The Rise & Fall of Great Powers (47 page)

Ten minutes later, Tooly left, as he had intended her to do. Reaching the end of their street, she checked the contents of her shoulder bag, ensuring that everything was there: clothing, passport, bank card. “Oh, well,” she said, pressing a knuckle into her breastbone, pushing as hard as she could, as if to cave in her chest. “Oh, well.”

Her train left Penn Station, passing the smokestacks of New Jersey, factories with windows smashed, rusty bridges, residential streets, houses whose insides she filled with blaring televisions, pregnant silences, uproarious laughter, sex, showers, cigars, chatter. She had no location of her own and none in prospect—less in common with those home-dwellers than with the sinister types lurking at each station the train pulled into, its brakes squealing to a halt, air vents gusting, a bag of chips crinkling behind her. “Last call for …” Trenton and Philadelphia, through Chester, Pennsylvania, Wilmington, onward.

2011:
The Beginning

T
HE PASSENGERS EXPLORED
their trays of foil-covered treasure, but she turned down her meal, irking the airline steward, who kept telling her that it was free. She looked out the window, smelling rubbery eggs, watery sausages. Flying reminded Tooly of her father. Whenever they’d had a bank of three seats to themselves, they left an empty one between them, she at the window, nose pressed to the glass, Paul on the aisle, looking around for a stewardess to request another ginger ale for his daughter.

There were no empty seats on this flight from New York to London. The passengers were crammed in, bulging over the armrests onto each other. She read a copy of
The New York Times
, whose front page contained a report that neutrinos may have broken the speed of light:

Even this small deviation would open up the possibility of time travel and play havoc with longstanding notions of cause and effect. Einstein himself—the author of modern physics, whose theory of relativity established the speed of light as the ultimate limit—said that if you could send a message faster than light, “You could send a telegram to the past.”

The purported discovery was shaky, the article continued, but the idea was wondrous. How Humphrey would have loved pondering it! And how odd that events went on regardless, leaving behind those who should have witnessed them.

It seemed inconceivable that he existed nowhere. Even when they’d
been apart for years, she’d heard his commentary each time she ate a potato or looked at a Ping-Pong table. The proxy Humphrey inside her continued talking even now that the original had gone from existence. He most definitely
was
, therefore it was jarring—almost impossible—to know that he was not.

Humphrey had talked once about block time, an idea of the philosopher J.M.E. McTaggart, who in 1908 had posited that human perception deceives us: time only feels like a forward-moving flow because of the limits of our minds, whereas time actually exists, as does space, with everything in existence simultaneously, even if one is not there anymore. The events of twenty years earlier still exist, just as another country and its inhabitants exist even once you leave it. Block time was like turning backward in a novel, as Tooly had done in childhood, finding dear characters preserved, quipping and contriving as ever. Block time offered comfort to secular minds, for those who had no heaven in which to save vanished friends. Nevertheless, to Tooly there was something untrue about the theory; a slight comfort, but not true.

She returned to the article, recalling a conversation during which she (in an H. G. Wells phase) had lamented to Humphrey that people always talked of building a time machine to go back and see great moments of history, whereas she’d want to go forward and see what the world looked like then. He had been appalled: to see two hundred and fifty years hence would be devastating. “Maybe in two hundred and fifty years,” he cautioned, “nobody plays Ping-Pong.” His world would be extinct, even if humanity continued. Extinction, as he meant it, took place yearly, in increments small enough to tolerate, harder as they accumulated. To leap so many extinctions at once would be too painful. That conversation had been twelve years earlier, in a world already long extinct.

From Heathrow, she took the Tube to central London, then two trains onward to Wales, and a cab from the local station. She had the driver drop her at the top of Roberts Road, so she could stroll through the village.

Bag over her shoulder, she tapped on the window of World’s End and entered, the bell above the door tinkling. She had doubted that the shop would be open anymore. But Fogg remained there on his stool. “Oh, hello,” he said. “Are you back, then?”

Each sought the appropriate register to address the other. Before, it had been owner to employee, then during her absence—after phone calls and his assistance in her search—they’d become friends, only for her to drop all contact for weeks. Now they settled midway.

