The Book Collector Read online

  Felix woke up and seeing her face started to cry. He can read my mind, she thought, he can read my mind. She realised the truth, that she was not the one with the power – it was Felix.

  As a bookshop owner, Archie was a bibliophile. He collected books, generally valuable first editions, for his own private collection, too. Their house was becoming more and more full of books. He would buy books and bring them back, like a hunter bringing back the corpses of small animals. They were books that Archie never read. He liked them as objects that he could arrange in alphabetical order or by subject. Her favourites were esoteric books on alchemy, astronomy and anatomy. She would examine the line drawing of a man heating lead in a crucible over a crozier and take pleasure in its diagrammatic portrayal of madness, obsession, and intellectual curiosity.

  One evening, Violet watched Archie in his library as he picked up a book and stroked his finger lingeringly over its leather cover. She watched as he opened it and brought up the splayed yellowing pages to his nostrils. He slowly inhaled. It was sensual, her husband’s experience of books, the texture, the sweet or acrid odours, the feel of a rough, uncut page.

  She thought they had shared the same love of books; it was one of the reasons she had fallen in love with him. But it was the content she loved, the processes of thought, the flight of imagination. She was not interested in the texture of old leather or the condensed pulp of fallen trees.

  Somewhere, instinctually, she felt the two were exclusive, that Archie’s fetishistic appraisal of a book betokened his lack of interest in thought. She knew this was not necessarily true but the odd way he lingered over the book without reading any of the words made her wonder what else this obsession precluded. If his obsession precluded meaning, did it also preclude herself and their new baby?

  ‘You are treating that book like a lover,’ she teased.

  ‘Once I have owned a book I am longing for the next one. Collecting is a creative act. One of perpetual longing and desire. One is never fully fulfilled. Collectors live in dread of satisfaction. There is that brief, transitory moment of satisfaction and then it disappears like dust in the air. We live to long after something, we know and accept the power of longing and desire. We are under no illusion that what we want is the unobtainable.’

  ‘You still sound in love.’

  ‘What you mean, don’t you, is that I am misguided and deluded, like a lover? As if another object or creature could ever fulfil all your dreams! Even for a moment.’

  Flicking through the catalogue of books in the library a week later in its thick heavy red binder with gold lettering, she wondered what book she would choose to read next. A book entitled Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen had been listed in Archie’s clear slanted handwriting and then marked by a single black seal. Curious, she tried to find the book in the library. She looked under fiction, then myths, as it clearly was a special book, but could find it nowhere. When Archie returned from work that evening, she asked him where the book was.

  ‘I keep it in my safe.’

  ‘Can I see it?’ She could tell he didn’t want to talk about it. ‘Why won’t you let me see it?’ she asked, but he shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘The book won’t interest you. And it needs to be kept out of the light. Sunlight damages the pages. Makes the print fade.’

  ‘It does interest me. I like fairy stories. You know I do.’

  Violet had loved fairy tales as a little girl, their dark iciness striking her as containing truths about life. There was a purity of emotion about them whether it was of love, hate or desire. Even when she was a child, they made her feel they were more real to her than the daily poverty of her life, her father a cobbler, struggling to bring home to their rented rooms enough money for his family to live on.

  ‘I’ve told you. I don’t want the book damaged.’ He was treating her like a child.

  And then he fobbed her off with a promise, offering up the future to her instead.

  ‘In a few weeks I’ll show it to you. It needs special gloves.’

  But she never saw the book. It was kept in the safe, the safe that was somewhere in his study, but she did not know where.

  As Archie ran his hands over her body that night she remained distant and objective. She could hear the baby was crying again. She felt vulnerable, her skin irritable. Desire had changed to various other emotions, like a chameleon, she thought, evasive and slippery. She wanted it all over with and, as he came, an odd feeling of distance overwhelmed her, as if he had become a stranger. So he had secrets? Well, she could have secrets, too.

  Chapter 4

  SHE LOOKED OUT of the window. The flowers were just coming into bloom. The lush white blooms of the prunus, the hallucinating acid green of the budding leaves. The birds in their cacophony for a mate. They just were.

  She couldn’t get the fairy tale book out of her mind. She looked around at her exquisite house and the garden. How far away from her past she now seemed. This was what was real now. The substance of materialised wealth, it protected her from everything, including herself. She managed the household, supervised the staff and looked after Felix. She loved her husband and her family was everything to her. Her way of life here was her whole identity – to question the reality of her life was to question the reality of her being. She had little realisation at the time of what she was doing, no idea that she was turning her back on anything.

  In the past month, since Violet had found out about the book in the safe, Archie had become diffuse round the edges like the prints on the walls. He had started to come back even later at night. He looked the same as usual, slim, chestnut haired, apparently friendly and open, yet also intractable. He was equitable. But he had lost his specificity. He appeared enthusiastic but something in him had gone missing. Archie had become uncircumscribed. It was as if Violet had offered him a definition by marrying him that he was now resisting. But only on the inside. On the outside he was just the same. Was that what Archie was now doing in their lives? Pretending to be who he was?

