“That’s a bit rough,” he said, returning with a paperback.
“Okay, I won’t ban you. But I ask one final time — aliens?”
“No aliens,” he promised, adding, “There may be an orc.”
“Is there or is there not an orc?”
“There’s an orc.”
Fogg’s most salient quality as an employee was his ability to be present while she fetched a sandwich. Beyond this, he contributed little that could be quantified. But she would not have wanted to continue without him. World’s End earned nothing, meaning she paid him from her personal savings, a small and diminishing sum. Within a couple of years, she’d be insolvent. Yet she observed her bank balance nearly with impatience for bankruptcy. This was the most fixed abode she’d known, and she couldn’t shake an urge to lose it.
A person like Fogg was so different from her, formed in considerable part by his location. He was inextricably from here, this village, a place findable on Google Earth (how he loved spinning the digital globe from Paris to Caergenog, zooming down to the roof of the shop). His continued residence in the village, he said, was because staying here was “la pièce de least résistance.” That was ungenerous. He remained partly out of decency, because his family had a devastating summer when he was fifteen, his elder brother paralyzed from the waist down in a car accident, his father’s affair uncovered through credit-card charges at a hotel, his mother suffering a breakdown. The father left, and the family had not recovered, Fogg holding them together since. Four years ago, he’d nearly married. But his girlfriend went to do theater in London and met a new man there. They’d stayed friends, till she sent photos of her newborn. “When you open the baby-photo email,” Fogg said, “it’s like your friends waving goodbye.” He and his ex exchanged messages once in a while, she inviting him to visit, he responding, “Would love to — when?” and she taking months to reply. He didn’t even know what she looked like anymore: on her Facebook profile was a picture of the baby.
Stuck in Caergenog, he had developed an imaginary parallel life, one in which he’d done an undergraduate degree in French literature at Durham University, a master’s at Cambridge, two years’ research in Paris, living in a garret on the Left Bank, or, as he called it, “the West Bank.” Central to his persona was the conviction that Caergenog was wrong for him, that he and his friends were a class above their context, that any setbacks or rejections were due to the backwardness of this place. One day in a month, he arrived at work in a black mood. Otherwise, he was touchingly buoyant.
“Do you feel more English or more Welsh?” she asked him.
“French,” he answered. “How about you? Do you feel French?”
“Why would I? I’m not remotely French.”
“You feel English, then?”
“I’m not English.”
“How about Welsh?”
“I’m not Welsh. You know that, Fogg.”
“We’re like a lost tribe, people like us,” he mused. “No traditions, no birthright, to be brutally honest. All of us have an acorn of sadness,” he continued, pressing the magnifying glass to his eye. “You notice our tristesse only in passing, like a door to a small room in a house where outsiders may not enter.”
“You’re very poetic today, Fogg.”
“Into which you get but a passing view,” he went on, mistaking her irony for encouragement. “An acorn of sadness,” he said, proud of the phrase, which he muttered on his way to organize Pirates, Smugglers & Mutiny.
Around noon, their first visitor arrived, a regular who couldn’t be termed a customer, for she used World’s End Books only as a showroom for online purchases. This was increasingly common, the practitioners identifiable by their note-taking on prices and ISBNs, and their failure to ever buy anything. Some openly consulted Web prices on smartphones and, hand on the doorknob, lamented how few good bookshops remained. Tooly wasn’t indignant: you couldn’t stop a tidal wave by wagging your finger at it. She considered bookselling to be a terminal vocation. More discouraging to her was that the heavyweights on these shelves held such puny sway. No matter their ideas and worth, they lived as did the elderly — in a world with little patience to hear them out.
If few people came to buy books, many came to sell. Everyone was clearing their shelves these days. The question was no longer what she could pay (a pittance) but whether she had space. Her areas of personal interest included vintage cookbooks, especially outmoded advice for the young lass, such as Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861) or Saucepans & the Single Girl (1965) by Jinx Morgan and Judy Perry. She had also built up the Zoology section, adding tragic histories of the bison, rare volumes on rare birds, oversized editions of nature photography. As with all coffee-table books, she bought first, then wondered where to put them.
Mr. Thomas made the first purchase of the day. A man in his late fifties possessed of multitudes of Welsh-speaking grandchildren, he visited World’s End once a month. Back when he attended school, education was viewed as an irksome delay before farm employment — an attitude that produced two varieties of citizen: those who scorned book learning and those who revered it. Huw Thomas — scar on the tip of his nose, head like an upright loaf, always in homespun cardigans — was among the reverential autodidacts. But he’d sooner not talk about it, and deflected her conversational gambits, standing at the servery counter with a volume in each hand, like a child before the librarian’s desk. (She never found a pattern in his selections. Today, it was a history of the Boer War and Alice in Wonderland.)
“Get all you wanted, Mr. Thomas?”
“No, thank you.”
“Can I help you find something else?”
“No, thank you.”
“See you again, Mr. Thomas.”
“Very well, then. Best be off.”
The bell on the door tinkled after him, a false calm before a dozen schoolkids swarmed in. Hardly a feral pack of readers, these were junior shoplifters testing their skills, glancing around furtively as if they’d invented the art. Impressive how much a schoolbag swallowed. Sometimes she let them get away with it, unless a previous haul had been discovered in the rubbish bins on Roberts Road, in which case she stopped the culprits on their next foray, speaking discreetly at the door and sending them away. The rude ones — there were a few — she crushed with choice words. One brazen boy had kicked the door when he left, giving her the finger as he ran backward until, most pleasingly, he fell flat into a puddle.
She checked the time — had a lesson this evening. “Mind if I …?”
“Say no more, say no more,” Fogg responded. “Off you go.”
Since her arrival in Caergenog, she had engaged in an adult-education frenzy, taking classes in sewing, home repairs (unexpectedly gripping), music. For a spell, she’d driven every Tuesday night to Cardiff for an art course, where she did life drawing in charcoal, acrylic, and oil. Each medium confirmed her lack of talent: every arm came out longer than its leg; ears were tea saucers; fruit resembled basketballs. Lousy though she was, Tooly adored it, and even improved in a plodding way.
“Will we be doing a class on noses?” she’d asked the instructor, an irritably failed sculptor.
“What?”
“Can you help me with drawing noses?”
“What?”
When the course ended, she sorted through her work and couldn’t justify conserving a single piece. Nevertheless, she drove home with a still life, called “Apples — I Think That’s What They Were,” and nailed it up in her attic quarters. The sight of that canvas, its comical terribleness, still made her happy.