Sunday, 15th
My dearest Helena,
I was extremely sorry to hear about your mishap yesterday over the ’phone. I do hope you will soon recover from the shock you must have sustained and that it will have no ill effects. I had not written you previously as I had thought you might have been away somewhere over the holiday season. I thought yesterday I would take a chance with a ’phone call to see if you were at home, but I was very sorry to have your news.
You will be interested to hear that Mrs Porter is returning to her house in August (it has been let for twelve months) with a husband, a local optician. It has been in the offing for quite a while.
Did I tell you that Mrs Tishman passed on during June? She had a long spell of suffering. Mr Tishman is not too good at the moment with bronchial trouble, and we have had one or two very cold days lately.
I did not have any luck on the July. There were so many “certainties” before the race that one got a little confused as to what to back. Last Ray saved me a little, as I had backed it for a place when it was in the 20’s, so I made a fiver there.
Well, my dear, I hope you are going to get back to complete normal soon. As I mentioned yesterday, I leave here by car next Sunday or Monday, and I shall ’phone you from Bernie’s as soon as I arrive. I had hoped to see you at once, not thinking of anything that had been likely to upset you.
I believe Muriel’s mother has returned to Port Elizabeth. I could not see her visit lasting.
With a warm affection for you.
J.P.L.
* * *
—
I would have relished something more personal, but one was able to read between the lines too.
* * *
—
Sir Robert Stanford meets Mistral in the public gardens at Monte Carlo, at dawn. “She was wearing a grey cloak of some soft material which fell from her shoulders to the ground, the hood shadowed her hair, and in the pale light he could just see the outline of her face – delicate features, wide eyes dark lashed, and beautifully moulded lips which were parted excitedly as she looked out to sea.”
* * *
—
The signs say: take nothing but counsel, leave nothing but bookmarks. This particular bookmark, which I discovered in Persuasion, said: Don’t let UNWANTED HAIR cast a shadow over your life! Have it REMOVED BY ELECTROLYSIS – the only medically approved, permanent way. Lisbeth Lewis, 302 Safric House, Eloff & Plein Streets, Johannesburg. On the left of the business card was a line-drawing of a woman’s face, and below it the caption: Be FREE of unwanted hair by the KREE method.
Naturally I wondered what the Kree method was. Are the Krees not a tribe of Algonquian-speaking Indians? But what held my attention was the drawing: in a few deft lines the artist had captured a heart-shaped face and a soft blonde permanent wave, pencilled eyebrows as neat as brackets, an impudent scoop of nose, lips glossed with sweet nothings. The face was bisected vertically by a dotted line, and the left-hand side, that side blighted by unwanted hair, was veiled by a half-tone screen.
As I examined the drawing my fingers began to tingle: I felt Helena’s gaze skimming over the lettering, gliding from the cool and supple limbs of one typeface to the warm hollows of another. I tucked the card back into the book and turned the page. But the tingling continued. I smelt the incense of the ink fuming from the print, mingling with the scent of orange blossom from her blue-veined wrists. I saw her right hand on the page, taking flesh around my own, then her downy arm, and then her freckled shoulder spilled over by yellow hair, one thing leading to another like the rhymes of a love-song. She raised her right hand to her mouth, licked the tip of her forefinger deliberately, lowered the hand again. The paper sucked the spit from her finger with a thirsty gulp.
* * *
—
I wanted to know everything about Helena Shein, but I refused to set about it properly. I went back to the beginning and asked myself sensible questions. I gave myself sensible answers too. Why had her library been dispersed? She had left the country. Or, more likely, she was dead. And even if she were still alive, and living in Johannesburg, she would surely be old enough to be my mother. I myself am a youngish man with a normal sense of regard for the aged. I could have cleared up the mysteries easily enough, I suppose, by consulting the relevant authorities. Certainty was possible. But I declined it. I wanted to know this woman, the one who had inscribed her name in these books. Did I mention that her g’s were like party balloons with dangling strings, that her i’s had soap bubbles revolving over them instead of dots? I wanted to touch the hand that had smoothed open these pages when they were new. I wanted to turn it over and read its palm.
