The Lion Tamer’s Daughter

by Peter Dickinson

  There was one shop, on the corner of the street where my room was, where the owner hadn’t a clue. Her name was Lucy Traill. Her husband had known about books but then he’d died and she’d carried on, but she wasn’t interested, not my way, not Mr. Glister’s way. If someone came in with books to sell she’d guess at a price and mark them up a bit and shove them on her shelves any old how and hope. What she didn’t like was regulars, like me, coming in and poking around and buying something because we thought she wasn’t asking enough for it. She may have been dumb about books but she was bright enough about people.

  “And how much do you expect to be selling that lot for?” she asked me one day when I showed her what I’d picked out.

  Inside the trade all’s fair, and we pull the wool over each other’s eyes as much as we think we can get away with, but somehow I didn’t think Lucy counted, so I told her.

  “That one’s just to read,” I said. “I might make a few bob on that. And three pounds on that, maybe.”

  “Three pounds!” she said.

  “If I’m lucky,” I told her. “I saw one in the Tottenham Court Road they were asking twelve for, and not in such good shape either. They do a line in African explorers.”

  “And you expect me to let you have it for three shillings!” she said. “You know what that is? That’s stealing!”

  “No, it’s not,” I said. “It’s trade. I don’t say it’s fair trade, but it’s trade.”

  “It’s stealing,” she said again.

  “Tell you what,” I said. “You let me have it for three bob, I’ll see what I can get for it, and we’ll split the difference.”

  In the end I only got three pounds ten shillings, so I gave her half that and she gave me my three bob back, and she was happy. After that I’d look in most days and she wouldn’t put anything new on her shelves until I’d had a look at it and told her what to ask. If it was something good, which didn’t happen that often, I’d sell it elsewhere for her and we’d take half each, as before. Getting on a year this went on, and then out of the blue she told me she was giving up and going to live with her sister in Wales, and I could have the shop, stock and all, for £500 if I wanted it.

  Of course I hadn’t got £500, nothing like. My grandmother had a bit put by for her old age, but she was very close about it, and no wonder. Who else was going to look after her, she used to say, if she didn’t look after herself. I wrote to Mr. Glister to ask for a loan, but he said he’d like to help but it was too much of a risk, trade being what it was, not without security. The only other person I knew who’d got any money was Miss van Deering, though I wasn’t sure she’d even remember me, but I wrote to her anyway. What I got back was a letter from a lawyer.

  Dear Sir,

  I am instructed by Miss van Deering of Theston Manor to inform you that she is unable to advance you the loan you request, but that since you are starting in the book trade she is arranging to forward to you, as a gift, some volumes that may be of use to you.

  Yours faithfully, etc.

  That was all. I hadn’t been expecting anything, really, so I couldn’t say I was disappointed, and I’d never say no to a parcel of books.

  They arrived a week later. They were a complete set of the Waverley novels in the original bindings. First edition.

  I sat staring at them in my grubby little room, turning the third volume of Ivanhoe over and over in my hands. They were beautiful. (I’d discovered by now what Mr. Glister had been on about, when he’d fallen in love with a drab old book nobody’d ever want to read.) I couldn’t imagine why Miss van Deering had taken it into her head to give them to me. Perhaps she’d gone mad. I didn’t care. All I knew for absolute certain was that I wasn’t going to sell them, ever, though they’d have fetched the £500 I needed ten times over. (Yes, I’ve still got them, with the lawyer’s letter tucked into Volume I of Waverley, to show they’re mine.)

  What I did in the end was take them down to Mr. Glister in Worcester and tell him he could have them as security for my loan, if that was all right with him. I had to take a taxi from the station, as I couldn’t decently ask him to come and meet me with the barrow.

  You should have seen his face when I showed him, and told him what I wanted.

  “They’re worth a good bit more than five hundred pounds,” he said. “You think you can trust me?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Maybe you can,” he said, “but we’ll get a lawyer in all the same.”

  Which we did, and we fixed I’d pay him £125 a year for five years (the £25 was for interest) and if at the end of five years I hadn’t repaid the lot he could insist on me selling the books to square up. And that’s how I came to buy my shop, and the little flat over it, which is where I still live. I wrote to Miss van Deering to say thank you, but she didn’t answer.

  And that’s who I am, and that’s where this story’s coming from. I’ve told you all this partly to keep things straight, but mainly so you can see, in spite of me liking to read a lot of romantic nonsense, I’m not the sort to make things up. You’re going to need that.

  4. Tom and Mercury

  Now, you’ll have gathered I’m not the sort to have much by way of friends, but the last few years I seem to have taken up with a couple of young men called Tom and Mercury. (Yes, Mercury. His real name’s Mike, but only Tom’s allowed to call him that.) They drop in and check that I’m all right, and I’m glad they’re around. I’d never have picked them for friends, mind you, not to look at. Tom’s all right, apart from doing his hair in a pigtail with a fancy ribbon. He wears a tie, and suspenders to keep his trousers up, which even I’ve stopped doing. But Mercury’s wild—leathers, and not just black biker leathers, either—green and silver and purple, and draped with chains. And he wears a pearl in his nose and earrings down to his shoulders. But he’s a sweet, gentle person, and I don’t know anyone I’d sooner turn to if I was in trouble.

