Death Sentences

by Otto Penzler

  I got up to put the books on the trolley for shelving. I was about to return to my seat when I saw Adam himself coming into the reading room by the north door, the one leading to the new staircase that acts as a spine connecting the disparate parts and levels of the library, old and new.

  Panic gripped me. He glanced about the room. It all happened so quickly I had no chance to turn away. He was carrying three or four books. For a moment his eyes met mine. There was no sign of recognition in his face, which both relieved and irritated me. He saw an empty seat near the window end of the room and made his way towards it.

  The spell that held me broke. I slipped through the glazed doors and onto the landing of the main staircase of the old building. I hurried downstairs, past the portraits of distinguished dead members, a parade of silent witnesses.

  Once on the stairs, however, I could think more clearly. I saw how absurd I was being. Why was I acting as if I had done something wrong, as if Adam were for some reason hunting me down? On the other hand, what on earth was going on between him and Mary? And was he really planning something on Francis Youlgreave? I told myself that I had every reason to be curious.

  Besides, Adam was unlikely to leave the reading room for a while.

  I continued more slowly down the stairs and into the issue hall. I turned into the passage where the lockers are. These are on the left. On the right is a line of tall cupboards, always open, with hanging spaces for coats and shelves where you can leave your bags.

  The Burberry was in the fourth cupboard down, hanging between a tweed overcoat and a torn leather jacket. Adam’s bag was on the shelf beneath.

  This was the moment when I crossed the line. It didn’t seem like that at the time. It seemed quite a natural thing to do in terms of my Youlgreave book. One has to research the possible competition.

  I looked over my shoulder. No one was paying me any attention. The bag was one of those canvas-and-leather affairs that look as if they ought to have a bloodstained pheasant or a dead trout inside. I lifted the flap and checked the main compartment and the side pockets. I found nothing but the Guardian, the Spectator and a couple of crumpled paper handkerchiefs.

  Straightening up, I patted the coat. In one pocket was a packet of Polos and a shopping list on the back of an envelope. The list was in Adam’s scrawled handwriting: burgundy, flowers, milk, salad veg. The other was empty.

  I nearly missed the coat’s third pocket, which was inside and fastened with a button. It contained something small and rectangular that didn’t yield to the touch. I slipped my hand inside and felt the outline of a phone.

  It was an iPhone. I had one myself as it happened, though mine was an older model. The ringer switch was in the off position. I pressed the control button. The screen lit up.

  The phone was locked. But someone had sent a text, and this was briefly displayed on the screen.

  I miss you more and more every moment we’re apart. J xxxx

  There was no name attached to the text, only a phone number.

  So that explains the Post-it note, I thought. The complete shit is having an affair.

  Nothing new there.

  So I come back to Mary. She told me later why she kissed me in the garden at the party: as a demonstration of disdain to her newly exboyfriend, who was watching us through the kitchen window. But it developed into something else.

  While the party thudded away in the house, we stayed in the garden and talked and drank and smoked another joint. I can’t remember what we talked about. But I do remember that for once in my life I seemed to have leapfrogged the paralyzing shyness that usually characterized my attempts to talk to attractive girls and landed without any apparent effort into something approaching friendship.

  Later I walked her home, and she kissed me again when we said goodnight. The next day we met between lectures for coffee, dispelling my lingering fear that she’d have forgotten me completely overnight. By the end of the day we had tumbled into bed together.

  I felt as if I’d been turned into someone new and infinitely preferable, like the frog kissed by a princess. Mary was so beautiful, so vital. She always knew what she wanted and she was very direct about getting it. I envied her that. The mystery was why she wanted me. It was still a mystery.

  We lasted nearly a term as a semi-detached couple before Adam decided he would have her for himself. He and I no longer shared a room, as we had in our first year. But we still saw a fair amount of each other. I was useful to him—I was the organized one, you see, who knew when the supervisions and lectures were, which library books we needed, how to find the material that could lift your grade from a B to an A.

  In a sense, it was Francis Youlgreave who brought Mary and Adam together. I knew something about Youlgreave, even then, because my mother had grown up in Rosington. Youlgreave was a Canon of Rosington Cathedral in the early twentieth century. She had one of his collections of poems, The Judgement of Strangers, which had once belonged to my grandparents. I was using this as the basis for my long essay, an extended piece of work we had to do in our final year which counted as a complete module of our degree. I’d made the discovery that there were several advantages to studying obscure literary figures—fewer secondary sources, for a start, and a better than average chance of impressing the examiners with one’s initiative.

  Mary was waiting for me in my room when Adam turned up one evening. He said he’d wait for me and, while he waited, he investigated the papers on my desk while chatting away to Mary. He found some of the Youlgreave material and Mary told him more.

  By the time I returned with an Indian takeaway for two, they were smoking a joint and chatting away like friends on the brink of being something closer. She responded to his charm like a plant to water. He had the priceless knack of seeming to be interested in a person. The takeaway stretched among the three of us. Adam and Mary got very stoned and I sulked.

