She stared at him without replying, as though she hadn't heard what he had said. Then she turned away, looking again dummy2
towards the table with its incongruous collection of souvenirs.
He coughed politely. 'Mrs Champeney-Smythe — ?'
She pointed. 'There is something. You can't have it. But you can look at it, Mr Robertson. They belonged to her.'
He looked at all of it, already defeated: wooden mouse, or brass frog? China tank or spindly glass horse (minus its tail)?
Old ginger beer bottle, advertising 'Burbank', a 'High Class Chemist' of Oxford? Unless Marilyn had left a message in the bottle, it was all rubbish. But he had to humour her. 'Which object do you mean?'
'Not the table — ' The thin finger stabbed irritably towards the table ' — the bookcase, Mr Robertson, the bookcase.'
There was indeed a bookcase behind the table, its mathematically aligned contents also part of the room's ornamentation: she had been looking at that all the time, not the bric-a-brac.
'Which books, Mrs Champeney-Smythe?' '
'At the end there — at the end!' It seemed to irritate her that he needed direction.
There was a set of Dickens (which didn't look as though it had ever been opened) and a run of diminutive New University Society classics in red-and-gold bindings — and a wealth of better-read washed-out yellow Reprint Society dummy2
volumes which Basil Champeney-Smythe had surely collected, and which customarily stood out on the shelves of a thousand second-hand bookshops . . .
But he didn't even know which shelf, which end: should he be looking for
'The fairy books — I told you — at the end, there!'
'The — ?'
Who had ever heard of 'W. Y. Evans Wentz', for heaven's sake! Well . . . evidently the Oxford University Press, for a start! And a Penguin book —
He opened the Penguin. The right date, anyway: first published, 1976 — and in Penguin, 1977 . . . And, on the flyleaf, 'F.F. '78' — but who the hell was 'F.F.' — ?
He looked questioningly at Mrs Champeney-Smythe, then down again at the dictionary of fairies, which had fallen open in his hands at the point where the paperback binding had fallen apart with use, at page 175 — '
And who the hell was '
He felt a cold hand on his backbone: Fin Bheara,
Finvarra, was apparently more than just the Fairy King of Ulster, which was 'Mad Dog' O'Leary's old stamping ground, but also maybe King of the Dead (and therefore a recipient of many of 'Mad Dog's' customers — ?) —
This foolish diversion of his concentration angered him.
'Who is 'F.F.', Mrs Champeney-Smythe?'
'You are looking at the wrong book, Mr Robertson.' She closed her eyes as she spoke.
The paperback almost came apart in his hands as he juggled clumsily with Marilyn Francis's only known possessions to bring the stout OUP hardback to the top —
'Who — ?' He realized that there was more than an inscription, there was a folded piece of paper —
It was a bookseller's bill, with a name and an address —
He looked back one last time into Lower Buckland churchyard, in which the second of his future book's bodies lay. But, unlike Jenny's lovely heroic Philip Masson, his own lovely, heroic 'Marilyn Francis' would at least remain decently undisturbed. For she was buried properly —
FRANCES
1948-1978
dummy2
— alongside her
ROBERT GAUVAIN FITZGIBBON
Meanwhile, the Village Green was still as comfortingly empty as it had been when he had first arrived. Maybe it
