Authors: Barry Maitland
‘The thing that really annoyed me, funnily enough, was that I’d got the idea for Option Four from that framed letter I’d bought at Kowalski’s shop in the Lane—the idea of a grid contained within an elaborate old frame. The idea had come all of a sudden in the middle of the night, and it had seemed so appropriate that I thought it just had to be right. When it fell so flat I felt, well, betrayed somehow.
‘I went back to my drawing board, and there were half a dozen telephone messages stuck all over it. One of them was to ring Judith Naismith, on a London number. I made the call, and immediately I heard her voice it was as if we’d left university only the day before, with only the faintest mid-Atlantic trace to mark the years between. She said she’d been glad to get my fax, but had been in a rush to get herself organized for a conference she was going to in Paris. She had a short stop-over in London, and she’d love to see me if I could spare any time that day.
‘Judith was the great unscaled peak among the women undergraduates in our group. All the lads had tried to seduce Judith at one time or another, and none had succeeded. Even Charlie, whose powers of persuasion had cut a swathe from the women’s college to the language school and through the nurses’ home, had been very subdued in his account of his final great attempt on the north face of Judith Naismith. She was a beautiful enigma, and her reappearance suddenly made up for the disaster of the morning’s meeting.
‘We met for lunch. She looked absolutely stunning, just as I remembered her.’
Although Kathy was absorbed in the story, Brock gave a little cough of impatience. Bob Jones mollified him by offering another whisky, and then continued.
‘We fairly quickly exhausted reminiscences and news of mutual friends and what we’d done since leaving university. I could see she was a bit edgy, and I asked if she was short of time. She said yes, really she couldn’t stay too long, but she’d wanted to find out about the letter I’d faxed her. I explained I’d picked it up by accident in a second-hand bookshop. I kind of rambled on a bit about the anniversary of my divorce, and she stopped me dead and said she’d like to visit the shop, and where was it? Suddenly I had the feeling that all the time she’d been much more interested in the letter than in seeing me again. I asked her what was interesting about it, and for a moment I could see her debating what to tell me, then she shrugged and started to explain.
‘“Mohr” means “Moor” in English, as in Moorish—the Arabs, you know? And apparently it was Karl Marx’s nickname. His family teased him that with his thick beard and swarthy complexion he was like a Moor.
‘His closest friend was Friedrich Engels—“Fred”. In April 1867 Marx went to Germany to deliver the manuscript of the first volume of
Das Kapital
to his publisher, Otto Karl Meissner, in Hamburg. He went on to Hanover before returning home to London in May. Gumpert was the name of Engels’ doctor in Manchester, and Mrs Burns was his mistress.
‘I think I made some stupid joke about it being a pity the letter was written by someone so unfashionable, and that I might have been lucky and found a letter from someone important, like Elvis. But all the time I was thinking about that blue plaque on the wall outside Kowalski’s shop, saying Karl Marx used to live there.
‘I asked if she thought there could be more. She seemed really puzzled about that. Apparently all of the correspondence between Marx and Engels was supposed to have been collected together when they both died. She said that it was now held in Amsterdam, in the International Institute of Social History. It had been published in nine volumes, and Judith said she was going to check the volume for 1867 and see how this letter fitted in. She was puzzled as to how it had come to be separated from the rest.
‘Then she asked me again where I’d found it. I kind of fooled around, and said that the price of that information might be high, considering how I’d always felt about her. You know, that sort of stuff. She humoured me, for about three seconds. So I paid the bill and we got a cab.
‘You should have seen her face when we got to Kowalski’s shop and I pointed out the plaque. There was the difference of dates, of course—Marx lived there in 1850, not 1867, but all the same, she was stunned. She said that coincidences like that just don’t happen. We walked into the shop half expecting to see the ghost of Marx himself standing behind the counter, waiting for us.
‘At first we got our wires crossed with Mr Kowalski. We assumed that the letter must have come from the shop itself, found in the attic or something, and he didn’t understand what we were going on about. Eventually he explained that he had bought it not so very long ago. The lady who had sold it to him had also given him a box of books, but no other letters that he could recall.
