hand to an inhuman green, the green of glass in a church window, or of emeralds or of boiled sweets, they gaze out over the heads of the commuters with perfect in-expression. I can't say whether the other travelers that day felt the same way as I about the picture; they had read the books, so they may have had a different perspective on things. But for me, looking into the large green eyes, I could not help being reminded of that commonplace expression about the eyes being the gateway to the soul. This woman, I remember thinking, as I gazed at her green, unseeing eyes, does not have a soul.
Such was, on the night of the letter, the extent of my knowledge about Vida Winter. It was not much. Though on reflection perhaps it was as much as anyone else might know. For although everyone knew Vida Winter-knew her name, knew her face, knew her books-at the same time nobody knew her. As famous for her secrets as for her stories, she was a perfect mystery.
Now, if the letter was to be believed, Vida Winter wanted to tell the truth about herself. This was curious enough in itself, but curiouser still was my next thought: Why should she want to tell it to
MARGARET'S STORY
Rising from the stairs, I stepped into the darkness of the shop. I didn't need the light switch to find my way. I know the shop the way you know the places of your childhood. Instantly the smell of leather and old paper was soothing. I ran my fingertips along the spines, like a pianist along his keyboard. Each book has its own individual note: the grainy, linen-covered spine of Daniels's
We see few customers in Lea's Antiquarian Booksellers, a scant half-dozen a day on average. There is a flurry of activity in September when the students come to buy copies of the new year's set texts; another in May when they bring them back after the exams. These books my father calls migratory. At other times of the year we can go days without seeing a client. Every summer brings the odd tourist who, having wandered off the beaten track, is prompted by curiosity to step out of the sunshine and into the shop, where he pauses for an instant, blinking as his eyes adjust. Depending on how weary he is of eating ice cream and watching the punts on the river, he might stay for a bit of shade and tranquillity or he might not. More commonly visitors to the shop are people who, having heard about us from a friend of a friend, and finding themselves near Cambridge, have made a special detour. They have anticipation on their faces as they step into the shop, and not infrequently apologize for disturbing us. They are nice people, as quiet and as amiable as the books themselves. But mostly it is just Father, me and the books.
How do they make ends meet? you might think, if you saw how few customers come and go. But you see, the shop is, in financial terms, just a sideline. The proper business takes place elsewhere. We make our living on the basis of perhaps half a dozen transactions a year. This is how it works: Father knows all the world's great collectors, and he knows the world's great collections. If you were to watch him at the auctions or book fairs that he attends frequently, you would notice how often he is approached by quietly spoken, quietly dressed individuals, who draw him aside for a quiet word. Their eyes are anything but quiet.
The shop itself makes next to no money. It is a place to write and receive letters. A place to while away the hours waiting for the next international bookfair. In the opinion of our bank manager, it is an indulgence, one that my father's success entitles him to. Yet in reality- my father's reality and mine; I don't pretend reality is the same for everyone-the shop is the very heart of the affair. It is a repository of books, a place of safety for all the volumes, once so lovingly written, that at present no one seems to want.
And it is a place to read.
A is for Austen, B is for Bronte, C is for Charles and D is for Dickens. I learned my alphabet in this shop. My father walking along the shelves, me in his arms, explaining alphabetization at the same time as he taught me to spell. I learned to write there, too: copying out names and titles onto index cards that are still there in our filing box, thirty years later. The shop was both my home and my job. It was a better school for me than school ever was, and afterward it was my own private university. It was my life.
My father never put a book into my hands and never forbade a book. Instead, he let me roam and graze, making my own more and less appropriate selections. I read gory tales of historic heroism that nineteenth-century parents thought were suitable for children, and gothic ghost stories that were surely not; I read accounts of arduous travel through treacherous lands undertaken by spinsters in crinolines, and I read handbooks on decorum and etiquette intended for young ladies of good family; I read books with pictures and books without; books in English, books in French, books in languages I didn't understand, where I could make up stories in my head on the basis of a handful of guessed-at words. Books. Books. And books.
At school I kept all this shop reading to myself. The bits of archaic French I knew from old grammars found their way into my essays, but my teachers took them for spelling mistakes, though they were never able to eradicate them. Sometimes a history lesson would touch upon one of the deep but random seams of knowledge I had accumulated by my haphazard reading in the shop.
In between reading, I helped my father in his work. At nine I was allowed to wrap books in brown paper and address them to our more distant clients. At ten I was permitted to walk these parcels to the post office. At eleven I relieved my mother of her only job in the shop: the cleaning. Armored in a headscarf and housecoat against the grime, germs and general malignity inherent in 'old books,' she used to walk the shelves with her fastidious feather duster, her lips pressed tight and trying not to inhale. From time to time the feathers would stir up a cloud of imaginary dust, and she recoiled, coughing. Inevitably she snagged her stockings on the crate that, with the predictable malevolence of books, would just happen to be positioned behind her. I offered to do the dusting. It was a job she was glad to be rid of; she didn't need to come out to the bookshop after that.
When I was twelve, Father set me looking for lost books. We designated items lost when they were in stock according to the records but missing from their rightful position on the shelves. They might have been stolen but, more likely, they had been left in the wrong place by an absentminded browser. There were seven rooms in the shop, lined floor to ceiling with books, thousands of volumes.
'And while you're at it, check the alphabetization,' Father said.
It was a job that would take forever; I wonder now whether he was entirely serious in entrusting it to me. To tell the truth it hardly mattered, for in undertaking it /was serious.
It took me a whole summer of mornings, but at the beginning of September, when school started, every lost book had been found, every misplaced volume returned to its home. Not only that, but-and in retrospect, this is the thing that seems important-my fingers had made contact, albeit briefly, with every book in the shop.
By the time I was in my teens, I was giving my father so much assistance that on quiet afternoons we had little real work to do. Once the morning's work was done, the new stock shelved, the letters written, once we had eaten our sandwiches by the river and fed the ducks, it was back to the shop to read.
Gradually my reading grew less random. More and more often I found myself meandering on the second floor.
