Chapter Text
[These writings were recovered after their author disappeared. Ostensibly a romance novel in journal form from the viewpoint of a hapless middle-aged man, they in fact contain the people she wished she could have met and the world she wished to vanish into.—The Archivist]
Year one. September 22nd. Morning.
"This living hand, now warm and capable"—Keats
I am standing behind a counter in a bookshop where I have been working for the past ten days. In front of me, I can see through to the far end of the shop floor, where large pine double doors open to a back room.
Through those old doors, there is a room with a window, and through that window, I can see the gray willows of the courtyard and the unkempt shrubs. It is autumn, though winter is arriving unusually early.
The old groundsman of the building is sweeping slowly and thoughtfully, his blue cap pulled over his creased face as he passes the window. The sky outside is a crisp, oceanic blue, and the first fresh, wintery breeze of the season is rolling into the shop, banishing the stale smells and spreading the aroma of coffee, bread, and butter through the shop floor.
By the window stands Eliza, the owner of the bookshop. She is leaning against the frame of the window. She is putting her thick and tawny hair back with hairpins. With her left hand, she is holding her hair up while sorting the pins by touch with her right. Her knowing green eyes observe the groundsman from behind round glasses in golden frames.
He leans his broom against the wall and puts down a wooden kneeler with a dirty, ancient-seeming purple cushion. He disappears from view beneath the window as he continues to prune and brush. Eliza’s neck cranes towards the window, and her eyes remain fixed on him.
I am standing behind the counter. To my left, there is an old mechanical cash register. It is full of notes and bolted to the counter. To my right, there is a digital tablet where I record sales. Beneath the desk, there are three ledgers. We have a routine: sales are performed as they would have been sixty years ago. Then I register them on the tablet. At the end of a shift, I record everything by hand in the ledger.
There is a wee desk in the right-side corner with a small, deceptively comfortable chair where I sit to update the ledgers three or four times a day. Every transaction in the shop must begin and end ‘off-grid.’
Everything that occurs in the modest shop goes through Eliza’s accountant, who, I am told, does not deal with digital records. I have never met this accountant, yet it is my signature on the files. The legality is my problem. There are other peculiarities. We have certain customers whose names and addresses are written in the ledgers every time they make a purchase.
These customers are exclusively women. We record which books they order and where they are delivered. I often deliver these books by hand. I have yet to discern anything unusual about the books our customers order.
It is September; it is my tenth day of employment. My second Monday morning. There is more administration and management to do in this small shop than I have ever had to do at any previous job. Due to the popularity of the shop and the number of students and tourists we serve, a number of lapses and discrepancies will accumulate over the week. Correcting them becomes repetitive in a calming, enjoyable way. There is an odd satisfaction to a completed ledger-page, with title and number recorded; and I am looking at old books that I never knew existed. Perhaps it is because I am approaching, or already in, middle age but observing what the customers treat as canonical classics makes me feel as if I have drifted out of touch with the times. The old you feel when you no longer recognize what counts as a classic book is a different kind of old from not recognising songs on the radio; how quickly the years pass between these two. ‘On the radio,’ hah. You know what I mean.
At this point, in September of my first year, my assumption remains that the quaintness of the arrangement is what our customers appreciate. Eliza will say, “The shop is a part of the history of the city, and we help our customers to feel part of that history also,” to most questions. It was her line from my interview for this job. It was also her line on the telephone call arranging for the interview.
The bookshop proudly calls itself ‘Historic’ on the sign above the door. The vitrine display, which is behind me as I stand at the counter, is full of dusty first editions and curios. I try not to wince seeing such a rare collection facing the busy street outside, separated by only a pane of glass. The sign above the window reads “The Historic Little Library.” The ‘Historic’ is golden paint, an ugly kitsch cursive. The ‘Little Library’ looks burned into the sign, black, deeply carved into the wood.
The first things you will likely see upon entering the shop are four old black-and-white photographs. One is taken outside the shop, where six women smile and proudly present large books to the camera. The other three show the backroom performing its most famous function: circles of women, of different generations and cultural backgrounds, engaged in enthusiastic debates in lively reading groups.
In none of the photos can you make out a single book, but in the largest of them, a woman stands next to a chalkboard where an elaborate cubist sketch of a lynx has been drawn. Two feline eyes stylized as asymmetrical, falling moons.
Above the photographs, a watercolor of a heron is fixed to the wall with a pin. The edges of the paper are curled from age. The heron holds a frog in its beak. Its eye is turned towards the viewer, indifferent.
Further above, a row of eight unlit candles has gathered a thick and sticky dust on top of a tall antique bookshelf. The bookshelf contains first editions. Some are very valuable. I remind Eliza that these should probably be behind lock and key, or at least beneath a camera of some sort, but her reaction to this unwanted advice is simple annoyance. Everyone obeys the ‘Look with your eyes, not your fingers’ sign without being asked. Curious, yet one cannot help but admire the contract the shop imposes on its visitors simply through its sense of belonging so very much to the city at large.
