Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

Stuck in Caergenog, he had developed an imaginary parallel life, one in which he’d done an undergraduate degree in French literature at Durham University, a master’s at Cambridge, two years’ research in Paris, living in a garret on the Left Bank, or, as he called it, “the West Bank.” Central to his persona was the conviction that Caergenog was wrong for him, that he and his friends were a class above their context, that any setbacks or rejections were due to the backwardness of this place. One day in a month, he arrived at work in a black mood. Otherwise, he was touchingly buoyant.

“Do you feel more English or more Welsh?” she asked him.

“French,” he answered. “How about you? Do you feel French?”

“Why would I? I’m not remotely French.”

“You feel English, then?”

“I’m not English.”

“How about Welsh?”

“I’m not Welsh. You know that, Fogg.”

“We’re like a lost tribe, people like us,” he mused. “No traditions, no birthright, to be brutally honest. All of us have an acorn of sadness,” he continued, pressing the magnifying glass to his eye. “You notice our tristesse only in passing, like a door to a small room in a house where outsiders may not enter.”

“You’re very poetic today, Fogg.”

“Into which you get but a passing view,” he went on, mistaking her irony for encouragement. “An acorn of sadness,” he said, proud of the phrase, which he muttered on his way to organize Pirates, Smugglers & Mutiny.

Around noon, their first visitor arrived, a regular who couldn’t be termed a customer, for she used World’s End Books only as a showroom for online purchases. This was increasingly common, the practitioners identifiable by their note-taking on prices and ISBNs, and their failure to ever buy anything. Some openly consulted Web prices on smartphones and, hand on the doorknob, lamented how few good bookshops remained. Tooly wasn’t indignant: you couldn’t stop a tidal wave by wagging your finger at it. She considered bookselling to be a terminal vocation. More discouraging to her was that the heavyweights on these shelves held such puny sway. No matter their ideas and worth, they lived as did the elderly — in a world with little patience to hear them out.

If few people came to buy books, many came to sell. Everyone was clearing their shelves these days. The question was no longer what she could pay (a pittance) but whether she had space. Her areas of personal interest included vintage cookbooks, especially outmoded advice for the young lass, such as Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861) or Saucepans & the Single Girl (1965) by Jinx Morgan and Judy Perry. She had also built up the Zoology section, adding tragic histories of the bison, rare volumes on rare birds, oversized editions of nature photography. As with all coffee-table books, she bought first, then wondered where to put them.

Mr. Thomas made the first purchase of the day. A man in his late fifties possessed of multitudes of Welsh-speaking grandchildren, he visited World’s End once a month. Back when he attended school, education was viewed as an irksome delay before farm employment — an attitude that produced two varieties of citizen: those who scorned book learning and those who revered it. Huw Thomas — scar on the tip of his nose, head like an upright loaf, always in homespun cardigans — was among the reverential autodidacts. But he’d sooner not talk about it, and deflected her conversational gambits, standing at the servery counter with a volume in each hand, like a child before the librarian’s desk. (She never found a pattern in his selections. Today, it was a history of the Boer War and Alice in Wonderland .)

“Get all you wanted, Mr. Thomas?”

“No, thank you.”

“Can I help you find something else?”

“No, thank you.”

“See you again, Mr. Thomas.”

“Very well, then. Best be off.”

The bell on the door tinkled after him, a false calm before a dozen schoolkids swarmed in. Hardly a feral pack of readers, these were junior shoplifters testing their skills, glancing around furtively as if they’d invented the art. Impressive how much a schoolbag swallowed. Sometimes she let them get away with it, unless a previous haul had been discovered in the rubbish bins on Roberts Road, in which case she stopped the culprits on their next foray, speaking discreetly at the door and sending them away. The rude ones — there were a few — she crushed with choice words. One brazen boy had kicked the door when he left, giving her the finger as he ran backward until, most pleasingly, he fell flat into a puddle.

She checked the time — had a lesson this evening. “Mind if I …?”

“Say no more, say no more,” Fogg responded. “Off you go.”

Since her arrival in Caergenog, she had engaged in an adult-education frenzy, taking classes in sewing, home repairs (unexpectedly gripping), music. For a spell, she’d driven every Tuesday night to Cardiff for an art course, where she did life drawing in charcoal, acrylic, and oil. Each medium confirmed her lack of talent: every arm came out longer than its leg; ears were tea saucers; fruit resembled basketballs. Lousy though she was, Tooly adored it, and even improved in a plodding way.

“Will we be doing a class on noses?” she’d asked the instructor, an irritably failed sculptor.

“What?”

“Can you help me with drawing noses?”

“What?”

When the course ended, she sorted through her work and couldn’t justify conserving a single piece. Nevertheless, she drove home with a still life, called “Apples — I Think That’s What They Were,” and nailed it up in her attic quarters. The sight of that canvas, its comical terribleness, still made her happy.

Now and then, a classmate invited her for a friendly drink and a gossip. Prue, a recent divorcée taking the home-repairs course in Hereford, asked what Tooly did besides work at a bookshop, and heard of her daily hikes. “Should get a bit of a walkabout myself,” Prue said. “Lazy since the kids.”

She arrived at World’s End one morning, buying a romance novel to be polite. Tooly drove them to the priory and marched upward, her acquaintance keeping up only till the foothills, then battling bravely in the middle distance. Tooly waited at the top, admiring the countryside, as a human dot clomped closer, expanding into a woman. “Brought the.” Wheeze. “Brought the wrong.” Wheeze. “Brought the wrong shoes.”

“It’s flat from here on,” Tooly said, continuing down the ridge.

“You walk!” Wheeze. “So!” Wheeze. “Fast!”

“Not that fast. Do I?”

Afterward, