The Hand on the Flyleaf

Foxed and Faded

Fog has its uses; it makes a town read its own street like a book held too close.

I have lived in Porthmellin sixty-eight years, and still, on a morning like that one, I had to put my hand on the cold iron of my own railing to be sure of where the lane went down. The sea-fret had come up the cleft in the night the way it always does in the last week of September, filling the town to the gutters, so that the chapel weathercock and the lifeboat mast and the upper windows of the Reading Room floated loose above a grey nothing, and the harbour below was only a smell — salt, weed, diesel, the particular cold mineral breath of granite that has been wet for two hundred years. You could hear the gulls without seeing one. You could hear, faint and far down, the slap of the tide against the slip, and a man whistling on the quay who did not know I could place him by his whistle alone. Edward Nankervis. He has whistled the same four bars of a hymn he could not name since he was nine and could not spell it either.

I unlocked The Foxed Page at twenty past eight, as I have most mornings since Tom died, and the bell over the door said its tired small thing, and the shop breathed out at me the way it does — paper and dust and the ghost of the paraffin heater, and under all of it the faint sweetness of foxing, that brown bloom that comes to old pages like freckles to a fair skin, which the trade pretends to deplore and which I have always rather loved. A book that has foxed has lived somewhere. It has been damp and dried and damp again; it has been read by a window; it remembers. People are forever asking me to explain the name of my shop, and I tell them it is a bookseller's joke and a true thing both, and most of them stop listening at "joke."

Sergeant Cuff was asleep on the counter, on top of the one book I had asked him, in plain English, the night before, not to sleep on: a 1932 Hogarth Press The Waves in its original jacket, the most valuable thing I had taken in all month, and the only thing in the shop dust-jacketed in mylar and priced for a person who was not going to walk in out of this fog. He is a large tuxedo tom, white shirt-front, black tailcoat, white spats, and an expression of permanent grave disappointment in the conduct of others, which is why my Tom named him for Wilkie Collins's great detective the day he arrived, half-drowned, off the harbour wall. He opened one eye at me. He closed it. He is not a sentimental cat. He has his likes — the boiler, the Buddleia, the lap of any reader who is genuinely reading — and his dislikes, which are fewer and more absolute, and he gives no reasons, and he is, I have learned over the years, very seldom wrong about a person. I lifted him. He went boneless in protest, a stone and a half of pointed reproach, and I set him on the warm chair in the reading nook and put the Woolf back where the damp would not reach it.

"You'll be the ruin of me," I told him. "You and the rates between you."

He began to wash, as if I had not spoken, which is his way of agreeing.

I had the till drawer open and was doing the small dishonest arithmetic by which I persuade myself the shop will see another quarter — Bookweek would help, Bookweek always helps, the visitors buy by the yard and the metre and the pretty spine — when the bell went and a man came in sideways out of the fog, shaking it off his shoulders, a big soft-faced man in a fluorescent carrier's tabard with a clipboard pressed to his chest like a shield.

"Miss Pengelly," he said. "Or — Mrs. Sorry. I never know."

"Either does," I said. "Most people settle on Miss in the end. It's the spectacles." I keep Tom's reading glasses on a black ribbon round my neck now, and his soft draughtsman's pencil behind my ear, and between the two of them I daresay I look exactly like what the town has decided I am: a tidy, dusty, harmless woman of a certain age who keeps a shop full of other people's leavings and can be relied upon to find your mother a large-print Catherine Cookson. There are worse things to be taken for. There is a great deal you can see, from inside a thing like that, that no one thinks to hide from you.

"Carrier'll be ten minutes," he said. "Your chests off the Institute. The lane's that thick he's having to walk the last of it." He hesitated, and then did the thing they all do, sooner or later, the reason half the town comes up my hill. He put a book on my counter. "While I'm here. The wife found this clearing her mother's. It's one of yours, isn't it? Library. We didn't want it going in the skip and somebody having the law on us."

