Authors: Penelope Lively
In 1941, in the streets and in the shelters and in the hurly-burly of the wardens’ posts he had seldom felt like that. Perhaps it was simply that, for the most part, you were too busy for such refinements of response—your dealings with others were immediate and essential and were concerned with telling them what to do, or being told yourself, or trying to extract information or convey it or argue the toss about who should go where and why. Oh yes, all those subtle signals were still around, but they were muted, they had lost their potency; what mattered were the sirens and the darkness and the great threatening dome of the sky out of which bombs would fall. Set against that, a person’s credentials came to seem rather insignificant.
And now that it was “after the war,” that yearned-for nirvana, they inhabited this battered place in which the only people not complaining were those too young to remember what it had been like before—that time a handful of years ago which now seemed like another country. Everybody complained about the shortages and the deprivations; women complained about men; the returning warriors went to the pub and complained about everything; the middle class complained about the government.
Lucas did not. This, after all, was what he had hoped for since those idealistic Oxford days. He still sometimes attended Fabian gatherings; he had joined the Labour Party. But he was no longer much interested in theory. Back then, there had been fervent discussion about how best to reconstruct society, about how you could procure the prosperity and happiness of all. Well, the process of reconstruction was now in hand, from the slow assault by bulldozer on the clobbered cities to the majestic creation of the welfare state, and it all felt rather more mundane than euphoric. Lucas was less disgruntled about the lack of comforts and, indeed, of necessities than were most; he had been going without for years and so had most of those whom he knew best. They had all been chronically short of money and were used to making do with what they could afford: a simple diet of eggs and cheese and bread and vegetables and the occasional chop. It was normal to use margarine instead of butter. And fuel was expensive so you put up with being chilly, rather than throw on some more coal or turn up the gas. You seldom bought new clothes but kept an eye out for jumble sales and secondhand stalls in markets. Admittedly, the universal constrictions of today were of a different order; they seemed to depress the entire nation. But even so Lucas could not feel that so far as he personally was concerned things were so very different from before the war. And the same went for Molly, who had spent all her childhood in circumstances of cheerful stringency. The Somerset cottage had been Spartan. Lucas remembered one Christmas he had spent there, the frost thick on the insides of the windows, the candles, and the oil lamps, the daily labor of fetching water from the outside tap, the trips to the privy, Lorna struggling over a load of washing in the big copper; he saw her in the village shop, considering the extravagant purchase of a quarter pound of bacon. But he remembered also, and more vividly, laughter around the kitchen table, a picnic up on the hill, in springtime. And he remembered the merriment with which Matt and Lorna had recounted her parents’ first visit to the cottage, and their dismay: “Oh, my dear…”
He had not at that point met Marian Bradley, but he knew enough of her, and had seen enough like her, to be able to hear the voice, and when eventually, as Lorna’s husband, he did meet her, that long-ago account rang in his head. He and Lorna were received at Brunswick Gardens. He had been acutely conscious of Marian’s assessing gaze as he entered the room at Lorna’s side; she had looked him over, made her judgment, and turned to her daughter with a practiced smile. “So this is Lucas,” she had said. And he had heard that same note of incredulity: “Oh, my dear…”
“When I was very young,” Lorna had once said, “I pretended I was a changeling. You know, like in fairy stories. I always did feel that I was a misfit. I could never be what Mummy wanted. My hair wouldn’t curl and I was hopeless at dancing class. The boys did everything right; I didn’t. So I had this fantasy that really I belonged somewhere else and one day the fairy prince would arrive and recognize me and whisk me off.”
“I suppose he did,” said Lucas. “Matt.”
Lorna looked away. They did not much talk of Matt, though Lucas sometimes felt that they should do so more, if only for Molly’s sake. Lorna was still distracted by grief—he knew that. Sometimes she would fall silent during a conversation, or freeze in the midst of some task, and he knew that grief had come sneaking up and clutched hold of her again. He knew also that she felt guilty because her feelings for him were not like her feelings for Matt. He had said, “It doesn’t matter,” and he had meant it; it was enough that he could be with her, always.