She explained her plan: to transfer formal ownership of the shop to him, then be on her way. If he didn’t want World’s End—and she’d understand—she would need to sell the stock, pay any outstanding bills, formally close the company, and lock up within a fortnight. These travels had decimated her savings. She’d be eating empty sandwiches for a while now.

That night, Tooly looked out the attic windows at the rain and the muddy pastures, sheep mewling in the darkness. Lying on her own mattress once again, she slept for eleven hours, utterly tranquil (a tweeting bird, sounds of distant construction, long stretches of oblivion between). Waking, she inhaled the smell of the rafters up here, which until her return she’d never realized had a scent. Her only unease was a hovering sense of responsibility—that she ought to be looking after someone. But there was no one anymore, just herself, which seemed so frivolous.

After opening the shop, she made an early sale.

“Find all you wanted, Mr. Thomas?”

“No, thank you.”

“Can I help you find something else?”

“No, thank you.”

“See you again, Mr. Thomas.”

“Well, best be off now.”

Fogg arrived with their shared newspaper, but without his customary cappuccino. He’d grown jaded about the quality of coffee at the Monna Lisa Café, he told her, so Tooly brewed tea for them both. He accepted his with thanks, flapping open the newspaper, front page
devoted to rebellions around the world that summer. “Must be said,” he remarked, “that everyone should live through at least one revolution.”

It was such a wonderful Fogg comment—declaiming on global affairs as the two of them sipped tea inside a bankrupt rural bookshop. Yes, bring on the revolution!

“Why are you smiling?” he asked.

“Just the idea of a revolt here in Caergenog. Who would we overthrow? The fiendish village council with their dastardly plan to mend the overturned fence posts on Dyfed Lane?”

“Yes, yes, I know—you think I’m beyond stupid.”

“I was smiling because I liked what you said,” she protested. “Don’t say that—that’s an awful thing to say.”

Among Fogg’s charms was that nothing wounded him for long. “To be brutally honest,” he resumed, pursing his lips importantly, “I’m not even sure I’d know
how
to start a revolution.”

She suppressed her smile, lest he misread it once again. And perhaps she
had
inadvertently belittled him in the past. Why had she? That’s just how she was. But damn how she was! She didn’t accept that how one was is how one must remain. Consistency in character was a form of tragedy.

She resolved to blunt her flintier side, not to assume that she understood people entirely, and to accept that to be surprised or disappointed or even betrayed was not a catastrophe. It could be a revelation to learn that you were wrong, as she had been about Fogg, a notion he confirmed with what he said next.

“I have something to show you.”

She walked around the servery to see what he indicated on the computer screen. It was a database of some sort.

“What is that?”

“It’s that,” he answered, pointing to each aisle of the shop in turn. “Took me millions of hours, and still not done.”

While she was away, he had occupied himself compiling a catalog of the entire stock and posting it online, then publicizing it on various
bibliophile blogs. A notable American antiquarian had emailed for prices, expressing particular interest in the vintage cookery volumes and animal books that Tooly had amassed. For walk-in customers, Fogg would have settled on a pittance for most of these editions. But, shrewdly, he had consulted competing prices online, and adjusted accordingly. By the next afternoon, he’d made his first Internet sales, almost eight hundred dollars from a single email. The dealer, delighted with his purchases, gave a favorable write-up of World’s End Books on his blog, followed by a rave on Twitter that encouraged his followers to check out the shop’s wares. Now, Fogg explained, a good deal of each workday was spent handling overseas orders, responding to emails, going back and forth to the post office.

“Fogg,” she exclaimed, “this is incredible!”

“Actually earning a bit of money.”

“This means the shop is even more yours now.”

He raised counterarguments, but her attention kept drifting to the window. How she had ached for a proper hike while away—she must go for a scramble right this instant. “Sorry,” she interrupted, “but it’s going to rain later. Would it be okay if I dashed out for a walk? I’ll be back, and we’ll continue this. I promise.”

“Or I could come along.”

“What about the shop? Then again,” she remarked, “how much walk-in business are we really going to lose.”

When he caught up with her at the ridge summit, Fogg was breathless, raising his hand. “Completely out of puff.”

