The Bookshop (8 page)

‘Come into the dining-room.’

The dining-room was straight through, with French windows closed on the garden. The view outside was blocked by a beech hedge, still hanging with brown leaves, heavy in the November damp. A mahogany table stretched from end to end of the room. Florence felt sad to think of anyone eating alone at such a table. It was laid, evidently for the occasion, with an assortment of huge blue-and-white earthenware dishes, looking like prizes at a fairground. Lost among them was a fruit-cake,
a bottle of milk and an unpleasantly pink ham, still in its tin.

‘We should have a cloth,’ said Mr Brundish, taking the starched white linen out of a drawer, and trying to sweep the giant crockery aside. This Florence prevented by sitting down herself. Her host immediately took his place, huddling into a wing chair, spreading his large neat hairy hands on each side of his plate. Shabby, hardly presentable, he was not the sort of figure who could ever lose dignity. He was waiting, with a certain humility, for her to pour out. The silver teapot was the size of a small font, awkward to lift, and almost stone cold. Round the crest ran a motto:
Not to succeed in one thing is to fail in all
.

Fortunately, since there was only one knife on the table and the forks had been forgotten, Mr Brundish made no attempt to press the cake or the ham on his guest. Nor did he drink his cooling tea. Florence wondered whether, as a general rule, he had any regular meals at all. He wanted to welcome her but was more used to threatening, and the change of attitude was difficult for him. She felt the appeal of this. After a period of absolute silence which was not embarrassing because he was evidently so used to it, Mr Brundish said:

‘You asked me a question.’

‘Yes, I did. It was about a new novel.’

‘You paid me the compliment of asking me a serious question,’ Mr Brundish repeated heavily. ‘You believed
that I would be impartial. Doubtless you thought that I was quite alone in the world. That, as it happens, is not so. Otherwise I should be an interesting test case to establish whether there is such a thing as an action which harms no one but oneself. Such problems interested me in younger days. But, as I say, I am not alone. I am a widower, but I had brothers, and one sister. I still have relations and direct descendants, although they are scattered over the face of the globe. Of course, one can have enough of that sort of thing. Perhaps it strikes you that this tea is not quite hot.’

Florence sipped gallantly. ‘You must miss your grandchildren.’

Mr Brundish considered this carefully. ‘Am I fond of children?’ he asked.

She realized that the question was simply the result of lack of practice. He talked so seldom to people that he had forgotten the accepted forms of doing so.

‘I shouldn’t have thought so,’ she said, ‘but
I
am.’

‘One of the Gipping girls, the third one, helps you in your shop, I believe. And that is all the assistance you get.’

‘I have a book-keeper who comes in from time to time, and then there is my solicitor.’

‘Tom Thornton. You won’t get much out of him. In twenty-five years of practice I’ve never heard of his taking a case to counsel, or even to court. He always settles. Never settle!’

‘There’s no question of any legal proceedings. That wasn’t at all what I wanted to ask you about.’

‘I daresay Thornton would refuse to come to your place in any case. It’s haunted, and he wouldn’t care for that. Perhaps, by the way, you would have liked a wash. There is a lavatory on the right side of the hall with several basins. In my father’s day it was particularly useful for shooting parties.’

Florence leant forward. ‘You know, Mr Brundish, there is a certain responsibility about trying to run a bookshop.’

‘I believe so, yes. Not everybody approves of it, you know. There are certain people, I think, who don’t. I am referring to Violet Gamart. She had other plans for the Old House, and now it seems that she has been affronted in some way.’

‘I’m sure she knows that was an accident.’ It was difficult to speak anything other than the truth in Holt House, but Florence added, ‘I’m sure that she means well.’

‘Means well! Think again!’ He tapped on the table with a weighty teaspoon. ‘She wants an Arts Centre. How can the arts have a centre? But she thinks they have, and she wishes to dislodge you.’

‘Even if she did,’ said Florence, ‘it wouldn’t have the slightest effect on me.’

