turned and went through the door behind her. James looked upward then around, taking in the vast room. He had barely visited here since the opening: he preferred to do his reading in the Radcliffe Camera, where he came across fewer of his colleagues. But Florence had embraced it right away. ‘Just think: I will be one of the very first scholars to have worked in a building that will probably stand for a thousand years.’ She paused, then gave him that smile he could not resist. ‘I like being first.’
He began to pace, looking at the rows of desks, new and barely scratched – lacking the dents, cracks, blemishes and the gluey, human resin accreted through centuries that coated the wood at the ‘Radder’. He looked at the clock. The librarian had been gone more than five minutes, closer to ten. He wondered what could possibly be keeping her.
Where on earth would Florence have gone? Mrs Grey was right: the obvious answer was her parents’ house, but he had ruled that out. He could feel a swell of anger rising inside him. He needed to see what the hell Florence had been looking at here. It could be her regular studies, Darwin and the like, but it could be something else, something more urgent. What was it Grey had said? Something she had to check, something she had to find out, before she could leave.
So what the hell was it? What had Florence had to find out? And where was that damned librarian?
He marched at full speed past the administrative desk, breaking through the invisible barrier that separated clerks from readers, and through the door the librarian had taken nearly quarter of an hour earlier.
Behind it, he found himself on a landing for a service stairwell. Dimly lit by a single sickly bulb, it was painted a functional grey, the floors covered in a thin linoleum. Instinctively he headed downstairs.
Two flights down he came to a pair of double doors. He pushed them open to see what struck him at first as a long corridor. He called out. ‘Hello?’
The echo on his voice surprised him. This was no corridor. He stepped into the almost-dark, calling out again. No answer.
He walked further, slowly becoming conscious that the path he was taking was narrow. He put out his hand, expecting the touch of cold concrete. Instead he felt rough metal, the texture of a bicycle chain. Slowly he began to make out the shape of a conveyor belt.
He had read about this innovation. He was inside the tunnel, the one that connected the New Bodleian to the Old, stretching under Broad Street. It had been lauded as a feat of engineering and great British ingenuity. Instead of librarians scurrying back and forth between the two buildings, a mechanical conveyor would do the work for them, dumbly transporting whatever had been requested, whether it were Principia Mathematica or Das Kapital.
James squinted upward to see a stretch of pipework attached to the ceiling. That must be the pneumatic tube system introduced with equal fanfare last year: put the request slip in the capsule and off it whizzed, powered by nothing more than compressed air. Aeroplanes, the wireless, the cinema – the world was changing so fast. It was already unrecognizable from the Victorian age his parents still inhabited.
‘Miss? Are you there?’ Where had the librarian gone and why was she not answering?
There was a sharp turn right; he wondered how far he had gone. Could he already be under Radcliffe Square? He didn’t think he had walked that far, but perhaps the absence of light had confused his senses. He suddenly became aware that he was cold; he shivered, feeling the film of sweat that still coated him.
What was that? Was that a flicker of light far ahead? There had been some kind of change, perhaps a torch coming on and off. He quickened his pace.
He broke into a jog. ‘Miss, is that you?’
There was a delay and then an answer, one that made his blood freeze.
The answer was ‘No.’ And it was spoken by a man.
SIX
‘Who’s there?’ He could hear the alarm in his own voice.
‘Is that Dr Zennor?’
An accent. What was it? Dutch? German? He couldn’t even see where the voice was coming from. What exactly had he walked into here? ‘Where has the librarian gone?’
‘I am the librarian.’
As that moment, James was dazzled by a bright-yellow beam aimed directly in his face. He turned away, lifting his hand to his eyes.
‘My apologies, sir. For the light, also I am sorry.’
The torch was now angled away from his face, but still James remained blinded. He blinked and blinked again to regain his vision. ‘Who the hell are you?’
‘Please.’ Pliz. ‘Do not swear at me.’
James could feel his rage building again. In a low voice, the calmness of a man repressing fury, he repeated, ‘Who are you?’
‘I am Epstein. I am now the night librarian here.’
So that would explain the accent: an émigré German. ‘And what happened to the woman?’
‘I saw her down here after six of clock and told her to go home already. Such long days they work, these girls. Working for seven days she has been, without a break. On a trot.’
‘On the trot.’
‘Yes. On the trot. That is what I mean.’
‘But she was helping me. I had a request.’
‘Yes, yes. I know this. I am helping you myself. I was trying to find the books.’
‘The books Mrs Zennor was borrowing?’
‘That’s right. But why you come down in the tunnel? This is prohibited, yes?’
James exhaled. His heart was pounding, at a pace that refused to slow. The light shining in his face had rattled him. He was still dazed, but it was not just the light. Something else.
The man spoke again. ‘Please. I have them now. You are to follow me.’
They walked in silence, James embarrassed by his pursuit of this man underground. And also fearful – that he would, by saying the wrong thing, induce a change of heart in the émigré librarian, that he would come across as too sweatily anxious. So he curbed his impatience to see the books in the man’s hands and waited till they emerged into the relative light of the stairwell, moving from there back inside the reading room.
‘We have to save the power, you see. At night. That is why there is no lights down there. Only this.’ Epstein waved his torch. ‘And no conveyor of course. So this I do by hand. It takes a long time, for which I apologies.’
‘No need to apologize,’ James replied.
‘Apologize, yes, of course. Sorry for my English. I can read it perfectly, but I never had to speak it before so much.’
‘No. It’s excellent.’ James momentarily considered speaking to him in German, then imagined the delay that would entail – explaining how he knew the language, his reading of the great Viennese analysts and all the rest of it.
‘In Heidelberg, I did not need so much English. But now I am here.’
‘I see.’ James was trying to identify the three books the German had placed on the desk, their spines facing – maddeningly – away from him.
‘I did not choose to leave, Dr Zennor. You see, I am of a type considered, how to say, undesirable by the new governors of my country. I came here two years ago.’
‘You are a Jew?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Well, welcome to England. And thanks for finding these books so quickly.’ James nodded towards them, hoping he would get the hint. ‘You’re obviously a good librarian.’
‘Thank you.