  Next week Mary and I officially broke up. It was one lunchtime in the pub. She did her best to do it tactfully. But all the time she was being kind to me, she was glowing with excitement about Adam like a halloween pumpkin with a candle inside.

  As she was going, she said, “Don’t take it personally, Tony, will you? I’m always looking for something, you see, and I never quite find it. Maybe one day I’ll come round full circle. Or maybe I’ll find it. Whatever it is I’m looking for.”

  I didn’t know which disturbed me more: the knowledge that Adam was having an affair and that his marriage to Mary was breaking down; or the growing suspicion that he would take Youlgreave away from me, probably without even knowing what he was doing.

  I knew perfectly well that Francis Youlgreave wasn’t “mine” to lose in the first place. He was just a long-dead clergyman with eccentric habits, who had written a few minor poems that sometimes turned up in anthologies. Even I accepted that most of his poetry wasn’t up to much. If half the stories were true, he had taken too much brandy and opium to do anything very well.

  For all that, Youlgreave was an interesting person, always striving for something out of his reach. He was also interesting in the wider context of literary history. He was not quite a Victorian, not quite a modern, but something poised uneasily between the two.

  We were about to reach the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of his birth. Publishers love anniversaries, and I had pitched the idea of a short biography of Youlgreave with a selection of his better poems to an editor I’d worked for in the past. To my surprise she liked the proposal and eventually commissioned it. The advance was modest. Still, it was a proper book and for a decent publisher.

  I knew there wasn’t a great deal of material available on Youlgreave. It was rather odd, actually, how little had survived—I suspected that his family had purged his papers after his death. But when talking to the editor I made a big point of his friendships with people like Oscar Wilde and Aleister Crowley, and also his influence on the modernists who came after him. There were people who claimed to see elements of Youlgreave’s
work in T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, which wasn’t as fanciful as it might seem.

  Besides, what we did know about him was intriguing. The second son of a baronet, he had published a volume called Last Poems while he was still at Oxford. He was ordained and spent the 1890s as a vicar in London. He was made a Canon of Rosington—some people said that his family pulled strings in order to get him away from the temptations of the capital—but had retired early owing to illhealth.

  Youlgreave was only in his early forties when he died. I had seen reports of the inquest. He was living at his brother’s house. He fell out of a high window. They said it was an accident. But no one really knew what had happened, and they probably never would.

  I had one advantage that I made the most of with my editor. Youlgreave had been a member of the London Library for most of his adult life. After his death, his family presented a number of his books to the library.

  One of them was his own copy of The Voice of Angels. Youlgreave’s last collection of poems, published in 1903, was called The Tongues of Angels. Voice was a privatelyprinted variant of Tongues that included an extra poem, “The Children of Heracles.” The poem, which has strong elements of cannibalism, was unpleasant even by today’s standards; presumably Youlgreave’s publisher refused to include it in Tongues.

  I suspected that the cataloguer hadn’t realized how rare this book was. It was not in the British Library or the Bodleian or Cambridge University Library. As far as I knew, the London Library’s edition was the only known copy in a collection that was accessible to the public, though there may have been a few in private hands.

  The Voice of Angels was valuable not just for its rarity and for the extra poem. This particular copy had penciled marginalia by Youlgreave himself. Some of them are illegible, but not all.

  Best of all, on the endpaper at the back, Youlgreave had jotted down a number of disjointed lines and clusters of words-fragments, I believed, of a poem he hadn’t lived to write. One phrase leapt out at me when I first saw it: the long sonata of the dead.

  I recognized the phrase. This was going to be one of the main revelations of my biography. Samuel Beckett had used the identical words in his novel Molloy, which he published nearly half a century after Youlgreave’s death. It was too unusual to be dismissed as coincidence. To clinch the matter, “The Children of Heracles” included the line: What words and dead things know. Beckett had used an almost identical phrase in Molloy.

  There was only one conclusion: that Beckett had somehow seen The Voice of Angels, this very copy that I had found in the London Library, and he had admired it enough to plagiarise at least two of Youlgreave’s lines.

  Now I had to face the possibility that Adam was going to take that from me too.

  All this passed through my mind as I stood there with Adam’s phone in my hand.

  I still had one thing in my favor: The Voice of Angels was safe on my shelf at home. It wasn’t listed in the library’s computer catalogue yet, only in the older catalogue, which consists of huge bound volumes with strips of printed titles pasted inside, the margins of the pages crowded with hand-written annotations by long-dead librarians. But, if Adam were serious about Youlgreave, sooner or later he would track it down and put in a request for it. Then I would have to return it to the library.

  It was possible he wouldn’t notice the discrepancy in the title. It was possible, even, that he wasn’t doing anything significant on Youlgreave. That was what I really needed to find out.

  I thought of Mary right away. She would know—she was credited as a researcher on the documentaries and in the books. And it would give me an excuse to see her, which was what I wanted to do anyway.

  But did I want to see her? The very thought terrified me. Since Adam had walked into the London Library, all the comfortable certainties that shored up my life had crumbled away. Would she even talk to me after all these years? What would happen if I showed her the message on Adam’s phone and proved to her that her husband was having an affair?

