The Telling Read Online Free PDF Page B

and quiet as a pine wood. The carpets swirled green andgold and red. I had picked up a craft book and was looking at a very seventies illustration of a woman making a wicker basket, when someone sniffed close by, making me start. In the space between the top of some French paperbacks and the bottom of the shelf above, I saw a fold of denim and a blunt-fingered hand. I’d thought myself alone.
    I ducked through the next doorway, into a corridor lined with shelves. It ended on a small room where the floor was almost entirely covered with boxes of sheet music, slitheringly overfull. There was a second, narrower, flight of stairs with books stacked on every tread. I made my way up, was soon half-hypnotized by the repeating labyrinth of corridors and rooms, the same layout as the floor below, but with sloping ceilings and different patterns on the patchwork carpets. I found myself standing in an attic, white sunlight through a low window, a wedge of shelved wall packed solid with books, with a sense that this was something I’d once dreamed. The heavy red book seemed to nudge itself into my grip like a dog pushing its muzzle into a hand; blunt, mute, accepted instinctively. I took it downstairs with me.
    The sun was shafting down the stairwell, so that I came down it in a stream of golden dust-motes. At the cash desk, the bookseller grunted and took my stack off me. A shiver of guilty self-consciousness ran through me: this was not what I was supposed to be doing. The bookseller flopped open the cover and checked the pencil-written price, keyed the figures into the till and set the book to one side. I tilted my head to look at the handsome old Everyman edition of Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress
, with a design of leaves and an armour-suited pilgrim on the front. When the bookseller lifted the cover to check the price, I read, upside down,an inscription in browning copperplate:
Prize for Holy Scripture
, but I couldn’t see the name beneath. The next book was a shabby tan-leather
Robinson Crusoe
, the edges rough where they’d been cut, and blotched and dark with age.
A History of the Lune Valley
, its porcelain-blue dust jacket worn white at the edges. The big red book was called
History of the Chartist Movement
. I couldn’t remember why I’d thought it was a good idea.
    —
    I was climbing the stairs to the Reading Room, to go and put the books on the bookcase. I held them in my hands, shuffling and reshuffling them as I climbed, so that one was on the top, and now another. I was ignoring my unease, indulging instead the rare pleasure of acquisition, the beauty of the books, tracing the embossing of the leather, lifting an opened volume to inhale the skin-scent of the pages. And then there was a voice.
    A young woman’s voice, speaking softly, urgently. I lowered the book and closed it. Not so much words as a suggestion of speech, like the burn a sparkler leaves behind when traced through the air. Then a pause, as if someone were replying, but the voice was too low for me to hear. I must have left the window open; there must be people out in the street. But there hadn’t been anyone on the street when I came in; no one at all. I pushed the door open, my books crushed to my chest. The room was silent. Both windows were shut; they gave a greyish, muted light. I set the books down on a shelf, went to look out of the window. The street was empty.
    The moment didn’t linger in my thoughts; when I turned away from the window I caught sight of the books, and they looked soright on the bookshelf, as if they’d always been there, that I felt an inarticulate urge to do more, to somehow soften the starkness of the place. I took the pewter jug from the box room, brought it downstairs and set it by the kitchen sink. I wandered down the garden, picking daffodils. The grass was long, rank, tangling around my feet. Shrubs sprouted gangling stems. Last summer’s dead heads wizened on the rose bushes.
    The daffodils glowed yellow on the