing chair.
“Let’s begin,” said the man in the wing chair.
“Can we ask for clues?” said one of the children.
Instead of replying, the man’s voice recited:
Ultima Cumaei venit iam carminis aetas;
magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo:
