One of my first thoughts, deduced mostly from the formal address and writer’s use of his surname, was that it had been a teacher-pupil relationship, and that the boy was trying to get revenge for the misery he felt his English teacher had inflicted upon him. Perhaps she had forced The Mayor of Casterbridge or Jude the Obscure on him at too early an age? But what schoolboy buys his teacher a volume of poetry? An apple is one thing, but a book quite another. Was the relationship something more? One of those teacher-pupil affairs one reads about with alarming frequency these days? Had Miss Scott sexually abused Barnes?
Or was Barnes a university student? I remembered my own teaching days, not so far behind me, and I quickly realized that most of those who had passed through my doors had been more than capable of pulling such a prank, if prank it was, though I had never come across a university student who had referred to his professor as “Miss.” Was I seriously misjudging the whole business, reading more into it than there was?
I thought I possibly was, so I sipped some more ale, put the book aside and delved deeper into the contents of the rest of the bag. Soon I was on my second pint of Timothy Taylor and enjoying Victoria Glendenning’s introduction to her inscription-free biography of Anthony Trollope, the mysterious Barnes and Miss Scott, if not quite forgotten, then at least relegated to a dim antechamber at the back of my mind.
I awoke the following morning from a troubled sleep, the Browning still weighing heavy on my mind. Though I could remember only scraps, I suspected the dreams that had woken me so often during the night were connected with the book’s mysterious inscription.
As the days went by, Miss Scott and Barnes crept their way back to the forefront of my thoughts. I found myself, in idle moments, attempting to construct mental pictures of what they looked and sounded like. Miss Scott I saw not as a Miss Jean Brodie type, but more as a Hitchcock blonde with her hair piled high. Tippi Hedren in The Birds or Kim Novak in Vertigo, without the Hollywood glamour. In my imagination, Miss Scott has the deportment of someone who attended a Swiss finishing school and spent many hours walking the corridors with a volume of Proust balanced on her head. Her voice is low, a husky contralto, and her accent educated, with the broad Yorkshire vowels well hidden behind hours of enunciation lessons. She is private, secretive, even, with a rare but heart-melting smile, and her pale, flawless skin blushes often. Her eyes are dark blue and hard to read. She gains easy control of the classes she teaches, but she does so through the calm strength of her personality and through her elegance and poise, rather than by means of authority and status. It is not that the students are afraid of her; they just don’t want to upset or disappoint her. She favors cream tailored jacket and skirt outfits over blue silk blouses, and all her skirts end modestly below her knees, offering just a tantalizing glimpse of her shapely legs.
As for Barnes, he doesn’t come through quite so clearly. There’s a mischievous look about him, as if he has just got away with something, a naughty boy constantly on the verge of a smirk. His hair is dark, parted on the left, though one restless comma is always slipping over his right eye. He wears a nondescript school uniform, navy blazer, grey trousers, striped tie, black shoes, nicely shined. He’s not outwardly scruffy, but he is a boy, after all, perhaps seventeen or eighteen, a sixth former, at any rate, and his pockets are full of a jumble of bits of string, rubber bands, a penknife, loose coins, maybe even a French letter or two, just in case, chewing gum, a packet of cough drops, a crumpled handkerchief and a couple of Bic ballpoints. He keeps a small writing pad in his inside pocket to jot down passing thoughts, mostly unpleasant ones, like the inscription on the book.
That was what I came up with when I let my early-morning imagination run away with me. I wondered whether I would ever get to find out how close my pictures were to the truth because, by then, whether I knew it fully or not, I was determined to find out who Barnes and Miss Scott were and what their relationship was.
In order to begin, I had to return to the bookshop and see if I could find out anything from its owner. Perhaps he would know who they were. What I would do with the information if I got it, I had no idea, but I couldn’t simply leave things as they were. I had to know more. It was as if I had been given a teaser, a trailer, the opening chapter of an author’s next book tacked on after the end of the one I had just read, and I had to see the film, had to read the next book.
As I drove back to Beverley several days later, I tried to work out what I would say to the shop owner. I could hardly show him the inscription; he would probably think I was insane. Of course, I realized it was more than likely that he would have no idea at all who had sold the book to him. I should imagine people who work in second-hand bookshops get quite a lot of customers dropping in with boxes or shopping bags full of old books. But there was a slim chance, and I didn’t want to ruin it from the outset by giving the impression that I was some sort of madman or stalker. No, I had to be careful.
The best approach, I thought, would be to say that I had found something in the book that I wanted to return to its owner. The problem with that was that it gave rise to a lot more difficult questions. What had I found? If it was of value, then why hadn’t the owner already returned to ask about it? If it was a letter or some such thing, wouldn’t it have the owner’s address on it? I could work out answers to most of these questions, but a great deal depended on how long the book had been on the shelf.
Obviously, whatever had been mislaid couldn’t be time sensitive and could have been lost elsewhere. By now it might well have been written off as gone forever. But it should be something that the owner would welcome back again, even if she had been able to live without it for some time. To my mind that left only one thing: money.
Perhaps Miss Scott had used a ten pound note as a bookmark and had forgotten about it? That sounded unlikely to me, but I supposed it could have happened. Would the shop owner be suspicious? How many people would drive all the way back to return a ten pound note? Leaving aside the matter of honesty, it would cost me more than that in petrol to return it. But the bookseller needn’t know how far I had come. I decided, in the end, that it had to be money. But twenty pounds would make my story more believable than ten. Though unusual, it could be convincing. I had done a similar thing once, myself, slipping a five pound note, a repaid loan, between the pages of a university library book I was carrying at the time. Later, I had returned the book before remembering to remove the note. I was fortunate in having an understanding librarian on that occasion, so I got my money back.
When I had parked my car, I headed first for W.H. Smith’s, on the High Street. There I bought the smallest package of envelopes I could find and, back in my car, slipped a twenty pound note into one of them and wrote “window cleaner” on the front, hoping that would convince the bookseller. I know that twenty pounds seems a lot for a window cleaner, but window cleaners are about the only people one pays in cash these days. Perhaps Miss Scott lives in a house with a lot of windows? Putting my concerns aside, I sealed the flap, let it dry, then gently tore it open, as I imagined anyone would do in the real situation of finding such an envelope in a second-hand book.
I had great trouble finding the bookshop again in the labyrinthine alleys, and by mistake first entered the wrong one, the place where I had bought the Trollope biography. I soon realized my error when I saw the man behind the messy front desk, but couldn’t stop myself glancing through the new arrivals. After a moment’s hesitation, I also couldn’t stop myself buying Florence Hardy’s life of her husband, Thomas Hardy, which all the experts say he wrote himself. I had a list of books I was “looking for,” though not in the sense of actively pursuing them through online sellers or eBay and so on, and this Life was on it. Another one I could cross off.