A book lay open before me, verso and recto curving voluptuously away from the spine. I put my nose into the fold and breathed. The pages smelt of caramelized sugar. I opened my left eye. Slightly blurred, gigantically magnified, I read the following words: “All in grey she seemed to move like a ghost across the room; and as she drew level with Sir Robert’s table, he could see that, wreathing her hair, where other women would have worn flowers, were the softest grey velvet leaves almost like shadows among the dancing gold.” I had opened A Ghost in Monte Carlo in the middle of the scene in which Mistral makes her first entrance into the dining-room at the Hôtel de Paris. Aunt Emilie and Mistral, or rather Madame Secret and Mademoiselle Fantôme, are the talk of Monte Carlo.
* * *
—
There seemed to be no end to Helena’s books. As far afield as Boksburg and Benoni, insistent voices called my name when I stepped into the swop shops and charity kiosks. My powers amazed me. In the tawdriest of a string of Bookworm Book Exchanges, a dismal place in Primrose wedged between a pet shop and a hairdressing salon, I found a copy of Firbank’s The Artificial Princess that I knew she had read, even though her name was not in it. There was an unmistakable trace of her on the pages, like a whiff of hair lacquer on a second-floor landing.
In time the dealers, who had never valued my custom much, began to despise me. I suppose I did make a nuisance of myself staggering around in the aisles, groping at the books, even those dumb ones that turned their backs on me, and mumbling through them. On more than one occasion I had to snatch one of Helena’s books from the clutches of a browser. “Browser” is not a term I would apply to anyone lightly, and least of all myself, but it suited this one to a T, with his rude hands (as Birrell would put it) and champing jaws. The book was The Way of All Flesh. God knows what would have become of it.
It pained me to think that with every passing day Helena’s precious books were being swallowed up by the libraries of perfect strangers. I redoubled my efforts.
* * *
—
Occasionally I gave myself a day off, and spent it visiting the sites of the vanished bookshops. First stop on my itinerary was always Vanguard Books, Helena’s favourite, long since obliterated by an insurance company’s high-rise. They were all gone – Pickwick’s and Vanity Fair and Random Books and L. Rubin, Booksellers and Stationers. City Book Shop had become Bob’s Shoe Centre. Resnik’s was now the Reef Meat Supply.
I breathed freely in these spaces emptied of books. Marrowbones and cleavers and the tinkling bell of the cash register made music for my ears. But in the lobby of Africa House a foul smell rose up from the floor, as if a long-forgotten bestseller was rotting under the marble flags.
* * *
—
Aunt Emilie takes the life of Henry Dulton to prevent him from revealing that she is really Madame Bleuet, proprietor of a house of ill fame in the Rue de Roi. Mistral, confined to her room while the body is disposed of, remembers how lonely she was at the convent, and how Father Vincent saved her by giving her the freedom of his library. “She read a strange and varied assortment of books. There were books on religion, travel, philosophy, and books which, while being romances, were also some of the greatest ach
ievements in French literature…There were dozens of others which at first she liked because they were English, but which later became, as books should, real friends and often closer than the real people in her life.”
* * *
—
The relics yielded by Helena’s books I filed away neatly in a Black Magic chocolate box that had once belonged to my mother, but the books themselves mounted up in odd corners of my house. I began to worry that this disorder would prevent the essential unities of the library from manifesting themselves, so one evening I carried all the books to my study and sat down to make a list.