“What kind of books?” Judith demanded. “Old books, on history, or socialism perhaps?” He scratched his head and said no, he didn’t think so. He thought they were children’s books. He didn’t know where they would be now.
‘We spent a fruitless hour searching the shelves, Judith starting in Politics and History, and me in Children. Finally we spoke again to Kowalski, asking for the name of the person who’d sold him the letter. He was reluctant to give it
to us, saying that the woman was elderly and might not want to be bothered. Was the document valuable, then? he wanted to know, sounding rather worried. He’d probably recognized the signs of an over-anxious buyer and thought there might be some money in this. He said he would speak to the seller himself, and see whether she had anything else that might be of interest to us. He took my business card and agreed to call me if anything turned up.
‘But it was Mrs Winterbottom herself who phoned me a couple of days after Judith had gone on to Paris. She didn’t seem to know what I wanted to talk to her about, so I explained that my friend was a historian, and she was interested in the letter I had bought from Mr Kowalski because it related to the period she was studying. Did Mrs Winterbottom have any other documents from that period? She wasn’t sure, but said she’d have a look. Apparently there were lots of old papers and things her mother had left, but whether they’d been thrown out by this time, she didn’t know. I told her that my friend would be back in London again in a couple of weeks, and asked if I could phone her nearer the time to arrange a meeting, and she gave me her address and phone number.
‘By the time Judith returned from Paris, Herbert and I had agreed to part company. The Lowell Partnership moved to much larger and more prestigious premises in Docklands, establishing a joint project office with a firm of New York architects for the Jerusalem Lane project, which they were now calling “Citicenter One”, would you believe. I took over the lease of this place, and set up on my own as Concept Design, with just one job, a loft conversion in a friend’s house in Maida Vale.
‘I contacted Mrs Winterbottom again, and she agreed to see us at a certain time on this Sunday afternoon—she was quite particular about the time.’
‘When was this?’ Kathy said.
‘It must have been about a month ago. Yes, four weekends
ago, I should think. Judith had timed her flights around the meeting. We arrived at 3, and Mrs Winterbottom invited us in to her flat and gave us a cup of tea. We chatted about the weather, and how Judith had been in Paris. Mrs Winterbottom mentioned she’d never been there, although it was so close, but she had been to Sydney, which was so far away, and she laughed at that. I got the impression she was sizing us up, to tell the truth, trying to find out if she could trust us. She chatted away about her family, and how she had a granddaughter who had been to Paris on a school trip, and I could feel Judith getting impatient, but trying not to show it. Then suddenly the old lady got down to business. She started talking about books. She didn’t have any herself now, she said, she preferred the telly. But her sisters did have some of the old books their mother had left them. She explained they lived in separate flats upstairs, and would we like to take a look?
‘We said yes, if it wouldn’t disturb them, and she explained that they always went out on a Sunday afternoon, but that they wouldn’t mind if we went upstairs and had a little look.’
‘You said she was very particular about when you called,’ Kathy said. ‘Are you saying she intentionally made it for a time when her sisters would be out?’
‘I didn’t really think about it. I suppose it’s possible. We went upstairs with her, and into a flat with the name “Harper”, I think it was. Judith’s eyes lit up when she saw the wall of books in the main room inside.
“Eleanor loves books,” Mrs Winterbottom said. “Most are fairly recent, I suppose, but I’m sure there are a few old ones that came from our grandmother to our mother.”
‘Judith was rapidly scanning the titles, as if she might at any moment be deprived of her opportunity. When she had looked at everything once, she returned to some old volumes on the shelves by the window. She took them out, one by one, turning to the flyleaf and then flicking through
the pages. She had her back to me as she examined them, but I could hear her intake of breath as each book was opened.
‘I went over and asked her if she’d found something. “Proudhon’s
Confessions
,” she said. “And look!” Her eyes were shining with excitement as she pointed to the handwritten dedication in the flyleaf. It was in the same black spidery writing as in the letter I’d found, though it had been more carefully scripted, and it was clearly signed “Karl Marx”.