‘It appears to me that you may be confusing force
and power. Mrs Gamart, because of her connections and acquaintances, is a powerful woman. Does that alarm you?’

‘No.’

Mr Brundish ignored, or perhaps had never been taught, the polite convention of not staring. He did stare. He looked fixedly at Florence, as though surprised at her being there at all, and yet she felt encouraged by his single-minded concentration.

‘May I go back to my first question? I am thinking of making a first order of two hundred and fifty copies of
Lolita
, a considerable risk; but of course I’m not consulting you in a business sense – that would be quite wrong. All I should like to know, before I put in the order, is whether you think it is a good book, and whether it is right for me to sell it in Hardborough.’

‘I don’t attach as much importance as you do, I dare say, to the notions of right and wrong. I have read
Lolita
, as you requested. It is a good book, and therefore you should try to sell it to the inhabitants of Hardborough. They won’t understand it, but that is all to the good. Understanding makes the mind lazy.’

Florence sighed with relief at a decision in which she had had no part. Then, to reassure herself of her independence, she took the single knife, cut two pieces of cake, and offered one to Mr Brundish. Deeply preoccupied, he put the slice on his plate as gently as if he were replacing
a lid. He had something to say, something closer to his intentions in asking her to his house than anything that had gone before.

‘Well, I have given you my opinion. Why should you think that a man would be a better judge of these things than a woman?’

At these words a different element entered the conversation, as perceptible as a shift in wind. Mr Brundish made no attempt to check this, on the contrary he seemed to be relieved that some prearranged point had been reached.

‘I don’t know that men are better judges than women,’ said Florence, ‘but they spend much less time regretting their decisions.’

‘I have had plenty of time to make mine. But I have never found it difficult to come to conclusions. Let me tell you what I admire in human beings. I value most the one virtue which they share with gods and animals, and which need not therefore be referred to as a virtue. I refer to courage. You, Mrs Green, possess that quality in abundance.’

She knew perfectly well, sitting in the dull afternoon light, with the ludicrous array of slop basins and tureens in front of her, that loneliness was speaking to loneliness, and that he was appealing to her directly. The words had come out slowly, as though between each one she was being given the opportunity of a response. But while the
moment hung in the balance and she struggled to put some kind of order into what she felt or half guessed, Mr Brundish sighed deeply. Perhaps he had found her wanting in some respect. His direct gaze turned gradually away from her, and he looked down at his plate. The necessity to make conversation returned.

‘This cake would have been poison to my sister,’ he observed.

Not long after, and not daring to make any suggestions about washing up, Florence took her leave. Mr Brundish accompanied her back across the hall. It was quite dark, and she wondered whether he would sit alone in the dark, or whether he would soon turn on the lights. He wished her good fortune, as he had done before, with her enterprise.

‘I mustn’t let myself worry,’ she said. ‘While there’s life, there’s hope.’

‘What a terrifying thought that is,’ muttered Mr Brundish.

British Railways delivered the copies of
Lolita
from Flintmarket station, twenty-five miles away. When the carrier van arrived it drew, as usual, a ragged cheer from the bystanders. Something new was coming to Hardborough. Outside every public house there were parcels waiting to go out, and Raven, to save petrol, wanted a lift to the upper marshes.

Christine was aghast at the large numbers ordered. They hadn’t sold so many of any one thing, not even
Build Your Own Racing Dinghy
. And it was long – four hundred pages. Yet she admired her employer’s integrity and seeming excess. Florence told her that the book was already famous. ‘Everyone will have heard of it. They may not expect to be able to buy it here in Hardborough.’

‘They won’t expect to find two hundred and fifty copies. You’ve lost your head properly over this.’

