The rain is still falling. I look down from my lounge room window, down at my patch of street. The pavement stones are worn and uneven. Random puddles of water reflect the passing legs of those to whom the weather is no impediment. One reflection is not moving, a man, leaning against the lamppost, outside my flat. He’s smoking. That old film “The Thirty Nine Steps” comes to mind, but it could be any Alfred Hitchcock mystery. The figure in the grey raincoat looks up. I move back, safe behind the curtain. I look at the second hand on my watch and wait until it sweeps a full circuit before I cautiously ease my head round the heavy drape.
The figure has gone. The space under the lamppost is empty, almost forlorn. But across the road? That blue car! Was it there before? Could be. I’m not sure. That’s the trouble with these dammed people. They come and they go. They can look so normal. I pull the curtain across. I feel safe in the semidarkness.
I’m in for one of my migraines. I know it. The people do that. I look back to my lounge and its comforting floral pattern. My two tablets and a glass of water are on the polished mahogany table, beside the photograph of poor Thomas in his gilt silver frame. I walk over and look down at the little pills. One red and one green, as always. As always, I take the red first and then the green. I pick them up carefully and swallow them with a sip of water. Mum will be happy now. I kick off my shoes, lie back on the lounge, cross my legs and look down at my stockinged feet. My little toe has found a hole in the nylon mesh and has worked itself free of its fellows. My pillow feels cool and comforting under my head. My mother thinks of everything.
I roll over and shut my eyes. Was the man in the grey raincoat a new recruit? Had I seen him before? Hard to tell. He was wearing a hat and it was only when he looked up I realised he had a small clipped moustache. Ridiculous really! Clarke Gable! Were his ears large? Who knows? I have to observe so much in these fleeting moments, it’s hard to remember everything, and I’m not a trained professional. I’ve been under surveillance for six months now. I’m sure it’s because of the baby but my mother always says no.
I am in a long empty corridor. There is a loud and rhythmical sound. An alarm bell is shrilling and at the end of the corridor is a flashing red light. Why am I running towards the sound of the bell? Towards the flashing light? Why am I not running the other way, I am thinking when I wake up?
The old phone on the side board is ringing but by the time I am truly awake, it has stopped. In the granular silence I stand up, walk over, pick up the heavy old black handset and say hello a couple of times, just in case. My headache is in the background now. My medications do work. They are supposed to help me relax as well but I doubt that. When I stop taking them it’s only the headache that bothers me. I walk unsteadily to the curtain and pull it open just a crack. The light hurts my eyes. It is still raining and the sky has that bruised look suggesting more. The lamppost? The man? I let my eyes adjust and look carefully. No one. The street is deserted. And no blue car. But there is a small unmarked panel van, without side windows, parked in its place.
***
“She’s much better,” my mother says confidently.
The doctor looks down and makes a meticulous note of this gem. I’m sitting beside my mother. The doctor’s desk always intrigues me. Like his head it is smooth and shiny and bare. My medical record, his spectacles, his concentration and his fountain pen gliding effortlessly across my life. Our meetings are always like this. He asks my mother a question about me. She answers. He nods slightly and bends to his labours like an ancient monk gilding a manuscript. I wonder if he practices writing at home. I imagine him sitting precise and stiff at his dining room table. Taking his rimless spectacles out of the black snakeskin case. Polishing them with relish. Shuffling out a single perfect sheet of paper. Laying it squarely in front of him. Snapping open a black onyx box in which his fountain pen lies in state like a pharaoh in a sarcophagus. Taking it out with a magician’s flourish and writing his neat perfect little words.
He’s not a bad man. His pills do help my migraines. But he wants to know so much about me and about my life. What my relationship with my father was like before he left. What I dream about. What I worry about. Whether I think much about the baby. I have learned not to talk about the people anymore. I learned that early. When I first mentioned the people and the surveillance, he abruptly stopped writing and leaned towards me with the same energy as he leans towards his notes. It was only that one time that I looked into his pale blue eyes, peeping and magnified slightly behind his glasses. Once was enough.
Now we are all getting up. The doctor is satisfied and my mother is happy. We all nod politely to one another as if some transatlantic trade agreement has been wrapped up. As usual my mother has taken charge of my medication prescription. No matter, I really do not want those migraines.
