Christine was on to it. ‘Let me pull up your schedule. Sure. No probs. You’re not down to speak at the Lane Bookshop till Wednesday. I was just giving you space to adjust to another time change.’
‘I’m enjoying Melbourne. I’d really prefer a day or so more here.’
The efficient Christine emailed in less than ten minutes to say that they were rebooked on a Tuesday-evening flight.
In answer to an email from Sam, Elizabeth wrote: Great seeing you too. Another dinner this eve would be lovely. E x.
After some thought she deleted the x.
He replied at once: 7 o’clock tonight at mine OK for you? S.
For their first reunion she had dressed formally, in a linen frock and heels. This time she went in jeans and trainers and was gratified when he answered the door in bare feet.
‘I’m cooking Thai. There’s wine in the fridge, if you’d like to pour us both a glass. My hands are covered in garlic.’
The brief passage of time between their meetings had eased them both into a degree of confidence. Over dinner Sam told her more about his research and she listened, not always understanding but drawn by his evident passion.
‘But my own arcane interest aside,’ he concluded, ‘I’m more and more of the view that most behaviour is nature rather than nurture. My son is the dead spit of me, not just in looks, in behaviour – bolshie, arrogant, in other words a right pain in the arse.’
‘Bright like his father too, though, I bet?’
‘Bright enough. But the girls are also bright and they take after their mother. Mild as milk, and they were all brought up much the same.’ She began to protest but he held up a staying hand. ‘And before you say that’s all to do with sexual stereotyping, I have a granddaughter who, character-wise, is a dead ringer for her grandfather. I call her Minnie the Minx. Her mother’s a classicist and her name’s Minerva.’ He shook his head. ‘These modern names!’
She laughed at the imperious hand. ‘And I imagine she’s your favourite.’
‘You were always perceptive, Lizzie.’ He began to clear the plates. ‘Shall we have a pause before the next course? What my son refers to as an inter-course break?’
Pleased at this second-hand intimacy, she asked, ‘Would you mind if I smoked?’
‘Not at all. I smoke. I was concealing it from you.’
‘I don’t tell the grandchildren, they’d tick me off like anything. I only indulge myself when I feel like a treat.’
‘I’m honoured to be classed an occasion for a treat. Shall we go on to the balcony?’
Outside, the Melbourne cityscape was graced by the lingering light of the evening sun. It lightly gilded the tops of the trees, already in full leaf, lining the long streets below. At home, Elizabeth thought, the leaves would be in the sere, yellowing, ready to drop.
‘Do you remember playing conkers, Sam? Children never play conkers now. I doubt they even notice them when they fall and for us the first conkers caused such an intense excitement. I still get a twinge of joy when I see that polished mahogany gleam.’
‘I love them too. I miss them here.’
‘And sticklebacks. I was thinking the other day, no one talks about sticklebacks. Do you remember, you had some in a jar and tried to make me drink them? You said, as they were fish, they would be good for my brain.’
‘Did I? I’d forgotten that. I’m sorry. Another occasion for apology. I remember putting one down Micky O’Malley’s neck, little tike that I was.’
‘And he married Jem.’
‘Poor sod.’ She stubbed out her cigarette and he said, ‘Shall we go inside?’
Inside, it seemed to her that enough bridges had been crossed and they stood now on some shared plain.
‘Sam, what happened to Marigold? You didn’t say the other night.’
‘I don’t know that much. We never spoke again after … Let me get the next course.’
Over cake and cheese he told her. ‘She and her mother moved away. There must have been a divorce because we heard her mother married again. Her father never did, as far as I know.’
‘Did he stay on as a GP?’
‘He joined forces with another GP when Dr Monk died but I got the impression that he didn’t see much of Marigold after her mother remarried. She sort of ticked over at that rather snotty private school in Salisbury that she disliked …’
‘St Catherine’s. We played them at hockey. Well, I didn’t, I was hopeless at games, but our school did.’
‘I got all this from Mum, by the way, who once she got over her prejudice became very concerned about Marigold – that was very Mum; the only person she never forgave was poor old Collins next door, who in retrospect I see was a sad old bugger.’
