The Man Who Wanted to Smell Books

by Elspeth Davie

  ‘No, I haven’t,’ the man said, with a hint of apology in his voice.

  ‘Oh no, no – of course you haven’t! I absolutely forgot for the moment that you haven’t got … Excuse me. I am being so stupid.’

  The man said no, there was nothing to excuse. It was easy to forget. He added that the hard shoulder did indeed sound a very unsympathetic place to rest on in the night.

  The three of them had now finished their first course and had turned towards the door to watch the next group entering. Half a dozen families were coming in, and a carload of men carrying trumpets. Two policemen were moving slowly about among the tables. At the far end of the room a waitress was mopping up the floor where someone had let a plate slide from a tray. The policemen bent and spoke to a man at a table, then sat down, one on either side of him while he put ketchup on a last wedge of steak pie and ate it with seeming relish. The three of them left the café together. ‘This is where you find them,’ remarked the car-owner to his wife and the passenger from the bus. They had now started on their squares of yellow sponge cake with a custard layer between. The custard too had been sliced into neat and solid squares, and their plates when they had finished were as dry and clean as when they had started. ‘One job less for the staff, I suppose,’ said the husband examining his dish with distrust.

  The other man – seeing they had confided in him – began to tell them what it felt like to walk along the edge of an ordinary country road while the cars went by. The husband looked vaguely aside. It was not a believable thing for a grown man to do and he did not hear it beyond the first sentence. But the woman said: ‘You mean hitch-hiking?’

  ‘No, no – just getting about from one place to another, sometimes by bus and train, naturally, and sometimes walking.’

  ‘As a pedestrian?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. In cities naturally one walks a good deal.’

  ‘Yes, I see – a pedestrian,’ said the woman, looking at him with a vague interest.

  Her husband had now brought coffee for the three of them and the man drank his quickly, for the time was up.

  ‘I’m sorry to rush,’ he said, ‘but the bus leaves in eight minutes, and they don’t wait long. Thanks for the coffee – and a very good journey!’

  ‘And the same to you!’ They watched him go, weaving between the tables, and a few minutes later saw him hurrying down the glass bridge and starting to run as he reached the far end.

  ‘A pedestrian,’ murmured the woman musingly.

  ‘Well, a bus-traveller.’

  ‘But he tells me he walks a lot of the time, in country as well as city.’

  After a while her husband looked at his watch. ‘Shall we get on then?’

  ‘Might as well. We can take our time.’ They wandered slowly away from the windows, looking back to see one of the buses moving off. ‘His bus, I expect,’ said the woman. ‘Careful and don’t slip on that chip,’ she added as they passed the spot where the plate had fallen.

  The glass bridge over the motorway was the only viewing-point for miles. The man and woman paused in the middle and looked down onto the great streams below. Four or five chains of long vehicles happened to be coming up on one side with a second line going down on the other. Great grey roofs slid beneath them in opposition like extra roads moving along on top of the others. At this time of day the cars too were coming one after the other with scarcely a second between them, and – seen from above – scarcely an inch.

  ‘I can’t say I’ve met many non-drivers in my time,’ said the man broodingly, ‘but there’s usually a perfectly legitimate reason for it. Certainly not money in his case though.’

  ‘Physical disablement, maybe,’ said his wife. ‘Remember Harry Ewing. He didn’t drive. He had one short leg.’

  ‘You’d never have known. Anyway, with all the dashboard gadgets these days, what’s a short leg, or arm for that matter?’

  ‘Some people have bad eyes,’ suggested the woman.

  ‘Funny thing, but I’ve seen cross-eyed people driving about and nobody stopped them yet. And as for one eye at the wheel – that’s common enough, believe me!’

