Ian Sansom - The Bad Book Affair

Mrs. Morris let Maurice’s embarrassment fully ripen before continuing. “So, she’s been reading the Kama Sutra, has she?”

“Good god, no!”

“Lady Chatterley’s Lover?”

“No!”

“Well, she wouldn’t need to get that from the library. She could borrow my copy. Along with The Joy of Sex and-”

“Sssh! She might hear you!”

“She’s still in bed.”

“Good.”

“You wanted her up a minute ago.”

“Anyway, I told him what I thought.”

“Who?”

“The librarian.”

“Oh. Well, good for you, Maurice. Keeping the lower orders in their place. Librarians, lending people books? I don’t know. What’s the world coming to?”

Maurice ignored his wife and glanced up at the TV; his friend was still there on the sofa.

“Has she talked to you any more about her plans?” said Maurice.

“What plans?” said Mrs. Morris.

“Her GCSEs. Is she making any other plans you know of?”

“No.”

“So?” said Maurice.

“She wants to stick with the art and media studies,” said Mrs. Morris.

“Mickey Mouse courses.”

“If she wants to go to the art college-”

Maurice huffed.

“There’s nothing wrong with the art college,” said Mrs. Morris.

“Art college!” said Maurice. “She’d be better doing law.”

“She doesn’t want to do law.”

“She’ll come round,” said Maurice.

“Not if you’re nagging at her she won’t come round.”

“I didn’t work all these years so my daughter could-”

“It’s nothing to do with you, Maurice.”

“It’s everything to do with me!” said Maurice.

“She’d be fine at art college.”

“Doing what? Hanging around a bunch of dope-smoking layabouts!”

“Layabouts? Nobody says ‘layabouts’ anymore, Maurice.”

“I say ‘layabouts.’”

“Anyway, she’s got years to work it all out.”

“You have to plan ahead for these things, I keep telling you.”

“Maurice, you go on ahead and get yourself elected, and let me worry about her.”

“She’s had a five-star education. Pony, clubs, the best of everything. When I was growing up on Corporation Street I’d have given anything to-”

“Maurice, please. You’re on repeat. You’re making a speech to me. I’m your wife. Remember?”

“How could I forget?”

“And I’ve not had my coffee yet. So let’s not get into all this now.”

“Fine.”

Mrs. Morris stubbed out her cigarette and took a final sip of her coffee.

“She’ll be late,” said Maurice, “if she doesn’t get up soon.”

“She won’t be late! Now, just leave her be. God, you’re such a control freak.”

Maurice was not a control freak. He had, for example, left much of the design and furnishing of the interior of the house to Mrs. Morris, whose tastes in home furnishings ran rather to the exotic. Left to his own devices, Maurice would have tended toward basic dictator chic-chandeliers and gold plates, with brocaded curtains and brand-spanking-new mahogany. Pamela had more bohemian tastes: tapestries, antiques, curiosities. He’d even allowed her to paint a mural on the kitchen wall, bold and Bloomsbury-style, when they first bought the house, depicting the mountains of Mourne and the cottage they had there and which they used as their bolt-hole. But the kitchen had since been vigorously extended with steel and glass and a table which could accommodate a large, catered dinner party, and the Mournes mural with its little cottage had long since disappeared.

They sat in silence, the two of them, sipping their coffee, as distant as any long-married couple. Maurice looked at his watch.

“All right,” said Mrs. Morris. “I’ll go and get her up.”

“Thank you,” said Maurice.

The right order had reestablished itself.

As he explained to the police and to the press later that day, the first thing Maurice Morris knew about his daughter’s disappearance was the sound of his wife screaming.

Sundays were always the real challenge for Israel in Tumdrum. On Sunday, Tumdrum’s sheer Tumdrumness somehow intensified: the place seemed to hum not only with its average everyday senselessness and pointlessness, but with an extra tone, a deep overtone or undertone-a void-of doom, as though a dark-cloaked chorus had arrived and was lamenting the steady encroachment of catastrophe in the last scenes of some long, depressing opera about the terrible fate of Everyman: Sibelius, Benjamin Britten, Don Giovanni, Simon Boccanegra. O Tumdrum! Weh mir! Weh mir! And on Sundays, as a consequence, with the thrum of doom in his ears, Israel always suffered from a combination of queasiness, headaches, and a nausea of a kind both physiological and philosophical that would doubtless be familiar to anyone who’d been out on a Saturday night drinking, or at an amateur production of a play by Harold Pinter, or at home listening to the Saturday night play on Radio 4: He was a man of sorrows, despised, rejected, and acquainted with grief.

Sometimes, to dispel the Sunday doom and anxieties Israel would go to the pub-the First and Last. But it only ever made things worse-the First and Last leaned more toward the Omega than the Alpha-and anyway, in the end he would always have to return home, to the converted chicken coop, his room like a prison cell, no more than twelve feet by twelve feet, with bare brick walls and a concrete floor and an asbestos roof, a room that Israel had worked on and worked on over the past year and had managed to transform into a…room no more than twelve feet by twelve feet, with bare brick walls and a concrete floor and an asbestos roof, with rugs and a bed and some books. A room of his own, to be sure, with his own enamel plates and cups. But no window. Fortunately, he wanted no window. For there was nothing out there to see.

Outside the coop was the yard, and the Devine farmhouse, and the garden sloping southward, and the old glassless glasshouse, and the row of cold frames broken down, and the couch grass and nettles where once had been blackcurrants and berries, and the walls of the walled garden, pitted with nails where apples and pears had once been carefully trained, and where there was now just mud, mud everywhere, and everywhere mud.

The Devine family farm wasn’t just deteriorating, it was sinking: the heavy and seemingly continual rain during the summer had not been kind to the two-hundred-year-old building. Parts of it had begun quietly to slip away-irreparable damage to outbuildings with leaky roofs and big old wooden doors and hardboarded windows that had swollen up like weeping eyes. And even in the main house, old carpets had had to be removed-the place was unprotected, like a sponge, the damp infecting and soaking in through the render and seeping down the walls providing the perfect environment for mold and for mushrooms. A fair crop of little crumble-capped fungi had sprung up on the wallpaper, and old Mr. Devine had simply brushed them off with the back of his hand, and scooped them up and tossed them onto the fire, and they’d filled the house with a sour, soapy smell that-mixed with the stench of damp cardboard and cabbage and chickens-was overwhelming, organic, fundamental: the unmistakable stench of decay. Israel gagged every time he went into the kitchen, which was decay, plus dogs, plus fat, plus Irish stew. Black mold, dry rot, condensation. Sum total: miasma. George did everything she could to maintain the property, but she was fighting a losing battle: it was simply impossible to fix everything that needed fixing, and paint everything that needed painting, and clean everything that needed cleaning. She often crawled into bed at midnight and then was up again at five to begin the day’s chores. The animals were cared for, but the windows were rotten, and the floorboards were rotten, and the walls were rotten; even the septic tank was rotten. There was continual surface runoff from the fields, and groundwater levels were rising; the farmhouse was like a rusting ship in an unforgiving ocean, and George was like Sisyphus, Tantalus, and Captain Smith of the Titanic. She could not cease in her lonely task, couldn’t leave her post, could not desert her command. Her duty was to the farm-and “the farm” they all called it, not “our” farm or “our house” or “our home.” It was “the farm” like the church was the church, and the government was the government, and the law the law. It was an entity, a being, an institution. It was not a way of life, it was life.