by Toni Jordan
He’s right; it’s a problem. But not one she’s prepared to face now.
‘No one else read this novel back in the thirties, that’s the story, right? How is that even possible?’
‘Inga Karlson had always been reclusive, even before the huge success of the first book. She hated interviews, hated parties. In her Hollywood years she was well known for showing up at functions only to vanish halfway through. Introverted almost to the point of agoraphobia. No close friends. No relatives in the US. Didn’t trust anyone, not even banks. And she only worked with Charles.’
Caddie asks how they met, although she knows.
‘Complete coincidence. When she first moved to New York from Los Angeles—she was trying to break into movies and failing—she worked as a babysitter through an agency. She ended up looking after his kids. He wasn’t famous yet but he was a smart young publisher with family money, and he was going places. Man about town, in that martini-drinking New York way. Everyone he met thrust a manuscript at him.’
Something has changed about his face. Something has awoken. His eyes are fiercely lit now, his speech is animated.
‘Including Inga,’ Caddie says.
‘She was smart. She didn’t say a word. Just left it on the coffee table one night before she went home. The whole house was covered in half-read manuscripts, he left them lying around all the time. Everyone thought it was something he was working on. The next night after his wife goes to bed, he pours himself a drink and he sees the thing right where Inga left it. He reads the first page. Next thing he knows, the maid is letting herself in. It’s six a.m.’
Caddie imagines that morning: Charles Cleborn, blinking, in a worn leather chair with an empty whisky glass and a full ashtray beside him, surprised by the sound of the door and the light peeking in the windows to the east. The thrill of knowing he has discovered something miraculous, a chink of time when a masterpiece belonged only to him.
‘Even now I can’t think about it without my hair standing up.’ Jamie rubs the back of his neck.
‘And there was no one else. No one called Rachel. You’re sure?’
The tea comes and he pours. His nails are short, clean. The steam looks like it belongs here, in this old church for this conversation, like incense from a thurible.
‘I’m sure. The whole world is sure. Inga is one of the most studied writers of the twentieth century. We know the names of everyone in her very small circle. If there was someone else and I knew about it, I wouldn’t be auctioning books. I’d be living it up on the proceeds of my bestseller.’
‘There must have been an editor?’
He shakes his head. ‘Charles edited it himself. It wasn’t uncommon back then, to be both publisher and editor when the firm was small.’
‘Who else would read a book normally before it was published?’
‘A jacket designer—but not in this case. The printer reported it was plain red cloth, with her name and the title embossed in gold. A typesetter, but Charles did that himself. No proofreader, she wouldn’t allow it.’
‘The typesetting. Isn’t that weird, the publisher doing it?’
He nods. ‘It was the only way she’d agree to publishing another book. She was pretty paranoid by that time. After the first book came out and was such a smash, photographers lay in wait for her, people would rifle through her bins. She found all the attention really unsettling. One day, she received sixty-two letters, all handwritten, all begging for a reply. Most people loved her first book but lots didn’t. She had death threats, a number of them. There’s a letter from Nabokov to his wife, funnily enough, in late ’36, recounting how he ran into Inga somewhere and she said she wanted to move far away from New York and live somewhere where no one knew who she was.’
‘How can you be sure? About the typesetting?’
He tilts his head and frowns at her. ‘Why does this matter?’
How can she explain? She is one of those people for whom things matter. She’s surrounded by people who skate above the surface of the world. The she’ll be right mate and close enough is good enough people who promise customers they’ll order something and never do, who misfile things, who open cartons with a Stanley knife and put the damaged books on the shelf anyway. It’s as if she lacks the same skin as other people. There’s something uncool about caring. The very word ‘cool’ implies a chilly indifference.
Finally: ‘It just does.’