They closed earlier than usual so that they could redress the window. Behind the shutters they arranged the
Lolitas
in pyramids, like the tins in the grocer’s. All the old Sellers were put in with the Stayers, and the dignified Illustrateds and flat books were shifted and disturbed without respect. ‘What’s all this cash in the till?’ Christine asked. ‘You’ve got a float of nearly fifty pounds in here.’ But Florence had drawn it specially, being pretty sure that she would need it all. The cashier looked up at her with suspended animation, waiting until she had left the bank to see what Mr Keble thought about it.

December 4 1959

Dear Mrs Green,

I am in receipt of a letter from John Drury & Co, representing their client Mrs Violet Gamart of The Stead, to the effect that your current window display is attracting so much undesirable attention from potential and actual customers that it is providing a temporary obstruction unreasonable in quantum and duration to the use of the highway, and that his client intends to establish a particular injury to herself in that it is necessary that she, as a Justice of the Peace and Chairwoman of numerous committees (list enclosed herewith) has to carry out her shopping expeditiously. In addition, the regular users of your lending library, who, you must remember, are legally in the position of invitees, have found themselves inconvenienced and in some cases been crowded or jostled and in other instances referred to by strangers to the district as old dears, old timers, old hens, and even old boilers. The civil action, which remains independent of course of any
future police action to abate the said nuisance, might result in the award of considerable damages against us.

Yours faithfully,

Thomas Thornton,

Solicitor and Commissioner for Oaths.

December 5 1959

Dear Mr Thornton,

You have been my solicitor now for a number of years, and I understand ‘acting for me’ to mean ‘acting energetically on my behalf’. Have you been to see the window display for yourself? We are very busy indeed on the sales side at the moment, but if you could manage the 200 yards down the road you might call into the shop and tell me what you think of it.

Yours sincerely,

Florence Green.

December 5 1959

Dear Mrs Green,

In reply to your letter of 5 December, which rather surprised me by its tone, I have endeavoured on two separate occasions to approach your front window, but found it impossible. Customers appear to be coming from as far away as Flintmarket. I think that we shall have to grant that the obstruction is unreasonable, at least as regards quantum. As to your other remarks, I would advise that it would be as well
for you, as well as for myself, to keep a careful record of what has passed between us.

Yours faithfully,

Thomas Thornton,

Solicitor and Commissioner for Oaths.

December 6 1959

Dear Mr Thornton,

What do you advise, then?

Yours sincerely,

Florence Green.

December 8 1959

Dear Mrs Green,

In reply to your letter of 6 December, I think we ought to abate the obstruction, by which I mean stopping the general public from assembling in the narrowest part of the High Street, before any question of an indictment arises, and I also think we should cease to offer for sale the complained-of and unduly sensational novel by V. Nabokov. We cannot cite Herring v. Metropolitan Board of Works 1863 in this instance as the crowd has not assembled as the result of famine or of a shortage of necessary commodities.

Yours faithfully,

Thomas Thornton,

Solicitor and Commissioner for Oaths.

December 9 1959

Dear Mr Thornton,

A good book is the precious life-blood of a masterspirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life, and as such it must surely be a necessary commodity.

Yours sincerely,

Florence Green.

December 10 1959

To: Mrs Florence Green

Dear Madam,

I can only repeat my former advice, and I may add that in my opinion, although this is a personal matter and therefore outside my terms of reference, you would do well to make a formal apology to Mrs Gamart.

Yours faithfully,

Thomas Thornton,

Solicitor and Commissioner for Oaths.

December 11 1959

Dear Mr Thornton,

Coward!

Yours sincerely,

Florence Green.

If Florence was courageous, it was in quite a different way from, for example, General Gamart, who had
behaved exactly the same when he was under fire as when he wasn’t, or from Mr Brundish, who defied the world by refusing to admit it to his earth. Her courage, after all, was only a determination to survive. The police, however, did not prosecute, or even consider doing so, and after Drury had advised Mrs Gamart that there was nothing like enough evidence to proceed on, the complaint was dropped. The crowd grew manageable, the shop made £82 10s. 6d. profit in the first week of December on
Lolita
alone, and the new customers came back to buy the Christmas orders and the calendars. For the first time in her life, Florence had the alarming sensation of prosperity.

