The Magus of Hay(5)

‘She was smiling at me,’ Ms Merchant said. ‘As usual.’

Merrily nodded carefully.

‘Although her eyes were without light.’ Ms Merchant took a considered breath. ‘And I wasn’t sure she could see me.’





3

The crown


BETTY SAID, ‘No, hold it.’

Watching Robin trying not to lean on his stick at the top entrance to Back Fold. His wild black hair was not so wild any more and not so black.

He was still in recovery. It would be a long recovery, never a full recovery, but he was not going to accept that. There was a jerky electricity in his movements and he kept looking all around him, his eyes collecting the sights the way a magpie crammed its beak full of the bread put out for all the birds. The sloping streets, the patched-up castle. His images.

As if he thought the town could help heal his bones: the idea of living in an old stone town under a medieval fortress. Right under the castle, part of the castle. Fused into a fairytale.

‘You know what?’ Betty said. ‘This pisses me off.’

It had been her idea, after they’d walked away from Nunne, actually to give some serious thought to starting a bookshop.

OK, it was crazy. They were closing down on every high street in the country. Like Nunne had said, e-books were strangling the second-hand trade. But e-books were boring, and a sufficiently seductive shop, given over to a particular theme, in the right location, was always going to pull people in.

And also – she wasn’t telling him this – it could be a showcase for Robin’s paintings. After the commercial work dried up, all he’d had left had been the paintings and, in a recession, original paintings by unknown artists were among the first items to vanish from wish-lists. Especially paintings like Robin’s graphically brilliant but slightly skewed, spiritually-disturbing landscapes, streetscapes, stonescapes. But in Hay, with its international tourists… in the kind of bookshop they’d talked about… well, who knew?

‘What I think,’ Betty said, ‘is we should go and talk to some of the others.’

‘The other what?’ Robin glanced sideways at her. ‘Other damaged bastards?’

‘Booksellers. Other booksellers.’

Crazy, but the thought of talking to other booksellers gave him cold feet. Forget Nunne, he’d said on the way here, booksellers are not like grocers and ironmongers. Booksellers, there has to be a hierarchy. Maybe subdivisions for philosophy and anthropology and like that. We’ll need to tread carefully.

His ideas could only have been confirmed by Mr Oliver, peering at him over those academic glasses. Betty really hated it when Robin got treated like the thick, naive American. But, more than that, she hated being used by people pursuing personal agendas.

‘There could be another shop available,’ Betty said.

‘With living accommodation? Near a castle?’

The alley was quiet. The remodelled red chimneys from the castle’s second incarnation jutted into the luminous grey sky like cigars from a packet. They walked down past Oliver’s darkened window and the next shop they came to had giant cricket stumps painted either side of its doorway and bails over the top, below the name P. T. Kapoor. In the window was an archaic-looking biography of Denis Compton, priced at thirty-five pounds.

The name would mean nothing to Robin, who shook his head in wonderment. Even after years living with an Englishwoman born in Yorkshire, he still didn’t get it about cricket.

‘All I can say, if this guy can make a living…’

‘Let’s find out how,’ Betty said.

Before he could argue, she was between the stumps.



* * *

Robin figured the guy was around his own age, maybe a little older. Stocky, with a dark-stubbled face, deep-set sparky eyes and what Robin figured was an East London accent. His blue and white T-shirt said MUMBAI INDIANS.

‘Bleedin’ Gareth Nunne, eh?’ he said. ‘What is it wiv these guys? Truth is, he don’t know if Oliver wants to sell. Nobody in the trade here knows, on account of Oliver don’t talk to them. Well, me, sometimes, to show he ain’t racist, but not often. He finks he’s been dissed, is what it is.’

‘What’s that about?’ Betty said.

‘How long you got?’ He looked at Robin’s stick, pulled out a stool for him, looked around for somewhere for Betty, but she shook her head. ‘Fing is, he’d never had a bookshop before, new or second-hand. College librarian or somefing academic. Told everybody who’d listen that he’d moved to Hay to be close to literature. Yeah, right.’

That was frowned on? Robin looked around the store. The spotlit walls and ceiling were painted different shades of green, the window frame white. A cricket bat hung on chains over the counter which you reached through an alleyway of book-stands, the books displayed face-up. Peeling dust-jackets with guys in caps, killer balls coming at you. Didn’t appear to be too much in here that wasn’t cricket-related.