Bedlam Burning (3 page)

The job of cataloguing was a precise, formal and pretty dull business. I had to be able to discern the difference between a fine copy, a nice copy, a good copy, and a good reading copy. I learned
pithy descriptive phrases – ‘some wear on the spine', ‘with the author's autograph inscription on the fly leaf', ‘front edge somewhat faded', ‘wrappers frayed'. I learned what foxing was.

A couple of months after leaving university I found myself sitting at my desk when my boss, Julian Somerville, placed two books in front of me. Although he shared the family name, he was a sufficiently distant relative that they didn't feel the need to share anything else with him, such as the family fortune. He managed the shop part of the business, not that they called it a shop, preferring the term ‘showroom', since that sounded classier and snootier and more likely to keep out passing trade, but let's face it, a shop is what a shop does. As far as I was concerned, Julian was the shop manager and much of the time I was his shop assistant.

Julian Somerville was a long, thin breadstick of a man, with perfect manners, who dressed in multiple layers of brown: corduroy suits, khaki waistcoats, beige shirts, knitted tweed ties. The two books he placed in front of me were both copies of Scott Fitzgerald's
The Great Gatsby
, both English first editions, both in fine condition, but one had a dust jacket and one didn't.

‘Lessons in book dealing, number one thousand and one,' said Julian brightly, and he indicated the book without the jacket. ‘This copy is quite desirable, quite collectable, and would set you back about a hundred pounds.'

I nodded, doing my best to appear the keen student.

‘This copy,' he said, indicating the other, ‘with the jacket, is worth about five hundred. The moral of the lesson: in this trade if in no other, you can judge a book by its cover.'

‘Far out,' I said. It was the kind of thing I liked to say. I was surrounded by literary tradition, by solidity, by locked glass-fronted bookcases, by leather-topped desks. I felt the need to inject the occasional bit of ‘modern' terminology. Julian frowned at me indulgently.

His lesson filled me with a certain ambivalence. If a jacketed
Great Gatsby
was worth so much more than an unjacketed one, the jacket in effect became far more valuable than the book itself. I well understood how this might offend literary purists. They would say that being fixated on the materiality of the book, the edition, the binding, the jacket, was clearly missing the point of what books were
about, that texts were somehow invisible, incorporeal, that they floated free of the solid matter of the printed object.

Yet I wasn't quite such a purist. I liked books. I liked their form as well as their content. I thought they were nice things to have around, to touch, to look at. A few of them furnished the small horrible room in Shepherd's Bush where I lived. They seemed like a reasonable thing to spend money on, not that I had any money to spend on books or on anything else. The rare-book world was not a place where an entry-level graduate could make his fortune. I had known this all along and I didn't feel particularly aggrieved. The fact that some books cost as much as I earned in a year was just a fact of life, and one I could by and large live with. Nevertheless, when some rich customer, usually American, usually too fat and too well-dressed, breezed into the showroom and casually spent a four-figure sum with rather less premeditation than I'd give to buying a Mars bar, I admit I could feel resentful.

However, this resentment was somewhat free-floating. Partly I resented the American for being so rich. Certainly I resented my employer for paying me so little, and as a corollary to that I resented the world for being so expensive. But I was also fed up with myself for not having any valuable skills that I could sell in the market place. Or maybe it wasn't about skills, anyway. I sensed there were plenty of young men out there who were successfully making their way in the world, and who weren't any more skilled than I was. So what was it they had that I didn't? What secrets did they have access to? I disliked myself for being so feeble, so ignorant of how to plug into the world of achievement, success and money.

And money was probably the least important of the three. I told myself I'd have been happy to work for little or no money if I was doing something I really liked, that really mattered, but in the event I seemed to be working for little or no money, doing a job that didn't matter in the least. I couldn't have said that I hated the job at Somervilles exactly, and I was well aware that there were millions of jobs I'd have liked far less, but I had a profound sense that I was wasting my time.

