‘Gran was so excited to see her. Mom, too. It’s crazy to think that the first time Pat met my mom was at the funeral.’
‘Transatlantic travel used to cost a fortune.’
‘Gran said that, when she came here, it cost a fortune just to make a phone call. She’d fix a time, like making a hair appointment. And she worried so much about the money she couldn’t think what to say.’
‘Wow.’
‘Like, you and I can Skype without even thinking about it. But Gran used to save her wages up to afford a phone call home.’
‘Imagine if you couldn’t talk to your friends or family for months!’
‘Crazy. And no email.’
‘No internet!’
‘Just women in great hats carrying library books on horseback.’
Cassie grinned. ‘I don’t think Pat and Josie go back that far.’
Erin’s face on the screen was thoughtful. ‘Still, it’s kind of sad that they hadn’t met for ages and then they only hung out for a couple of weeks.’
They chatted back and forth a bit longer, and Cassie wondered if Erin had seen Jack lately. But, since she didn’t know her well, she didn’t like to ask. Anyway, it could be that Erin only knew him from the Shamrock Club, and Cassie had gathered that neither went there often. Most members appeared to be well over fifty, and anyone younger seemed only to be there because they’d been drummed up for a special occasion. So perhaps Erin hadn’t seen Jack since the night of the farewell party.
She blinked, aware that her mind had drifted, and Erin laughed. ‘You look like you’re ready to sleep! What time is it over there?’
‘Coming up to midnight and I had a long day.’
‘Well, the night’s still young in New York State and I’m going out to a classy restaurant.’
‘Good for you.’
‘I hope so. I’ve known him forever and this is our first proper date.’ Erin squinted at her own face in the corner of her computer screen, tugging critically at her long, fair hair. ‘And you know what? I should be in the shower. Not sitting in my bathrobe talking to you.’
‘Okay. Go. Have a good one.’
‘I’ll try. You get some sleep. Give my love to Pat.’
‘Sure. Say hi to your gran and your mom for me. And let me know how the date goes.’ Cassie closed her laptop, looking thoughtful. It was stupid to think that Erin’s date might be Jack, and even dumber to want to hear that it wasn’t. But that’s how she was feeling. Which, she told herself crossly, was the stupidest thing of all.
When she got into bed she imagined she’d sleep as soon as her head hit the pillow. Instead her thoughts went round in circles, moving from her conversation with Erin to her day’s trip in the van. At a stopping point that afternoon she’d encountered a woman who’d said she knew Erin’s gran. ‘Oh, my God, Josie Cox! I was at school with her. Mind, she was older than me but I knew her well. My dad and Josie’s would give us lifts from Lissbeg. She married a lad called Fenton and settled down in the States and she never came back. She would have been a cousin of Pat’s.’
‘We stayed with her family when we were in Resolve.’
‘God, I’d love a chance to meet up again with Josie! Actually, there’s a lot of people I know over there. I’d send them a card at Christmas, say, and that’s about the height of it. And I wouldn’t be alone. The American post is a big thing here around Christmas. Well, for my generation anyway. It might be dying out.’
Cassie turned over in bed and tried to settle more comfortably. She remembered the woman’s smile as she’d received her latest library book. The middle-aged daughter who’d been with her had placed it in her bag and winked. ‘That’s Mam set for the week with Catherine Cookson for company.’
Her mother had given her a shove. ‘And isn’t it better than sitting in front of the telly watching Celebrity Something or Other? Anyway, I do hate turning the telly off at bedtime. It brings it home to you that there’s no voice in the house.’ Then, seeing the look on her daughter’s face, she’d turned to Cassie. ‘Not that the family isn’t great, coming in and keeping me company. And it’s I that’s insisted I want to keep my own roof over my head. Anyway, isn’t it great to have winter behind us? There’s a grand stretch in the evenings now, and fewer dark days.’