  Watchers on the bridge, or any persons not in a hurry, invariably attracted others. Something about the static bridge, sealed in above the speed, made company acceptable. So, before long, the two who had been standing there found that another couple had joined them – a man in a blue summer jacket and his wife in a cream coat. For a while the four of them stood comfortably together, silently watching. Then the first man said, ‘My wife and I were speaking about non-drivers – their reasons, I mean, for not having a car. Most disabilities can be overcome, you know.’

  ‘Maybe it’s nerves,’ said the man in the blue jacket. ‘Or more likely psychological.’

  ‘You mean,’ said his wife, ‘like that woman who’d never let her boy touch a machine – not even a child’s scooter. So he never had a car all his life, not even when she was dead. Well, I suppose he loved his mother.’

  ‘Well, I’ve heard that story the other way,’ said her husband. ‘His mother wants him to own this super-car since ever he opened his eyes. Nagged him all his life. And he won’t do it, not even when she’s dead.’

  ‘Sure,’ said the other man, ‘because he doesn’t love his mother.’

  They turned and sauntered slowly along the bridge together like old acquaintances, looking down at the motorway to the left and right of them as though it was still a long, long way off.

  ‘That man in the café – maybe he just didn’t want one,’ said the first wife. Her husband looked aside again with his vague and unbelieving smile. The four of them now seemed reluctant to reach the end of the bridge. They began to walk more and more slowly as they neared the opening. In front the great gravelled space was, if anything, more closely packed than ever – some cars edging out, others slowly burrowing in like beetles into hidden corners. The two couples paused and stared intently at this space, searching for their own. ‘Well, nice to have met you,’ they said to one another, ‘very nice indeed to have the pleasure …’ For one more moment they hesitated on the sloping ramp of the bridge. An overpowering whiff of loneliness reached them from the fumy air beyond. Then they stepped down and out into the narrow lanes between the cars and the glittering maze of metal divided them.

  The Time-Keeper

  IT WAS TAKEN as a matter of course that at one time or other during the summer he would be showing people around his city. Renwick was a hospitable man and for certain weeks it was a duty to be available to visitors. The beauty of the place was written on its skyline in a sharp, black script of spires, chimneys and turrets and in the flowing line of a long crag and hill. It was written up in books. He had shelves devoted to its history and its architecture. It was written on anti-litter slogans with the stern injunction that this was a beautiful city and it had better be kept that way.

  Sometimes the people he took on were those wished on him for an hour or two, friends of friends, or persons he’d met by chance passing through on their way north. They were all sightseers of a sort and the first sight they wanted to see, particularly if they were foreigners, was himself. Well, he was on the spot, of course. Yes, he had to admit he probably was a sight and even worth looking at in a very superficial way. At certain times he put on his advocate’s garb – a highly stylized get-up, dark, narrow and formal. A bowler hat went with the suit and an umbrella which – because of the windiness of the city – often remained unrolled. He was never solemn about the business. He was the first to point out that it was traditional wear – a kind of fancy dress or disguise. ‘And there are plenty of them about these days,’ he would say. ‘We ourselves are falling behind in the game. Look at all the people either dressing the part or the opposite of the part!’ But there was no need of excuse. Visitors enjoyed him in his dress and were disappointed to discover he seldom wore it when the Court was not sitting. Sometimes however they were lucky. And he had a face that went with the garb – a rather masked face, lo
ng and grave with hair well plastered down over a neat skull, as though to show what an extreme of flatness could be achieved in comparison with the dashing wig which he might later put on.

  Renwick’s hospitality didn’t mean that he was always a patient man. There was a good deal of exasperation and sharpness in his character, and he shared with many of his fellow citizens a highly argumentative and sceptical turn of mind. He developed it and was valued for it. That hint of the suspicious Scot in his make-up was well hidden. The impatience was not so well in check. It boiled up silently at dullness. It occasionally exploded at stupidity. As time went on, he had even begun to be impatient with those visitors who insisted on taking a purely romantic view of the city. It was not after all made up only of interesting old stones, nor were the people going about their business on top of these stones particularly romantic. Certainly not. They were a commonsense, very businesslike lot and more to be compared to down-to-earth scene-shifters doing their jobs against a theatrical background.