It was a Subscription Library book — I knew it before I touched it, by the marbled boards and the cracked spine and the oval bookplate, Porthmellin Institute & Subscription Library, Founded 1871 — a battered green Coral Island, the boys'-own kind, much loved and much abused, the corners gone soft as suede. Forty years overdue if it was a day. The little pocket in the back still held the card, and the date stamps marched down it in faded violet, and stopped.

"There's no fine," I said, mostly to watch him relax, "they wound the lending up in the nineties." I opened the front board with my thumb. And there, on the flyleaf, in the round laborious pencil of a child who has just learned that his name is a thing he can own — the careful pressure, the reversed lower-loop on the g he hadn't quite mastered, the proud full stop — was written: This book belongs to David Pengbourne. Class 3.

I did not need to think. That is the part people find uncanny, and it is the least uncanny thing about me. I taught David Pengbourne to write that g. I taught two generations of this town its letters and then its grammar and then, the lucky ones, to love a sentence for its own sake, forty years of small hot hands and chewed pencils and show your working, show me how you got there, and a hand is not a mystery to me, it is a face. I forget names. I never forget a hand.

"This is David's," I said. "David Pengbourne. He'd be — fifty-one, fifty-two now. Lives out at St. Erbyn, doesn't he, does something with windows."

The carrier stared. "That's — yeah. That's my brother-in-law. How in the world —"

"He wrote his name in it," I said, and turned the flyleaf to him, and he looked at a child's pencil scrawl and saw a child's pencil scrawl, the way you'd look at a stranger's face in a crowd. "He pressed too hard, he always did, you could read his sums through three pages. Tell him I want it back the way it came to me, mind. It's the Institute's, and the Institute is nobody's now, which means it had better be careful whose hands it falls into." I slid it under the counter. "And tell him I remember he owes the school library a Treasure Island as well, 1985. I'm patient. I'm not forgetful."

He went out laughing, the way they do, the way that says isn't she a marvel, old Miss Pengelly, like one of those women on the telly — and I do not mind it. Let them. A reputation for parlour tricks is a comfortable house to keep your real self in. Tom used to say I was the only person he knew who could disappear by being looked at. He said it as a compliment, and I took it as one, and I have had three years to learn how much of a comfort it is to be underestimated, now that there's only me to do the looking back.

I touched the pencil behind my ear. His pencil. A 2B, soft as you like, that he sharpened with a knife and not a sharpener because he said a machine made a coward's point. He used it to draw — boats mostly, the gigs, the lost luggers, the Morning Star once from memory, which I have framed and do not often let myself look straight at. I use it now to mark a price inside a cover, very lightly, in the corner, in the little code the trade uses so that one dealer can read another's mind and no customer can read either. I cannot say why a dead man's pencil should make the figures kinder. It does. I had stopped reading, after — I will be honest, since I am the only one who'll hear it — I had stopped reading the way I once read, the close way, the way that lets a book get its hand round your throat. For a long while I dealt in books the way a teetotal publican deals in beer, by weight and shelf and price, and kept the lid on. His glasses against my breastbone. His pencil behind my ear. A woman managing.

The festival would shake the lid loose, I supposed. It always shakes something. Bram Goss had been up and down the lane for a week in his good coat, "as chair," tacking bunting to lampposts that the fret would have down by Tuesday, talking footfall and "the brand of the town" to anyone slower than himself, which is everyone. The marquee was up on the Green, a great wet white whale of a thing dripping in the murk. And this year — this year of all years, the fortieth — there was the rumour, grown from a whisper to a near-certainty, fanned by Bram until you'd think he'd arranged the Second Coming: that she was returning. Dame Rosamund Frayne. Our own. The girl who'd gone up that hill to the train one grey morning in 1986 and become The Saltglass and the world, and never once in forty years come back down it. They were calling it her homecoming. They were printing her face on the programme. I had been her teacher, once, and another child's teacher beside her, and I had said nothing, for forty years, about a thing I knew, and I told myself, that foggy morning, that I would be very glad to shake her hand and very glad to see the back of her, and I believed about half of it.

