Consequences

  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.

  “Mr. Portland?” said Molly, interested. “The old man?”

  Jennifer looked shocked. “The Chairman? No, of course not. Mr. Portland. He’s a publisher and—oh, I don’t know what else. He’s very grand and well off, anyway. Everybody’s heard of him.”

  “I haven’t.”

  Jennifer looked supercilious. “There are some very well-known people among our members.”

  Miss Clarence evidently felt that Molly was inclined to carry fraternization with the members too far, a response provoked no doubt by the breath of fresh air remark. After a couple of weeks she took her on one side.

  “One does, of course, want to be of every service to the members but at the same time it is essential to resist what one has to call time wasting. You were at least twenty minutes with Mr. Trubshaw this morning.”

  “He’d forgotten his glasses and wanted something light for his wife that she hadn’t read before.”

  Miss Clarence shook her head. “Even so. There was a stack of requests that needed processing. You must learn how to detach yourself—politely, of course.”

  Without his glasses, Mr. Trubshaw had been unable to spot the tiny hieroglyph at the foot of page thirty-three in any book whereby Mrs. Trubshaw indicated for her own future reference that she had read this work. Molly was impressed by this adroit system and quite ready to help with the trawl of the fiction shelves. It seemed a bad idea to enlarge on this to Miss Clarence, so she nodded and said that she would try swifter detachment, in future. Since many of the members came in for a chat quite as much as for a book, and had to make do with the staff if there was no other member to hand, she thought that it would be hard to comply with this. Especially as many members tended to home in on her, nowadays, perhaps on account of Miss Clarence’s more austere outlook.

  “I shan’t stay there forever,” Molly told Lucas, “But it does nicely to be going on with.”

  When she displayed her first pay packet, Lucas had eyed it with admiration.

  “I’ve never had one of those in my life,” he said. “What it is to join the salaried classes.”

  The Heron Press was in decline. Indeed, it was at its last gasp. A changing climate of book production, the demise of illustration and increased costs were making it more and more difficult for Lucas to produce a book and break even, let alone make enough profit to provide a living.

  “This is the twilight of the fine press,” he would say. “Oh well, I had a run for my money, I suppose.” He now spent most of his time on freelance copyediting and proofreading, working at a disheveled desk in the former Heron Press office, from which would come periodic yelps of dismay and disgust. Occasionally, he would sneak down to the basement to operate the press, in some wistful production of a selection of poetry for private distribution, or an elegant little edition of a favorite essay or story. “Self-indulgence,” he said. “Sheer nostalgia. Eventually, it will be just the annual Christmas card. Never mind, we had our day.”

  The tall house in Fulham was as it had ever been: untidy, grubby, unlike other people’s homes. During the years that Molly was away at university she had returned to it each time with a mixture of exasperation and fond relief. If she brought her friends there, they were entranced—by the evidence of an alternative lifestyle, by Lucas’s awkward appeal.

  “He’s not a bit like a father,” they would say.

  And Molly would reply, “He is an accidental father.”

  Simon was now interested in football, meccano, and rock and roll. Both football and the music had Lucas on the ropes, as parent. The sound of Simon’s gramophone reduced him to a tormented, angular heap, crouched with his hands over his ears, muttering “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear…” In the service of Simon’s football, he would sometimes take him up to the park and kick a ball around with him—ventures from which he returned gallantly limping. “That it should come to this,” he said to Molly. “I spent my entire boyhood avoiding games if I possibly could.”

  Molly knew that the time had come to leave the house in Fulham. She was twenty-two, and people of twenty-two do not live with their families, even a family so far removed from the norm as Lucas and Simon. She began surreptitiously to hunt for something to rent, fortified by the pay packet. Eventually she found a room in another girl’s flat, with share of kitchen and bathroom.

  Lucas was astonished. “But why? You’ve got a room and share of kitchen and bathroom here.”

  She tried to explain, skirting the word independence, which was difficult.

  Simon looked knowing. “I expect she’s got a boyfriend.”

  “G-good heavens,” said Lucas. “Have you?”

  “I don’t know why you should be so amazed at the possibility. As it happens, I haven’t. The girl in the flat is called Glenda and she works at Peter Jones. And listen—I’ve had a thought. If I’m not here you could have a lodger in my room. Useful income.”

  Lucas sighed. “I can see you’re set on it. Simon and I will go to pot without you, mind. As for a lodger, they’d want cooked breakfast and clean sheets. We’ll see.”

  “I’ll only be ten minutes’ walk away. I shall come back for lunch on Sundays. And look in often.”

  “What about my homework?” grumbled Simon.

