Tell me the truth. The words from the letter were trapped in my head, trapped, it seemed, beh the sloping ceiling of my attic flat, like a bird that has got in down the ey. It was natural that the boy』s plea should have affected me; I who had never been told the truth, but left to discover it alone and i. Tell me the truth. Quite. But I resolved to put the words and the letter out of my head. It was nearly time. I moved swiftly. Ihroom I soaped my fad brushed my teeth. By three mio eight I was in my nightdress and slippers, waiting for the kettle to boil. Quickly, quickly. A mio eight. My hot-water bottle was ready, and I filled a glass with water from the tap. Time was of the essence. For at eight o』clock the world came to an end. It was reading time.
The hours betwee in the evening and one or two in the m have always been my magic hours. Against the blue dlewick bedspread the white pages of my open book, illuminated by a circle of lamplight, were the gateway to another world. But that night the magic failed. The threads of plot that had bee in suspense ht had somehow gone flaccid during the day, and I found that I could not care about how they would eventually weave together. I made an effort to secure myself to a strand of the plot, but as soon as I had ma, a voiterveell me the truth—that unpicked the knot a it flopping loose again.
My hand hovered instead over the old favorites: The Woman in White, Wutheris, Jane Eyre…
But it was no good. Tell me the truth…
Reading had never let me down before. It had always been the one sure thing. Turning out the light, I rested my head on the pillow and tried to sleep.
Echoes of a voice. Fragments of a story. In the dark I heard them louder. Tell me the truth…
At two in the m I got out of bed, pulled on some socks, unlocked the flat door and, ed in my dressing gown, crept down the narrow staircase and into the shop.
At the back there is a tiny room, not much bigger than a cupboard, that we use when we o pack a book for the post. It tains a table and, on a shelf, sheets of broer, scissors and a ball of string. As well as these items there is also a plain wooden et that holds a dozen or so books.
The tents of the et rarely ge. If you were to look into it today you would see what I saw that night: a book without a cover resting on its side, ao it an ugly tooled leather volume. A pair of books in Latin standing upright. An old Bible. Three volumes of botany, two of history and a sity book of astronomy. A book in Japanese, another in Polish and some poems in Old English. Why do we keep these books apart? Why are they not kept with their natural panions on our ly labeled shelves? The et is where we keep the esoteric, the valuable, the rare. These volumes are worth as much as the tents of the entire rest of the shop, more even.
The book that I was after—a small hardback, about four inches by six, only fifty or so years old—was out of plaext to all these antiquities. It had appeared a couple of months ago, placed there I imagined by Father』s ience, and one of these days I meant to ask him about it and shelve it somewhere. But just in case, I put on the white gloves. We keep them in the et to wear when we hahe books because, by a curious paradox, just as the books e to life when we read them, so the oils from our fiips destroy them as we turn the pages. Anyway, with its paper cover intad its ers unbluhe book was in fine dition, one of a popular ser