Night Music (6 page)

“See them?” said Mr. Gedeon. “By all means! Best bring your coat, though. I find it can get a bit chilly back there.”

Mr. Berger did as he was told. He put on his coat and followed Mr. Gedeon past the shelves, his eyes taking in the titles as he went. He wanted to touch the books, to take them down and stroke them like cats, but he controlled the urge. After all, if Mr. Gedeon was to be believed, he was about to have a far more extraordinary encounter with the world of books.

In the end, it proved to be slightly duller than Mr. Berger had expected. Each of the characters had a small but clean suite of rooms, personalized to suit their time periods and dispositions. Mr. Gedeon explained that they didn't organize the living areas by authors or periods of history, so there weren't entire wings devoted to Dickens or Shakespeare.

“It just didn't work when it was tried in the past,” said Mr. Gedeon. “Worse, it caused terrible problems, and some awful fights. The characters tend to have a pretty good instinct for these things themselves, and my inclination has always been to let them choose their own space.”

They passed Room 221B where Sherlock Holmes appeared to be in an entirely drug-induced stupor, while in a nearby suite Tom Jones was doing something unspeakable with Fanny Hill. There was a brooding Heathcliff, and a Fagin with rope burns around his neck, but like animals in a zoo, a lot of the characters were simply napping.

“They do that a lot,” said Mr. Gedeon. “I've seen some of them sleep for years, decades even. They don't get hungry as such, although they do like to eat to break the monotony. Force of habit, I suppose. We try to keep them away from wine. That makes them rowdy.”

“But do they realize that they're fictional characters?” said Mr. Berger.

“Oh yes. Some of them take it better than others, but they all learn to accept that their lives have been written by someone else, and their memories are a product of literary invention, even if, as I said earlier, it gets a bit more complicated with historical characters.”

“But you said it was only fictional characters who ended up here,” Mr. Berger protested.

“That is the case, as a rule, but it's also true that some historical characters become more real to us in their fictional forms. Take Richard III: much of the public perception of him is a product of Shakespeare's play and Tudor propaganda, so in a sense that Richard III
is
a fictional character. Our Richard III is aware that he's not actually
the
Richard III but
a
Richard III. On the other hand, as far as the public is concerned he is
the
Richard III, and is more real in their minds than any products of later revisionism. But he's the exception rather than the rule: very few historical characters manage to make that transition. All for the best, really, otherwise this place would be packed to the rafters.”

Mr. Berger had wanted to raise the issue of space with the librarian, and this seemed like the opportune moment.

“I did notice that the building seems significantly larger on the inside than on the outside,” he remarked.

“It's funny, that,” said Mr. Gedeon. “Doesn't seem to matter much what the building looks like on the outside: it's as though, when they all move in, they bring their own space with them. I've often wondered why that might be, and I think I've come up with an answer of sorts. It's a natural consequence of the capacity of a bookstore or library to contain entire worlds, whole universes, and all situated between the covers of books. In that sense, every library or bookstore is practically infinite. The Caxton takes that to its logical conclusion.”

They passed a pair of overly ornate and decidedly gloomy rooms, in one of which an ashen-faced man sat reading a book, his unusually long fingernails gently testing the pages. He turned to watch them pass, and his lips drew back to reveal a pair of elongated canines.

“The Count,” said Mr. Gedeon, in a worried manner. “I'd move along if I were you.”

“You mean Stoker's Count?” said Mr. Berger. He couldn't help but gawp. The Count's eyes were rimmed with red, and there was an undeniable magnetism to him. Mr. Berger found his feet dragging him into the room as the Count set aside his book and prepared to welcome him.

Mr. Gedeon's hand grasped his right arm and pulled Mr. Berger back into the corridor.

“I told you to move along,” he said. “You don't want to be spending time with the Count. Very unpredictable, the Count. Says he's over all that vampiric nonsense, but I wouldn't trust him farther than I could throw him.”

“He can't get out, can he?” asked Mr. Berger, who was already rethinking his passion for evening walks.