Previously, Tooly would have marched ahead. But she waited till he was ready. When he apologized for his slow pace, she reduced hers. “Nice to have a calm wander for a change,” she said. “No point running ourselves ragged.”

“Look!” He pointed out a hare darting through the gorse.

They watched, and when Fogg turned to her, aglow with pleasure at his sighting, she hopped over to hug him.

“Physical harassment,” he joked, blushing.

By the time the weather had changed, they were in the little old
Fiat, trundling back to Caergenog. And by the time she’d parked opposite the shop they had reached agreement: although Fogg refused to take full possession of the shop, he might take half. That is, he’d accept nothing officially, but she would proceed on the assumption that each owned fifty percent of World’s End and that any profits (even to
mention
such a possibility was extraordinary) would be split. “That’s non-negotiable,” she insisted. “Really, you should have it all. With my business acumen, this place would’ve been bankrupt ages ago.”

Later that week, Duncan phoned. After Humphrey’s death, he had encouraged Tooly to return home and pledged to take care of the paperwork. He called now to update her on the disposal of Humphrey’s possessions, having traveled down to Sheepshead Bay and glanced through everything, finding only garbage, junk mail, tons of old pill containers.

“Humph was a pharmacist once,” she explained. “He liked to keep all sorts of cures around to help people. When you throw away the drugs, I think you’re supposed to pull off the labels so they don’t get misused on the street.”

“They were pretty much empty already.”

“No,” she corrected him, “did you check under the cushion of his armchair? There was a bunch of heart medication there. I saw it recently.”

“I checked there. Just empty bottles.”

When could Humphrey have taken all those? Tooly had gone out that morning. He knew well the effect of those drugs.

“So, in theory,” Duncan continued, “you’d get anything.”

“What? Sorry, I was thinking of something else.”

“Just saying how Humphrey left no will. But if there’s anything left in his estate you’ll get it as his daughter.”

She wasn’t sure how best to explain, after all this time, that Humphrey was no relative of hers. “Sounds like there’s nothing of value anyhow.”

“That’s pretty fair to say. Given the outstanding bills for that surgery he had,” Duncan said, “we’ll move toward declaring him insolvent
upon death. I’m going to Sheepshead this weekend to oversee the removal of his junk.”

She hated that strangers would rummage through Humphrey’s belongings, then toss it all away. “Should I come back and deal with this?”

“Seriously, it’s fine.”

“If there are fees, you have to bill me.”

“Don’t worry.”

“Duncan,” she said.

“It’s fine.”

He couldn’t accept gratitude, so changed the subject to talk of the winter break. His kids were still grumbling about not having gone anywhere that past summer. Unseriously, he and Tooly chatted about the family coming to visit Wales the following year. She offered free lodgings at World’s End—he’d been so generous to her, and the inn rooms would accommodate them all for as long as they liked. But his family was a closed circle again, she an outsider, one whose lifestyle had initially looked like novelty to the McGrorys, briefly like inspiration, and finally like subtle criticism. Sometimes it was best to leave the past where it lay.

During this period, Tooly kept her grief over Humphrey to herself. She contemplated him when opening books, speculated about his opinion, imagining how it would have been to show him around the shop, which really was his. She kept busy, working with Fogg to complete the database, dealing with online sales, which were not quite as rampant as he’d suggested but kept them afloat.

Toward the end of Humphrey’s life, he had abstained from alcohol, wanting clarity of mind, and Tooly had stopped in solidarity, no matter how she had craved a drink. Since then, she’d ceased the solitary tipples of old, abolishing her nighttime habit of vanishing into glasses of red wine, that nightly amnesia starting around 8
P.M.
Anyway, she was collaborating so much with Fogg now that her evenings were no longer solitary. She reserved time to practice her ukulele (oddly, she’d gotten slightly
better
by not playing these past weeks). Even as she
strummed, her new cellphone often trilled beside her in the attic, with a text from Fogg posing a catalog query. She thumbed in half a response, then gave up and went downstairs to answer him. For breaks, they closed the shop, took afternoon hikes past the priory, up into the Black Mountains.