  I had a practical problem to solve first of all. I didn’t even know where to find her. Adam hadn’t included his private address in his Who’s Who entry. The library would know it but members’ addresses were confidential.

  That was when I remembered the crumpled envelope I had found in the Burberry. I took it out again. It was a circular addressed to Adam. There was the address: 23 Rowan Avenue.

  I glanced over my shoulder. No one was looking at me. I slipped the phone into my trouser pocket.

  The library kept a London A-Z. Rowan Avenue was out towards Richmond, not far from Kew Gardens.

  I gave myself no time to think. I took my coat and left the library. I cut across Pall Mall and the Mall and went into St. James’s Park. Hardly anyone was there because of the rain. My hair and my shoulders were soaked by the time I reached Queen Anne’s Gate. A moment later I was at the Underground station. I was trembling with cold and, I think, excitement.

  Proust was right about his madeleine. Once something unlocks the memories they come pouring out. I was drowning in mine just because I’d seen a man standing in the rain outside the London Library.

  Adam had always been a bastard, I thought. People don’t change, not really. As time passes, they just become more like themselves.

  I didn’t have to wait more than a couple of minutes for a Richmond train on the District Line. Kew Gardens was the last stop before Richmond. It was now late afternoon. The carriage was at the end of the train and nearly empty.

  I sat down and stared at my reflection in the black glass opposite me. I saw an untidy middle-aged stranger where I half-expected to find a slim, sharp-featured student with shaggy hair.

  It was still raining when I left the train and took my bearings. Kew was a nice place, just right for nice people like Adam and Mary. You couldn’t imagine poor people living there. But it wasn’t not for the very rich, either, for people who flaunted their money and slapped it in your face. In a perfect world I might have lived there myself.

  Rowan Avenue was a gently curving road about five minutes’ walk from the station. The houses were terraced or semi-detached-solid Edwardian homes, well-kept and probably unobtrusively spacious. The cars outside were Mercedes, BMWs and the better sort of people carriers designed for shipping around large quantities of nice children.

  Number 23 had a little glazed porch with a tiled floor, a green front door and a small stained glass window into the hall beyond. I rang the bell. Adam and Mary had no children—I knew that from Who’s Who—but there might be a cleaner or a secretary or something. Mary might be out. The longer I waited, the more I hoped she would be.

  There were footsteps in the hall. The stained glass rippled as the colors and shapes behind it shifted. My stomach fluttered. I knew it was her.

  With a rattle, the door opened a few inches and then stopped. It was on the chain. I felt unexpectedly pleased—London is a dangerous city, growing worse every year; and I was relieved that Mary was taking precautions.

  “Hello,” she said, giving the word a slight interrogative lift on the second syllable.

  “You probably won’t remember me.” I cleared my throat. “It’s been a long time.”

  I could see only part of her face. She seemed a little smaller than in memory. The hair was carefully styled and much shorter.

  She was frowning. “I’m afraid I don’t …”

  “Mary, it’s me—Tony.” Despair nibbled at me. “Don’t you remember?”

  “Tony?” Her voice was the same. Slightly breathless and husky. I used to find it unbearably sexy. I still did. “Tony?” she repeated, frowning. “From university?”

  “Yes,” I said, more loudly than I intended. I touched the beard. “Imagine me without this.”

  “Tony,” she said. I watched recognition creep over her face. “Tony, yes, of course. Come in.”

  She unhooked the chain and opened the door. She was still Mary, my Mary. She was wearing jeans and a green shirt with a jersey over it.
Cashmere, I thought. She was looking at me and I was acutely aware of my own appearance, something I rarely thought about.

  For the first time I saw her face properly. “What have you done?” I said. “Are you OK?”

  Her upper lip was swollen on the right hand side as if a bee had stung it. Or as if someone had hit her.

  “I’m fine. I walked into the bathroom door last night. So stupid.”

  The hall was large and long, with rugs on stripped boards. Mary took me through to a sitting room dominated by an enormous TV screen. The furniture was modern. There were hardback books lying about—new ones, recently reviewed—and a vase of flowers on the coffee table.

  “This is … nice,” I said, for want of something to say.

  She switched on a couple of lamps. “Do you want some tea?”

  “No, thanks.”

  I thought she looked disappointed.

  “Do sit down. It’s good to see you after all this time.”

  That’s what she said: what she meant was: Why are you here?

  I sat down on a sofa. There was another sofa at right-angles to mine. She chose that one.

  “It’s been ages, hasn’t it?” she said. “How’ve you been?”

  “Fine. I—”

  “What have you been doing?”

  “This and that,” I said. “I review—I do odds and ends for publishers—reading for them, sub-editing, blurb-writing. I’ve ghosted some memoirs. That sort of thing. I’m working on the biography of a poet at present.”

  “Which one?” she asked.

  “Francis Youlgreave.”

  “Really.” Her eyes widened as the memory caught up with her. “You always had a thing about him. Funnily enough, Adam’s thinking of doing something about him too.”