He nods sharply, as if she’s given reason enough. ‘The typesetting bit is in the posthumous letter to Charles. The famous one. It’s here in Brisbane right now, it’s in the exhibition. It arrived after they were both dead. She must have mailed it on the day of the fire, this rushed kind of note, you can tell she’s under the pump. It says: “…and all the trouble you’ve gone to, to master those horrible little letters just for me. Typesetting it yourself was the greatest kindness, Charles, I shan’t forget it.”’
He too is the kind of person who knows sentences off by heart.
‘It seems like an enormous effort.’
‘It was extraordinary, but he was dedicated. You have to remember, Inga’s first book was hugely successful. Publishing is rife with these stories. Maxwell Perkins edited Tom Wolfe so…’—he searches for a word—‘so aggressively that researchers argue about where Wolfe ends and Perkins begins. Back then, they did what had to be done.’
‘So there’s no chance of anyone else.’
He leans forward and joins his hands, fingers threaded together. His mouth is turned up at one corner, but his eyes are kinder.
‘If there was, someone would have found them by now. It was a big deal at the time, as you could imagine. Inga, dead? She’d sold the film rights to All Has an End for twelve thousand dollars, almost a quarter of a million in today’s money, at the tail end of the Depression. She’d won every book prize going and sold maybe two million copies in the first year, over fourteen reprints. The fire was front-page news. The whole building gutted, two firemen badly injured.’
‘How do you think the fire started?’
‘That’s not my area.’
‘You must have an opinion.’
‘My opinion is that people should stop theorising without the facts. Yes, they found traces of an accelerant. Yes, Charles had the only key to the warehouse. That doesn’t mean he did it. It’s easy to blame him, he can’t defend himself.’ His cup rattles when he replaces it on the saucer.
‘But he died too.’
‘People say he somehow stuffed it up. The book was terrible, that’s the theory, and he decided to torch every copy to keep the Inga mystique and boost sales of her first book. So not only is he a murderer, he was also incompetent.’
‘But you don’t believe that.’
‘I think the so-called accelerant was the bottles of booze he stored out the back going up like rockets. Charles liked a drink. Prohibition only ended a few years before and I’d guess he was still sitting on a stash, just in case.’
‘And the bodies? They were positively identified?’
He nods. ‘Inga sent Charles a telegram asking him to meet her at the warehouse; it was found in his pocket. Charles wasn’t burnt as badly as Inga. Smoke inhalation. Her body was in a terrible state, except for one arm. Positive ID. They matched her fingerprints to a copy of her will, which was lucky enough to have an ink smudge on it. And the case has been revisited with cutting-edge forensics as well—fingerprints have been taken now from a number of letters she’d sent to fans. Everything matches. Dying that way…it seems kind of exotic now but safety standards back then were rubbish. The Cocoanut Grove fire was only a few years later—almost five hundred people incinerated in a few minutes from one match. Did you see the necklace? The glass one?’
No, she didn’t. It was in the exhibition all right, in the display about the fire. The one she turned away from. Caddie shakes her head.
‘Green glass, with bees on it. She was never without it. It melted in the fire but it was recognisable as hers. All those book
s, all that paper. It was an inferno. The warehouse had bars on the windows—the firefighters reported there was no way either of them could get out.’
She’s treading the path already worn by much smarter people than her. Of course there’s nothing left to discover. ‘Charles must have been devoted to her, to have gone to all that trouble of doing the typesetting.’
‘He was, but not like that. There was nothing between them in that way. He had a reputation as a ladies’ man, of course—flamboyant, hard-drinking, loved a party. Hats and cravats. But she had a kind of purity that was impossible to resist,’ he says. ‘By all accounts, she was the sort of person who inspired devotion.’
‘The exhibition’s fabulous.’ She’s descended into platitude, she knows, but she doesn’t want the conversation to end. ‘It’s wonderful so much of her legacy’s been preserved.’
He smiles at her. He’s amused.