She might have felt less secure if she had reviewed the state of her alliances. Jessie Welford and the watercolour artist, who by now was a permanent lodger at Rhoda’s, were hostile. Christine’s comment, that she’d as soon go to bed with a toad as with that Mr Gill, and she was surprised he didn’t give Miss Welford warts, was quite irrelevant; the fact was that the two made front together. Not one of the throng in the High Street had come into the dressmaker’s, still less bought a watercolour. Nor had they looked at the wet fish offered by Mr Deben. All the tradespeople were now either slightly or emphatically hostile to the Old House Bookshop. It was decided not to ask her to join the Inner Wheel of the Hardborough and District Rotary Club.

As Christmas approached, she grew reckless. She took her affairs out of Mr Thornton’s wavering hands and entrusted them to a firm of solicitors in Flintmarket. Through the new firm she contracted with Wilkins, who undertook building as well as plumbing, to pull down the damp oyster warehouse – work, it must be admitted, which went ahead rather slowly. She could decide later what to do with the site. Then, to make room for the new stock, she turned out, on an impulse, the mouldering piles of display material left by the publishers’ salesmen. A life-size cardboard Stalin and Roosevelt and an even larger Winston Churchill, an advancing Nazi tank to be assembled in three pieces and glued lightly on the dotted line, Stan Matthews and his football to be suspended from the ceiling with the string provided, six-foot cards of footsteps stained with blood, a horse with moving eyeballs jumping a fence, easily worked with a torch battery, menacing photographs of Somerset Maugham and Wilfred Pickles. All out, all to be given to Christine, who wanted them for the Christmas Fancy Dress Parade.

This was an event organized by local charities. ‘I’m obliged to you for these, Mrs Green,’ Christine said. ‘Otherwise I’d have fared to go attired as an Omo packet.’ The detergent firms were prepared to send quantities of free material, as were the
Daily Herald
and the
Daily Mirror
. But everyone in Hardborough was sick of these disguises. Florence wondered why the young girl didn’t want to go dressed as something pretty, perhaps as a Pierrette. Out of the unpromising materials, however, Christine sewed and glued together an odd but striking costume – Good-bye, 1959. One of the
Lolita
jackets provided a last touch, and Florence, whose feet were almost as small as her assistant’s, lent a pair of shoes. They were crocodile courts, the buckles also covered with crocodile. Christine, who had never seen them before, although she had had a good poke round upstairs, wondered if they were by Christian Dior.

‘You know that Dior met a gipsy who told him he’d have ten years of good fortune and then meet his death,’ she said. Florence felt she could hardly afford to speak lightly of the supernatural.

‘That’d be a French gipsy, of course,’ said Christine consolingly, slopping about in the crocodile courts.

The patroness of the Fancy Dress Parade was Mrs Gamart, from The Stead. The judge, in deference to his connection with the BBC, and therefore with the Arts, was Milo North, who protested amiably that he should never have been asked, as he tried to avoid definite judgments on every occasion. His remarks were greeted with roars of laughter. The Parade was held in the Coronation Hall, never quite completed as Hardborough had intended, so that the roof was still of corrugated iron. The rain pounded down, only quietening as it turned to drizzle
or sleet. Christine Gipping, wheeling Melody in a pram decorated with barbed wire, which had been sent down to publicize
Escape or Die
, was an easy winner of the most original costume. Discussion on the point was hardly possible.

The Nativity Play, which followed a week later, was on a Saturday afternoon, when the shop was too busy with the Christmas trade for Florence to take time off. She heard about the performance, however, from Wally and Raven, who dropped in, and Mrs Traill, who had come to see about her orders for next term.