  This was made clear to an American couple one afternoon, as they stood with him in one of the oldest graveyards of the city. There was a great deal to see and a lot to hear about. Renwick had given them something of the turbulent history of the place and listed the succession of famous people who had been buried here. They in their turn exclaimed about the ancient monuments and walls. They touched the moss-covered dates on headstones. It was getting late. The three or four still left in the place were slowly making their way out. In the distance a blonde girl was moving round the dark church between black and white tombstones. But Renwick’s couple were all for lingering in the place until the sun went down. Renwick felt a sudden flare of impatience rise inside him. He directed them to look up and out of the place. From where they stood they could see, rising on all sides, the backs of houses and churches, and beyond that a glimpse of the bridge which carried a busy street over a chasm. Cars and buses crossed it. People went striding past. ‘But look up there,’ he said pointing. ‘We are rather an energetic crowd. You can see we’re in a hurry. You’re not going to find your ordinary citizen of the place sitting around staring at old stones for long. I believe you might find it hard enough to get him to stop and talk for any length of time unless there was very good reason for it. For better or worse – that is our character!’

  The Americans didn’t deny this. They had already attempted to detain people on the bridge. They had sensed the bracing air. Now, polite but silent, they stared down at an angel whose round and rather sulky face was crowned by a neat green crewcut of moss and backed by frilly wings sprouting behind his ears. Cautiously they mentioned the old ghosts of the place.

  ‘But just behind you,’ came the brisk voice, ‘there, in that wall, there are still lived-in houses. Look at that window for instance.’ It was true that in the actual ancient wall of the place they were looking into the room of a house. Sitting in the open window was an old man being shaved by someone standing behind. At first they saw only a hand holding his chin, the other hand drawing a razor along his cheek. But while they watched the job was done. The head of the old man and his middle-aged daughter emerged from the window. It was close enough to get a clear sight of them – keen, unsmiling, both staring straight down with eyes which were shrewd but without much curiosity as though they had seen decades of tourists standing just below them there on that particular spot in the churchyard.

  ‘You see there are more than just angels around us,’ said Renwick tersely. ‘There are also ordinary, busy folk getting on with their own jobs.’

  The young couple looked for a moment as though they might question the business and even the ordinariness, but had thought better of it, especially as they had seen Renwick look openly at his wrist.

  Renwick counted himself a polite man. Lately, however, he had given in to this habit, common to persons of consequence in the city, of glancing at his watch – and often while people were actually talking to him. He believed that he was indicating in the politest possible way that he was a very busy man, that even in summer his time was limited. But as the habit grew, not only visitors but even friends began to see the wrist shoot out, no longer surreptitiously but very openly. Those who still hung around after that had only themselves to blame. And as well as the watch he was very well up in the tactics of the engagement diary. ‘Well, certainly not tomorrow, nor the day after. This week’s out in fact. Next week? Full up, I’m afraid. No, I have a space here. I think I can just about manage to fit you in.’ Acquaintances might sound grateful, but they felt squeezed and sometimes throttled as they watched him writing them into the minimal space between appointments.

  Just as Renwick was both proud and yet irritated by the romantic reputation of the city, so he felt about the supernatural history of the place. He was good-natured about disguises, masks of all kinds. He understood the hidden. But the guise of the supernatural he didn’t care for. He had lost count of the number of times he was asked about the witches and warlocks of the city, mediaeval apparitions hidden down closes, the eighteenth-century ghosts of the New Town. Grudgingly he pointed to deserted windows where heads had looked out and stairs where persons without their heads had walked down. Reluctantly he led willing visitors to the district where the Major had made his pact, pointed out infamous tenements and doorways blasted with the Devil’s curse. ‘And now you’ll want to see the spot where the gallows stood – and you’ll not mind if I leave you there. I have to keep an eye on my time. The fact is I have a good deal of business to attend to between now and supper.’