‘Most of that was sheer luck. There was a great outpouring of grief at the time of her death, of course, but later that year Hitler was invading Poland and then the world had other things to think about. Most of Inga’s stuff was moved into a storage unit. Charles had a widow and children. His publishing company was wound up. One daughter kept all his papers in boxes under the bed. By the time the war was over, All Has an End was exactly what people needed to read—the Inga craze took off from the post-war reissue.’
‘And you?’
‘And me, what? Your turn now. The woman—your old lady.’
She describes the queue, the chatty photographer with the yellow eye on his shirt, and the woman’s manner. The mysterious Rachel. It feels vague and minuscule, like describing the way the hairs on your forearm register the sun going behind a cloud. What was she thinking, wasting this man’s time?
‘Thin,’ he says.
‘I know. Wishful thinking.’ It’s been a long time since she wished for anything. This very act of longing has made her happy, she sees now. It’s a vital, pulsing thing, the energy that comes from yearning.
‘Most people spend their whole lives wishing for things,’ he says.
‘How did you become interested in Inga in the first place?’
He finishes his tea and fiddles with the cup. ‘It started as a tiny project in the first year of my arts degree, a ten-minute presentation on Charles Cleborn. I was a terrible student. I cribbed a page of notes, aiming for a solid pass so I could get to the pub, and then for some unknown reason I kept reading. I was young and naive. She seemed exactly what I was looking for. I found myself falling in love with Inga.’
This she could understand. ‘So you’re a Charles expert as well?’
A little shrug. ‘There’s not a lot about him in the record. It’s a shame. Inga was magic, of course, but there was something special about Charles. His firm seems old-fashioned and a bit eccentric to us now; little style quirks—even diaereses, for heaven’s sake. You know? Like an umlaut? Only the New Yorker does that now, but at the time he was avant-garde. He was a war veteran who’d been injured in France and people used to say his list had a European slant. What else? Rich, of course. His grandparents were in banking so he didn’t have to work much at all. And famously impatient with all his other authors but he did whatever Inga wanted. He’d be forgotten now, except for his connection with her. I can’t help wondering what he would have done with his life if he hadn’t died so young.’
There it was again, the pinpoint deflection. He answered her question about him by talking about Charles instead. It was elegantly done. Most people wouldn’t have noticed.
‘And your passion for Inga?’
‘A thing of the past. I sell old books now. Books destined to be unread, as you’ve remarked.’ He shuffles to the end of the booth. ‘I’ll fix up the bill on the way out. Take your time, Caddie.’
*
Two nights after tea with Jamie Ganivet, Caddie wakes in the early hours, sweating and tangled in sheet, to the sound of hail pounding the corrugated-iron roof. These heavy summer storms are common in Brisbane but more usual in the afternoon. You glance out the window to find the air suspiciously still. If you drive anywhere with any regularity, to an office or a factory or school, you carry with you a mental map of all the undercover parking places along your route: bridges, overpasses, the awning of an abandoned petrol station. Some days the clouds have a greenish, bruised tinge and when the skies are like that the hail can come down without warning. An oval becomes a sea of white, birds are struck dead on the branch. Holes drill through windows like a straight drive down a fairway, divots as deep as your first knuckle appear on car bonnets. Then the wind picks up, then the rain. Turmoil, like being trapped inside a washing machine. The price to be paid for all those days of endless blue.
She could get up to see the sky lit by zigzag bolts. But she has no obligations in this brooding hour—no car, and as for the condition of the roof, there’s not much she can do about it now. She thinks about her dream instead: a hot-weather dream, dense and muddled. Her small self sitting on the floor of the garage in her school uniform with her father bent in concentration over a watch.
Her father repaired watches. Breitling and Omega, IWC and Rolex. Fobs, sometimes, but wrists for preference. He loved their mix of elegance and utility. He’d begun his working life as a jeweller because it seemed a way to combine his eye for fine detail and his obsession with art deco. During his apprenticeship, his heroes were the great jewellers of the twenties and thirties—Després, Lalique, Boucheron—but as he grew into the work he loved them all: precious things that worked hard at a purpose. It’s not the nature of the job that matters, he sometimes said when she was small. What matters is the way you do the job, any job. That’s what shows the world your character.
