Incidents in the Rue Laugier (19 page)

‘Kroll,’ he said. ‘Max Kroll. I just wondered what had happened to old Ted’s place. Only just heard of his death. Very sorry to hear about it. I always thought of him as the last of the innocents.’

‘I’m beginning to think that’s me,’ said Harrison.

‘And you are?’

‘Edward Harrison. And this is Tom Cook. Mr Sheed left the shop to me.’

Max Kroll unfurled a fleshy white hand and presented it to Harrison and Cook in turn. ‘Know the book trade, do you?’ he enquired.

‘I know nothing,’ Edward said simply. ‘Would you like some coffee?’

At a sign Cook retired to his flat and reappeared with coffee in a flowered cup and saucer, in contrast to the mugs which they had used earlier. More biscuits were fastidiously arranged on a glass plate.

‘Do sit down,’ Edward went on. ‘I’m afraid there isn’t much room. I was trying to decide what to do with the stock. I can’t quite get the hang of it.’

‘You’ve got a gold mine here,’ said Kroll, helping himself to a couple of biscuits. ‘Look at this,’ he said, picking up a book and dusting it with a green silk handkerchief. ‘First edition. Half the stock is first editions. You don’t want to let this stuff walk out of the shop. This stuff goes to collectors.’

‘How do I find them? I don’t know any.’

‘Well, you could advertise for a start. Use the papers, the journals. “Books bought and sold. Enquiries welcome. Under new management.” That sort of thing. But if I know Ted Sheed he’s got a set of books somewhere.’

‘Tom found these account books in the basement.’

‘That’ll be it, then.’

‘But they’re only about money. Sums received.’

‘With names?’

‘Yes, with names. But I don’t know who the names belong to.’

‘I found this address book,’ said Tom. ‘Would this help?’

‘It would if you could match up the names with the sums received. This young man could do that.’

‘Could you do that, Tom?’

‘Then it’ll have to go on some kind of collator. Got one of those? Ted wouldn’t have one, I know.’

‘I know about such things,’ said Tom. ‘I’d be glad to advise.’

‘Advise! We haven’t even thought about it yet.’ He saw Tom’s face grow dusky with repressed longing. ‘Do you think you could buy one, then?’ he said weakly. ‘I suppose it’s really necessary?’

‘Essential,’ said Mr Kroll. ‘Any more of those biscuits? Or shall I take you both out to lunch? Yes, I think I’ll do that. Nelly, that’s my wife, says I eat too much. But you English don’t eat enough! We’ll go to Overton’s. You like fish?’

‘Yes, thank you,’ they chorused, relieved to be taken in hand.

‘It’s very kind of you,’ said Harrison. Kroll shrugged. ‘I was going there anyway. If you take my advice, both of you, you’ll have a good lunch. That way you’ll keep going till six. You’ll close at six, I suppose?’

‘I dare say,’ said Harrison, dodging in and out of the crowds, while keeping an eye on Kroll, who strode steadily ahead, his hands in his pockets.

‘Mark you, most of your business will be done by post,’ Kroll went on. ‘Once you get your catalogues out. That’s a job for you,’ he said, poking a finger in Harrison’s chest, oblivious to the traffic that was obliged to divide around them. ‘Oysters, I think. You like oysters?’

Both shook their heads, lips firmly compressed.

‘Then a nice sole. And over coffee I’ll tell you about the book trade.’

‘This is all very good of you,’ said Harrison.

‘Well, I’m retired, haven’t much of anything to do with myself’ was the rather disappointing reply. He seated himself in the restaurant, motioned the two of them to sit facing him, and fell into a silent perusal of the menu. Waiters seemed to know him. Little was said until the oysters were placed before him. They watched, appalled, as he applied himself, then looked politely away, as if the sight should not be witnessed.

‘Right,’ he said, as the table was cleared. ‘You want to know who I am and why I’m talking to you like this. It’s very simple. I’m a bookseller, or was; that’s how I knew Ted Sheed. I had a business in Long Acre. Sold it like a chump, because Nelly told me to. She worries about me, said I was doing too much. I always do what she wants, because I love her,’ he said, eyeing the huge plate being set down in front of him. ‘You got girlfriends?’

‘Yes,’ said Harrison, speaking, as he thought he should, for them both. Anything was simpler than an explanation.

‘But I may have been wrong there. Not that I don’t enjoy myself. I wander about, look in on friends. Not that there are many of them left. How old do you reckon I am?’