  Friends dated his concern with time back to a year when his post brought new responsibilities. Others pointed out that business was all a matter of choice, and that the time-obsession was common to most middle-aged men once they’d begun to feel it making up on them. ‘And worse things can happen to a man than keeping to a tight schedule,’ remarked a colleague as they discussed others in the profession. ‘We’ve had a good few suicides by his age, and quite a tearing of the silk. There was McInnes letting it all rip and making off for the South Seas. And Webster? Wasn’t it the stage he’d always yearned for, never the Bar? Yes, retired now, white hair to the shoulders – happy enough they say, and no guile in the man at all. Still, meeting him late on summer nights in loopy hats with orange feathers gave some people more of a turn than seeing the Devil himself.’ Other names came up. They decided if it was nothing more than a little touchiness about time – Renwick was doing well enough.

  By midsummer a stream of holiday-makers were on the streets. Renwick would become impatient – or was it envious? – at the idea of an endless enjoyment of leisure. How could they wander for days and weeks, sometimes for months? From early spring, when the first few aimless visitors arrived, he would begin to take note of the city clocks. Not that he hadn’t known them all his life – the clocks under church spires, the clocks on schools and hospitals and hotel towers. He’d seen brand-new timepieces erected in his day and had attended the unveilings of memorial clocks. But now he counted them as allies in the summer game, to give him backing when the wristwatch methods had no result. It was his habit, then, to stare about him for the nearest clock – if it was old, so much the better. Having alerted visitors to its history, it was an easy step to exclaim at the time of day, to excuse himself and make off with all possible speed to the next appointment.

  During one summer Renwick had several visitors of his own for a short time. He enjoyed their stay. They knew the city well. It was not always necessary to accompany them, but he had the pleasure of their talk in the evening. Later, however, he was asked if he would help a friend out with four visitors who had been staying in the city and, with little warning, were to land on him for twelve hours. The friend had to be out of town on the evening of that day. Could Renwick possibly take them round for half an hour or so? Yes, he could do that. When the time came, they turned out to be two middle-aged couples from the south who had not set foot in the city before this visit. But they had read the necessary books. They wer
e well primed with history and they knew legends about every door and windowframe. They had expected smoky sunsets and they got them. They knew that on certain nights there might be a moon directly above the floodlit castle. The moon was in the prescribed spot the first night they arrived. They did not mind bad weather. They said that gloom and darkness suited the place. They liked the mist and even the chill haar that could swirl up out of the sea after a warm day. They were amiable, and they had an equal and unqualified love for all the figures in the city’s past.

  That evening Renwick had taken them down into one of the closes of the Lawnmarket, and they were now standing in a large court enclosed by tenement walls. There were a few people besides themselves in the place; a group of youths with bottles bulging at their hips, a fair-haired girl holding a guide-book and three small children who had raced in after a ball and out again. It was getting late and a few small yellow lights were appearing high up on the surrounding walls.

  ‘If only we could get in there and see some of those weird old rooms,’ said one of the wives, staring up.

  ‘And speak to one or two of the old folk,’ her husband added. ‘There’ll be ones up there with many a tale to tell of the old days.’

  ‘Many a tale?’ Renwick straightened his shoulders. He directed a rather chilly smile over the heads of the group. ‘No doubt there might be tales – and ones not so very different from our own. Of course those particular rooms you’re looking at have all been re-done. They are expensive places, very well equipped, I should imagine, with all the latest gadgets. You’ll find quite young, very well set-up people living there, I believe. You’ll get your dank walls, poor drains, black corners in a good many other places if you care to look. But not up there!’

  They had been with him now for half an hour. Renwick had begun to check the various times on their watches with his own, and murmuring ‘I will just make sure,’ had walked down the few steps at the far end of the court and out to where, overlooking street and gardens, he could see the large, lit clock at the east end of the city.