The Loneliness of the Long Distance Book Runner Read Online Free PDF Page A

almost six years: we do, we don’t, we will, we won’t. It is going to be a testing time; reacquainting myself with the personal pronoun.
    Avoiding eye contact by concentrating my efforts on not spilling the coffee, I hand Eddy a cup with an air of exaggerated calmness. There is a flurry of words about resignations and a change of scenes. Excited by the prospect of leaving it all for Paris, I, too, become garrulous. Coach timetables are scrutinised as the hypothetical seemingly turns to something more substantial. Little attention is given to the television which is left on so as to provide background noise should conversation dry up. But there is little chance of that happening while grandiose plans of book dealing and travel are being made and, to some extent, made up. Getting carried away, he almost misses the last bus back home. It’s nice of Eddy to have called. Our friendship has history and form.
    We used to catch a bus and then the tube out to Heathrow Airport, ostensibly to watch planes. What we mostly did was wander Terminal 2, covertly helping ourselves to a panoply of baggage labels as well as anything else such as key rings and badges – all items offered by the airlines to passengers as freebies, which was how we also viewed them. Our Heathrow jaunts were considered self-made teenage entertainment in the late seventies; a successful Saturday afternoon culminating in a bag chock-full of tangled, multi-coloured paper that spoke of exotic destinations. Eddy was stopped on one occasion. I’d done a runner, leaving him to his fate. On the bus home, he relates the ‘bollocking’ that he’d been forced to endure.
Corcoran Irish Pub in Paris, 1990
    Eddy has tipped me off. A Virginia Woolf? I don’t seek out the pub immediately, deferring an anticipated pleasure. I walk indesultorily fashion until Corcoran’s catches my eye. It is strange to walk off a French street and into an Irish pub. Irish by name but certainly not exclusively Irish by its patronage – inside is a mix of Brits and Parisians. Ireland is a country loved by the French; English boozers not commanding in gallic hearts anywhere near the same degree of romantic reverence. It can’t really be a Celtic thing either; the continent is hardly overrun with Welsh or Scottish pubs. Maybe it’s the Guinness label and their pure marketing genius.
    The bar staff are unfailingly polite, graduates, perhaps, of a Guinness finishing school that produces clean-cut personable young men. In addition to pulling pints, they provide a social service for tourists and the homesick. This evening, I don’t class myself as either. I’m here for business.
    I order a pint and sit down in the corner to the right of the pub’s door. This is where Eddy says he saw the book. The décor is typical: plenty of old pictures, mirrors, bric-a-brac, frames of old Guinness bottle labels and books to which I am drawn. There is a row of books on a single shelf running above my head. A frisson of excitement. Always the same. It’s not just the thought of finding a valuable book. It’s curiosity’s pull. Corcoran’s library comprises mostly small hardbacks lacking dust jackets.
    Sipping Guinness, I survey the books whose spines have faded into a uniform appearance of greying grubbiness. On closer examination, beneath the dust, are the distinct hues of brown, green, red and blue. Book club editions, some with Boots Booklovers’ Library labels. George Eliot’s Romola in BCA plonked beside Board of Traffic Offences , third supplement to the 15th edition. And there, as Eddy has said, is a copy of To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.
    Taking care not to dislodge the surrounding titles, I reachup and extract it from the shelf. There is no dust jacket but it is a first, the book published by The Hogarth Press in 1927. I wipe the dust off the blue cloth, revealing gilt title lettering on the spine. There are no inscriptions. People still aren’t paying me any notice while I casually