“Matt happened, yes,” Lorna said, after a moment. “But sooner or later I would have cut loose anyway. I was having awful rows with them, at the time. I wouldn’t go to balls and parties and look for a husband, like you were supposed to do. It was because of a row with Mummy that I was sitting on that park bench that day.”
“Then your mother is indirectly responsible. We should all be grateful to her.”
There was a silence. Matt was a shadowy presense, conjured up by the “we.”
“Lucas,” said Lorna. “You are the nicest person I know. And I love you.”
Soon after that time, Simon was conceived.
A war baby, though the war was in its last dreadful throes by the date of his birth. And now he was a child in this pinched and dingy peacetime, a grubby toddler with Lorna’s eyes and a beaky little nose that reflected Lucas’s. His deprived status was recognized in every quarter. Neighbors referred to him as “the poor little mite,” Lucas’s mother descended whenever she could to sort him out. Lorna’s parents did not visit but sent parcels of black market goods from time to time—tinned ham and butter and chocolate and scented soap—which seemed like a local version of American relief aid, those benevolent Bundles for Britain. Lucas and Molly received these offerings with interest and a certain cynicism. Molly had had so few dealings with her grandparents that she would not have known them if she met them in the street. She recognized that they were in some unidentifiable way from an alien world, rather as though they were foreigners. Lucas’s house was quantifiably different from the Somerset cottage, which she remembered only dimly, but there was a sense in which the same language was spoken in the two places, the codes and the climate were similar. Her grandparents, she sensed, came from elsewhere, a place where things were done differently. She had never questioned Lorna, but she registered the fact that Lorna hardly ever referred to her parents, and took note.
Matt’s family, tucked away in the border country, wrote fortnightly letters and made the laborious journey to London every now and then. Molly had been to stay with them in the school holidays, at the neat terrace house in the small gray town from which her father had trekked to London and to art school, clutching his scholarship. They were quiet people, who had first been made anxious by their son’s precarious way of earning a living, and now were scarred by sorrow. They hung over Molly protectively, and indeed had suggested that she come to live with them, after Lorna’s death. Lucas had put this proposal to her, writhing about in embarrassment and worry: “It’s for you to decide. Of course I don’t want you to go, but you must think what you would rather do.”
She had not needed to think. She knew that it would be out of the question to leave this house. Lucas. Simon.
She said, “I want to stay here.”
Lucas reached out and squeezed her shoulder. He took his glasses off and started to polish them. “Well, good. Thank goodness for that.”
Part 4
MOLLY WENT TO WORK
at the library because someone had left a copy of the
Evening Standard
in the tube. She picked it up, glanced through the pages, arrived at Situations Vacant, and learned that this library, which was in fact called the Literary and Philosophical Institute and hailed from the early nineteenth century, was in need of a library assistant. Why not? she thought. I like books. I am not a trained librarian but I have a shiny new degree, barely used. I can learn. I am rather more than literate, and said to be personable. Better this than dogsbody in an office, or tea maker at the BBC.
She got off the tube at South Kensington, and went home to tell Lucas that she was going to work at the Lit. and Phil.
“How do you know they’ll give you the job?”
“Because I shall wear my very nicest smile, and appear to be both efficient and astonishingly well read.”
“I’m sure they’ll be bowled over,” said Lucas. “Mind, books are filthy things. Don’t imagine it’ll be nice clean work. Especially if they’re a hundred years old.”
Waiting for the interview, she eyed the competition: two girls in twinsets, tweed skirts, lisle stockings, and brogues, and a youth with acne. It emerged that one of the girls had just finished her librarianship course. Oh dear, thought Molly. She was wearing her new black batwing sweater and a turquoise felt skirt, with a wide elastic belt. Lucas had thought this outfit a touch emphatic: “It’s somehow more art gallery than library.”
“But I don’t have any librarian clothes,” said Molly. “They’ll have to take me as I come.”
Simon said, “Actually, you’ve got lipstick on your front tooth,” and shambled off to school.
