It took me a week or so to type the catalogue into my computer. Each book was listed by author, title, publisher, place of publication and date, and then there was a column for notes on inscriptions, bookplates, illustrations and other distinguishing marks.
As far as distinguishing marks are concerned, I was appalled by the state of Claude’s books. The habit of scribbling in books with crayons acquired as a child had clearly never been unlearnt. Practically every one was marked by cigarette burns and food stains, pencil scribbles, smears of ink and ash, gouges and tears. An astonishing range of bits and pieces were trapped between the pages, scraps of newspaper and pictures torn from magazines, moth wings, mandibles, antennae and other insect remains, shreds of dottle and leaves of grass. Some of the papers were stuck with grains of rice and unidentifiable lumps of food. One book contained an entire cigarette pressed flat like a flower. Two pages of another were glued together by a fruit pastille. A chicken bone fell out of Madame Chrysanthème. The corners of some pages were folded over and worn down, while others were pierced by hundreds of tiny holes. The books had not only been used, they had been used up, spent, eaten off, walked over, doused, mortified. After ten minutes of leafing through them, I had to wash my hands.
There were two hundred and fifteen books. While most were singletons and some were oddities, a few favoured categories were readily apparent. There were many books on murders and trials — Famous Trials by Harry and James Hodge, More Murders of the Black Museum by Gordon Honeycombe, Five Famous Trials by Maurice Moiseiwitsch; and many more on the mysterious and the occult, including Frank Edwards’s Strange World — ‘Sensational stories of fantastic events… astounding and absolutely true!’ — and the Reader’s Digest’s Mysteries of the Unexplained. There were outdated works of German scholarship dating back as far as the nineteenth century — Wilhelm Braune’s Althochdeutsches Lesebuch, Karl Weinhold’s Mittelhochdeutsches Lesebuch and Sigmund Feist’s Einführung in das Gotische.
Among a dozen volumes by Angela Brazil, the two that had been read until their spines cracked were A Harum-Scarum Schoolgirl and The Jolliest Term on Record.
There was a single book by Mrs George de Horne Vaizey. According to the ornate green plate on the flyleaf of Pixie O’Shaughnessy it had been a Prize from the Sons of England Patriotic & Benevolent Society Imperial Lodge № 558 Awarded to Cecily Tomlinson for the Best Girl at the Brooklyn School, Dec. 1923. On the opposite page, in the handwriting I had by now discovered was Claude’s, stood the phrase: ‘galumptious, page 62, line 16’. I typed it into the Notes column in my catalogue.
There was also a single book by Lilian Turner. The Girl from the Back-blocks had a Methodist Sunday School bookplate to say that it had been presented to Sylvia Shepperd, Heilbron SS, 27 Nov. 1938. Lilian Turner — the pen name of Mrs F. Lindsay Thompson — was also the author of Betty the Scribe, Peggy the Pilot and Three New Chum Girls. These words at the end of Chapter VIII had been underlined in red pen: ‘Joan Darcy, aged fourteen, of Killali Homestead, Killali, Moonagudgerry, away beyond Berribullam, had arrived at Greythorpe School, Miss Sharman’s high-class college for young ladies.’ I typed these facts into my catalogue too.
But I still did not know what to make of them.
In the inventory of his books, I could trace the outlines of a character, the son of a manufacturers’ representative who had become a teacher. I saw this shadowy figure, somewhere between the boy with the curls on his rocking horse and the bald man with the bitter mouth in his deckchair, and sensed his interests, one could say obsessions. He liked women in nylons with seams and little girls with Shirley Temple ringlets and flounced skirts. He was fascinated by automata: he had written several scholarly papers on the symbolism of the mechanical creature in literature. He had an interest in sudden appearances and inexplicable disappearances, in Kaspar Hauser and the Mary Celeste, paranormal powers and ghosts. If this man called Claude, a ghost himself, could be given substance, if some flesh could be put on his bones, he might carry the story that still lay in the trunks, scattered among faded photographs, mangled typescripts and postcards in French and German.
How much could he be made to bear though? Among the books that were in a category of their own, the one that bothered me most was Juden sehen Dich an by Johann von Leers, an anti-Semitic diatribe by one of Hitler’s most poisonous propagandists. Of course, the possession of such an odious book did not necessarily mean that Claude — or Berti — had been a Nazi or an anti-Semite, but the sight of it filled me with disquiet.
I created a folder called Dr T (still wishing to preserve a formal distance between myself and Claude, my subject, if that’s what he was) and stored my list in it. Digital records are a marvellous advance on the paper ones in this respect: they gather no dust and they occupy so little space.
The following winter, a pipe burst in the roof of the guest suite and ruined the ceiling and walls. In order to repair and repaint the place, the trunks had to be moved. Fortunately, none of the contents had been damaged. Extracting the valuables a couple of years earlier had created space in all four trunks and this seemed like the right time to repack them more sensibly to lighten my load. I had shuffled through the papers too often still to have qualms about disturbing their arrangement. Finally relinquishing whatever correspondences the physical ordering of the papers may have revealed, I repacked everything and left one of the metal trunks empty. Rusted though it was, the painter was very pleased to have it. When the job was done, he filled it with tins and brushes and took it away on the back of his bakkie.
Then I forgot about the trunks. Margery and I had drifted apart and I no longer expected her to call to find out if I had made up my mind about Claude and Berti. The trunks simply sat there in the guest suite; they had become part of the furniture.
In May of 2008, a thief broke into the guest suite and made off with some linen, a two-plate stove and a handful of ornaments. He ransacked the trunks, throwing books, letters and photographs out on the floor and the bed, but found nothing. This intrusive stranger brought the trunks back into focus for me. I was glad now that I’d thought to move the valuables into the house. Worthless as many of these objects were, a frustrated housebreaker may well have walked off with them. But such a thief was always unlikely to steal papers. As far as I could see, not a single item was missing. But how on earth would I know? One thing was certain: whatever residual logic the ordering of the papers may have retained was now inalterably undone.
I repacked the papers and had the shattered door repaired. I thought about putting in a security gate or an alarm, but the truth is there was not much left to steal out there. My house guests had stopped coming too. The friends who used to call on me felt unsafe in my neighbourhood; they knew people in the northern suburbs who offered them safer, more comfortable lodgings.
After the burglary, I went out to the guest suite more often to check that everything was in order. A few months later, when I opened the door, I noticed a single cufflink lying on the tiles, a silver disk with an ivory cameo inset, perhaps depicting a Roman god. It must have been dropped by the thief, I thought, as he made off with the other one in the pair. But where had he found them? I’d never seen them before. I’d meant to move everything of value from the trunks, but perhaps I’d missed something, some small cache of treasures, a cough-drop tin full of coins, a cigar box holding an old timepiece or an antique razor. More importantly, why had this object, this shiny clue lying in the middle of the floor, remained invisible until now? It seemed impossible that I could have overlooked it. Who or what had carried it out into the open? I checked the windows, but there was no sign of forced entry, as the detectives say. I peered through the keyhole, as if that would tell me something.