To my way of thinking, alphabetical is still the order of choice. I created the categories A–I, J–R and S–Z and began to sort the books into them by author, constructing three ziggurats on the end of my desk as I went along. This arrangement, though architecturally sound for the first tower, proved to be impracticable for the others when a statistical imbalance was revealed. The first tower (A–I) contained just a dozen books, but the second and third (J–R and S–Z) had 111 and 77 respectively. So I razed the first tower, spread the books out in an alphabetical fan, slipped a sheet of Ariston bond into my Olivetti typewriter, and began.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Austen, Jane, Persuasion (J.M. Dent, London, 1950)
Birrell, Augustine, Obiter Dicta (The Reprint Society, London, 1956)
Bloom, Harry, Episode (Collins, London, 1956)
Bosman, Herman Charles, Cold Stone Jug (A.P.B. Bookstore, Johannesburg, 1949)
Butler, Samuel, The Way of All Flesh (Collins, London, 1953)
Cartland, Barbara, A Ghost in Monte Carlo (Rich and Cowan, London, 1951)
Dickens, Charles, Pickwick Papers (McDonald, London, 1956)
Ehrenburg, Ilya, The Fall of Paris (Hutchinson, London, 1943)
Firbank, Ronald, The Artificial Princess (Duckworth, London, 1934)
Fowler, Gene, Schnozzola: The Story of Jimmy Durante (Hammond, Hammond & Co., London, 1956)
Gordimer, Nadine, The Lying Days (Victor Gollancz, London, 1953)
Huddleston, Trevor, Naught for your Comfort (Collins, London, 1956)
* * *
—
This latter was among the first volumes belonging to Helena I ever found. You will recall that I was particularly taken with the dust-jacket. I flipped to the copyright page to check the date. Then I ran my eye down the inside flap: This is the testament…burning questions of the day…burns like a beacon…challenge which no person of conscience can ignore…Jacket design by Kenneth Farnhill…Price in Union of S. Africa 15/- net. I groomed a dog-ear with my fingernails. And it was then that I noticed a small white triangle protruding from between the black-edged board and the dust-jacket. I tugged it, and three photographs tumbled out.
I arranged these photographs under my reading-lamp. They were black and white snapshots, about six centimetres by eight, with wavy edges. Two of them were snaps of the sort people feel obliged to keep even though they’re practically worthless. One showed a babe in arms with its face obscured by the fringe of a shawl. The other showed three men in swimming-trunks forming a pyramid, two standing side by side and the third straddling their shoulders. The pyramid was on the point of collapse, all three men were moving, all their faces were blurred. Even so, I could tell at a glance that none of them was Julius P. Lofsky.
Have you noticed that snapshots have been getting larger over the years? Very few of them will fit in a wallet these days – not that I’m the sort of person who would carry a snapshot around in a wallet.
The third photograph showed Helena and her parents. There was no caption on the reverse side, just the number 9056/3 written in pencil and the word EPSON, the trade name of the photographic paper, repeated in red ink seven times (and an eighth EP with the SON cut off), but there was no doubt in my mind that it was Helena. She looked nothing like my imaginings, and yet I felt an acute pang of recognition; in fact, the argument between these two contradictory certainties was what persuaded me that it must be her.
I gave the photo a sniffing, but all I turned up was the faintest hint of glue. It may be true, as I’ve been told, that the human nose is an organ in decline, habituated to stenches and increasingly incapable of drawing finer distinctions.
Helena and her parents are posed on a speckled tile path that runs at a diagonal across a patch of lawn. On either side of the path are beds of impatiens kept in check by toothy brick borders. The garden wall, angling away to left and right like the arrowhead to the pathway’s shaft, is made of pale brick, solid for a dozen courses, then surmounted at intervals by square posts half a dozen courses high, with the spaces in between filled by panels of twirly wrought-iron. The gate at the end of the path, visible as broken corkscrews and drill-bits in the spaces between the three figures, has a matching design. From the disposition of the houses in the background, and two streetlights shaped like morning glories on delicate stems, I can tell that Helena’s house is on a corner stand. Those houses are made of the same brick as her garden wall and have corrugated-iron roofs. Their windows are set into frames of chunky white concrete and dimmed by cataracts of venetian blinds. One of the houses has a porthole in the wall next to the front door. Another has a hedge as smooth as a concrete quay, and a ragamuffin palm-tree.