***
I was stirring the sugar into my cup of tea. It was about three months after the baby died and I was in the city for the first time without Mum. Why does tea taste so much better at a café than at home? A neatly starched waitress had just delivered a little bone teapot, cup, and saucer with a black and white chequered motif rather matching her own. There is a rigmarole associated with tea that I like. Turning the teapot exactly three times in either direction to mix the tea leaves. Straining the tea and holding the teapot as high as I can and cutting off the amber flow with a quick flourish. Using just the correct amount of milk. Adding two teaspoons of white sugar and stirring for far longer than is necessary. And carefully tapping my teaspoon on the rim of the cup exactly six times to drain. The clear neat sound is the satisfying end of my ritual and it was this that attracted his attention.
I forget exactly what he said. It could have been something like “Now that’s a performance” or “Do you sell tickets”, but whatever, I looked up and saw two brown eyes, an easy smile and two perfect ears. I was under surveillance by this time and usually I would have just mumbled my apologies and hurried away while trying to remember everything possible about the person for my notes. But this was different. My mother liked Thomas from the start.
***
It’s been three glorious months since Thomas brought his fresh music into my life. He seems entirely untroubled that I still live with my mother. He seems ever interested in my life. What I am thinking. What I am doing. He seems endlessly patient and is never short with me. He seems so perfect I can barely believe it. And he is interested in my work. Now that is rare. Even my mother glazes over when I talk about my work. And best, best of all, he doesn’t dismiss my worries about the people. I did mention the people early in the piece. Best to cross the rickety bridge first.
“That’s terrible”, he had said, looking at me with those brown, brown eyes, “why would they want to do that?”
It’s what the doctor asked me, of course, but I didn’t want to talk to Thomas about the baby.
***
I’ve not yet told you about my work. I should. It is important and it explains a lot. I am a librarian. I know, it sounds dull. But you’d be surprised. It was because I’m a librarian that I have been placed under surveillance. I’ve always liked reading. Somehow everything that happens in a book is more real. And, yes, I read the newspaper every day. My mother doesn’t like me saving the newspapers any longer. Not since the scare with the fire but I did go back frequently and check that a story hadn’t changed and that the reporters were being consistent.
It was just before I lost the baby that I stumbled across the conspiracy at work. I blame it for the death of the baby. It was too much stress. My mother’s not sure about the people so I never talk to her about them anymore.
I’m an antiquarian librarian and I love working with the old vellum and parchment books. Sometimes, when I am on my own, I just have to pull off my protective gloves and stroke those smooth illuminated pages. It puts me directly in touch with a thousand years of history. Perhaps more. In my mind’s eye I see the calf skin, the foetal membranes being wrought and prepared to last forever. Then the cowled monk, every bit as earnest as my doctor, sitting over his task in a high back chair. Laboriously writing. Anxious not to smudge. Keenly accurate. A labour of love. And then the illuminator would appear with all his colourful inks to guild and decorate with magic auras to please the eye. I imagine myself a medieval scribe, gently closing the book, carrying it carefully to the controlled environment cabinet and reverently kissing the green binding before storing it away.
I found out about the arsenic quite by accident. It was before the problem with the baby and before they started keeping tabs on me. Mr. Benchley is an easy boss to work for. If I leave him alone, he’ll leave me alone. He’s not an antiquarian and is more interested in coming in on budget and glad-handing the Board of Governors. He’d only just replaced old Farley. Now Mr. Farley was an antiquarian. A real antiquarian. I learned almost everything I know about antiquarian books from him. He had that ancient scholarly way of telling you a fact so gently that you felt you had always known it. He had merely teased it out of its hiding place in your brain. The finest vellum was made from foetal calf skin? Well of course. What else would they use?
***
Later, after the baby died, and when I trusted Thomas enough, I shared my discovery.
“But perhaps that’s normal,” Thomas had said when I told him. “Perhaps it’s routine to test those old bindings for chemicals and the like.”
