POST 8

BOOKS

As the weather continued hot each day and cloudless, the idea of Matthew (I never could remember in his absence exactly what he looked like), now he was to be married, haunted me daylight as well as night. Vivid, enchanting, fatiguing dreams, memories.

There was the horse incident, but it sickened me to think of that: he put me on it, picked me up all bent. He was at his best soothing the terrors created by literature. I remembered the Poe book, it was later than the horse business. One look at those pictures to go with those stories and I could not go to sleep or endure the dark for nights on end. Matthew rubbed my back and congratulated me on my marvellous perceptions.

"This author," he said, "wishes to seize upon and frighten you out of your living daylights."

"Does he?" I sobbed. I was nonetheless very impressed.

"Oh yes. Yes, it was all in his mind and he wanted to seek out a bit of your mind you didn't know you'd got, and share it with you. It's like weight-lifting. Unpleasant at the time, but it makes you strong."

"It makes me frightened," I protested.

"Worse things happen at sea."

"Worse? Look!" I boldly opened the book at the most terrible page. "This man is tied up and there are rats all over him, and those knives are swinging along up the room and they are going to cut him into...into slices," I said faintly. "There can't be anything worse than that, can there? That must be the very worst." I wanted him to say `That is the worst'. There would be at least that much comfort. Instead he said,

"No worst, there is none."

Nothing to my purpose. "Has anything so bad ever happened to you?" I tried another way.

"Yes. It has," he said, still thoughtful and sweeping with his whole hand a few crumbs perhaps off the picture. I watched him. "Yes, because it came into a bit of my mind I didn't know I'd got." We were in deep waters. I did not know what to say or think. I only wanted him to come back to me. I looked at him in awe. At last a smile came on to his mouth but not into his eyes. He ruffled my hair. "Connie, my darling child, this is nothing. Nothing to worry about. It's all made up!"

He got up, and I was happier. Something worse had happened to him (I almost understood him, almost believed him because his eyes glittered), very bad anyway, and he was still alive! But the picture had lost its power over me because when I looked at it I saw his hand passing across it sweeping it away.

I passed on to my Aunt Matthew's account (of my amazing percipience in the matter of Poe), much improved. I thought she would be as impressed by it as I was. For this piece of `miseducation and mis-information' he had been thoroughly castigated as wicked for encouraging morbid fantasies, nothing to do with life.



Saturday walks with Matthew during his wartime leave when we were back in London always sent us to the old bookshops. He wore his old clothes and I suppose I did not see him in uniform more than once or twice. But in those days I always saw him as a soldier. He never looked so handsome to me (he looked very handsome, but not so handsome) in a sports jacket or a waistcoat and chain. Oh he was handsome all right, upright, military bend, slight, with a confidence in his address to you of a special kind. The reason for this special confidence, according to Aunt Molly, was that `his gifts are recognised'. But I had only to remember the lock of dark hair that fell forward, the rumpled up waistcoat when he was lounging deep down in a chair, feet either in everyone's way on the floor, or perched up on some stool in everyone's way, to make him familiar to me again. Sometimes he was quiet, I mean very quiet, and there were secrets in his eyes. His eyes gave him away, and under the confidence and the good manners, there was something sensuous, furtive, formidable, a lot of things likely to cause trouble if too freely let out. Sometimes when Aunt Molly spoke to him it was to those secrets that she spoke. I knew that from an early age, because it was all spoken over my head in a quite different way from the usual. But the bookshops. Some had gone out of London `for the duration', but the one I liked best had gone underground into a reinforced fire-proofed cellar somewhere off Bayswater Road. Immediately the bent head cleared the doorway (I used to bend mine, needlessly, for it seemed a fitting part of the ritual). The powerful smell of chemicals and old books mingled with the natural must of medieval, well, ancient cellar steps. It was an arched tunnel of dusty stone that we descended, and perhaps the greatest excitement of the venture was reaching that step where I could at last behold the high desk directly in front of us with its bulwarks of books and columns of spiked papers, which parted in the middle not quite so steadily as the Red Sea, which framed the singular face, like a dried apricot with a beard, both in hue and texture, of Mr. Adonijah Perlmutter, as it was painted on his desk-front. The thickest lenses in the smallest brass frames had reduced his eyes to black shiny pinheads like the little balls in cracker puzzles that whizz about under their imprisoning glass discs until you persuade them into the last humiliation and drop them into the capture cups where they tremble mutinously. These eyes trembled sometimes if you were a stranger looking into them, but mostly they whizzed over the top of the glasses, one side, the other side, down the main pathway between the long shelves, up the stairs as you left (Mr. Perlmutter had been known to detect an unpaid for book as far away as the nearly top step), and constantly between the four high large convex mirrors that displayed the behaviour of his clients for his inspection, including a funny view of bottoms alone as their owners dived headfirst into tea chests at the cheap side. What had done his eyes good seemed to have made a nonsense halfway down his nose, for his spectacles rested, rooted there on the bottom of a valley of their own making.