He kept an old desk in the garage, each drawer wedged full of tattered cardboard boxes without lids. Some contained movements sorted by size and maker; others, backs of different metals, or lenses. Along the front were stoppered plastic pill bottles of tiny screws and pins and dials and hands and buckle tongues and free loops, all sorted by size and colour and sometimes model. He had half-a-dozen magnifying glasses, though one was his favourite, and tweezers and razor blades and plastic bags and spools of thread. He had case bands and bezels in every colour hanging on nails on the top of the desk alongside watches, mid-repair, suspended by the buckles.
She liked to check on him while he worked. Often she’d go to Terese’s after school, where Olympia cut them orange wedges to eat in front of the television, but once home she headed straight to the garage to check her father’s desk light was on and make him tea. She was a bossy child. She’d stand with her weight on one leg and her hands on her hips, telling him off if she found his lunchtime sandwich uneaten with the bread curling at four in the afternoon. On weekends she would sit cross-legged on the floor reading her book, looking up to see him hunched at his desk before his wall of torn-out photographs of precious jewels. The concentration, the patience. Half the time he didn’t even notice she was there. Sometimes even now if she glimpses a lovely watch, an old, special one, on the wrist of a customer, she imagines his long fingers bent in its service.
In her dream, it was just like that. He doesn’t know she’s there, watching. She sees the tanned back of his neck, his trimmed sideburn. The watch hands are moving as he works on it. Tick, tick. The ticking grows louder until it morphs into the hail on the roof, but her father doesn’t react. Nothing will hurry him. She sees his focus, his quiet diligence.
Charles Cleborn had money. He was ‘famously impatient’ with all his other authors—when it came to Inga, though, he did anything she wanted. She sees her father, surrounded by his ragged jewelled pages and all those tiny watch parts, perfectly sorted.
She doesn’t know the first thing about typesetting but she knows the kind of man who can devote himself to the exquisite order of things. Her father was not inclined towards business. He was employed in jewellery shops sometimes, but more often than not he drove bosses crazy: his perfectionism, his
insistence on painstaking care. He would come home, unexpected, with a cardboard box of stained tea mugs and his tools, his expression sheepish but unsurprised. Let go, is how they said it. We have to let you go. That’s why he worked in the garage for private clients—people who found him by word of mouth and would send their heirlooms, present and future, for repair by courier from Melbourne and Sydney.
Caddie sits up in her bed and punches her pillow. There’ll be no more sleep tonight. She doesn’t know how books were made back then but she pictures a desk like her father’s, except instead of watch parts it has tiny individual as and ts and ws in cardboard boxes wedged in a drawer. Would Charles Cleborn—injured war veteran, wealthy businessman—have loved Inga’s horrible little letters enough to take responsibility for an entire book? She must find out.
8
Allentown, Pennsylvania, 1938
The Sunday morning of that week, Rachel wakes early. George is like a starfish in their bed, dead to the world. In the bed opposite her father lies, cradling her mother from behind. In sleep her mother has nestled into him; his arm reaches over the top of her. In recent days they’ve been tender. Walter cutting Mary’s food into small pieces or producing a banana from the pocket of his coat like a magician. Mary, coquette eyes, giggling behind her hankie. Both of them laughing at Rachel for not having a beau. You’d think they were honeymooners if not for the mulberry cloud along the line of her mother’s jaw.
Rachel wraps herself in the gown that hangs behind the door, wrestles her feet into boots that were reserved for outdoors when they lived on the farm. Everything is rough on her skin: the coarse weave of the gown, the splintering timber of the dresser, the jagged finish on the floor. Back on the farm, beauty was all around her and so common it was never remarked upon. It’s taken a while but she’s begun to see tiny hints of beauty here in town, and not just in the silks. The girls, their strong arms pulling the spools, their proud necks, corn hair as it frames their faces.