Although Eliza is the owner of the store, she is not my boss. I am the boss. I was hired to be the manager here, and she is taking the role of shop assistant. As it is still September and I have only been working here for ten days, I assume this is another peculiarity. She dislikes administrative work intensely but often attempts it, which eventually only gives me more work to do. Her magpie eye for detail, which I now understand to be locally famous, does not translate to moribund concerns like ledgers, stock lists, and accounts.
I cannot argue with the presence she has with her customers, most of whom she knows by name and most of whom she can engage in conversation about their intellectual and imaginative adventures—at least as far as those adventures impel them to traverse through her shop.
Right now, she has finished fixing her hair in a subtly old-fashioned style but is still staring intently at the groundsman. He grunts as he rises up, wiping his brow with a hand that is holding a rusty pair of shears.
“Your work is very appreciated, Thomas,” Eliza says, her voice as flat as a station announcer.
“Aye, well. I am appreciating my last full winter before retirement. You get one more Christmas with me. My back won’t miss it, but my eyes will.” He begins to ramble at her.
She cuts him off, amiable and calm. “It will be a shame to see you go, but you should retire now while you can still take as many fishing trips as you want.”
The old man laughs to himself, wheezing. “If only you could talk that much sense into my wife. I’ll be taking her on a damn cruise before I get a sniff of being out on the river, Miss Darrow.”
Eliza’s soft laugh spills over her practiced manner. “Tom, I can almost guarantee that you will love the cruise. Do not pretend you think otherwise. Tell your wife I was delighted with her note. And more delighted that she enjoyed the books.” As the old groundsman replies, she is already shutting the window and walking across the floor to me, the smile fading on her face.
“Lawrence, can you hand me the purple ledger? I need to put down this week’s delivery dates. We are behind,” she says, the announcer tone ebbing into a cold prompt.
“No need, Eliza. That’s all done this morning.” I hand her the ledger.
“All done, and correct?” She peruses my handwriting quizzically and hands it back to me, straightening her green cardigan. “Very well, since I am evidently redundant this morning, I shall go prepare my lunch.”
“There is a nettle salad bowl in the fridge. I stopped by the Burnt Crust on the way here. I put in goat cheese and capers. Like you did last week; I saw how you like it.”
“Lawrence. Did I ask you to make me lunch?” Her voice lands firmly on my name. I cannot place her tone as irritation but only as firmness.
“No, but you complained about the queue in Dorothea’s twice last week. The Burnt Crust uses fresher ingredients anyway. You should try it with anchovies. I saw you have the same brand I use, so I got a second jar. Worth breaking etiquette about fish at work over, I can almost guarantee it.”
As soon as I realize I have repeated her words, I pull my earlobe in frustration.
She scowls at me and turns towards the old landline telephone that sits on a stool on the far left of the room. “Very well. Since I am now utterly obsolete, I will call the accountant.”
“No need, he will email me the files later. All they need is a signature. I reordered them. It took a while for him to agree to an email, but apparently, his secretary can scan anything I need. I think it will save you a lot of time if you let me do it.”
“Lawrence,” my name lands heavily again. She turns to close the double doors behind her with a gentle click. “Those are my personal files. Where did you get them?”
“They were at the top of the filing cabinet with the order files for academic textbooks. I worked through everything as you said.”
Eliza sighs. “I shall arrange to be euthanized, then. Since I am dead weight to this establishment.”
I flick through ledgers and satisfy myself that the work is all as complete as I believed it to be. “Don’t be dramatic, Eliza. There is a reading group tonight. I assumed more… intellectual matters would be on your mind.”
Eliza walks over to the counter and leans in, her hands overlapping. Her face inches from mine. Her eyes jabbing at me. Her lower lip held under her front teeth.
I wave my hand once between our faces. Trying to defuse. “I have to be sincere for a moment. It is uncomfortable watching you doing so much of the pencil pushing and drudgery here. You pay me for it. It only takes me forty minutes. You’re obviously a person with different concerns. If you’ll excuse my saying so, you don’t seem like you’ve ever had to do admin work at any job in your whole life. Let me do what you pay me to do. It’s a pleasure, really. I like the rhythm of it all; I feel quite…” I search my mind for a light term, “zen!” and I immediately regret my choice.
“Zen? Pleasure?!” She mouths the words, she angles her head and her voice shifts. “Oh rats, Lawrence. Did I hire you as a PA or to make me a packed lunch? I am not a college student whose parents pay you to tutor me.”
She steps back and tucks her fingers under her elbows. Shoulders sloping. A perfect contrapposto without intending it.
I am trying to be friendly. At least helpful. “Last week, I only had to see it once: the way you cut tomatoes into big chunks and spooned out canned olives, that rush… I’d prefer it if I handled that. That is, Eliza, if you would like it.”
“I see, I see,” she says, stretching out her arms with a flick and then clapping her hands together silently. She turns and opens the double doors dramatically, paces through the backroom, then into her personal office, and gently shuts the door behind her.