I know these bricks, these houses. Although the photograph is black and white, I can see the marmalade colour of them, the glazed rind of brick and the plaster thick and white as pith. This is a Highlands North house, a Cyrildene house, an Orange Grove house. The streetlights nod against a wan blue sky, crossed in one corner by telephone lines.
Helena is a head taller than her parents, who stand on either side of her. Mr and Mrs Shein are middle-aged and look like immigrants. Mr Shein wears flannels, a loud tie, a bristly pullover. The cuffs of his shirt are pulled up with sleevebands, and this has the effect of enlarging his hands, which dangle in hollow fists at his sides as if they are dreaming of pushing a barrow. His pants are too short: you can see his socks, and shoes as round and shiny as aubergines. Mrs Shein wears a dark skirt, and a cardigan with raglan sleeves over a white blouse buttoned to the neck. She has strappy wedge-heeled shoes and a boy’s haircut. Her left hand seems to be holding in her stomach. Her right hand rests on Helena’s hip, disembodied, severed from the encircling arm.
It is hard to believe that two such dumpy, badly dressed Europeans could produce this statuesque beauty of a daughter, looming over them despite her flat black pumps. She is wearing a sleeveless halter-neck top in a dark colour, brightened by a chain and locket. Her skirt, which is soft and full, falls to mid-calf. The skirt is a moon colour with circular motifs – flowers or cogs – scattered over it. I imagine that they are earth colours.
What I have failed to imagine is her black hair, her dark eyes, her olive skin. She is no wispy blonde. With a name like Helena Shein, I might have known.
I saw her cross a tiled lobby. At the foot of the stairs she stepped out of her shoes and then quietly ascended. I followed, scooping up the shoes as I passed, watching her brown feet and the heart-shaped prints they left on the polished treads. On the second-floor landing it dawned on me that the photograph had been lying undetected for all these months. How many times had I held the book in my hands and failed to feel the warmth beneath its skin? The books had blunted my curiosity by surrendering their treasures too easily.
I’m ashamed to say that I fell upon the other books in a frenzy, ripping off their jackets, fondling their boards and flaps, turning them upside down and shaking them, thrusting my fingers into their spines, squinting into their pockets. I became so engrossed in the search that I forgot my Bibliography entirely. The search failed to turn up anything new.
* * *
—
The Rajah of Jehangar abducts Mistral with the intention of turni
ng her into his concubine, but she escapes.
* * *
—
The next day I was reminded of the Bibliography and sat down to it again. But I think I was never meant to complete the task, for as soon as I ran my eye over the twelve entries on my list I was struck by a peculiarity so obvious that for the life of me I cannot explain how it had escaped my notice before (it surely cannot have escaped yours): the predominance of the year 1956.
I looked through the rest of the books. Scores of them had been published or purchased in that year too. Why had Helena read so much in 1956? Historically speaking, it was not the most memorable of years. The Soviet invasion of Hungary came to mind, and the Olympics in Melbourne. Of course, I was born in 1956…
Then it hit me like a ton of books: we were brothers and sisters, the books and I, Helena’s offspring. Helena’s abandoned children! Cast out into the streets, thrown upon the mercy of strangers. A sense of kinship with the books overwhelmed me as I gathered my long-lost family into my arms. “They are mine, and I am theirs,” I said with Birrell.
When I had regained my composure, this new understanding of my relationship to the library made me a little uncomfortable about my feelings towards Helena and the rather overwrought way I had been burying my nose in my siblings. I resolved to adopt a more proper attitude towards them all.
* * *
—
Aunt Emilie reveals to the Grand Duke that his son, Prince Nikolai, is in love with Mistral – who is the Duke’s lost daughter! “There was so much bitterness and spite in Emilie’s passionate declamation that instinctively Mistral turned towards the Prince as if for protection and found him beside her. He took her hand in his and held it tightly. She clung to him, thankful for his strength. She knew that he was as astonished as she was at what was occurring. Yet neither of them could say anything. They could only cling together, two children lost in a wood of terror and bewilderment.”
Flashback Hotel Page 20