it? You’ve been nobbled!’
Arthur looked at his empty glass and then up at the bar. He looked at the glass again but made no attempt to get up.
‘Look, Auriol,’ he said, ‘you know that one day Huguette will be very well off. Her father left everything to her mother when he died, but she is the eventual heir – after all, when Monsieur Dimont became ill she took over the diamond business and did wonders with it. Wonders! You might almost say she made more money than her father, and he was a shrewd one.’
‘She knows all that. She doesn’t need money, Arthur, she needs peace of mind. She found it working at the Riviera Express. She’s got her cottage, her cat, her career.’
‘Grace wants her to change her life. Give up the journalism business. Go to live in Essex and enjoy what is rightly hers.’
‘Not Essex, Arthur!’
‘You’ve been there, it’s a lovely house. Right on the edge of the marshes. It needs to be lived in, have some life brought back to it.’
‘But it’s huge. She doesn’t need all that – how many bedrooms, for heaven’s sake!’
‘Grace hates the thought of it going out of the family. She always hoped Hugue would marry.’
‘Well,’ said Auriol, ‘you can tell her all this yourself when she gets here.’
The old boy looked shyly at his companion. ‘I was rather hoping you’d say it for me. I do so hate rubbing her up the wrong way,’ he said.
‘And you – awarded the military Order of the British Empire!’ laughed Auriol, planting an imaginary medal on his lapel. ‘Sir Arthur Cowardy Custard!’
The old soldier rose to his feet and headed towards the bar looking perhaps a trifle green round the gills.
Hector Sirraway made quite a fuss when he first arrived in the public library on Fore Street. It was a small building, no bigger than the size of a large terraced house, but perfect for the needs of Temple Regis – during the summer months the residents were far too busy serving their guests, refugees from less attractive parts of Britain, to sit around reading. And in winter they were too busy repairing, and preparing, for the next season.
To say Temple Regents weren’t bookish would do them an injustice, but it followed that their modest library needed only the smallest area reserved for reference work – and even then its one desk remained empty most of the year. Was it any surprise that this is where the Christmas tree should be placed when Advent came around?
Given their modest budget, Miss Greenway and Miss Atherton had done a wonderful job, lavishing the lofty conifer with love and, it might be said, the necessary splash of vulgarity. Everyone said what a marvellous sight it presented, with the exception of Mr Sirraway.
‘What have you got that thing there for?’ he asked starchily when he first showed up a month before Christmas. ‘Can’t you get rid of it?’
Since then, he’d been in every day, and his temper never seemed to improve. Miss Greenway had offered him her desk if he needed somewhere to sit, and even made him a nice cup of tea. But nothing budged Mr Sirraway from his hatred of the tree.
Or it could have been something else that bothered him, it was hard to tell. Tall, white-haired, with a pinched face and a permanent dewdrop at the end of his nose, it emerged from the few sentences he uttered that he was researching a book on the industrial buildings of Dartmoor.
‘Fine time to come in and make a nuisance of himself,’ muttered Miss Atherton on the fourth day. ‘Why couldn’t he wait till after Christmas?’ But Miss Greenway loved to see her library used, whether by schoolchildren, housewives or scholars like Mr Sirraway. In fact, she especially liked Mr Sirraway’s presence because very few asked much of the library, apart from a light novel or a Jane Austen and the occasional Shakespeare.
‘We must show him what we’re capable of,’ she told her assistant, and so they did.
The two librarians watched with interest the growing pile of books their visitor ordered from the shelves. From an ancient leather satchel he drew large sheets of paper which looked like plans of some kind, spreading them out on an adjacent table, grunting and whispering to himself and only occasionally remembering to reach for a handkerchief for his nose.
Miss Greenway was inclined to look up to him – she adored learned people! – but Miss M had taken against.
‘Rude, secretive – and you can tell he doesn’t have a wife. Look at those socks!’ One red, one grey – what wife would allow their man to go out dressed like that?
Mr Sirraway was oblivious to these whisperings. Though he originally demanded books on buildings from all over the moor, he seemed after the first couple of days to be concentrating on an area towards the eastern edge, nearest to Temple Regis. His interest stretched from tin mines to corn mills to peat cutting and even granite blasting – for such a large and barren place as the moor, it was extraordinary how many different ways there were to earn a living from it. He’d even demanded, and got, a book on warrening, the mass farming of rabbits.
But he remained unimpressed with the raw material he was being fed. ‘Look at these charts – crude, outdated, and frankly inaccurate,’ he barked, waving a lanky finger at some ancient roll of papers Miss Greensleeves had unearthed after considerable effort. ‘How can you possibly present a case – an important case – using erroneous data like this?’ But he seemed more to be arguing with himself than complaining about the service the librarians provided.
Over by the desk the occasional last-minuter would wander in, returning books before they collected a penny-ha’penny fine, but nobody lingered over the shelves – they were far too busy preparing for the festive season. As each one entered there would come through the door a mournful sound offering a reminder of the approach of Christmas.
‘There’s old Wilf, left behind again,’ said Miss Greenway to Miss Atherton. ‘I’d better take him a cup.’
The noise, like a cow calling for her calf, also wafted through the high window and irritated Mr Sirraway no end, but it wasn’t likely to cease any time soon – Old Wilf was a stalwart of the Salvation Army silver band, whose gentle harmonies stirred up the Christmas spirit in the marketplace and encouraged everyone to dip into their pockets.
Wilf was old and lame now, and could no longer wander through the town with his bandmates, so they would set him up on a chair outside the library with his euphonium and leave him to it. Somehow ‘Away In A Manger’ tootled through his silver tubes lacked joy and encouraged sorrow. You could get tired of it pretty quickly.
‘Thank heavens,’ sighed Mr Sirraway finally, pushing his plans and his books away from him. ‘That’s that done!’
‘Have you finished, sir?’
The scholar leaned back in his chair, stretched his legs and put his hands behind his neck. ‘Finished.’
‘Is there anything else we can get you?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Cup of tea?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Well, I hope we’ve been of service.’ Miss Greenway wouldn’t have minded if her little library got a mention in the author’s acknowledgements when Mr Sirraway’s book came out, but was too shy to ask what its title would be.
‘Well, I’ll be wishing you a Happy Christmas, then. May I ask when your book will be published?’
‘I don’t think a fir tree covered in tinsel has a place in an establishment of learning,’ replied Sirraway, and with that walked out. As he opened the door they got a blast of Wilf’s ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’. It sounded more like someone sitting on a whoopee cushion.
‘He’s