Perhaps because she had been less hurt by his querulous neighbour, Elizabeth was more unwilling to forego her dislike of him. ‘I’m not sure about “sad”. He did kill the fox cubs’ mother.’
‘That’s true. To be fair to Marigold, she genuinely minded that.’ She began silently to bridle at this – wasn’t it she and he who had found the dead vixen together? – and he must have sensed her objecting as he added, ‘Not as much as you did, of course.’
‘He was vicious,’ she insisted, prepared to forgive Sam but not Mr Collins.
But Sam had long since left Mr Collins behind. ‘According to Mum, Marigold went to some provincial university, I forget which, not Oxbridge anyway, which is what you’d have predicted. But she crashed out after only a year and for a time she was in a psychiatric hospital. I tracked her down on the internet, quite recently. She’s running some kind of yoga retreat in Wales. I guess yoga’s how she got herself right again.’
How are the mighty fallen, Elizabeth thought. ‘That’s awful.’
‘My daughter teaches yoga!’
‘Sorry, I didn’t … I only meant that she was so brainy.’ Too clever by half, she recalled Ned saying once. ‘Did she marry, did your mother say?’
‘Not that Mum ever mentioned. I’ve never wanted to get in touch with her. It seemed too sad.’
It was sad. Elizabeth felt compunction. ‘All these years, I’ve been jealous of her.’
‘Why? You of all people. You’re the big success, Elizabeth Pattern.’
‘You’ve not done so badly, Sam Hedges.’
He looked at her, assessing her tone, then grinned. He’s still prickly, she thought. There’s the sliver of a chip there still.
‘That was my grandfather’s doing. He took me on as an apprentice and being with him saved my bacon. Flee Crake had a lot of time for him. It was really him and her who saw me through. Sylvia had been marvellous, of course.’
‘Is she still alive, d’you know? I wish I’d thought to get in touch.’
‘She died a couple of years back. She would have been proud of you becoming a writer. But she would have known, surely?’
‘She might not have done. My name is different.’ My stupid diffidence, she thought. She would have been proud but I was too ashamed. ‘Did you ever see her again?’
‘Once just before I moved out here. She came to stay with Flee. They kept in touch.’
‘What was she like?’
‘Much the same. Funny, warm, very left-wing. She’d married a decent-sounding bloke, an expert on John Clare, who taught at Manchester University. She was Chief Librarian there when she retired.’
‘So it came all right for her too in the end?’
‘As much as it does for anyone, I guess.’
He walked her back to the hotel, where they kissed decorously, each on each cheek.
‘Shall I see you again?’ he asked. ‘You’re off, aren’t you, tomorrow?’
‘As a matter of fact, I misread my schedule. It turns out I’m not leaving till Tuesday, after all.’
‘Oh, well, do you fancy, or maybe you’ve had enough …?’
‘No, no, it’s been fun.’ Better than fun. ‘It’s interesting catching up.’
‘Tomorrow, then? Or …’
‘Yes
, OK, tomorrow, if you’d like?’
‘Only if you’d like …’
‘Yes, yes, I would like. Really.’ She began to push the hotel doors but she stopped and turned back. He was still there, watching her, with the face of the boy she remembered visible still beneath time’s changes. ‘There’s no one else,’ she said. ‘No one, I mean, who I can talk about the past with like this.’
This time he rang her on the hotel phone. ‘I can take you out to a spectacular place on the beach to eat or I can cook for us at home. Your call.’
‘I don’t mind.’
‘You’re not allowed to say that here. They won’t have it. You have to choose.’
‘OK, if you insist, then truly I’d rather eat in. I spend all my time on tour eating in restaurants.’
‘That’s the right choice. I shall prepare a feast.’
She had taken more care with her appearance and was amused to see that he had too. They were a little shy with each other – the growth of intimacy had brought wariness in its train and, it would seem, a concomitant need for alcohol. By unspoken agreement, neither brought up the past until the second bottle of wine. It was Elizabeth who broke their tacit pact.
