She was staring ahead, prim and small, as the auctioneer stepped up onto the rostrum in front of us. ‘Yes. A first edition I sold in the sixties. Terrific content. Even then, it was valuable.’
‘You worked in a bookshop in the sixties? In England?’
A flicker of something unreadable crossed her face. She had taken a mint from her purse and offered me one, and I could see the shutters coming down.
‘Before you had David? I thought you worked in an office in England.’
But it was the end of the conversation. Phyllida opened her catalogue and the auction began.
On the way home that day, as we listened to her favourite Vivaldi CD in the van and approached the Brookbank exit from the freeway, she said, ‘I don’t think I’ll go back to the bookshop, dear. You go. I’ll drop in on Kicki. I need to see how sheis.’ Kicki ran the village post office all on her own. Quite a job, even in such a small community. There was a lot of lugging of boxes and parcels, and endless sorting to do.
Something felt odd about the way she made this statement, though, and it was unusual, because Phyllida had been to the post office that morning already.
‘I’ll come with you and collect our mail,’ I said. I didn’t need to collect ours. Miriam always did it. But later I would tell myself it was Phyllida’s distracted air and the slight tension in the way she was carrying herself that had made me stay with her. I suppose I was trying to explain it to myself by then, because moments after we walked into the post office, Kicki had a massive heart attack. Phyllida had calmy retrieved the community defibrillator from the post office foyer, attached the paddles to Kicki’s chest and shocked her back to life. (This had the added benefit of finally silencing Richard Dove’s constant complaints that the defibrillator money the garden club had fundraised for would have been better spent on the six dozen mature crepe myrtle trees he wanted to buy for the club’s next village beautification project. ‘Win-win,’ Phyllida had commented later. She couldn’t abide Richard Dove’s whingeing.)
Now, Roddy is looking at me with concern. ‘Are you all right?’
‘That book. It’s just … she has a copy at home. It’s one of her favourites. It’s strange that you just picked it up.’
This edition must have come in with the collection on witchcraft we’d bought last week from a woman in Werai. Phyllida must have unpacked it.
The bell above the shop door tinkles and Patty Prince walks in.
‘Hi, Patty,’ I say, pleased at the distraction. I can’t help thinking there is something eerie going on. I haven’t seen another edition of that book since the day of the auction when the Morrigan appeared and Kicki had what would have been a fatal heart attack if Phyllida hadn’t been in the post office. I don’t want to think too much about what it might mean, so Patty’s arrival is timely. She regularly visits but never buys books. She is here to gossip. The fact that there are extra people in the shop looks to have instantly lifted her mood.
‘It’s so lovely and cool in here, Lottie!’ She turns to Roddy and asks after Mary.
‘Roddy was just on his way to fix Mary’s computer,’ I say. ‘He actually just mentioned there needs to be a service where people come and help older people with computer problems in their homes. What do you think, Patty? Should we talk him into it?’
‘Goodness, yes!’ She grasps Roddy’s arm and leads him away, and he flicks me a look that says,Thank you very much, Charlotte Miriam.
I make a face back that says,You’re more than welcome, Roderick Eugene.
In the next room, Sienna is frowning.
‘Keep sweeping,’ I say. ‘It’s therapeutic after a while.’
I go to the back room and begin to check the books on the rickety sorting table. I should get Roddy to buy us a more stable one when he is out fossicking for antiques. I think of the cost and am struck by the idea that Phyllida has money. There are so many things about Phyllida I don’t know. She’s never talked about her early life, or her parents, or where she came from in England. I wonder if this person—this Francis she wantsme to find—is a cousin. Someone she was close to in childhood. I have no idea where to start looking. All I know about my grandmother is she arrived in this village when David was small. There is a photo of her holding David as a baby, taken outside this building in 1975. That was fifty years ago. Before that, there is nothing.
13
DOROTHEA
1965, CAMBRIDGESHIRE, ENGLAND
As she turned the bookshop door sign fromClosedtoOpen, Dorothea Stewart looked out at the damp fog in the air. Viscous; almost liquid. She regarded the penny box on wheels, filled with old texts and damaged second-hand books that had no real value. She couldn’t wheel it outside onto the cobblestones today. ‘Damp is the enemy of books, Dorothea.’ Mr Thistlethwaite’s refrain was a small, irritating jingle in her head.
Last week he’d returned from assessing a book collection peppered with invaluable volumes. The owner, a wealthy hermit, had loved birds and collected books on ornithology. Usually, there was a joyous energy in Mr Thistlethwaite’s step after returning from such a find. But the hermit had no family, so when he died two years ago, somebody had locked the house and walked away. At some unknown time, a storm had felled a tree and there was a huge splintering gash in the roof, water damage across the entiretop floor. The books upstairs were ruined. Beautiful books about winged creatures from all over the world. Rare large folios on natural history, lithographs and original plates of African and South American birds; unusual, centuries-old scientific works. But swollen, or with fatal staining or foxing on every page. Some could be restored, of course, and Mr Thistlethwaite had conducted his assessment the following week with the care of an emergency physician and the kindness of a priest.
Dorothea wheeled the penny box back inside, safe from the fog. She was tired, an essay having kept her up into the early hours and she had a lingering sense that something was missing now that James had gone to America. She wondered if this was her heart, crying for the loss of her love. No. She didn’t think so. Some small part of her had been glad when this opportunity had arisen for him. She had been afraid he was going to ask her to marry him and, no matter how hard she tried, she could not see him in her future.
The sky was grey so that the pretty panelled windows struggled to let light into the small, book-filled room. Cold emanated from the flagstone floor. She picked up a pile of books from the counter and ducked beneath the lintel as she entered the shop’s second room. It was larger, two ladders attached to rails on each side so that books on the top shelves could be reached with ease.
This room held the leather- and cloth-bound treasures of their antiquarian collection. Dorothea knew to keep an eye on anyone who came in here. Not so much for theft, although it sometimes happened, but because it was not necessarily easy to locate the books on a topic of interest. They were filed based on Mr Thistlethwaite’s intuition about value and significance,so that books on elephants might be filed adjacent to volumes with photographic plates showing indigenous populations of Africa or Asia; their system relied on knowing how he thought. If Dorothea’s memory failed her, their card file would soon reveal the correct location.
The rarest books were not kept on the shop floor. They were safely in a locked glass cabinet in Mr Thistlethwaite’s office, away from browsers. Collectors were an unusual bunch, and they would move mountains to own a rare first edition or a book that completed their collection. As soon as he laid eyes on a special treasure, Mr Thistlethwaite knew exactly who to telephone.
Dorothea looked out onto the street. It was almost ten in the morning, and a familiar car was parked outside the bakery. An Austin in British racing green. She peered through the fog. The owner of the car, Lady Adeline Fitzhenry, was talking to a woman with a pushchair. She kept leaning over and placing her hand into the pushchair as if touching the child. The woman was Jane, one of the girls who had worked at the Fitzhenry estate before marrying last year. Her baby must be nearly four months old, Dorothea thought. How time flew.