Cassie wondered how Erin was going to wear her hair on the date. American girls went in for long, flowing tresses. Lots of volumiser. Pushing her own hair off her forehead, she thought she might change the colour of her fringe. Metallic bronze, maybe. Or subtle streaks of silver. She’d anticipated that Margot might say her fringe was a bit out there for the salon, but Margot had been cool. Not like the manager on her last ship who’d said that Florida matrons wouldn’t want a stylist looking like Björk. And he’d turned out to be wrong. Half the ladies on their way to gamble in the Bahamas had been a lot livelier than he’d thought. That was the thing about older people: far too many idiots wrote them off.
Rearranging her pillows, she looked at the clock by the bed. If she didn’t get to sleep soon, she knew she’d be dozy tomorrow. It wouldn’t matter, since it was the weekend, but she’d planned to see if Pat fancied a jaunt. Having visited Uncle Frankie’s house, she’d imagined she’d touch base with him about that sort of thing from now on. Perhaps she ought to give him a call in the morning. But that might seem pushy. After all, Pat was his mom and – hang on – he, too, must be grieving for Ger, who, after all, was his dad. Feeling troubled, Cassie wriggled up against the pillows. Had it been insensitive to talk about Pat’s loss and not even mention his?
Cringing at the thought, she turned her mind back to Erin, who was probably at the restaurant now, looking great in a gauzy dress and gladiator sandals. Erin had a pick-me-up-and-take-care-of-me quality. Nothing like a Catherine Cookson heroine. More like Cate Blanchett in The Lord of the Rings.
Determined to make herself drowsy, she set herself the task of matching The Lord of the Rings actors to their characters. Cate Blanchett as Galadriel. Liv Tyler as Arwen. Orlando Bloom as Legolas. Viggo Thing as Aragorn. This was rather good, like counting sheep. Ian McKellen (or was it McKellern?) as Gandalf. Elijah Wood was Frodo. Sean Bean was the guy in the huge cloak. Though they all had those. Huge black cloaks and filthy fingernails. Boromir! That was Sean Bean . . .
Vaguely trying to list all the hobbits, Cassie found herself slipping satisfactorily towards sleep. Then, just as she drifted off, her eyes opened and she sat bolt upright, gripped by an idea. She knew exactly what was needed to take Pat out of herself, and it wasn’t just a common-or-garden, run-of-the-mill book club.
Chapter Eleven
Saturday mornings in the library tended to be noisy. People who came to Lissbeg to shop dropped in to return or borrow books and stayed to chat with each other. When Hanna first took up her post she’d battled for months to maintain a conventional level of silence, gaining a dragon’s reputation in the process. But the new reading room, with its sliding door and soundproof glass wall, had solved the problem. Those seeking peace and quiet could make use of it while their neighbours were more convivial in the hall. And that wasn’t all. The state-of-the-art exhibition space was designed to house a medieval psalter gifted by a donor who’d also funded the library’s renovations. So the reading room was expensively equipped with blackout blinds and a projector, and a screen that still gave Hanna a thrill whenever she hit the button to lower it from the ceiling.
The only downside was the effect of the sliding door on Darina’s children. Setanta confined himself to creating sticky handprints on the glass, but Gobnit, if left unsupervised, would swing from the brushed-steel handle, using her weight to open and close the door. Today they were doing nothing worse than popping out from the shelving, making faces. Darina, who was selecting CDs, was oblivious to their antics, and everyone else appeared to find them amusing, though Hanna knew from experience that the mood could change in an instant if the children became too obstreperous, and that she’d be expected to cope, since their mother couldn’
t.
Darina was a tall woman, originally a blow-in from Dublin, with a high-pitched voice and a laugh like a horse’s neigh. Mary Casey frequently dismissed her style as ‘mutton dressed as lamb’. No one could argue with the description, but the tie-dyed smocks worn with Lycra leggings, and the hennaed hair braided with beads, appeared to Hanna, on her charitable days, to be brave as well as pathetic. Under Darina’s assurance lurked a great deal of perimenopausal panic: she’d never really found her feet among her Finfarran neighbours, though her husband had made a group of breezy friends in Carrick’s exclusive golf club. Now, as she approached the desk, her expensive scent contrasted oddly with her stringy hand-knitted scarf and paint-stained fingers. Remembering that her latest fad was art classes, Hanna enquired how they were going.