If, in that old existential sense, we are what we do, then I thought I was nothing because I'd done nothing, experienced nothing, at least nothing that seemed to matter either to me or to anyone else. I'm always amazed and irritated when I see people interviewed on the TV
news or in documentaries, and there's the interviewee's name and a one-line, or even one-word, definition of who and what they are: Michael Smith ‘Student', Mike Smith ‘Friend', Mick Smith ‘Disgruntled employee'. Of course, most people who appear on TV or in documentaries have rather more dramatic captions than these. To be newsworthy they need things like ‘Orgiast', ‘Father of Siamese Twins', ‘Unrepentant Nazi'. I'm depressed by this too. It seems so limiting. Like anyone else, I had always wanted to be more than the labels attached to me, but at least I'd have liked the labels to be somewhat impressive: Michael Smith ‘Wit', Mickey Smith ‘Lover of Women' Mike Smith ‘A Man to Watch'. What I didn't want, and what I suspected would have been the most appropriate was Mike Smith ‘Pathetic Bastard'.

And I was confused too. I'd had this supposedly privileged English education; privileged enough that millions of my fellow Englishman would be quite prepared to hate me for it, to consider me a snob and an élitist. It was supposed to open all doors, to plug me into some pernicious old boys' network. So why was I no more than a not much glorified shop assistant? And why was I living in squalor, in a horrible room in Shepherd's Bush, instead of the Chelsea penthouse that I inhabited in my dreams?

The other extant myth about Cambridge that I was finding to be completely without foundation, was that it supposedly provided you with friends for life. Since leaving university I'd seen hardly anyone. In a few cases there were good reasons, my friends had got married, gone to work abroad and so on, but even the ones who lived and worked in London stayed out of contact. Oh sure, I got a few party invitations, was sometimes called upon to be the ‘spare man', went out for the occasional beer or pizza with somebody, but it wasn't quite the gilded social life I'd been hoping for. Perhaps the truth was I didn't have any friends any more, and that made me think perhaps I'd never really had any in the first place.

But at least I had a girlfriend of sorts. She was called Nicola Campbell and I'd known her a little at university. I'd seen her at lectures and in the coffee bar, and had regarded her as a good acquaintance rather than a friend. Nicola had a clean, scrubbed, healthy quality that a lot of people found very attractive, very sexy. I could see, in a theoretical way, that this was true, but some sort of chemistry was lacking in my case. At university I'd never quite
fancied her, never thought of pursuing her, but in London it was different. I ran into her going into a cinema on a Sunday afternoon. We were both alone, and maybe there is something especially depressing about going to the cinema alone on Sunday afternoons, and maybe we both thought the other one was more lonely and desperate than either of us really was. We sat together in the cinema, and then went out for a drink, and later we went out a few more times to see other films, then we had sex once, and then we had sex a couple more times, and somehow, before we knew it, it appeared we were going out with each other, albeit in an uncommitted, half-hearted sort of way.

Nicola was a good person. She was attractive, intelligent, charming, witty; just like me. We made a good, or at least a good-looking couple. We liked each other, but I think we both knew we didn't like each other quite enough. Nothing was wrong and yet we had a sense of how things might be better. We thought our relationship would do for now, but we keenly hoped that something more passionate and interesting and substantial was not too far around the corner.

The main thing I remember about Nicola from those days, is how little odour she had about her. Sometimes she smelled of soap, and occasionally of expensive, understated perfume, but she never smelled of herself. She never smelled of sweat or sex or garlic or anything robust like that. Her breath, her hair, her body, were all quite odourless.

We fell into a pattern. We saw each other twice a week at most, and went to the cinema or for a cheap meal. We always went Dutch. She too had moved to London straight from university and was doing a job that seemed to have certain parallels with my own, although hers sounded much better since she was ‘working in publishing'. It seems absurd to me now but that phrase had a magic to it then, and not only to me. Publishing was spoken of as a glamour profession, something a graduate might aspire to and only be accepted into if you were one of the brightest and the best. It was a hundred times better than working in rare books.