  By way of a living they do up rooms for rich people. It’s Tom who designs the rooms, while Mercury looks after the business, but they let the rich people think it’s the other way round, so they feel they’re getting something wild and interesting, like Mercury. Sometimes, if it’s a fine day, they go off and look at old houses that are open to the public, see if they can pick up any ideas for their business, and like as not they’ll drop by my shop and ask me if I want to come along too, which mostly I do. I shut up shop and we all three get into the front seat of Tom’s old Mercedes and off we go, with me in the middle between them. We’ll have the roof down and the heater turned right up and the stereo playing the sort of pop you heard when I was as young as them. It makes a change, so it’s probably good for me, and it’s very kind of them to think of it.

  They make a game of it, not telling me where we’re going, teasing me, but there’s no malice in it. I get about England quite a bit, going to book sales, but with my eyes I’ve never learned to drive, so I use trains and taxis mostly, which means I don’t recognize roads for the most part. It was like that the day I’m going to tell you about. We’d left London as if we’d been going to Oxford, I noticed, but after that Mercury started telling me about some crazy rich people they’d been doing a job for, and next time I bothered to look we could have been anywhere in England, almost. I didn’t mind. Then, an hour or so later it must have been, we were all three singing along with a bit of music, driving on a middling kind of road up a long hill with a wood on one side and fields and a couple of cottages on the other, and I knew exactly where I was. It was like when you’ve napped off in your chair and you didn’t mean to, and suddenly you jolt out of your dream and find where you are. Day after day, six days a week, for three years and over, I’d biked up this road on my way back from Mr. Glister’s.

  I gave myself a couple of moments to recover and then, teasing them back for once, as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world, I said, “I see we’re going to Theston Manor. I didn’t know it was open.”

  I can’t ever tell what’s going to
amuse them. Usually it’s something I don’t see what’s funny about at all, but this time they laughed like kids, they were that delighted. And then we were turning in at the drive and apart from the National Trust notice boards it was just the same, with its lodges either side looking as if somebody hadn’t made up his mind whether he wanted pint-sized castles or public toilets. Tom and Mercury thought I must have read the name off one of the brown road signs you get around show places, and I’d been holding out on them to spring it on them when I did—no, I don’t know why they thought that was funny—but when I told them I’d lived here most of the war they were delighted all over again and said I’d get to show them round, so I had to explain I didn’t know my way round anything except some of the servants’ part. For instance I’d never once, in all the time I’d been at Theston, gone through the front door where we went in now to pay for our tickets.

  Doing these trips we’d split up, once we were in, because Tom and Mercury wanted to go through them room by room and bit by bit, with Tom making sketches of anything that caught their eye, such as curtain fastenings or the finger-plates on the doors. I’d wander around and see what there was to see, and take a look at any books I could get close enough to, though you weren’t supposed to touch anything and most of it was the sort of stuff you can buy by the yard to look good on shelves. Then I’d find the tea room and read the couple of books I’d have brought with me, just for this. Eight or nine cups of tea I’d have drunk, very likely, by the time Tom and Mercury came to look for me.

  I didn’t suppose Theston would be much different, apart from the kitchen and maybe the library. Everything else was going to be as new to me as it would have been in any other house. I was right about that, and not just for that reason. It didn’t feel like Theston Manor at all, because it was all so light. No blackout, and the sun shining in through the great tall windows, and chandeliers blazing away, and new electrics in all the dark corners.

  I bought the guidebook and started on the grand downstairs rooms. They’d got them looking pretty well the way they would have been a hundred years ago, with a posh dinner laid out on a huge polished table in the dining room, and in what they called the saloon, which was all done up with white peacocks—Tom and Mercury were going to go mad about it, I guessed—newspapers on the tables with headlines about the siege of Mafeking, and the sort of books people might have been reading around then. They’d got Love and Mr. Lewisham by H. G. Wells—that’s the fellow who wrote The Time Machine—which was the same year as Mafeking, only this was the third edition, which wasn’t till the year after. Then there was the morning room, with tea laid out on a big brass tray, and cakes on little stands and so on, and then there was the library.

  I wasn’t expecting much. I’d only seen it those few times, remember, all under dust sheets and newspapers. They’d got it to rights now, of course, and very handsome it looked with the books up the three walls, apart from the fireplace, and the windows opposite with the tall mirrors between—they’d got the blotches out of them too, somehow. And the desk could have been the very one I’d been hiding under to read Ivanhoe when Miss van Deering had found me, but the reading lamp on it was different, an old brass one with a green shade. One side of the fireplace there was a big leather sofa, with a winged armchair to match on the other side. They could have been the same ones too, to judge by the white hummocks they’d made under their dust sheets.

  Next to the armchair was a black oak stool. I didn’t remember that at all—no reason why I should, they’d have shoved it under one of the other dust sheets—but … I don’t know. I must have stood staring at it a good couple of minutes as if I expected it to tell me something, until I shook myself out of that and took a look at the books.