  The world started to seem dangerous to her and Felix. She began to see danger all around. Everything seemed poised to take Felix away from her. It was as if the universe, just as it had created him, was now designed to take him away from her. She became convinced just as she had been gifted Felix, so, too, she would be punished by his loss.

  She decided to find out more about the book of fairy tales. One day when Archie was planning to be back from London late, this provided the impetus she needed. He would be late, so she would disobey him. Childish, this tit-for-tat? No. It was about finding out the truth.

  She went into his dark green study, the windows obscured by the heavy golden curtains. It would be behind his favourite picture in the study. She looked behind the oil painting of the nude Venus but there was nothing but a darker square of green where the painting had protected the wall from the light. Then perhaps the safe was behind the landscape painting of the grounds and house? She lifted the painting completely off the wall and leant it carefully against the desk. Behind, inserted in the wall, was the metal door of his safe. But how to find out the combination of the safe? It would be a series of numbers. She tried Archie’s date of birth. She tried Felix’s. She finally tried hers. The safe opened. She was surprised he had used that date. Lying inside was the book.

  The book had a pale green binding of calfskin. The outline of a white circle had been inserted in the front. The book looked old. She opened it up. The illustrations were printed in bright colours. The girls’ faces had a flat look with the luminous big eyes and curly golden hair of Victorian times. What was so special about it? Why had he locked this book in the safe? It was a first edition but Archie had many first editions in his library. The pages were thick with gilt edges. She looked at the flyleaf: For Rose. It was dated just before they had met.

  Violet let out a gasp of shock and bewilderment. So this was why he had kept it secret from her. This book was a token of love for his dead wife.

  Sh
e heard the front door open and she quickly put the book back in the safe and shut the door. She could hear his footsteps in the corridor as she hung the picture back on the wall. She turned round to see Archie come into the study, his usual exuberant self. Her heart went out to him in spite of herself. How she looked forward to him coming back home after work. How, in the hours before, anticipation of his coming would swell up unconsciously and creep into her mind like a cat slowly approaching a bird. He moved like a cat, she thought, sinuous and effective, and that made her the bird, a little blackbird with beady eyes.

  ‘How was your day?’ she asked. ‘You are back earlier than you said you would be.’

  ‘I was tired, so I changed my plans.’

  Was it her imagination or did his eye flick over to the painting? She made an effort not to follow his eyes. Had she hung the painting back on the wall straight?

  ‘How was work?’

  ‘Fine. Are you all right? You look tired.’

  ‘There’s no need to treat me like an invalid.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  She fought against his concern that since the birth of their baby she hadn’t felt quite herself. Beneath this apparent idyll where everything on the surface seemed so perfect, where the birds sang and the trees were inexorably growing into bud, there was a certain fear, all along. Fear was growing as surely as the buds were unfolding. A secret, hidden budding fear, curled up in on itself, waiting for the sun to shine on it, for it to unfold. But until that happened she wouldn’t let the light shine on it, just as the book stayed locked up in the safe, hidden away.

  Chapter 5

  AS SHE WATCHED the leaves on the trees turn greener, this odd paralysing fear remained resolutely folded up on itself. This desire not to know the truth. It was an odd kind of self-preservation.

  But looking back, she was right to protect herself from the truth. The truth was to do her damage. And look how the sunlight illuminated the garden. The sun now after a particularly cold winter. But in an odd way the heat, the unfamiliar heat after the cold, added a kind of nervous strain to her, for it signalled change.

  Friends did visit, however. One in particular was Bea, a grey-haired spinster who lived in the neighbouring village, just a mile from the estate. She bounced in one day, full of energy in spite of being well over seventy and with a disarming childlike self-absorption that came from having only herself to look after. She plonked herself down at the kitchen table.

  Her first words to Violet were, ‘You look different.’

  ‘I do? In what way?’

  ‘More there, somehow.’

  ‘Unlike being somewhere else.’

  Why were personal comments about her making her feel so defensive? Bea was kindness itself – she bore no malice.

  ‘You look as if something is intriguing you.’

  Violet couldn’t help but laugh.

  ‘Am I that obvious? I can’t seem to stop thinking about it.’

  ‘Thinking about what?’

  ‘Oh, this book. Archie has hidden a book of fairy tales away in his safe. And won’t let me see it.’

  ‘So how do you know about it?’

  ‘I opened his safe.’

  Bea looked aghast and impressed at the same time.

  ‘You are a dark horse, Violet.’

  ‘But I’ve decided it’s nothing.’

  ‘You’ve decided it’s nothing. What happens if it’s not nothing? What happens if it’s something?’

  Violet was beginning to feel unaccountably angry. She looked across at Bea and could see the whirring of her thoughts.

  She looked out of the window. It was another beautiful early March day. Everything was clear and fresh. She didn’t want anything to change.

  ‘It is nothing, Bea. I don’t know why I told you anything about it. It’s just his possessiveness and secretiveness. I wasn’t going to tell you this but he has dedicated the book to Rose!’

  Bea gave her an odd look.

  ‘Did you ever meet Rose?’ Violet asked.