‘Sixty?’ queried Cook.

‘Nearer seventy. I’m pre-war. My father owned a bookshop in Vienna. Now there was a bookseller! But he saw the light in 1933 and brought us all to London, me and my mother and Nelly, my second cousin, whom they’d more or less adopted. We stuck together, and then we married. We always knew we should. And then it was more like home. Well, it is home now.’ He looked sad for a moment, older than seventy. ‘No children, unfortunately. When we go there’ll be nobody left. Eat up!’ he said, rallying. ‘Sometimes the time hangs a bit heavy,’ he confessed, sombre again.

Stuffed, they could think of nothing to say, until Harrison finally managed, ‘I don’t know what we’d have done if you hadn’t come in.’

‘I haven’t finished yet,’ said Kroll. ‘Just coffee, I think,’ he said regretfully. ‘You want to know about the book trade? I’ll tell you. It’s very simple. Identify your ideal readers and serve them faithfully. Give them what they want, or what you think they’ll want. That stock of Ted’s—that’s fairly specialist stuff, although it may not look it. My feeling is that he catered for people who love a good story, whether it’s old-fashioned or not. The English love a good story. What they don’t like is showing off. And they are very nostalgic. Shall I tell you about my ideal reader?’

He lit a cigar and drew on it steadily. They watched him, sluggish now, and half hypnotised by the glowing tip.

‘When I came to England I was heartbroken,’ said Kroll. ‘Safe, but heartbroken. London—we came to London—defeated me. Then gradually I got to know it, wandered
around at weekends when it was quiet, got to appreciate little things, street corners, old girls out shopping, different-coloured front doors, flowers in the park. All the time I had this fantasy of England, of how we would live, Nelly and me. We’d be living in the country, or by the sea, and we’d be old, quite old. I’d be retired, and Nelly would be at home, in our house. I’d play a round of golf in the morning, and in the afternoon we’d take a walk or sit in the garden—because you must have a garden in England—and after tea we’d read. We’d read the classics, the English classics: the rest we’d read in Vienna. Only, if I were English, I’d also read J. B. Priestley, unpretentious honest stuff. Or Howard Spring. And Nelly’d be spoiled for choice with her Elizabeth Bowen and her Rosamond Lehmann and her Elizabeth Taylor. That’s how I saw your English reader: not a satirist, not subversive. Bit out of date now, I suppose, but I’m willing to bet you’ll find him in Ted Sheed’s files, once you’ve straightened them out.’

‘And did you really want to live like that?’ asked Harrison, attentive now. ‘Only I think my parents …’

Max Kroll had lost interest. Sighing, he pulled out his wallet, extracted a number of notes. ‘Live in the country, Nelly and me? Not a chance. We live in West End Lane, surrounded by Art Deco furniture. Nelly loves it. I leave it all to her. Nowadays I live in the past. I read what I read as a young man: Kafka, Colette, Thomas Mann. My day is done, I dare say. We’re happy enough, we’ve got a bit of money behind us. But I miss the business, and that’s the truth of the matter.’

‘You’re more than welcome to look in any time,’ said Harrison.

‘I’ll do that,’ said Kroll, extending his well-kept hand across the table to pick up the book-matches. Harrison noted his heavy ring, set with a dull red stone. A ring, he thought; I must buy Maud a ring.

‘Now is there anything else you want to know?’ enquired
Kroll, as they emerged into the soft sunless afternoon. ‘Compile your lists, get your correspondents straight, and start sending out catalogues. Advertise. You’ll get some offers. I’ll be happy to advise. How much are you paying this young man?’

By the time he had accompanied them back to Denbigh Street he had fixed the amount that Cook was to be paid, indicated a printer who might give them a discount on their stationery order, given them the name of a reliable shop-fitter, and told Harrison to buy a car (‘You can’t collect books by public transport’). He declined a further cup of coffee, and strolled off in the direction of Victoria, watched by Harrison and Cook as they stood on the threshold of the shop, unwilling to see him go but impatient now to put their own plans into execution.

‘Will he come back, do you think?’ asked Cook.

‘Yes, I think so. He’ll come back to see if we’re doing what he told us to do. Do you want to get off and look at office supplies? Only don’t spend too much. We’re about to get through a lot of money. And I’ve got to buy a flat.’ Indeed the thought of the future seemed suddenly so foreign, so remote, that he wondered if it had been an illusion from the start.