“No, he's one of the special cases. We keep those books behind bars, and that seems to do the trick for the characters as well.”

“But some of the others wander,” said Mr. Berger. “You met Hamlet, and I met Anna Karenina.”

“Yes, but that's really most unusual. For the most part, the characters exist in a kind of stasis. I suspect a lot of them just close their eyes and relive their entire literary lives, over and over. Still, we do have quite a competitive bridge tournament going, and the pantomime at Christmas is always good fun.”

“How do they get out, the ones who ramble off?”

Mr. Gedeon shrugged. “I don't know. I keep the place well locked up, and it's rare that I'm not here. I just took a few days off to visit my brother in Bootle, but I've probably never spent more than a month in total away from the library in all of my years as librarian. Why would I? I've got books to read and characters to talk to. I've got worlds to explore, all within these walls.”

At last they reached a closed door upon which Mr. Gedeon knocked tentatively.

“
Oui?
” said a female voice.

“
Madame, vous avez un visiteur
,” said Mr. Gedeon.

“
Bien. Entrez, s'il vous plaît
.”

Mr. Gedeon opened the door, and there was the woman whom Mr. Berger had watched throw herself beneath the wheels of a train, and whose life he felt that he had subsequently saved, sort of. She was wearing a simple black dress, perhaps even the very one that had so captivated Kitty in the novel, her curly hair in disarray, and a string of pearls hanging around her firm neck. She seemed startled at first to see him, and he knew that she recalled his face.

Mr. Berger's French was rusty, but he managed to dredge up a little from memory.

“Madame, je m'appelle Monsieur Berger, et je suis enchanté de vous rencontrer.”

“
Non,
” said Anna after a short pause, “
tout le plaisir est pour moi, Monsieur Berger
.
Vous vous assiérez, s'il vous plaît
.”

He took a seat, and a polite conversation commenced. Mr. Berger explained, in the most delicate terms, that he had been a witness to her earlier encounter with the train, and it had haunted him. Anna appeared most distressed and apologized profusely for any trouble that she might have caused him, but Mr. Berger waved it away as purely minor and stressed that he was more concerned for her than for himself. Naturally, he said, when he saw her making a second attempt—if attempt was the right word for an act that had been so successful the first time around—he had felt compelled to intervene.

After some initial hesitancy, their conversation grew easier. At some point Mr. Gedeon arrived with fresh tea and some more cake, but they barely noticed him. Mr. Berger found much of his French returning, but Anna, having spent so long in the environs of the library, also had a good command of English. They spoke together long into the night, until at last Mr. Berger noticed the hour and apologized for keeping Anna up so late. She replied that she had enjoyed his company, and she slept little anyway. He kissed her hand and begged leave to return the next day, and she gave her permission willingly.

Mr. Berger found his way back to the library without too much trouble, apart from an attempt by Fagin to steal his wallet, which the old reprobate put down to habit and nothing more. When he reached Mr. Gedeon's living quarters, he discovered the librarian dozing in an armchair. He woke him gently, and Mr. Gedeon opened the front door to let him out.

“If you wouldn't mind,” said Mr. Berger, as he stood on the doorstep, “I should very much like to return tomorrow to speak with you, and Anna, if that wouldn't be too much of an imposition.”

“It wouldn't be an imposition at all,” said Mr. Gedeon. “Just knock on the glass. I'll be here.”

With that the door was closed, and Mr. Berger, feeling both more confused and more elated than he had in all his life, returned to his cottage and slept a deep, dreamless sleep.

The next morning, once he had washed and breakfasted, Mr. Berger returned to the Caxton Library. He brought with him some fresh pastries that he had bought in the local bakery in order to replenish Mr. Gedeon's supplies, and a book of Russian poetry in translation of which he was unusually fond, but which he now desired to present to Anna. Making sure that he was not being observed, he took the lane that led to the library and knocked on the glass. He was briefly concerned that Mr. Gedeon might overnight have spirited away the contents of the premises—books, characters, and all—fearful that the discovery by Mr. Berger of the library's true nature might bring some trouble upon them, but the old gentleman opened the door to Mr. Berger's knock on the glass and seemed very pleased to see him.