She found herself confronted by four people seated behind a baize-covered table in a room lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases. Unfortunately, she had by now become somewhat infatuated with the library, which reeked of old books, had squashy armchairs and tables littered with magazines—and a warren of rooms, crammed with books in various states of decrepitude, accessible only by imposing mahogany ladders; this interview had begun to matter to her.
There were two middle-aged women in navy suits behind the table, an elderly man, and another man, who sat at one end, slightly apart and evidently in a state of extreme boredom, his eyes on a pile of papers in front of him: a fortyish sort of man, dark, with a rather intense stare on the rare occasions when he looked up.
The elderly man introduced himself as the Chairman of the Trustees and took the lead: questions about her interests, her degree course, her skills. The two women chipped in at points. The job involved rather more than assistance with cataloguing, shelving, and manning the issue desk, it seemed. “We are not just a library, you see,” said one of the navy suits. “We are for members a sort of club, a refuge from the daily grind. Things must be welcoming. There are the flowers, and the coffee machine.”
Molly said that she was especially fond of flower arranging. Coffee machines were a particular interest.
“Well,” said the chairman. “I think perhaps that’s all. Thank you, Miss Faraday—we’ll let you…”
The man at the end stirred, shot a look at Molly, broke in. “May I ask, Miss Faraday, what book is on your bedside table at this moment?”
The chairman drew in his breath, and then cleared his throat. One of the women bounced in her seat.
Molly stared directly at the man. “There are three,” she said. “One is the Collected Works of Shakespeare, because my brother is doing
The Merchant of Venice
at school, and I am giving him some help. There is also a Gallimard edition of a novel by François Mauriac; I am finding it quite hard going, but I am keen to improve my French. And there is a novel by Elizabeth Bowen, which I am enjoying.”
The man said, “Thank you. May I suggest that Françoise Sagan might appeal more to someone of your generation.” He glanced at his watch, and began to line up his papers. The chairman half rose, and indicated the door.
Three days later, Molly heard that she had got the job.
“Well, well,” said Lucas. “Clever girl. I advise dungarees and a pair of gardening gloves. Possibly a face mask.”
In fact, the library turned out to be far from atrophied. Its core collection did indeed hark back to the early nineteenth century and festered on the shelves, for the most part, but acquisitions were kept bang up to date. There were ranks of new dust jackets in the main reading room, where the membership foregathered for a cup of coffee, a glance at the papers, and their weekly fix of books. There was a waiting list for the latest Graham Greene or Charles Morgan or Vincent Cronin; the new Iris Murdoch flew out of the door. The clientele was the
haute bourgeoisie
of that part of London; membership was a prized commodity. If you were a member of the Lit. and Phil. you were a person of discernment; if you were on its Board of Trustees you were one of the elite.
Molly was acclimatized there within days. Librarianship could be picked up with ease by anyone with their wits about them, she decided. She enjoyed bustling around with an armful of books; she was interested in the intricacies of the card index and the shelving system; she became a deft operative at the issue desk. The members found her courteous, well-informed, and a help if you were stuck for choice: a charming girl, in fact, quite a breath of fresh air.
This last comment was overheard by Miss Clarence, the librarian, and did Molly no good. Miss Clarence had already let it be known that she resented the Trustees’ policy of interviewing without her presence: “One is allowed a hand in the short list, and that is that. Not entirely satisfactory.” The other library assistant was a woman in her thirties, given to sucking polo mints and in strict fealty to Miss Clarence; she made it clear that she found Molly’s arrival an intrusion.
“The two pegs to the right of the washbasin are Miss Clarence’s and mine. I suggest the one behind the door for you. You’re not library-trained, are you?”
“No,” said Molly. “But I’ve used them.” This was a deliberate shaft; Jennifer was not a graduate. Molly did not like being told where to put her coat, and that she should bring her own hand towel for use in the staff cloakroom.
The shaft was ignored; sensibility was not Jennifer’s strong point. “One of the other girls on the short list was qualified. Miss Clarence has been told that Mr. Portland spoke strongly for you, and so…” Jennifer shrugged.