‘Just as well for us that it does,’ I said, wedging my fingers between two books to ease out a lurking pamphlet. ‘It’s the ones that end up on the tip that I – hey, look at this!’
I didn’t care who overheard. This was almost certainly unique, a living fossiclass="underline" a wartime Russia Today Society pamphlet called Soviet Millionaires. It hadn’t stayed in circulation long, not after the SPGB had seized on it as irrefutable proof that behind the socialist facade the USSR concealed a class of wealthy property-owners.
‘I’ve heard about it from my father,’ I told Reid. ‘But even he’d never had a copy. I’ll send it to him.’
‘Told you!’ Reid grinned down at me from a step-ladder. ‘You’re such an unselfish bastard! That’s what the old bloke saw in you! You’re a hereditary socialist!’
‘Ideology is hereditary?’ I scoffed. ‘And what does that make you?’
‘A grasping kulak, I guess,’ he said happily. ‘Ah, now what about this?’ He opened a book and studied the fly-leaf. ‘Stirner, The Ego and His Own, property of the Glasgow Anarchist Workers’ Circle, 1943. Five pounds.’
I stared up at him, open-mouthed. I didn’t realise I was reaching for it until he pulled it away. ‘Uh-uh. Finders keepers.’
‘It’s of no interest to you,’ I said.
‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Reid stepped down the ladder, holding the book like a black Grail in front of my eyes. ‘Young Hegelians, German Ideology and all that. Marxist scholarship.’
‘You’re having me on!’
‘Yes, I am,’ Reid said. ‘But I do have a use for it. I’m going to buy it, and as soon as we get outside I’m going to sell it to you for a tenner.’
No lunches for a fortnight, and back to roll-ups. I could manage that.
‘It’s a deal!’ I almost shouted.
Reid stepped back and scrutinised me.
‘Just testing,’ he said. He shoved the book into my hands. ‘You passed.’
In the grey leaded light of the Union smoking-room, the air thick with the unappetising smell of over-percolated coffee-grounds, we sat in worn leather armchairs and flipped through our acquisitions. I smiled at the twisted dialectics of the wartime apologist, frowned over the laboured wit of the great amoralist. Fascism, communism and anarchism traced their ancestry back to the same Piltdown, the Berlin bars of the 1840s. Give me turn-of-the-century Vienna any day, I thought, its Ringstrasse a particle-accelerator of ideas.
We both sat back at the same moment. Reid toyed with the bamboo holder of the previous day’s Guardian. The MPLA had taken Huambo, not for the last time.
‘How’s Annette?’ I asked with guarded casualness.
‘Fine, as far as I know,’ Reid said. He turned over a page.
‘Not seen her for a bit?’
Reid laid down the paper and leaned forward, looking at me intently. ‘We’ve kind of…I don’t know…fallen out, drifted apart.’
‘That’s a shame,’ I said. ‘How did that happen?’
Reid spread his hands. ‘She’s got a real sharp mind, but she’s the most unpolitical person I’ve ever met. She never reads newspapers. It’s very hard to find things to talk about.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘Sounds stupid, I know, but there it is.’
I nodded sympathetically: yes, women are hard to figure out. I was trying to remember the location of the Zoology Department.
I walked up University Avenue, the broad Victorian edifice – Gilmoreghast, as one rag-mag wit had called it – on my left, the Wellsian ’thirties Reading Room on my right. (I hadn’t used it since discovering that everything about it was perfect, except its acoustics, which were those of a whispering-gallery.)
At the top of the hill the pedestrian crossing was at red. I waited for the little green man, and wondered if I shouldn’t turn around right there, and wait until seeing Annette again could be passed off as a casual encounter…
No, I told myself firmly. If you’re interested, you’ll be there. I crossed and continued on down to the junction at the bottom, then left along an internal roadway between massive grey sandstone buildings set among patches of grass with flowerbeds and tall trees. The Zoology Department was another of those ancient buildings, solid as a church and founded on a rock of greater age. Inside, polished wood, tiling, the smell of small-animal droppings. From behind a glass partition a receptionist peered at me incuriously. I decided to be bold and asked him where Annette was working. He glanced at a clock and a timetable and told me.
The laboratory at first appeared to be empty. Then I saw Annette, her back to me, laying down sheets of paper along a bench at the far end. I pushed open the double doors and walked up. She turned at my footsteps, saying:
‘Excuse me, the practical isn’t – Oh, hello Jon.’
Her hair was tied back, her figure hidden in a white lab-coat. Still no less desirable.
‘Hi,’ I said. Her green eyes examined me quizzically.
‘Let me guess,’ she said. ‘You suddenly developed an interest in invertebrate anatomy, right?’
She gestured at the bench. I looked down at a round glass dish, half-filled with water, in which a few small sea-urchins lay – or rather, moved, as I saw when I looked closer. Laid out along the benches were sheaves of notes, diagramming the echinoderm’s organs, the nomenclature beautiful and strange: ampulla, pedicellaria, tube-feet, madreporite, radial canal, ring canal, stone canal…
‘Not exactly.’ I fidgeted with sturdy tweezers, laid out like cutlery to break the delicate harmless creatures apart.
‘So what brings you here?’
‘Uh…’ I hesitated. ‘I just wondered if you’d fancy going out for a drink or something.’
Her face reddened slightly.
‘Does this have anything to do with Dave?’
‘No,’ I said, wondering what she was getting at. ‘Only that he told me he wasn’t going out with you any more.’
‘Oh! And when did he tell you that?’
‘About twenty minutes ago,’ I admitted.
She laughed. ‘What took you so long?’
‘I thought jumping up the minute he told me might be a bit insensitive.’
It was as if the implications of my statement were too direct, too blatant. She looked away and glanced back with a half-smile.
‘It’s very nice of you to think of me,’ she said. ‘Lonely and forlorn as I am. I’m not sure I’m ready for such kindness.’
If she could tease, I could tease right back. ‘I don’t expect you to stay that way long.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘no, I haven’t been washing my hair every night!’
‘Losing yourself in the giddy social whirl?’
‘Yep.’
‘So,’ I persisted. ‘Perhaps you can find room in your hectic life for a quiet drink?’
‘Or something.’
‘Or something.’
She smiled, this time dropping her ironic look.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘How about nine o’clock tonight in the Western Bar?’
‘I’ll see you there,’ I said.
The doors banged open and a commotion of students came in.
‘You better go,’ she said. ‘See ya.’
At the door I looked back, and saw her looking up. She smiled and turned away.
I jogged off down the corridor. ‘Yes!’ I told the world, with a jump and an air-punch that startled a few stragglers and narrowly missed an overhead fluorescent light.
The Western was a quiet pub, tarted up with some attempt at appropriate (i.e., cowpoke) decoration. I arrived about ten minutes early and was standing at the bar, half a pint and one smoke down, when Annette walked in just as the TV heralded the nine o’clock news. The barman reached up and flipped channels. (There were three, all controlled by the government).