Nicola was doing her best to rid me of this illusion. She said her colleagues were grey, tubby men and women who chain-smoked and wore cardigans. They regarded her as dangerously glamorous and well-groomed and therefore frivolous and insubstantial. Her work, much like my own, was a mixture of the clerical and the dogsbody,
but there was one part of her job that sounded to me like a reasonable amount of fun. She was in charge of the ‘slush pile'. She had to deal with the unsolicited manuscripts: the military memoirs, the spiritual confessions, the travel diaries, the experimental novels sent in by the talentless, the desperate and the disturbed. It sounded fine to me, but Nicola felt otherwise.

‘It only confirms how pathetically low on the totem I am,' she complained. ‘Everything in the slush pile is, by definition, crap, otherwise it wouldn't be in the slush pile. So basically I'm wasting my time. And if by some strange chance something good managed to creep in there, and if I spotted it and said we ought to publish it, my bosses would still reject it, because they wouldn't trust my opinion because they think I'm just the imbecile who's in charge of the slush pile.'

There was reason enough for both of us to be dissatisfied, but one of the best things to be said for living in London was that it was always easy to see people around you who were far worse off than you were. And that was how I thought of Gregory Collins when I next met him.

He came into Somervilles one drab, wet afternoon. I suspect that if it had been anyone other than Gregory Collins I might have been embarrassed to be seen going about my dreary shop-assistant duties, but I felt so sure that whatever he was up to had to be less interesting and fulfilling than what I was up to, I greeted him quite warmly. And he was even warmer in return. He greeted me like the oldest of old friends. Perhaps he thought our experience at the book-burning party had created insoluble bonds.

‘This is a posh place you're working in,' he said. ‘You must be doing all right for yourself.'

Poor old Gregory.

‘It's OK,' I said. ‘What about you? What are you up to?'

‘Teaching,' he said dourly, and my sense of superiority remained quite intact.

‘In London?'

‘No, up in Harrogate. Grammar school. One of the last. Teaching history.'

Yes, that fitted perfectly.

‘How is it?' I asked.

‘It's champion,' he said. ‘Teaching's my life. I'll always be a teacher.'

I felt better and better.

‘So what brings you down to London?'

He snorted and looked unhappy.

‘London,' he said, dismissively. ‘I came all this bloody way for a meeting, and the bugger wasn't there. He'd called in sick. I'm going to be demanding an apology.'

He wandered about the book shop, opening cabinets, picking up very expensive items, a signed Wyndham Lewis, a Gertrude Stein letter. He seemed to find them interesting enough, but he handled them the way he might have handled the morning paper.

‘I've got a few hours to kill before I get the train back up north. Do you want to have a bevvy after you finish work?'

I said sure. I had nothing better to do, although I wasn't certain I'd have anything to talk to him about. I didn't think I had much in common with Harrogate schoolteachers. The shop was open for another hour, so I expected Gregory to go away and then come back when I'd finished work, but he hung around till closing time, clumsily handling extremely rare and expensive items. Julian Somerville watched him with mild disapproval but was too feeble or polite to say anything. I was glad when I could finally get Gregory out of the shop and into the pub. He drank half his beer in one big gulp, then considered the taste carefully. ‘Not bad for a southern ale.' His professional northerner act was even more irritating in London than it had been in Cambridge.

‘So, have you done any more acting?' he asked.

‘No, of course not,' I said. ‘I think I've grown out of it.'

‘Very good decision,' he said. ‘I suppose we ought to be drinking champagne really. Not that I like champagne.'

‘Something to celebrate?' I asked. I wondered if he'd found a good Yorkshire woman to marry him, although that seemed highly unlikely.

‘Actually, I've not been quite straight with you, Michael. I'm trying not to be showy about it, but the fact is I'm down in London to see a publisher.
My
publisher.'

‘You have a publisher?'

‘Aye, I just said so.'

‘Is this for history textbooks or something?'

‘No, it's for a novel.'