Darina looked troubled. ‘I’m not actually sure that I’ve found my métier. Well, you know yourself I’ve a wonderful eye for colour. But perhaps my real canvas is my home and my own person.’ She frowned at a splodge of Cadmium Lemon on her forefinger. ‘Oils aren’t easy, Hanna. But I did forget the primer, of course, and that was part of the problem. And landscapes are notoriously tricky for Leos and I’m on the cusp. Anyway, Gormfhlaith – she’s my mentor – suggested I might seek out a different medium. So I think I’ll step back from the course for a while. Well, she thought I should.’
Keeping a straight face, Hanna said that sounded wise.
‘Do you think so? I do. I really think it’s important to let one’s juices flow organically.’
Gobnit was edging towards the reading-room door, so Hanna held out her hand for the CDs. ‘Is that everything, Darina? Because I’ll need your library card.’
‘Oh, God, of course you will. I’m sorry!’ Darina rooted madly in her bag before giving up and tipping its contents onto Hanna’s desk. ‘I have it here, I know I have.’
Hanna rescued an iPhone and an orange, which was rolling towards her in-tray. ‘I think yours is a keyring tag.’
‘It is! You’re right! You’re absolutely right! And my keys are in my purse. Or, at least, they should be.’
As Darina searched wildly for her purse, Hanna noticed a library book in the pile of miscellaneous possessions strewn across her desk. It was a copy of E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. Picking it up, she saw it was weeks overdue. Darina’s hand flew to her mouth in horror. ‘Oh, no! That’s where it was. I’ve been looking for it forever. But you know me, head like a sieve and so much to contend with!’
‘It’s not a problem.’
‘No, it is! I’m such a silly mare. But I could swear I searched my bag and it wasn’t in it.’
The children were now watching from behind the shelving and Hanna suspected that Charlotte’s Web had not been in the bag when Darina had searched for it. Directing a repressive glance at the two pixie faces, she said again that it really wasn’t a problem. ‘It’s here now, so there’s no need to worry.’
‘Yes, but the fine.’ Darina spotted her purse and made a pounce for it. ‘I must owe you a fortune.’
Hanna replied that overdue children’s books incurred no fines. It was something she’d told Darina more times than she could remember yet, once again, it produced a squeal of astonishment. ‘Really? How extraordinary!’
Fast losing any sense of charitable sympathy, Hanna explained again that this was a long-standing policy. ‘And, actually, the entire fines system has been abolished. Though your membership card can be blocked if overdue books aren’t returned.’ She had explained this repeatedly, too, and put up prominent signs about it, but it always took ages for people to grasp new systems.
The young woman behind Darina said it was more than time for the change. ‘Fines only encouraged me not to bring books back at all.’ Making a mental note to check her records, Hanna refrained from comment. An elderly man towards the back of the queue announced it was just as well that there was still some deterrent. The woman looked at him blankly. ‘How d’you mean?’
‘You’d have to have a proper deterrent or else we’ll be facing a crime wave.’
‘At that rate, you might as well advocate hanging.’
‘For not returning a library book?’
‘I never said that.’
A spotty boy chipped in: ‘Well, that’s what you find at the end of the road when you get obsessed with deterrents.’
A middle-aged council official turned on the boy pompously. ‘Hold your horses there, now. It’s clear you’re a stranger to logic.’
‘As a matter of fact . . .’
With great relief, Hanna saw that Darina had found her keyring. Having checked out the CDs, she turned to the returns trolley, giving the book an automatic shake before setting it down. A bookmark fluttered from between the pages and spiralled to the floor, landing at the feet of the elderly man. As he bent down to retrieve it, Darina gave an embarrassed squeal and snatched it out of his hand. It was a voucher for a herbal product guaranteed to control hot flushes. Behind the shelving, the children burst into hysterical laughter, Gobnit leading and Setanta joining in without knowing why.
‘That’s where this went to! Gobnit!’ Grasping at dignity, Darina swept her possessions into her bag and marched out, hustling the children ahead of her. As soon as the door closed behind them, the queue began to discuss alternative medicine. There was no point in attempting to interrupt them, so Hanna decided to sit back and enjoy it. The personal anecdotes were riveting and at least the queue had abandoned the row about bringing back capital punishment.