  The Waverley novels were gone from stack C, of course, but it was too high up for me to make out what they’d put up there instead. But some of the others were ones I could remember helping Kitty clean, and it was nice to see them still there, though I don’t suppose anyone had actually read any of them from that day to this.

  Then I went and stared at the stool a bit more—I couldn’t help it—and pulled myself away and went to look at the rest of the house. The other rooms were just as grand. There was a ballroom, even. But they didn’t mean anything special to me. They’d done the office, where Miss van Deering used to be during the day, to look like the kind of room you could have used to run the estate from, so there wasn’t anything there that reminded me of her.

  That was all the rooms on the ground floor, so I went on down to the kitchen. This was a good bit more different than what I remembered. For a start they’d taken out the Aga my grandmother had used to cook on, and put in a big old black range instead. And the room was fresh-painted and a lot cleaner, and they were making out someone was cooking for twenty and more in the house, and servants too, so they’d got the huge scrubbed deal table all covered with doings instead of the corner my grandmother had for just her and me and Miss van Deering. The kitchen didn’t do anything for me, much, make me feel strange or sad or bothered I mean. It was just a place I’d spent a good deal of time in when I was a kid.

  They’d turned the servants’ hall into the tea room so they’d taken out the old bookcase. I was sorry about that. I think I could have told you the story in each and every one of those books, after all those years. I wasn’t ready for tea yet, so I explored back the other way along the corridor past the kitchen and found they’d barred the old back stairs off with one of those ropes, so I went back to the kitchen and found the lady who was there to keep an eye on things and told her about me living in Theston during the war and how I’d gone up those stairs every night to go to bed and would it be all right if I did it now? She was really interested and took me along and unhooked the rope for me, so up I went, twisting to and fro on the steep wooden flights, seeing it all by daylight, which I’d never done before because of the blackout, till I got to the red baize door we’d used to get through for the last bit. It was still there.

  Now the next part is slightly complicated, but I’ll try and make it clear. The door was right bang on the stairs, where they twisted back to carry on up. You pushed it, and there was a little landing to give it room to open, and then three more stairs ahead of you and then a short corridor. If you went along there and turned right you came out onto the gallery above the main hall (which I told you about before) and if you turned left you got to some of the grand bedrooms, but my grandmother and me never used to do either of those, because the stairs to the next floor went up from an opening in the left side of this short corridor.

  There was a light on the back stairs, with its switch that side of the door, and a light on these other stairs with its switch just up round the corner. The door was on a spring, so you couldn’t leave it open, with the back stair light still on for you to see by while you went up the three steps and got the other light on before you went back and turned the first one off. You had to do it in the dark. Instead of banisters there was a bit of rope fastened to the wall by those last three steps.

  Now, if you’d asked me about all this anytime between then and now I could have told you, because I remembered it perfectly well. I could have told you too that I’d never liked doing it, and how some nights my grandmother would find me still there when she was coming up to bed after the news, with the smell of her red-currant wine on her breath, and tell me I was a stupid great baby minding a bit of darkness. I don’t know whether it was worse in summer, when there was just enough light coming from somewhere in spite of the blackout for you to make out this dark sort of cave in the left-hand wall where anything might be lurking, or in winter when it was pitch, pitch black and you simply knew it was there. I don’t think I was more than ordinarily afraid of the dark. I think any kid might have felt much the same, climbing those stairs alone in that huge old empty house.

  What I couldn’t have told you was what it was like. I couldn’t have told myself.

  5. Adalina

  It was the rope tha
t did it. The moment I was through the door my left hand took hold of it without me looking or thinking. Then it was like what I was saying about driving along the road up the hill and realizing that we were coming to Theston, the same kind of shock, or jolt, only far, far stronger. This time I thought my heart was going to conk. The rope felt so exactly the same as it did fifty-plus years ago, very dry and soft, as if it had had flour sifted onto it, which it hadn’t, of course. It didn’t feel like real rope, the sort my father used to keep a bit of by his chair with a knot in the end and pretend he’d larrup me with it if I didn’t behave. It felt cobwebby, loose, like a bit of something alive. And I used to stand there holding it, looking at the black cave in the wall along the corridor, nerving myself to let the door go and feel my way up the steps in the dark, and on along the wall, and round the corner to where the next switch was. And something else, I didn’t know what.

  So now I stood in the same place, remembering the old sick, stupid terror that had sometimes stuck me there until my grandmother had come up and found me, like I’ve said. There was no blackout now, and good strong daylight shining across the end of the passage from the dome over the main stairs, and more daylight coming down the staircase on the left, but none of that made any difference, any more than it had made a difference to me right back then, knowing perfectly well that there couldn’t be anything horrible waiting for me round the corner where the switch was.

  I heard my lungs empty themselves right out in a great sigh. That was the sigh I used to give when I’d actually made it round the corner in the dark and found the switch, and the light came on, and of course there was nothing there. But once, once, I had sighed like that standing where I was standing now, at the bottom of the three steps, holding the red baize door open, with the light still on behind me. Because by that light I had seen that this time there was something there.