The place was illuminated with strips of bright white light and open only on Saturdays, but the back cellar behind the desk, which Matthew occasionally visited, was open by appointment only to well-known customers on Sunday afternoons. (It was years before I knew the truth of those Sunday visits.) Matthew might make an enquiry after an order he had placed, `Flavius Josephus? Complete set?' and Mr. Perlmutter's eyes would close, squeeze right up for one fraction of a second, open one after the other, whizz round on an inspection and then he would say `Octavo. Fine binding. Uncut. Forty-two and six'. After that he would stoop under the desk, but not so far that his nose disappeared or he was made late for an inspection, and a lanky boy would come from that mysterious back cellar in answer to the bell, and while I was picking out picture books, old note-books, children's books, written-on postcards, and Matthew was picking out Nine French Poets or Das Evanglium des Matthaus or a few old copies of the Journal of Biblical Literature (again, it was a long time before I understood the connection of all this heavy theology with the book Matthew: Studies in the First Gospel, M.L. Kellory to be found in Uncle Paul's library because it was not until that was finally sold I found it lying forgotten on a shelf), a parcel might be wrapped.

I remember his tall straight figure bent backwards beside me, I bent backwards beside him, under our inordinate stacks of books, while we waited impatiently, loaded to the noses, for the door to 22 Golden Square Gardens to be opened. We would make for the nearest sofa in Uncle Paul's old room downstairs, cover it with all categories of reading matter and start examining and reading at once, dirty hands and all. Then I would find out that half his buys were for me and quite often my best ones, and most of what he had bought for himself, apart from the theology were unheard of French novels, and thick German books, or county histories, especially anything to do with Shropshire and Ludlow; occasionally `a binding'. On those days I had to carry my own books back. `Bindings' I understood were usually reserved for Sundays as were the specially ordered ones. I remember one Saturday morning he handed me four volumes of Macaulay's History of England that he had bought me. He was about to be demobilised and there was a festive note in the house. Tom came in, his son, he'd been playing football. I grimaced at Tom, displaying the gift, and then I made a face at Matthew, who took the book from me, opened it at random and started shouting.

"The nation, awaking from its rapturous trance, found itself sold to a foreign, a despotic, a Popish court, defeated on its own seas and rivers by a state of far inferior resources, and placed under the rule of panders and buffoons." Tom and I stood by in concentrated amazement while there rolled into our ears a thunder of sound, every wave bringing some bizarre creature to our senses, prisons and criminals, or Dutch ships in the Thames, or shameful subordinations, offences against liberty, sharpers and courtesans, harlot after harlot and bastard after bastard, or governments becoming odious, bosoms in a House of Commons elected in the ecstasy of penitence, disasters, sequestrations, exiles, seductions and panics, conspiracies, plots, and at high-tide, a gunpowder treason no less. Then on came Oates, and Babington and Digby; Sydney, Rosewell and Cornish. "Till the revolution purified our institutions and our manners, a state trial was merely a murder preceded by the uttering of certain gibberish and the performance of certain mummeries." Tom and I looked at each other through tears of joy, bursting to laugh. Matthew was carried away and bore it out to the very edge of doom, through the character of the king; obstinacy, passion, levity, apathy, indolence, artfulness, until `The panic gradually subsided'.