The carrier — the proper one, with the trolley — came at last, thumping at my step, and brought the fog in with him in cold rolls. Three tea-chests, the old plywood kind with the foil linings and the shipping marks of a tea that stopped coming to Cornwall before I was born, stencilled now in the Institute's hand: CLEARANCE — LOT 7 — F. PAGE. He stacked them by the reading nook, took my signature and my last note for his trouble, and was gone, and the bell rang him out, and the shop settled, and it was just the cat and me and three boxes of a dead library.

It is a strange thing to buy. I had bid for the lot on a printed sheet, sight half-unseen, the way you do — the Institute's wind-up is the talk and the tragedy of the autumn, a hundred and fifty years of a town's reading sold off by the cubic foot to whoever'll cart it, the dealers down from London circling, the doors to be locked for the sale on Saturday and the place sold for flats by Christmas. I had wanted some of it kept here, where it was read, even if I could only afford the leavings, the lot nobody fought me for. Lot 7. The bottom of the barrel. Damp goods.

I fetched the kettle on, because some things want tea before they want courage. I put Tom's glasses on properly, for the first time in I could not tell you how long, the close-work lenses, the world swimming and then snapping true. I knelt by the first chest. Sergeant Cuff, who had ignored the entire transaction with the disdain of a creditor, rose, stretched fore and aft, came down off his chair without a sound, and sat at my elbow with his tail wrapped round his feet and his ears forward, which he does for nothing, which he does for mice and for the moment a customer is about to do something foolish. I should have read him. I have learned since to read him better.

The lid was nailed and swollen. I worked Tom's old bookbinder's knife under the corner and leaned, and the nails gave with a small shriek and a puff, and up it came — and with it the smell.

Forty years of damp and dust and dead chapel-cold rose out of that chest into my face, the smell of every locked room in Porthmellin, of pews and pressed flowers and the underside of stairs, of paper gone slowly back to the rag it came from. I knew that smell. It is the smell of the year I do not let myself smell. I had to put my hand flat on the cold plywood rim a moment, the way I'd put it on the railing in the fog.

Then I looked. Near the top, face up, slid sideways under a fat water-stained Pilgrim's Progress, was a slim book in a plain dark cloth with no jacket, and someone had laid it in last, or it had worked its way up, the way a thing will when it means to be found. I lifted it out. I opened the cover. And on the flyleaf, in an ink gone the brown of an old wound, was a name in a hand I would have known among ten thousand, a small exact upright hand I had taught and then watched outgrow my teaching, a hand that had been forty years under the green water off the Wolf with the Morning Star and the boy who owned it — and I had not let myself think his name, or that hand, or that spring, since 1986.

A Job Lot

A job lot is a stranger's life sorted by the pound.

You buy it half-seen — three tea-chests and a banana box, knocked down at the Institute's winding-up for less than the price of the chests — and you carry it up the hill to your back room and you find out, slowly, who a person was. Or in this case who two hundred people were, because a subscription library is not one life but a parish of them, layered like silt: the colonel who read nothing but campaigns, the spinster sisters who shared a ticket and a taste for poison in country houses, the boy who took out the same atlas eleven times and never the same novel twice. You learn them from their leavings. A ferry ticket used as a bookmark at the chapter where someone stopped reading for good. A recipe in the back of a gardening manual. Tea, mostly, and the brown ghost of a teacup, and the particular grief of a presentation copy given for long service and never once opened.

I had set the kettle to boil and Sergeant Cuff to supervising, which he did from the top of the flat-file as though he had been appointed to it by the borough. The lamp I work under is Tom's old anglepoise, and the loupe beside it is Tom's, and the soft pencil I tuck behind my ear is the one he kept for the crossword, a 2B worn down to a thumb's length. Three years now and I still reach for his things first. I have stopped apologising to the cat about it. He doesn't grade me.

I cleared the deal table and laid out the cloth and began.