  ‘I did, briefly. She died soon after they moved here. She was absolutely lovely. In all ways. In the most important ways.’

  ‘How did she die?’

  ‘It was tragic. In childbirth. The baby died with her.’

  ‘And how did Archie take it?’

  ‘It struck him very hard. But he’s never one to give himself away. Do you not find Archie’s desire to collect odd?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Obsessive.’

  ‘It’s what he likes to do.’

  ‘You don’t think it means he’s missing something?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  Bea laughed and crossed her sturdy legs, thick as oak trunks in their jodhpurs. She nursed her cup in her large familiar hands.

  ‘I can’t explain exactly. It just seems a bit cold.’

  ‘No, I know what you mean. But he’s not like that really. He’s kind.’

  ‘Are you sure? The birth has taken a lot out of you. It’s only been a month and you imagine that people have qualities they don’t have. The ones you have too much of.’

  ‘I’m not kind.’

  ‘You’re sensitive. That’s your trouble. And susceptible. You trust people too much.’

  ‘Are you saying I shouldn’t trust Archie?’

  ‘No, not exactly. I don’t know what I mean. I shouldn’t have brought it up. I’m being silly.’

  ‘No, you shouldn’t. You’ve never liked Archie. I think you secretly find him attractive.’

  Bea laughed, her grey curls trembling. ‘Like anything.’

  In spite of her anger, Violet felt relieved, in a way, that she had told Bea about the book. It was out in the open.

  ‘It’s not just going to disappear, you know that,’ Bea said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your knowledge about the book. You have it now. Whatever you do with it.’

  Just at that moment they heard the front door open. It was Archie.

  They listened to his footsteps as he walked down the corridor towards them. The kitchen door opened. There he was at the entrance, looking handsome and open faced with his natural engaging smile. The few grey flecks in his brown, wavy hair gave him gravity. None of this is making any sense, Violet thought. Nothing adds up. I can’t get things to cohere. She felt feelings of love and pride and undying loyalty to Archie as he stood there. He was true; he belonged to her.

  ‘Good afternoon, Bea,’ he said. Still that smile – you couldn’t tell that he didn’t like her. But they circled around each other like predator and prey. Violet could almost see the hairs rise on Bea’s arms when he walked into the room. They were obviously civil to each other but Archie had a male pride that found Bea’s dominant nature unfeminine. Violet knew her own introversion had appealed to him, since it made no demands on him, but Bea on the other hand – Violet could see Archie found the strident urgency of her mind oppressive.

  They sat round the table talking about the unexpectedly warm weather for the time of year until Bea finally left. Violet went out onto the lawn and lay down in the prickly grass amongst the daisies. It had been a long winter and now this sun. It beat down on her face and on her limbs. Everything was going to be all right, she thought. How can it not be on this fine afternoon, with the pigeons cooing and sensation gradually returning to all her limbs?

  But then her body went rigid. Transparent and veiled, the garden seemed to take on a grey mist and a languor came over her. Something in her life, her precious, idyllic existence, was wrong. This sensation was trying to tell her something. It was a warning, like a prophecy. It was all to do with the book in the safe. And she felt as she lay there that her limbs and her eyelids were heavy and her skin on fire.

  Just then she heard Felix gurgle in his pram on the lawn. And it felt as if someone were pulling her out of the grey, back into the garden with the lawns and beds full of flowers. The cooing pigeons gradually became more audible again. She went over to the pram and looked d
own at Felix. He lifted up his round chubby arms towards her and the fog drifted away and only the vague traces of doom outlined her heart. She saw his open, pale face, the eyes the colour of two small coals and the thin intelligent lips. The freckles that dusted his nose, freckles that she once had thought had been added, to give the illusion that he was a real child when really he was a changeling.

  Chapter 6

  THAT EVENING, IN the library, she took down from a shelf a book on anatomy. She started to skim through it. The picture of a body being flayed caught her eye. Hanging upside down, by chains, by his feet. It was a cadaver in an anatomy class. A convict perhaps, hanged upside down on a star-shaped board. His legs and arms outstretched like a four-pronged star. A man was intent on flaying his arm with a knife. Violet realised with a shock that the sketcher had drawn the man alive. She briefly tried to imagine how it would be, to be flayed like Marsyas.

  She heard the door open and Archie come in. She turned round to greet him. He had an expression on his face she had never seen before. It was a distorted look that made his flesh seem mobile, as if the skin were melting. She immediately realised he had found out that she had opened his safe, that she had discovered the fairy tale book. He rushed over and snatched the anatomy book from her hands. He began nervously fingering its pages.

  ‘Don’t ever go into the safe again without consulting me. I could see the fairy tale book had been put back in a different position.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t you realise how precious that book is?’

  ‘But books are meant to be read!’

  ‘Not that one.’

  ‘Because it’s for Rose?’

  He looked as if he were about to slap her. ‘How do you know that? Don’t you dare mention her name to me. You don’t understand. Books have to be cared for, looked after. Otherwise they will be damaged. In fact, I forbid you to go into the library as well!’