  “We shall have to struggle on as best we can,” Lucas told him. “Anyway, my math is improving. You said yourself that we got B+ last week for algebra.” He looked at Molly. “You had better take some of Matt’s engravings with you to add a touch of class to your new hideout.”

  The walls of the Fulham house were lined with Matt’s work: a farmhouse with geese, a church tucked away among hills, small intimate studies of spiderwebs or blackberries. Shakespeare characters. Ducks, and a lake, and a distant girl in a white dress. Molly had in her bedroom a Victorian jug and basin of flowered
china; there was still a dim picture in her head of these objects in another context, which she knew to be the Somerset cottage.

  Her parents seemed to her now to be somewhere far away, as though you looked through the wrong end of a telescope. At the same time, they were constant, frozen forever in a particular instant of recollection: her father dressed as a soldier standing in a doorway, her mother in the office here in the Fulham house, her hands on the typewriter, looking up with a smile. Her mother wiping a cut on Molly’s leg with cotton wool that becomes bright with blood; her mother pinning washing on a line, and Molly hands her the pegs; her mother standing at a window, here in Fulham, and when she turns around her eyes are shiny with tears.

  They are locked into Molly’s childhood, her parents. They were somewhere long ago, always there, unchanging. They would never get any older, unlike Lucas, who had gray hair now, and Simon, who was hurtling from childhood into adolescence. She would see them always with her own child’s eye, these distant, immortal figures. What she felt for them was a trace of childhood emotion, which seemed to come smoking back, when their images floated into her head. She became for an instant a child again, experiencing them.

  Her adult self saw them differently, as simultaneously remote but deeply personal. She saw them also with detachment, as themselves: young people who had not lived for very long. She felt a strange protectiveness toward them, as though she guarded them in her mind, affording them some kind of survival. But at the same time she knew herself to be without them, entirely. To be parentless is to be in some way un tethered. For Molly, it was also a recipe for determined self-sufficiency.

  “You are such a competent girl,” Lucas would say, observing with awe as she negotiated her way through the labyrinthine process of getting a grant to enable her to go to university, as she searched out vacation jobs to eke out the grant, as she emerged with a degree in History and a high zest for whatever lay ahead.

  Once, he added, “But so was your mother, in her different way”—shook his head violently and changed the subject. It was at such moments that Molly saw that he grieved still, and presumably forever would.

  The trouble with competence was that it landed you with tedious jobs. At college, you ended up as the secretary of societies, or the person who ran the Junior Common Room. At home, she had for years over-seen the acquisition and preservation of Simon’s school uniform; he would have left the house sockless and capless were it not for her. Lately, she had helped Lucas to wrestle with his income tax forms.

  “My income is derisory anyway,” he complained. “I am not worth their attention. Are you quite sure they’ll send me to prison if I don’t do this stuff?” Molly would also take command of the unpaid bills on the kitchen dresser from time to time, and instigate essential household repairs, though this last was a problem since there was never any spare money with which to pay for them.

  “You could have a career,” said Lucas. “Imagine! You could be something respectable like a civil servant, and hang your hat on a pension. I have never known people like that.”

  Molly grimaced. “Do you mind?” She was not going to allow competence to edge her into some numbing form of occupation. One had to earn a living, but there was no reason why one should not earn it in some way that also was stimulating, and if possible enjoyable. Both Lucas and her father had been driven by passionate commitment to their respective callings. She knew that she lacked specific talent, so that was not an option, unless she were to discover some unsuspected capacity. As for her mother—well, for her mother things had been rather different. Her mother had stepped out of a moribund world, as Molly understood it, and had reconstructed herself. She was resourceful, thought Molly. Flexible, if you like.

  “Don’t worry,” said Lucas. “I can’t really see it happening. You with a briefcase and umbrella. You are indeed dismayingly efficient but there is one mitigating circumstance.”

  “Mmn?”

  “You’re also quite pretty. I understate the case so as not to encourage vanity.”

  Molly did not see how these comments related, but she let the matter pass. Lucas’s conversational style had always been opaque.

  When she looked at the few existing photographs of her mother, she could not think that she much resembled her. Lorna had been considered beautiful, she knew—delicately built, with that small pointed face. Molly was stockier, with more of her father’s build, and his thick brown hair, his stronger features. But perhaps there was indeed something about her eyes, her mouth…. Pretty?