‘What did happen about that fire, Sam? Was it a cover-up? Was it Marigold?’
‘I’ve been thinking about that too since our conversation last evening. I never worked it out myself. The report from the fire department did find something amiss with Collins’ electrics which could easily have set off a fire. But Marigold gave me the distinct impression that she had started it. She sent me a note saying to meet her by the lock. She wanted to hear that I hadn’t “betrayed” her, as she put it, over that book and I was pleased as Punch’ – he laughed, cynical for a moment about the innocent he had been – ‘to be able to assure her that I hadn’t and wouldn’t. I saw myself as a sort of knight in shining armour who had saved her unsullied reputation by taking the blame on his own shoulders.’
‘You were in love with her,’ his guest interjected sharply.
He appeared faintly surprised. ‘In love? I don’t know. Captivated maybe. Can you be in love at eleven?’
I could, the woman who had been Lizzie Smith thought.
Aloud she said, ‘Myself, I think children know more or at least better about love than adults. It’s part of the magic for them. Look at Tom’s Midnight Garden.’
He appeared to reflect on this. ‘But Tom and Mrs Bartholomew aren’t in love when they meet again in so-called real time.’
‘They were as children, though.’ This, after all, was her own ground. ‘The love changes, as the time changes, but the book tells you clear as a bell that it survives because it was real.’
‘I guess what got me,’ he apologised, ‘is how their affinity trumps time. The echoes in their DNA, as I see it, that lead to their meeting in her dreams.’
But she was still on her own line. ‘Yes, but isn’t that affinity the being-in-love that transcends time?’
‘In that case’ – he had found his position – ‘I wasn’t in love with Marigold. There was no affinity. I believed there was, or maybe wanted to, but there wasn’t. Not really.’
‘No,’ she agreed, maybe almost ready at last to let it go. ‘I suppose what it was’ – she considered – ‘what it was was that you were spellbound.’
He shrugged and for a moment she thought she had lost him but he only said, ‘Yes, perhaps that was it. That night of the fire, when I met her she was in a very odd state and I was, frankly, frightened. She laughed, and this I’ll never forget, she said, “Anyway, I’ve paid old Gingernut out for you over the foxes.” I felt guilty at having been the unwitting cause of the fire, or thinking I was. I still don’t know the truth of it.’
‘The trouble is,’ Elizabeth said, ‘everything makes you feel guilty when you’re a child, whether it’s your fault or not.’ Maybe more so when it’s not.
‘You know, I haven’t thought about all this for years but I was thinking last night, I wonder if Marigold knew herself whether or not she started that fire.’
Elizabeth reflected. A memory was mistily rising: Marigold stopping her as she came out of her house and addressing her with a sudden matiness. ‘Be a pal, Liz, and take this book back to Sam for me. Only he’s out of bounds for me still, worse luck.’
‘I think I may have been the unwitting messenger who delivered that note for you to meet that night. Was it in a book on chess?’
‘I think it was. I’d forgotten that.’ He laughed uneasily. ‘I was so keen to impress Marigold with my prowess at chess. I don’t think she was interested. Not at all, I suspect.’
‘And there I was, longing for you to teach me.’
‘I’m sorry, Lizzie. You’d have been a much better subject than Marigold.’
‘I doubt it. I never had that sort of mind. Do you still play?’
‘I do now. I didn’t during the years of the protracted tantrum. It was Cathy, my wife, who got me playing again. The Minx is pretty ace at chess.’
Elizabeth, not quite attending though no stranger to grandparental pride, said, ‘I’ll tell you something I’ve never told anyone.’
He looked alarmed and she said, ‘It’s nothing serious, really.’
‘Go on then.’
‘I did steal a book.’
‘From the library?’
‘Mmm.’
She had had to screw her courage to the sticking point – feeling so to blame for all that had happened – but still she had gone to the library to say goodbye to Miss Blackwell. And the other woman, Mrs Harris, had been there in her place. She hadn’t liked Mrs Harris, who laughed too much and wasn’t really kind. Certainly not kind like Miss Blackwell.