The critical reception of the play had been mixed. Too much realism, perhaps, had been attempted when Raven had brought a small flock of sheep off the marshes on to the stage. On the other hand, no one had forgotten their parts, and Christine’s dancing had been the success of the evening. As a result of her success in the Fancy Dress she had been awarded the coveted part of Salome, which meant that she was entitled to appear in her eldest sister’s bikini.

‘She had to dance, to get the head of John the Baptist,’ Wally explained.

‘What music did you have?’ asked Florence.

‘That was a Lonnie Donegan recording, Putting on the Agony, Putting on the Style. I don’t know that you cared for it very much, Mrs Traill.’

Mrs Traill replied that after many years at the Primary
she had become accustomed to everything. ‘Mrs Gamart, I’m afraid, didn’t look as though she approved.’

‘If she didn’t, there was nothing she could do about it,’ Raven said. ‘She was powerless.’ He exuded a warm glow of well-being, having had one or two at the Anchor on the way over.

Florence was still anxious about Christine’s prospects in the eleven plus. ‘She is such a good little assistant, I can’t help feeling that after she’s been through grammar school she might make it her career. She has the ability to classify, and that can’t be taught.’

The glance that flashed through Mrs Traill’s spectacles suggested that everything could be taught. Nevertheless, a sense of responsibility weighed on Florence. She felt she ought to have done more. Granted that the child didn’t like reading, with the exception of
Bunty
, or being read to, mightn’t there be other opportunities? She kept Wally back after the others had gone and said that she had been interested to hear about the play, but had he or his friends or Christine ever been to a real theatre? They might go over to the Maddermarket, at Norwich, if something good came on.

‘We’ve none of us ever been there,’ Wally replied doubtfully, ‘but we did go over from the school to Flintmarket last year, to see a travelling company. That was quite interesting, to see how they fixed up the amplification.’

‘What play did they put on?’ asked Florence.

‘The day we went it was
Hansel and Gretel
. There’s singing in it. They didn’t do it all – they did the bit where the boy and girl lie down and get fresh together, and the angels come in and cover them with leaves.’

‘You didn’t understand the play, Wally. Hansel and Gretel are brother and sister.’

‘That doesn’t make it any different, Mrs Green.’

January, as always, brought its one day when people said that it felt like spring. The sky was a patched and ragged blue, and the marsh, with its thousand weeds and grasses, breathed a faint odour of resurrection.

Florence went for her walk in a direction she usually avoided, perhaps not deliberately, but certainly she had not been that way for a long time. Turning her back on the estuary of the Laze, she walked over the headland, northwards. A notice on a wired-up gate read PRIVATE: FARM LAND. She knew that the path was a right of way, climbed over, and went on. Presently it took a sharp turn to the sea, which idled on its stony beach, forty feet below. The turf was as springy as fine green hair. Running to the cliff’s edge could be seen the ghost of an old service road, and on each side of it were ruins, ruins of bungalows and more ambitious small villas. A whole estate had been built there five years ago without any calculation of the sea’s erosion. Before
anyone had come to live there the sandy cliff had given way and the houses had begun to totter and slide. Some of the FOR SALE FREEHOLD notices were still in place. One of the smaller villas was left right on the verge. Half the foundations and the front wall were gone, while the sitting-room, exposed to all the birds of the air, flapped its last shreds of wallpaper over the void.

For ten minutes or so – since it felt like spring – Florence sat on an abandoned front doorstep, laid with ornamental tiles. The North Sea emitted a brutal salt smell, at once clean and rotten. The tide was running out fast, pausing at the submerged rocks and spreading into yellowish foam, as though deliberating what to throw up next or leave behind, how many wrecks of ships and men, how many plastic bottles. It annoyed her that she could not remember exactly, although she had been told often enough, how much of the coast was eroded every year. Wally would supply the information immediately. Churches with peals of bells were under those waves, as well as the outskirts of a speculative building estate. Historians dismissed the legend, pointing out that there would have been plenty of time to save the bells, but perhaps they didn’t know Hardborough. How many years had they left the Old House, when everyone knew it was falling to pieces?