There is a grammar to this, the same as there is a grammar to anything, and I taught grammar for forty years before I taught myself to sell it. You start with the body of the book before the soul of it. You weigh the paper between finger and thumb. You can date a book nearly to the decade by its paper if you have handled enough of them — the rag stock of the old days that takes a knock and forgives it; the cheap wood-pulp that began to brown almost before it was bound, so that a novel printed in the war comes to you already the colour of weak tea, brittle at the fore-edge, smelling of the cellar it survived; the bright bleached stock of my own middle age, white as a dental advert and just as honest. Riffle the leaves under your nose and they will tell you. Damp has a sweetish reek, like apples kept too long. Smoke is its own confession. And foxing — those rust-red freckles that bloom across an endpaper like the back of an old hand — foxing is the slow rusting of the iron the papermakers never quite washed out, hurried along by damp and the breathing of the room, and it spreads where the air sat still. A book foxed only at its outer margins lived shut in a humid place. A book foxed straight through was loved badly in a kitchen.

None of which is on the page, and all of which is the book.

The Institute's hand was on every one of them. Two marks, always. A bookplate pasted inside the front board — a wood-engraving of the harbour and a mermaid who had lost most of her tail to silverfish, and beneath her the legend PORTHMELLIN SUBSCRIPTION LIBRARY, THE INSTITUTE, FOUNDED 1887. And then, stamped over it in violet, the india-rubber stamp with the accession number written in by hand in a clerk's looping copperplate, a number for every book the town had ever owned in common. I have always had a soft spot and a sore spot both for that stamp. It says a book belonged to everyone, which is a generous thing, and therefore in the end to no one, which is the sad end of generous things. You cannot sell an ex-library copy for much. The stamp is a wound that does not heal. But it is a provenance, and provenance is only the posh word for memory — for where a thing has been and whose hands were on it — and memory, as it happens, is the one gift I was given instead of beauty or money or a husband who lived.

I worked down through the first chest, pricing as I went.

That is the other cipher in this trade, and the one the customers never see. Open most secondhand books to the front free endpaper, or the inside of the back cover, and somewhere in the corner you will find a little pencilled clutch of letters and figures — the dealer's price-code. We none of us like to write the plain cost where a buyer can read it, so each of us keeps a code word: ten letters, no two alike, standing for the figures nought to nine. Bram Goss up at the Reading Room uses BLACKHORSE, which tells you everything about Bram, that he would choose a code word with a snob's flourish and then use it where no one will look. Mine is the one Tom and I settled on the winter we opened, and I will not put it in writing even here. You read a stranger's code the way you read his handwriting — once you have the key, the man is naked. I can stand in a barn auction and tell you what a London dealer paid for a thing and what he means to ask, just from the soft grey letters hiding in the gutter, and whether he bought it last month or has been carrying it, disappointed, for years. The code is a trail. It remembers who handled the book, and when. People forget that. I never have.

So I priced, and I sorted, and I made my three heaps — the saleable, the foxed-to-ruin for the penny tray, the few worth a second look. And all the while I was not looking at the thing near the top of the chest that had stopped me an hour before, when I first prised the lid and the smell of forty shut-up years came up at me. A name on a flyleaf. A name I had not let myself say since 1986.

I had put it down. I had told myself I would come to it in order, fairly, the way you mark a stack of essays and do not skip to the clever child's. I had let the ordinary work be a wall between me and it. That is a thing grief teaches you, and I am ashamed of how well I learned it: how to keep your eyes moving so they never settle, how to dust a shelf for an hour rather than open one drawer.

The kettle clicked off. Sergeant Cuff put one white paw on the rim of the chest and looked at me, and then at the book, and then at me, in the way he has, and I have lived alone long enough to take instruction from a cat.

I lifted it out.

It was clean. That was the first wrong note — clean, where everything round it was foxed and damp-warped and stamped. A 1986 first edition of The Saltglass, the true first, the one with the lighthouse and the hourglass on the jacket and the price still on the flap, unclipped: the book that made Rosamund Frayne a Dame and made this town, briefly, somewhere. I have sold a hundred of them. I could price one in my sleep — a pound or two for a reading copy, more for a fine one in its jacket, the sort of book every house in Porthmellin keeps a copy of out of loyalty and none of them reads twice. I knew its body the way you know a hymn.

But there was no Institute plate in this one. No accession number. No violet stamp.

It had come up the hill in a library's coffin and it had never been the library's.

I opened it to the half-title, the way you do, to see if some festival visitor had got it signed in a queue, and the room went very quiet and very far away.