I remember shaking my head at Thomas, firmly but lovingly, like a mother reprimanding a child. I thought he didn’t understand. I went over the events again. My chance discovery of the report from the toxicology laboratory. Something old Farley must have arranged before they let him go. The report had been folded and used as a book mark in a particularly fine example of a fifteenth century binding. As soon as I saw it I recognised the symbol for arsenic.
“Look, Thomas,” I had said, probably sighing with frustration, “The report was clear. It had the reference number of the book and the arsenic concentration was high. They’d even detailed the copper in the malachite green used to dye the binding. And…..and when I showed it to Benchley he snatched it off me and told me it was nothing. Just routine. Silly old Farley stuff. Just forget it.”
I longed to tell Thomas about the baby. How the arsenic had probably killed it. But I did tell him about the surveillance. That stopped all his arguing and, for a moment, he looked suspiciously at me, and then with those loving brown eyes that could wish me no harm. And Thomas was helpful. I know he was concerned and had long conversations with my mother. He suggested to my mother that I should see a doctor and even found my doctor for me.
“OK,” he had said in his understanding way,”OK. Perhaps it’s unusual to find arsenic in medieval bindings but just because Benchley wanted to keep it quiet doesn’t suggest he put it there, does it? Maybe he’s scared bad publicity will dry up funds for the library.”
That night, when I was alone, I took out my journals and went back to my notes of the events with Benchley, just to be sure. No, I was right. I had written of the strange look in Benchley’s eyes and that he had specifically said, “This is no concern of yours young lady. Just you keep your nose out of things that don’t concern you. You are a good worker. I don’t want to have to let you go.” Poor Thomas. Why couldn’t he understand how suspicious all this was? Perhaps if I had told him about the baby? No! He was having enough trouble with the arsenic, no need to burden him with the baby. But his doubt was troubling.
***
“…and how long have you known this Thomas chap?”
I looked at the top of my doctor’s head. It shone as if he polished it. Not a hair anywhere, just taut skin, stretched like the finest vellum, curing on the frame of his skull. What would I write there, I wondered, what wise Latin text? Then my mother touched my knee and I responded.
“It must be six months by now. Yes. I’m sure. Six months exactly, Doctor.”
“Hmm,” he said, and those worryingly blue eyes flashed up at me over his glasses and then he was back writing again.”
But, I thought later, ……but I hadn’t told him about Thomas. Never! Did my mother talk with him secretly when I wasn’t present? Would she do that? I was puzzling about it when the phone rang. It was Thomas asking me how things were. What I had been doing. How it had gone at the doctor’s. It wasn’t until I had hung up and was sitting on the couch drinking a hot chocolate my mother had brought in, that it struck me.
“What a nice man that Thomas is, dear,” my Mother was saying as she held her cup of tea in one hand and a digestive biscuit in the other, “Such a nice man.”
I nodded. I muttered. I drank a sip of the hot sweet drink. But the thought bright as neon in my mind was how Thomas knew so much about me. I’d not mentioned going to the doctor that day. How did he know? What else did he know? And it had been such good luck that he had turned up just after the baby died and I was under surveillance. Under surveillance!! Another vivid hoarding lit up in my mind. UNDER SURVEILLANCE. Oh what a dunce I was. Of course. Old Farley getting the boot. Mr. Benchley replacing him. And Benchley not an antiquarian. The arsenic! The baby! The surveillance and then……Thomas!
***
My mother never really accepted the death. Even now when she puts my pills out on the waxed mahogany table she picks up Thomas’s photograph and carefully polishes the glass with her apron. Then she looks at me sadly, as if I were some poor sweet soul who understands nothing. Sometimes she’ll tut-tut sympathetically and sometimes trace out his handsome face with her finger. Then she reverently replaces the photograph, her gift to what might have been. Once a year I take her to the cemetery and we leave a little posy of flowers on the grave. My mother always sobs a little and dabs at her eyes with her handkerchief. I like the brightness of the flowers against the drab gray slate. It’s good to know that Thomas is lying here, waiting for me, any time I want to visit him. As my mother and I walked back to the bus that day, I did wonder where Mr. Benchley might be buried, though he was so unpleasant, I’m sure he was probably cremated. When we are in the bus I look back at the blue car driving out of the cemetery gates. I am still under surveillance.
At the End of the Day 