A little later, when things were quiet, Hanna’s thoughts strayed to a story she’d told Cassie. It was about a Scottish librarian who’d thought she’d uncovered evidence of a crime. ‘She worked in a library in Dundee. And, one day, a reader asked her why the number seven was marked on page seven of all the books she took out. It was underlined in pencil.’
‘In every book?’
‘In each one this woman had chosen to borrow. She was a sweet little old lady. Probably had a blue rinse.’
‘We had a library on a cruise ship I worked on, and half the books were romances set in World War Two. Which was probably the heyday of most of the female passengers. I spent that cruise up to my ears in blue rinse. So, what happened to the Dundee librarian?’
‘She decided there was another Zodiac Killer on the loose. You know the Californian serial murderer? The one obsessed with cryptic numerology?’
‘No.’
‘It was a big case in the late 1960s. They never made an arrest, so this librarian got spooked. She’d gone through every book in the genre and they’d all had the same cryptic mark on page seven so she smelt a rat. Maybe a new murderer. Maybe the one who’d escaped detection had come to live in Scotland. Maybe it was a case of espionage, or an international plot.’
‘So what did she do? Call the police?’
‘No, she had a bit of sense and told her supervisor. And then she discovered the secret of the Elderly Readers’ Codes.’
Cassie had grinned at Hanna’s dramatic pause. ‘Okay. I’ll bite. What was it?’
‘Well, you’re quite right. Some readers like to stick to a single genre. And ladies of a certain age do tend to gravitate towards World War Two romance. Authors like Ellie Dean, say, or Lizzie Lane. These days we’ve got digital filing systems, which link a person’s library card to the books they’ve already borrowed, so you can check with your librarian if you’re wondering whether or not you’ve already read a particular book. But the generation we’re talking about predates digital filing. And before it came in, lots of people invented systems of their own.’
‘But if you’d read a book wouldn’t you remember it?’
‘Maybe not if you only read one kind of book. So you devise a code.’
‘That’s amazing.’
‘It’s also defacement. But I do think it’s charming and, apparently, it happens all over the world.’
‘Even here?’
‘A bit. There’s one bedridden old lady who sends her husband to borrow
books for her. Whenever she reads a novel, she puts a tiny star in the top left-hand corner of the title page, so he knows which books to avoid.’
‘That is so sweet.’
‘I can’t be seen to encourage it, but it’s a case for using discretion. I’m not going to interfere.’
‘Not even to tell him she doesn’t need to do it?’
‘No, because it gives them a sense of control at a time when life is getting difficult. Anyway, no one wants to be told what they need, or how they ought to do things, and elderly people are just like anyone else.’
It struck Hanna that Darina’s unfortunate bookmark was yet another instance of the importance of discretion in its other sense. The most unlikely personal revelations occurred in libraries, and in a small community it mattered greatly that, whoever else might gossip about them, readers could feel confident that library staff would not.
As Saturday morning ticked away, Hanna began to look forward to sitting down with a book herself. She’d planned to do some early seasonal clearing in the garden, but the weather suggested an afternoon indoors. With a pleasurable sense of the week winding down, she wondered if she might bake a cake and have tea by the fire. Then, as she finished her final tasks, the door swung open and Cassie bounded in, followed by Pat.
Cassie came to rest by Hanna’s desk. ‘I’ve had an idea!’
Pat intervened: ‘Yes, but, Hanna, love, I’ve told Cassie it mightn’t be something you’d want. I mean we can’t just come barging in with some mad proposal.’
‘It’s not mad, it’s sensible. And what’s not to like?’ Cassie’s eyes were bright with excitement behind her flying fringe. She planted her hands on Hanna’s desk and leaned towards her. ‘You said you couldn’t go round telling people what they needed, older people especially, that’s what you said.’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘And you told me you couldn’t demand that people turn up to clubs and things if they weren’t inclined. It was a matter of keeping an ear to the ground, you said, and responding to what was required.’
The Transatlantic Book Club Page 7