‘“Are they the sort of thing you’d be interested in, then?” Mrs Winterbottom had been watching us from the centre of the room. I remember that as she turned to answer her, Judith suddenly stopped and stared at an old photograph hanging on the wall. She said something like, “Oh, how extraordinary”, and the old lady told her it was their great-aunt, whom her sister admired enormously. “Mind you,” she added, “some of our Eleanor’s ideas are a bit odd to my way of thinking. She’s an intellectual. Both of my sisters are. I inherited the common sense rather than the brain-power. But I’m the one what pays the bills.” Then she said, quick as a flash, “And do you think them books might be worth a bob or two, then?”
‘She caught Judith off guard, and I began to see that she was probably quite a shrewd old duck.
‘“Well, frankly, Mrs Winterbottom,” Judith said, “I don’t think they would fetch much just left out on the shelves of Mr Kowalski’s bookshop. But on the other hand they would be of value to someone like myself, studying the history of that period. I think I could probably persuade my university to come up with quite a reasonable figure for them.”
‘It sounded to me that she was patronizing the old dear, and I wasn’t sure it was going to work.
‘“My granddaughter is at the London University,” Mrs Winterbottom said innocently. “Is that where you are too,
dear?” Judith said no, she was at Princeton, in the United States. “Oh, an American university, eh? They have
lots
of money, I dare say.”
‘Judith began to look a bit worried. “Well, I don’t know about that,” she said. “But I think they might be willing to pay your sister . . . oh, perhaps fifty or even a hundred pounds each for these older books.”
‘“A hundred nicker! Well! That’s better than a slap in the face with a cold kipper, eh, Mr Jones?” And she dug me in the ribs with her elbow and cackled happily. Judith said, “But do you think your sister would be interested in selling, though, Mrs Winterbottom? She might be attached to these books?” She sounded pretty anxious.
‘ “Well, you’d best leave that to me, dear,” the old lady said. “She may not want to sell. But on the other hand we have a lot of expenses at the moment, and neither of my sisters contributes much in the way of cash, like. The pensions from their work weren’t so good in their day, and they’d always rented, never bought as my Frank used to tell them—which is just money down the drain, isn’t it? So these books, which was left to all of us, like, when our mother died, perhaps they’re something that my sisters might feel they could now contribute toward the household expenses, now that we’re in need. But I’d have to put it to them.”’
‘So she was quite specific about needing money?’ Kathy said.
Jones nodded.
‘And you don’t think she’d previously had any idea that the books might be valuable?’
‘That’s right. My impression was that she was pretty sharp, and she probably guessed as soon as Kowalski contacted her that she might have something of value. Presumably she’d insisted on meeting us herself, rather than go through the book dealer. And once Judith started looking inside those books she really hadn’t been able to
hide her excitement. It was obvious to me, and it must have been to Mrs Winterbottom too.’
‘What about Judith’s valuation of them? Was it fair?’
‘I’ve no idea. My guess, listening to her, was that they had to be worth more.’
‘And if Mrs Winterbottom was as smart as you think, she probably drew the same conclusion?’
‘I wouldn’t be surprised.’
‘Go on, then.’
‘We had a look in Peg’s flat too, but there were far fewer books there, and none held the same interest for Judith. Then we went back down to the first-floor flat, where we chatted about the weather. We assumed that was the end of our meeting, when Mrs Winterbottom suddenly asked if we were interested in papers as well as books, because she’d had a bit of a look and had come across one or two things. We sat down in her living room again while she disappeared into her bedroom. She waddled back in with two sheets of paper covered with the same black ink scrawl as on the letter. As soon as I saw it, I felt the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. I looked across at Judith and she was frozen in her seat, her eyes fixed on the pages.
‘Eventually Judith asked, very quietly, what they were, and Mrs Winterbottom said that they were just a couple of sheets from a bundle of old stuff she’d found among her mother’s papers. There were more, but most of them were in store. She wondered if this was the sort of thing Judith was interested in.
‘Judith took the sheets carefully from her and studied the writing intently. Just the way she held them you could tell she felt as if she was handling something very precious. The old lady was delighted. “I can’t make heads nor tails of it,” she cackled. “It’s like doctor’s writing.”