“Will you take some tea?” asked Mr. Gedeon, and Mr. Berger agreed, even though he had already had tea at breakfast and was anxious to return to Anna. Still, he had questions for Mr. Gedeon, particularly pertaining to the lady.

“Why does she do it?” he asked, as he and Mr. Gedeon shared an apple scone.

“Do what?” said Mr. Gedeon. “Oh, you mean throw herself under trains?”

He picked a crumb from his waistcoat and put it on his plate.

“First of all, I should say that she doesn't make a habit of it,” said Mr. Gedeon. “In all the years that I've been here, she's done it no more than a dozen times. Admittedly, the incidents have been growing more frequent, and I have spoken to her about them in an effort to find some way to help, but she doesn't seem to know herself why she feels compelled to relive her final moments in the book. We have other characters that return to their fates—just about all of our Thomas Hardy characters appear obsessed by them—but she's the only one who re-enacts her end. I can only give you my thoughts on the matter, and I'd say this: she's the titular character, and her life is so tragic, her fate so awful, that it could mean both are imprinted upon the reader, and herself, in a particularly deep and resonant way. It's in the quality of the writing. It's in the book. Books have power. You must understand that now. It's why we keep all of these first editions so carefully. The fate of characters is set forever in those volumes. There's a link between those editions and the characters that arrived here with them.”

He shifted in his chair, and pursed his lips.

“I'll share something with you, Mr. Berger, something that I've never shared with anyone before,” he said. “Some years ago, we had a leak in the roof. It wasn't a big one, but they don't need to be big, do they? A little water dripping for hours and hours can do a great deal of damage, and it wasn't until I got back from the picture house in Moreham that I saw what had happened. You see, before I left I'd set aside our manuscript copies of
Alice in Wonderland
and
Moby-Dick
.”

“
Moby-Dick
?” said Mr. Berger. “I wasn't aware that there were any extant manuscripts of
Moby-Dick
.”

“It's an unusual one, I'll admit,” said Mr. Gedeon. “Somehow it's all tied up with confusion between the American and British first editions. The American edition, by Harper & Brothers, was set from the manuscript, and the British edition, by Bentley's, was in turn set from the American proofs, and there are some six hundred differences in wording between the two editions. But in 1851, while Melville was working on the British edition based on proofs that he himself had paid to be set and plated before an American publisher had signed an agreement, he was also still writing some of the later parts of the book, and in addition he took the opportunity to rewrite sections that had already been set for America. So which is the edition that the library should store: the American, based on the original manuscript, or the British, based not on the manuscript but on a subsequent rewrite? The decision made by the Trust was to acquire the British edition and, just to be on the safe side, the manuscript. When Captain Ahab arrived at the library, both editions arrived with him.”

“And the manuscript of
Alice in Wonderland
? I understood that to be in the collection of the British Museum.”

“Some sleight of hand there, I believe,” said Mr. Gedeon. “You may recall that the Reverend Dodgson gave the original ninety-page manuscript to Alice Liddell, but she was forced to sell it in order to pay death duties following her husband's demise in 1928. Sotheby's sold it on her behalf, suggesting a reserve of four thousand pounds. It went, of course, for almost four times that amount, to an American bidder. At that point, the Trust stepped in, and a similar manuscript copy was substituted and sent to the United States.”

“So the British Museum now holds a fake?”

“Not a fake, but a later copy, made by Dodgson's hand at the instigation of an agent of the Trust. In those days, the Trust was always thinking ahead, and I've tried to keep up that tradition. I've always got an eye out for a book or character that may be taking off.

“So the Trust was very keen to have Dodgson's original
Alice
: so many iconic characters, you see, and then there were the illustrations, too. It's an extremely powerful manuscript.