Seconds later, muffled sounds of Mozart’s Don Giovanni radiate through the walls of the shop.
“Eliza, if you’d like me to put music on for the customers, I can do that!” I shout through the double doors. But there is no reply. Her office door is shut tight.
I get back to work. Two customers walk in. A disheveled young woman with long curly black hair and her lanky, squeaky-clean boyfriend. They ask for secondary literature on Keats. There is none on the shelves. I tell them what is available to order. The woman sways her head to the distant Mozart as I try to help them remember the title of a particular essay they need to find for her studies. They quip on obvious things happily, without embarrassment. Negative capability. New heads having old conversations. Lions after slumber. Already my own signature is sleeping in the ledgers a hundred times over.
I am realizing, sale by sale, that Eliza’s achievement is the shelter the Little Library gives. But it’s a shelter that extends to one of these people and not the other. I smile at their lecture-hall banter, and the neat young man looks painfully self-conscious. His partner excitedly skips to a back shelf to retrieve a book. Not Keats. Not anything I recognise.
The day passes. Eliza spends most of the rest of her time in her office; the Mozart is uninterrupted but unmuffled now the doors are open and the mood is easier. Different recordings of the same opera. Some scratchy, one with modern flourishes. An electric guitar, a Moog. Not corny, not ugly. Surprisingly. That wouldn’t work on paper.
In the afternoon, I go into the backroom for a well-deserved coffee and find the salad bowl I prepared empty and presumably eaten, and the new jar of anchovies opened. I clean her bowl, dish, and fork and put everything away. I refill her carafe of water from the glass bottles of sparkling water under the sink. Up to the mark. Mustn’t be left to go flat. I notice that an orange has been taken from the fruit dish, so I go to replace it from the refrigerator. No oranges remain, only six tangerines. I put out two. They seem exquisite; I hold one beneath my nose and inhale. I think of perfumeries, orchards, orange-blossom water on the neck of someone who gives a second date but not a third. I think of my own clumsy hands peeling ugly, thick, and dry oranges on the high school tennis court in my hometown.
The Mozart recording stops. Her voice calls me to her office. As soon as I open the door, she has already begun speaking to me. Quickly and surely. A brightness that was not there this morning.
“Lawrence, I have a particular question on my mind.” She pauses and pushes up her glasses. A studied, intentional gesture. She did the same twice at my job interview. I was sitting just in front of where I am standing.
She leans back into her chair, the leather and wood creak. She takes off her glasses and folds them, putting them on the desk in front of her. “Do you ever hear any of my friends speak to me as you do?” Her words are strict but her voice is soft and curious.
I start to speak, but before I even know where the sentence I am uttering is going, she is waving me to a halt. A black fountain pen tumbling through her fingers without falling to the desk.
“Ah! Think, now, before you answer.” Her cadence does not match the youth of her voice. It is mellow, hushed, and punctual.
I think. I run through each encounter with a customer she seems to have known and each reading group member that has been introduced to me. I answer truthfully. “No, I don’t…”
“Why is that? What do you think?”
“May I be frank, Eliza?” My thoughts gather; I can explain myself. “You own several properties. Not just the shop — you employ the groundsman for the whole building — so I assume this is not your family’s only business.”
“I know what you are implying.” She puts the pen down and taps the edge of her desk twice.
“I am not sure that I was implying anything in particular.”
“Well, does it make you reconsider?”
“Working here?”
“No, of course not. Reconsider how you speak to me.”
“Not really. You’re an interesting woman. It is interesting to meet the clientele here, however hostile some may be to me personally; the pay is generous and the work is stimulating. You’re not used to working under a manager.”
“Am I under a manager, Lawrence?”
“You pay me to manage this place; you are the sales assistant. As you told me in the interview. Eccentric, but I understand.”
“Ah. Do you feel vulnerable, Lawrence?”
“Excuse me, what kind of a question is that?”
“Do you feel vulnerable?”
“I can’t answer.”
“What sort of women do you find attractive?”
“I should leave.”
“Maybe you should.”
“Fine, good evening. See you tomorrow.”
“Lawrence, good work today. But… The Burnt Crust is too rustic for my tastes. Dorothea’s is worth queuing for. Next time, go there. You are right about the tomatoes and olives. There is a sharper knife in the second drawer. Put it to good use. And I trust you can also make an acceptable omelet?”
“Cheese, or French?”
“I don’t see a nine-year-old child in this office. French omelet. Now, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I try to say goodbye, and she makes the same silencing gesture to wave me out.
[This seems to have been the last entry written in the entire corpus. It was the only one to contain no typos. It was partially written in British English. The other entries were written in American English but the author seems to have started to retroactively revise everything into British English shortly before writing this entry, but she did not do so very thoroughly. I have tried to remain true to the unrevised version but a few things escape my attention and many original culture references have been effaced and thus made unrecoverable. There was a messy paragraph about Shelley in this entry but since it was incoherent I have not reproduced it here.—The Archivist]