As she was going out the old librarian was standing at the door. He said, ‘We have millions of books here. Millions. Down below,’ he said, pointing.
‘Do any of them ever get stolen?’ she asked.
‘Sometimes,’ he said. ‘We have a lot of manuscripts here. Some valuable ones get stolen.’
‘I suppose a lot of them go to America,’ she said.
‘They go where the money is. But I don’t know much about that.’ They talked for a little longer and then she went out into the sunshine.
She continued down the long street. After a while she came to a museum and went inside after she had paid ten pence. She stayed for some time at a case which showed old spectacles worn by people in the past. One pair reminded her of the ones her grandmother used to wear when she visited her as a child. She remembered her grandmother as a twinkling old woman who seemed always to be sitting knitting at a window looking out on to a field full of flowers and inhabited by one wandering cow with soft resentful eyes. As she looked at the spectacles she seemed to see her grandmother again holding a needle up to her eyes and peering through her steel-rimmed glasses.
She left the case with the glasses and had a look at one with old coins, and later one with old stones which were labelled with the name of the finders. There were also ancient stone axes and stone jewellery.
There was a case which showed a wild cat with its claws sunk in the dead body of a rabbit, and another one of a large eagle with flashing yellow eyes. In a corner there were some old guns. There were powder horns richly decorated and domestic implements of various kinds.
One section had a complete reconstruction in shaded orange light of a cottage of the nineteenth century. There was an old woman wearing a shawl sitting on a chair looking into a peat fire. In one corner there was a herring barrel and in another a creel. There was an old clock on a mantelpiece and an iron grille for holding oat cakes. There were old candles and by the fire an old teapot and kettle. Beside the old woman there was a cradle with a doll lying in it imitating a sleeping child. There was a churn and a dressing table. There was a flail and a table. The old woman, long-nosed and shawled, seemed to be dreaming as she looked into the imitation fire. Again she was reminded of her grandmother as this woman too had a pair of spectacles on her nose.
How long ago it all was. How apparently calm it had all been. How pastoral and tranquil that existence behind glass. Had it really been like that? Day after day of peaceful existence without challenge, surrounded by the furniture and routine of a life without significant history. If she broke the glass and entered that world how would she find it? Would she find it peaceful or boring, a world without radio or TV or ballet or art or music, but a world with children and animals and work? How much one could lack and how much one could have. Faintly in the distance she heard the roar of the traffic. What about her own mother? Had she been happy in her routine? She didn’t think so, though her father had apparently been. Did she love her father more than she loved her mother? She couldn’t say: perhaps they were both part of her, the restless and the tranquil. The fire flamed in front of the old woman showing a red landscape. What was she thinking of as she looked into it? What a strange motionless world really. What a distant motionless world.
She turned away and went outside again. She sat down on a bench and rested in the coolness of the morning.
Men and women were going in and coming out of a bar opposite but she herself never went into a bar alone. At one time she used to go to pubs with Phil and she would sit there sipping a tomato juice. She never said much but Phil was always the centre of attention, open and generous. Not that he was particularly witty, he was just energetic and lively. She sometimes wondered whether this was what was important in life, energy, but at other times she thought that it was courage that was important. Phil wasn’t particularly courageous. In fact in many ways he was weak. She had heard that he had left the shop and gone off to London and wasn’t doing very well there. He was the kind of person who would become very dull and complaining when he felt that his youth was over, she was sure of that.
She decided that she would go to the Castle after all, since there was nothing else to do. She got up and walked slowly up the brae and when she got to the entrance bought her ticket and joined the queue which was waiting for the guide to take them round. Standing at the gate were two soldiers dressed in tartan trews who, with rifles beside them, stared unwinkingly ahead of them as if they were mechanical dolls. The guide who was carrying a stick and who looked like an ex-sergeant major – strong and red-cheeked – led them off. She half listened to his practised