Mrs Harris had been looking through a pile of books and when she had asked about Miss Blackwell’s leaving Mrs Harris had said, ‘Sorry, you’ve missed her,’ in a tone which made you think she wasn’t sorry a bit.
Then Mrs Harris had said, ‘Miss Blackwell’s left us her books. I’m trying to sort them now,’ meaning she should go away and stop bothering her, and when Mrs Harris wasn’t looking she had slipped one of the books from the pile into her school satchel – was that right? Yes, by then Nan had bought her the satchel.
‘What was the book?’ Sam asked.
‘It was Through the Looking-Glass. Miss Blackwell’s – Sylvia’s,’ she corrected herself, ‘copy. She left her books to the library and I nicked it.’
‘Lizzie Smith! I didn’t know you had it in you.’
‘I’ve got it still.’
‘So you were a thief, after all.’
‘I suppose I was.’ She almost preened herself. ‘Do you remember “Old Father William” on that old 11+ paper we did together?’
But he shook his head. ‘I think I probably suppressed everything to do with the 11+.’
In the silence they each roamed the criss-crossing, overgrown paths of their childhood. Into Elizabeth’s mind came lines from the poem that she had read long ago in the Poetry Corner of East Mole Library: They shut the road through the woods/ Seventy years ago …
‘You know,’ she said, looking around his room with its clean contemporary colours, the books and pots and carvings and jumble of pleasing paraphernalia, ‘I am where I am because I got help from you and Sylvia, and you got help from your grandfather and Flee Crake –’
‘And my wife,’ he interrupted. ‘She put up with a lot.’
But for the moment she wasn’t interested in his ex. ‘What I was thinking is that no one helped Marigold, not really.’
Reluctantly, for it is truly a task for the angels to surrender a grudge long held, she acknowledged that the brilliant copper-haired long-legged Marigold had been deprived in a way that by the grace of human kindness she and Sam had escaped.
‘I would have helped her,’ Sam said. ‘I thought I had, covering up for her over the book. But that probably made her worse. Who knows?’
‘If it’s anyone’s fault it’s her parents’,’ Elizabeth suggested. ‘T
hough according to you it was all down to her genes. But their marriage breaking down – breaking up? which is it? I never know – anyway, it can’t have helped.’
‘She told me once that her father was going to leave her mother and marry Sylvia.’
‘But that wasn’t true?’
‘Wishful thinking, I guess. She told me she hated her own mother and she had this notion, I see now it was a child’s fantasy, that Sylvia was going to be her mother in her real mother’s place. She was full of how the three of them, she and her father and Sylvia, were all going to live together. She was so sure of it that I believed her. I was slightly envious.’
‘We all believed her. It was that burning confidence she had. You know, it’s a shame. If her parents did break up, as you say, Sylvia and Dr Bell might have made a match.’
‘Sylvia asked me about him when I saw her in London,’ Sam remembered.
‘And?’
‘I told her the Bells had split up and that Marigold had, you know, not exactly prospered. She seemed sad.’
‘There you are’
‘But she would have felt sad. She minded about us all, Sylvia.’
‘I still think she and Dr Bell …’ Elizabeth could see them in her mind’s eye, the slight fair-haired woman with the grey-green eyes with the tall man in horn-rimmed specs, almost as if it was a memory she had forgotten or laid aside. In one of her books they would have found each other, finally, sometime, somewhere.
‘We don’t know, do we?’ Sam said.
As with the other evenings, they had each settled on one of the pair of sofas which faced each other in his bright living room. Now, released by the growth of their new acquaintance, he succumbed to the late hour and the bottles of wine, flopping back full length along the sofa. ‘You know what I think, Lizzie Smith? In the end, we don’t know much.’
‘I know that I’m a bit drunk, Sam Hedges.’ For all that, she remained upright, spine erect, holding her core tight, as dictated by her granddaughter.
He smiled at her across the gap. ‘Did you know that, according to Herodotus, the Persians debated all important decisions twice: once drunk and once sober? Flee Crake told me that once when I had the mother of all hangovers.’
The Librarian Page 29