‘I’ll get off then. What are you going to do?’

‘I’m going to get married,’ he heard himself say, and the doors to the future clanged shut in his face.

Again he experienced the doomed sensation of one who commits himself to a course of action utterly foreign to his nature and to which he has been led by either altruism or willpower. How much easier it would be to linger in contemplation of the day’s events (surely unexpected) or to give a little uninterrupted time to a study of his equally unexpected associate Tom Cook. This gracile and accommodating youth, who, for some reason he could not hope to understand, had chosen to work for him, to espouse his interests, even to further
them; yet he had been acquired effortlessly, and thus bore witness to the virtues of effortlessness as a strategy, or rather as a lack of strategy. Harrison knew that his happiest sensations, and even those rare decisions he had been forced to make, had come about by a process of almost magical passivity, which was in some way allied to the process of dreaming. Anything that involved hard adult ratiocination led invariably to a feeling of disappointment, as if he were being forced to act against his best interests, or even against nature. To be borne along on some wave of providence was his dearest wish, to be left in a state of reverie his most constant desire. He could even recapture his pleasure in surrendering his will to Tyler in those far off days of summer, which were in reality only six weeks distant. And the efficacy of this agreeable state was proved by the ease with which he had acquired Cook, simply by dint of not trying to acquire him, of choosing and accepting him almost absent mindedly, when his thoughts were fixed on some other matter, when he was impatient to buy his ticket to France and begin his journey in the wider world.

The irony was that, of that whole episode, only Cook remained. His illusion of escape had ended in greater imprisonment. He supposed he should count himself fortunate that he had not wasted more time on this fantasy, that it had only consumed a few weeks instead of a few years of his life. Yet how cold it was to come down to earth so young, before the world had been experienced! He knew himself now to be unalterably bound to home, to circumstances which until very recently had struck him as unbearably humdrum, to this shop which he had instinctively rejected, along with the enigmatic but surely home-haunting ghost of his benefactor. In a little while he would shut the shop and walk back to his rented flat, though that, he realised, would soon have to be relinquished, if he were to set himself the surely rather urgent task of finding a
permanent home. A rented flat was only suitable for someone of an unpredictable way of life, suitable in fact for that traveller he could no longer emulate. Now he had to reconcile himself to a stay-at-home existence, the sort of existence he would never have contemplated during his years at university, when large and romantic ambitions were the norm. The view from his barred window did nothing to lighten his mood: through the smeared glass he saw patches of waste ground, a collection of builders’ materials, and a pile of rubbish sacks. In the background he could hear the sound of suburban trains easing themselves into Victoria, stopping for twenty minutes or so, and then easing themselves out again.

Unbidden, there came into his mind the image of Tyler, as he had left him in the rue Laugier. The flat had seemed dark and unfriendly, filled with his own hostility, which had had time to mount while he was walking with the silent weeping Maud in the grey Tuileries. He could still see her raincoated back and her bent head as she contemplated the gravel of the path. He contrasted this with Tyler’s sudden powerful reappearance, his even darker tan, his air of remoteness, of disengagement. It was a measure of his dominance that he had not responded to the insults rather hysterically offered to him but had appeared to think them over, to test them for veracity, to ask himself if they were justified, and finally to accept them, not ruefully, not apologetically, but in a spirit of some amusement. Of course, thought Harrison belatedly, I gave him the ideal opportunity to free himself from the encumbrance of Maud, from the encumbrance, rather, of his responsibility for Maud’s condition. Here he thought with some irritation of Maud herself. In fact in those last moments in the rue Laugier Maud had compared unfavourably with Tyler, although it was quite clear to anyone with any moral sense which one of them was to blame. But that was the painful fact of the matter,
thought Harrison: effortlessness was always more attractive than guilt, even if it were attached to a line of conduct quite devoid of conscience. For this reason alone he would have found himself admiring Tyler, and indeed had done so during that tense last interview. That, after all, was why he had offered him his hand. If Tyler had chanced to walk in the door of the shop even now he would offer him his hand again. They were Steerforth and David Copperfield, he realised, with that poor girl between them. And there was no doubt in his mind that David had loved Steerforth, as Dickens had done, as the reader does, so great is the regenerative power of that unregenerate character, so profound the appeal of beauty and carelessness, and that somewhat unearthly aura of seduction.