It was not a signing. A signing is a name flung down a hundred times an hour, the loops gone slack with boredom. This was written. This was a hand taking its time, pressing, the down-strokes dark with the weight of the wrist, and I knew the hand before I read a word of it, because I taught it. I taught Rosamund Frayne to join her letters at this very harbour forty-odd years ago, taught her the long-tailed y she never lost and the way she crosses a t with a little upward flick like a wave breaking the wrong way. You do not forget a hand you taught. It is the nearest thing I have to perfect pitch.

For Eppie Pascoe, it said, who knows the glass better than I ever shall — and where I came by it. Of all its pages the truest of them is 113. I cannot give you back what I took. I can only give you this, and the rest of my silence, and ask what I have no right to ask. Forgive me. — Rosamund. Michaelmas 1989.

I sat down. I did not decide to; the stool was simply there and I was on it.

Eppie Pascoe. Eppie who scrubbed the chapel steps and skinned her knuckles gutting for the Wreckers' Rest and raised a houseful on a drowned man's pension and her own two hands. Eppie who had a boy once, the cleverest boy I ever taught, and lost him to the sea the spring of '86 and never, that I saw, wept where the town could watch. Forgive me, Rosamund had written to that woman, three years after the book came out under her own name and carried her away to London and the rest of the world. I cannot give you back what I took.

A bookseller learns not to read too much into an inscription. People write soft things on flyleaves they would never say aloud; a gift makes liars of us all in the kindest way. Forgive me might mean nothing. Might mean a borrowed brooch, a hard word at a funeral, forty years of meaning to write and not. I have talked myself out of a hundred such chills.

But she had told me which page. The truest of them is 113.

I have always despised a reader who will not show their working. So I turned to it.

Page 113 is the famous one — the passage every Cornish child has had read at them, the one they print on the tea-towels they sell down at the Reading Room. The boy on the beach with his grandfather's glass, the hourglass blown from green bottle-glass with the sea-sand sealed inside it, and the grandfather telling him that a saltglass is not for the hour but for the tide, that it keeps what the water takes back, that you turn it over and over and the same sand goes round and you are not losing it, you are only lending. I will not quote it whole. I can never read it without something going tight under my breastbone, and I had a notion the something was about to be named.

There. Two-thirds down. The sentence I could have recited.

He tipped the glass in his two hands and watched the sand run out, the way the light goes out of a window when someone you love walks away from the lamp.

Only somebody had been there before me.

Faint — so faint that under the bare bulb I would have turned the leaf and missed it — a pencil had passed across that line. The soft silvery grey of a soft lead. A single small stroke struck clean through out, and above it, in a hand no bigger than a row of stitches, one word.

home.

So the sand did not run out. The sand ran home.

I reached, without thinking, for Tom's loupe — the round glass I had not let myself lift to anything closer than a price for three years, because to look that hard at a thing is to admit you care how it turns out, and I had been so careful not to. My hand was not quite steady on it. I laid the lens to the page and the little word swam up huge and grey and certain.

It was not Rosamund's hand. Rosamund's I had just read, fat-wristed and showy; this was its opposite — small, upright, frugal of ink and of space, every letter shut and finished, the kind of hand that has had to fit a great deal of thinking into the back of a tide-table because paper cost money in that house. I had a stack of those exercise books once. I kept them longer than I should. A hand like the print in a missal, a boy's hand that never grew loud because the boy never got the chance.

I knew it. God help me, I knew it the way I knew Rosamund's, and from the same room, the same year, the two of them side by side in the window of the Institute where I sit now and price their library by the pound.

It was Jago Pascoe's hand. Eppie's boy. The truest of them.

And Jago Pascoe went out with the Morning Star and did not come home in the spring of 1986, and this book — this clean, unstamped, impossible book in my two hands — was printed that autumn, months after the sea closed over him.

A correction. In a printed book. In the hand of a boy who had been dead before the type was set.

I sat very still on Tom's stool with Tom's glass cooling in my fingers, and somewhere out over the harbour a jackdaw said something short and metallic, and I understood that I was holding a thing that could not be, and that I had been waiting forty years to be allowed to.