Kevern thought he ought to stick up for his profession. ‘Opportunities for doing evil have always been limited in Bethesda,’ he said.
She snorted. ‘Don’t you believe it. There was a time when this institution was happy to consort with the Devil.’
‘I didn’t think we went back to the Middle Ages.’
‘Shows how wrong you can be. Look there. .’
She pointed to a blown-up photograph that hung above the Local Topography shelves, alongside a couple of wishy-washy studies of St Mordechai’s Mount at low tide by Professor Edward Everett Phineas Zermansky, FRSA. It was a famous, often-reproduced photograph showing about twenty quaintly old-fashioned ice-cream vans lined up, like elephants at a circus, looking at St Mordechai’s Mount themselves. Kevern had glanced at it several times without ever knowing what he was looking at. The photograph was renowned for the cute symmetry of its composition, he guessed, and for the idea of long-ago seaside idylls it evoked.
He wondered what Rozenwyn wanted him to see.
‘That was taken before they were decommissioned,’ she said. ‘A month later those vans were going round the country painted with the slogan “Leave Now or Face Arrest”. Bethesda Academy did the artwork.’
‘Ice-cream vans?’
‘Yes.’
‘Telling people to leave?’
‘Yes.’
‘Which people?’
‘Come on, Kevern. You know which people.’
He shook his head, as though it were a kaleidoscope, to rearrange the patterns.
‘But why ice-cream vans, for Christ’s sake?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine. Not to frighten the children? Because they had macabre imaginations?’
‘They weren’t, I assume, selling ice cream?’
‘You assume right. But here’s the strangest thing. .’
He waited.
‘. . they kept the chimes.’
‘Beethoven’s Fifth? “Für Elise?” “Greensleeves”?’
‘Exactly. And some forgotten favourites of the period. “Whistle While You Work”. . “You Are My Sunshine”.’
Something twitched, like curtains opening furtively, at the furthest corners of Kevern’s mind. He stared at her in perplexity. ‘When was this?’
‘Well it wasn’t the Middle Ages, Kevern.’
‘No, but when?’ He tapped his forehead.
‘You’re too young,’ she said, understanding his meaning.
‘You Are My Sunshine’. . He began to hum it for her. If he was too young, how come he knew it? Then he remembered the blind soul singer and his father’s final bitter laughter, directed he hadn’t known where. If I don’t sit down, he thought, I will topple over.
‘Are you all right?’ Rozenwyn asked.
He nodded. ‘And you know this for sure?’ he asked stupidly, gripping the table behind him, so that his hands were close to hers.
She patted the wrist nearer to her. ‘I’m a librarian,’ she said. ‘A librarian knows where to look.’
But he wanted her to be exaggerating, at least. ‘Still and all,’ he said, ‘painting a few vans is not exactly a criminal act, is it? And it was just a warning. I can imagine the Everetts of the day believing they were acting humanely.’
‘I don’t doubt it. We always think what we’re doing is humane, even when we’re secretly relishing the evil of it. But all the warning did was soften the populace up for what came next. As did the defamations and the boycotts in which this institution also played a noble part. Let’s not be modest. We did more than paint the vans. We provided them with the fuel. There is this malignancy out there, we said. And left it to others to operate.’
Kevern looked around. Was Rozenwyn Feigenblat at liberty, he wondered, to be talking like this? He was his father’s child. He had been brought up not to show too much expression in a public place. You never knew who was watching.
But he was a man not a boy and needed to show Rozenwyn he had some fight in him. ‘You have to make allowances for this being an academic institution,’ he said with heavy irony.
She rolled her eyes. ‘They wouldn’t welcome your making allowances for them,’ she said. ‘They don’t like you.’
‘Don’t they? I didn’t know that. Why don’t they like me?’
‘Uniquely malevolent.’
‘Uniquely malevolent! Me?’
‘I’m being facetious,’ she said. ‘Uniquely malevolent is a quotation from then. I use it now for anyone or anything not approved of by junior academics. The actual reason they don’t like you is that they have to dislike somebody or they have no occupation. And of course because you hold different views.’
‘I don’t hold views.’
‘There you are then. They are nothing but views. Views I have to listen to them expounding for hours at a time. They think that’s my job — answering their requests for books that an idiot would know there’s no point consulting, books with unacceptable arguments torn out of them, books that have already silenced argument, cult books, propaganda, justification manuals. . and then agreeing with their ill-informed conclusions.’
You have nothing to say on the subject, Kevern reminded himself. You are the grandson of a hunchback. You are lucky to have been born here. You Are My Sunshine.
‘You’re probably more Everett’s man than I realise,’ Rozenwyn said, noting Kevern’s reserve. ‘But you tell me when there has ever been a reign of terror that wasn’t instigated by intellectuals and presided over by someone possessed of the madness of the artist.’
‘You have done a lot of thinking,’ Kevern said.
‘For a woman, do you mean?’
‘Of course not.’
‘For a librarian then?’
‘No, I don’t mean that either.’
But he wondered if he did.
‘It’s a great intellectual privilege to work in a library,’ she reminded him. ‘The Argentinian writer Borges was a librarian. The English poet Philip Larkin was a librarian.’
Kevern hadn’t heard of either of them.
‘All human life is here,’ she went on. ‘The best of it and the worst of it, mainly the worst. Books do that, they bring out the bad in readers if there’s bad already in them.’
‘And if there isn’t?’
She smiled at him and stroked her pigtail. ‘Then they bring out the good. As in me, I hope. I’ve been able to read a lot here.’
‘You should write a book about it yourself,’ he said.
‘What for? So they can tear the pages out? I am content to know what I know.’
‘So why are you telling me?’
She regarded him archly. ‘To pass the time.’
He consulted his watch. ‘I should be going then,’ he said.
‘Why don’t you look at people when you’re talking to them?’ she asked suddenly, as though reverting to a conversation they’d been having earlier.
‘I didn’t know I didn’t look at people.’ He was lying. Ailinn too would comment on his apparent rudeness. ‘But if I don’t, it’s shyness.’
‘Your colleagues think of you as unapproachable,’ she went on. ‘They think you look down on them. They call you arrogant.’
‘I’m sorry to hear it. I carve lovespoons. I have nothing to be arrogant about.’
‘There you go. . the simple carpenter. That’s the arrogance they mistrust.’
‘I can’t do anything about it,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry if they hate me. .’
‘I didn’t say “hate”. I said they mistrusted you.’
‘For being “uniquely malevolent”. .’
She laughed. ‘No, for being uniquely arrogant.’
He smiled at her. ‘That’s all right then. As long I’m uniquely something.’