  Men appeared to find her of interest. She had been in demand, at college. She had lost her virginity, because on the whole everybody did, and it seemed rather staid and unadventurous to be forever saying no. Besides, one had all the natural urges; one wanted to see what it was like. But her considered view was that she had never been in love. Not if the condition was indeed as it was portrayed in literature, on the cinema screen, even in the incoherent confessions of her own contemporaries. Oh, she had been attracted, yes indeed, making the decision to say yes this time not very difficult. But she had not yet known the onslaught, the obsession, the madness. All in good time, she thought. One day.

  So she had said yes on several occasions, and in consequence had gone through days of anxiety waiting for her period to come. Everyone did. Girls watched the calendar, quaking; from time to time you heard of someone for whom the worst had happened. Like as not, they disappeared from the college, usually forever.

  She had been lucky, but had been affronted by this extraordinarily high price that had to be paid for the most basic human activity. By women, that is. Notoriously, contraceptive devices were unreliable—those horrible rubber things; it seemed astonishing that in the day of penicillin and the atom bomb nobody had successfully addressed this one basic need. Were all scientists men?

  Once installed in the flat, Molly felt older. Indeed, during the first week she had a sort of crisis and wanted only to scuttle back to the Fulham house, to the familiar backdrop of her life. Glenda, her flat-mate, was a worldly girl who was an assistant buyer at Peter Jones, with her sights set on a serious career in the retail business. She evidently did not reckon much with Molly’s present occupation. “What are the prospects? Where do you go from there?”

  “Onward and downward, I should think,” said Molly.

  Glenda shook her head. “I shall be buyer when Mrs. Appleby retires next year. By the way, if you want some new cushions for your room, I can get you a staff discount.” She was an amiable girl, with a fund of tales about the private life of a department store to which Molly listened with interest over Nescafe in the shared kitchen, while Glenda painted her nails and girded herself up for the next day’s round of creative trading. Gradually, the flat began to feel like an acceptable base; Molly knew that, like the library, it was merely a stepping-stone of some kind, but she was pleased to have set off in this way. I have no idea where I am going, she thought, but I have begun.

  Her contemporaries at Oxford differed wildly in their own first moves. Many of the men were disconcertingly positive, pitching at once into jobs in industry, or banks, or chosen safe havens like law and medicine. Others wandered uncertainly into teaching, as did many girls. A few girls simply went home and did some cookery or child minding for friends, openly admitting that they intended only to get married, as early as possible, a position that was held in contempt, by and large. Molly shared this disdain. You only had to look around you to see that women for whom marriage was still the primary goal in life were concentrated at each end of society: the aristocracy and the working class. Everybody else had moved on.

  “We are the meritocracy,” she told Jennifer, as they unpacked a delivery of new titles.

  “Well, speak for yourself,” said Jennifer. “And do keep biography separate from history.”

  “We are where we are because of our own abilities,” Molly continued. “That’s the point. Of course, you’re much more able than I am when it comes to librarianship, but at least I??
?m striving, like a good meritocrat.”

  Jennifer frowned, unsure if this was a dig. “And Osbert Sitwell is memoir, not biography.”

  “I know. Pompous old windbag.”

  “That’s not very nice,” snapped Jennifer. She did not care for value judgments, where the stock was concerned. A book was a book was a book: a matter of classification and shelf mark.

  It sometimes seemed to Molly that the library was a place of silent discord and anarchy, its superficial tranquility concealing a babel of assertion and dispute. Fiction is one strident lie—or rather, many competing lies; history is a long narrative of argument and reassessment; travel shouts of self-promotion; biography is pushing a product. As for autobiography…And all this is just fine. That is the function of books: they offer a point of view, they offer many conflicting points of view, they provoke thought, they provoke irritation and admiration and speculation. They take you out of yourself and put you down somewhere else from whence you never entirely return. If the library were to speak, Molly felt, if it were to speak with a thousand tongues, there would be a deep collective growl coming from the core collection up on the high shelves, where the voices of the nineteenth century would be setting precedents, the bleats and cries of new opinion, new fashion, new style. The surface repose of a library is a cynical deception.

  Two or three times a year, the Trustees held a meeting in the Johnson Room, an inner sanctum reserved for silent study (or sleep). On these occasions, there was extra expenditure on flower arrangements, and Miss Clarence wore her best coat and skirt.

  Molly was detailed to take in a tray of coffee and biscuits half-way through the meeting. The Trustees were familiar faces to her, for the most part—assiduous library users. But this was the first time that she had again set eyes on Mr. Portland, whom she had to think of as her supporter, according to Jennifer. He sat once more at the end of the table, slightly apart, and as she placed a cup in front of him, and offered milk and sugar, he glanced up: a nod, a flicker of a smile. Molly, too, nodded, but forbore to flicker; inappropriate, perhaps.