The Magus of Hay Read Online Free PDF Page A

Nott’s bed?’
    ‘I can help you… if you like… to move it into another room?’
    ‘Why would I want that?’
    ‘She didn’t die in it, did she? She died in hospital. You could sell the bed. Or give it away. There are places always looking for good furniture.’
    ‘It is not an empty bed,’ Ms Merchant said.
    Merrily said nothing. The shadow fronds of a willow tree in the garden wavered on the lemon wall above the beds. She felt constricted in the typist’s chair. Had the chair always been here, or had it been brought up after Alys Nott’s death?
    ‘I don’t understand, Sylvia. Why did you want me to come? Why me?’
    ‘Because I’m a Christian. Because we’re both Christians. Because there was no one to pray for her when she died. I’d like you to pray for her now.’
    ‘I’m sorry. Of course I will.’
    Prayers. She could do that. No formal ritual at this stage. You could devise your own, as mild or as explicit as you felt necessary. The prayers would be for peace. And afterwards you might leave written prayers behind. Simple lines which could be uttered like a mantra. And then there might be further visits. Aftercare. And, gradually, the atmosphere would change.
    Or it should.
    ‘Here?’ Merrily said. ‘Now?’
    ‘If you wish.’
    ‘Do you think I could alter the positioning of this chair?’
    Sylvia Merchant smiled.
    ‘It won’t. That’s the position Ms Nott had it for years.’
    ‘Right.’
    For a moment, Merrily found it hard to draw breath and sprang up, too quickly, from the chair.
    A moment later, the chair creaked.
    God.
    Sylvia Merchant’s eyes were alight.
    ‘Now,’ she said, ‘we are all here. The three of us.’

5
    Fix it
    T HAT EVENING , R OBIN read the book, Betty read the tarot.
    Outside, kids were yelling and neighbours mowing their tidy, right-angled lawns, the ones that hadn’t been turned into extra parking space for their goddamn people-carriers.
    This bungalow – Robin despised it – was attached to another one and built on an estate near Kington, fifteen or so miles from Hay. Pink-brick suburbia made all the worse for having empty hills tantalizingly on the horizon.
    After supper, the sky reddening, they lit a fire in the small woodstove they’d installed to save on oil, and Betty sat on the rug near the legs of Robin’s chair and felt the excitement around him like ground mist.
    ‘See, this guy… a legitimate hero.’
    ‘Another one?’
    ‘This is the real thing,’ Robin said. ‘This matters.’
    He hadn’t been sure if the man he’d talked to in the King of Hay shop – older than the man on the front of the book – had actually been the King of Hay and hadn’t dared ask. Robin was strangely shy with people he thought he might admire. But now he was halfway into the autobiography and sure on both counts.
    ‘I just didn’t know the half of this. You hear about the King, you think it’s a pisstake. Which, OK it was. Until it became majorly serious.’
    He stared into the stove, the flames still yellow. Robin saw the stove as an essential energy source, like all the books on their shelves, soon to be turned into a different kind of energy.
    Betty thought the King of Hay had just looked like some overweight, ageing bloke, detecting no obvious charisma, but…
    ‘OK… tell me.’
    Richard Booth – later Richard Coeur de Livres – had grown up at Cusop, the strung-out village just on the English side of Hay. Back in the early 1960s, when Hay was a run-down farmers’ town, sinking into an economic ditch, he’d bought the old town fire station for seven-hundred pounds, opening an antique shop there.
    ‘But his business took off,’ Robin said. ‘Like really took off… when he switched to second-hand books.’
    Booth loved books and books seemed to love Booth, and it was a slow explosion. In the years that followed, he opened bookstore after bookstore, building the town an international reputation as the place where you could find a book on anything