It was London, mid-July, and the morning was hot. Heading south-east in the taxi towards the centre of town and the London Library, we had to drive through hectic and irascible traffic. A moment of doubt, a hesitation as to which direction to take, was immediately punished by horns, shaken fists and faces about to spontaneously combust. London had been heated up into a boiling mass of primeval anger. My driver was as impassive as the ferryman of Hades.
Even the pigeons were pecking each other for crumbs. Waiting in the traffic jam that encircled Trafalgar Square I watched the luminously dressed tourists splash each other in the fountains. I wondered what they made of this grotesque, enticing city. From the perspective of Nelson who was watching us all implacably from the top of his column, I was just a part of this seething mass of frantic humanity.
Inside the taxi I was suffocating, and I unwound the window for air. Trafalgar Square’s sick sweet fumes of exhaust pipes swept in almost choking me. My face was wet with the heat.
‘Hot, ain’t it?’ the taxi driver said, ‘Hottest day so far. Up in the nineties, I’d say. Too hot, don’t you think?’
I couldn’t be bothered to reply. I watched a woman cross the road a few cars ahead of the taxi, weaving expertly between the jam of the stationary vehicles. She was now walking down the shadowed north side of Trafalgar Square, past the National Gallery. She moved with such grace. She could have been meandering down a silent country lane in the shadows of the trees. London was only a mirage. It was when she moved into the direct sunlight and the sun caught the colour of her hair, that I saw it was Justine.
Without hesitating, I leapt out of the taxi into the cauldron of London. The voice of the taxi driver calling for his fare disappeared into the distance. I ran between the packed cars to the other side of the road, keeping my eyes at all times on her retreating back. I heard a noise, the sound of an angry engine, before I turned to my right to see the motorbike almost upon me. A dispatch rider in black leather looked straight into my eyes like the Angel of Death. We both swerved at the same time. He swerved to my right. I swerved to the left. The decision that saved my life took a split second. I watched him drive off into the distance between the gaps in the traffic jam. I turned to look for Justine but she had disappeared from sight.
I walked on to the library, in the same direction that Justine had been heading. I mused on the irrationality of my response to seeing Justine. I had acted as if I were completely out of control. This was out of character from my usual state of equilibrium and had nearly resulted in my death. I admitted that my thoughts may have become slightly over-preoccupied with Justine, but I had taken it for granted that I was still in control of my behaviour. I wanted to win her, but on my terms.
The London Library was a tall but inconspicuous building, tucked away in the corner of the square. I would not have realized it was a library but for the small brass plaque on the wall next to the wooden doors of the front entrance. On it was written the london library and its opening times.
I walked up some steps into a large lobby. A few elderly men stood just inside the lobby discussing the painter Moreau. I walked through to the back of the main hall and climbed red carpeted stairs. Black and white photographs of distinguished male faces of famous writers peered down at me from where they hung along the staircase wall.
I opened glass doors to the reading room. A couple of members looked up from where they were sitting, as if they had just been disturbed, like birds on their nests, in the act of laying their eggs. An octogenarian was asleep under the round clock, in a large leather armchair, snoring loudly. Otherwise, apart from the hum of distant traffic, the room was silent.
I felt at home here, in a place where the intellectual prowess of a man was obviously of more value than his physical strength. Hunchbacked scholars worked here, on ancient manuscripts and first editions, as if the heat and the fevered excitement of London outside was a dream that they had just woken up from.
Justine was nowhere to be seen. I looked around the room again, but saw only the same men, sitting in the same positions, saw only the same absence. She had to be here somewhere. I had been given an omen ten minutes ago. The sighting of her wouldn’t have made sense otherwise.
I became conscious of the sweat pouring down my face and I followed the staircase up to a wooden door marked gentlemen. Inside I splashed my face with cold water. My face in the mirror looked like the reflection of an angel. I decided to follow the staircase up to the top floor where I found the section of the library where the books were stored. Opening another glass door, I found myself in a room where shelf upon shelf of books were running up and down the room in rows. The shelves reached almost to the ceiling. The floor was a metal grid of patterned triangles, through which I could see the floors beneath. When I looked down, I felt vertigo.
Here, it was as silent as a tomb. Not even the ubiquitous sound of London traffic could be heard. Just then, the sound of metal jangling softly started up on the floor beneath me, the sound of high heels hitting a steel grid. I looked down between the metal patterns of my floor into the room below. A woman was walking directly beneath me. A parting, straight as a knife, split the golden hair of her head in two. She was walking slowly past the shelves of books, obviously looking for one in particular. She was contained, between the two metal floors like a bird in a cage, in my moment of seeing her.
TWENTY-NINE
This time I restrained my immediate impulse, which was to call out to her. The meeting had to appear accidental. I quickly and quietly walked back along the metal floor and down the metal staircase that led down to the stored room of books below. I kept control of my breathing but there was the sound of beating wings in my head. Reaching the lower floor, I looked down the twelve tall rows of shelves but could see her nowhere. It had taken me three minutes at the most to get from one floor to the other. Surely she couldn’t have disappeared in such a short time?
It was then that I saw her. She was standing at the end of the eleventh row of shelves, intently reading a book she had in her hands, her hair falling across her face. I could not understand how I had just missed seeing her. I was now only a few steps away from smelling the scent of her skin.
I pretended to be looking for a particular novel in one of the shelves. I slowly walked up the passageway of books towards her, as if in search of an author’s initials that took me by chance to just beside her. Standing next to her, I took out a book at random and opened it up. I pretended to read, concentrating desperately on how I could make my first move. It was only then that I realized that I had picked out the novel Justine by the Marquis de Sade. The pages of the book were so thin they were almost transparent and the print from the other side showed backwards, through. My first meeting with Justine had to seem natural and coincidental.
I could smell her now. Still with my eyes focused unseeingly on the book, I decided on my plan. I would turn to Justine, nonchalantly, and ask her if she knew whether the library had a Romantic Section, or not. As a strange man asking this of a beautiful woman, the situation would, I conjectured, be ripe with comic irony. But just as I was about to look up, the words forming in my mouth, I felt a tap on my shoulder, a light tap as if a bird had just landed on me.
‘I’m sorry to interrupt your reading.’ Justine’s hand fell from my shoulder of recognizing me from the funeral. Her voice was as low and dry as the desert. ‘But I need your help.’
I had to gauge my response carefully. On the one hand I had to appear surprised that a strange woman was approaching me for help in the London Library. On the other hand I had to conceal my surprise at the part Destiny was playing in making Justine approach me. Her making the first move gave me an advantage beyond my wildest dreams. I deliberately took a step back from her, as if almost resistant to such an out-of-the blue request, while making sure I retained an expression of helpful courtesy on my face.