At a party she met a little androgynous middle-aged woman who owned a secondhand bookshop in a small country town. Both men and women seemed to fall in love with Judy in those days: but I should have known, she mused, that something was wrong, because I didn’t feel love for any of them.
Helen lived in peace, with two neutered cats, and whatever girl she happened to pick up for a few months. ‘Whether I’m a biological dead-end,’ she said on a winter’s evening after the shop was closed, and they sat by the upstairs fire toasting bread against the bars, ‘is neither here nor there.’ She relished her isolation and the power she felt from it, which made her interesting to any young girl.
Judy was fascinated by the way she kept busy compiling catalogues or writing letters, and she never saw her either bored or unhappy with the two rooms of books which made up the shop. Helen knew what to buy, and collectors would drive from London. The bell rattled, and a face showed itself. Sometimes a customer wouldn’t appear for two hours after the door was unbolted. At other times a browser would already be waiting on the pavement.
A man stayed for an hour, as if afraid to go back into the rain, looking at every book intently. She observed his medium height, pinkish face, well-lit grey eyes, and straight reddish hair cut fairly short. His open duffel-coat had special pockets, for the thieves’ mirror installed on the ceiling showed at least six books go in as he moved around the shelves, and it still didn’t look laden.
Helen had gone to a sale. Judy was supposed to call the police, and her hand moved to the telephone. Two shoplifters had been prosecuted before her time. He approached the desk. ‘I’ll have this.’
You might as welclass="underline" you’ve had so much else. A copy of Middlemarch. He had taste – but had made a feast. ‘Four shillings.’
‘Lots of nice books here,’ he said, smiling.
His look intensified, for he guessed by her eyes that she had seen him loading his pockets, and he wanted to solve the mystery as to how she knew, when no one had ever rumbled him before. Yet he was prepared to sacrifice the pleasure of an explanation provided she did not try to stop him leaving the shop. She read the condition in his gaze, and when he became convinced that she had, he diminished its intensity but did not smile as pleasantly as before.
Civilization must have taken a big leap forward when the language of the eyes had finally been enriched by words. ‘There’ll be less now that you’ve been in here.’
‘Only one, I’m afraid.’ He handed his coins as if there weren’t too many more where they came from. ‘I’ll try to do better next time.’
‘We do sell quite a lot of books.’ He seemed to have doubted that many people actually bothered to pay in such an out-of-the-way place. ‘But not all that many to students, I admit.’
He fastened his coat-toggles. ‘Our grants aren’t much to write home about these days, unless to ask the old folks to top ’em up a bit.’
She nodded at his girth, which didn’t match his thinnish face. ‘You seem to feed quite well on it.’
‘We do our best.’ His head was close. He decided to turn prosaic, and get out as soon as possible. ‘We eat communally, fifteen to a pot, a yoghourt pot!’
The bell tinkled as he left. She had been bullied. She hadn’t been living with another woman long enough to know how to put men properly in their place. She was angry, and she should know, anyway. After dialling one digit, she replaced the receiver, a failure to act which, she was to recollect, fucked up her life.
She had allowed him to charm her into not reporting his theft, and in being disloyal to Helen. She was supposed to write the title and amount of every volume sold, even if out of the sixpenny box. Helen knew, or seemed to know, every book in the place, and when she missed them Judy wouldn’t be able to tell her how they had gone. Maybe Helen would think she had pocketed the money. She wouldn’t be trusted any more.
She put a card in the window: ‘Back in Five Minutes’, and went to the High Street to buy meat for their supper. Looking through the window of Silver’s Grill she saw the book thief reading his morning paper.
‘Remember me?’
His eyes were deadened by print.
‘I work in a shop.’ She stood by his side.
He put six spoonsful of sugar in his coffee, stirred, drank, and shuddered. ‘Woolworths?’
‘No. Nor Marks and Sparks, either.’
‘Did I get you pregnant?’
She took off her coat. ‘You might at least buy me a cup of something, after I allowed you to steal those six books.’
‘Seven.’
‘My reactions were slow, otherwise you’d have been in the copshop by now.’ His duffel-coat hung over the next seat, and the loot was, she supposed, in the cloth bag by his feet. ‘Was that the closest you’ve been to getting caught?’
His hand went up for the waitress. ‘I’ve had closer shaves. Two coffees, please. I’m eating into my profits, you realize.’
‘I could still call the police.’
He looked at her. ‘You could, but why?’
‘Aren’t you ashamed of stealing?’ She had never come face to face with a thief before.
‘You’ve got your definitions wrong. But then, uneducated people like you always do.’
He must have done his National Service already, and she also supposed he came from a very middlebrow home – if that – to accuse her of being uneducated. And if he really was educated – if that was the word (though she had every reason to doubt that he was) – such a slur would not have been thrown at her. If he really thought so, he would have kept the opinion to himself.
‘You’ve got your definitions wrong,’ he repeated. ‘I’ve never stolen. All goods are produced at the expense of the working class, and wealth is property, and property is theft, so theft is the only way of getting property back into the hands of the working classes where it belongs. A mere redistribution of wealth. So don’t accuse me of stealing, you right little tight little – actually rather big – middle-class tart. You’ve blackmailed me into buying you a coffee, and if you insist on calling the capitalist property-guarding class-conscious gestapo-coppers I’ll have a long and very circumstantial tale to tell about how you connived in my removing those books from the shop – when they drag me into one of their illegal show-trial courts.’
He was sweating. She had frightened him, and was satisfied – for the moment. ‘But what is stealing,’ she asked, ‘if that isn’t? If you did it in a socialist-workers’ state you’d be in the equivalent of Siberia for twenty-five years.’
‘Stealing is only from the working classes, and I’d never steal from them because if I did and they caught me they’d kick me to death – ugh!’
He sounded so simple that she became more interested in him, and said: ‘But I work. And the woman I work for works, so we’re working class, aren’t we?’
At his laughter, people sitting around hoped they had ended their lovers’ quarrel. ‘Nobody works who puts goods on display. They sell, and make profits. They tempt people. They ask for trouble.’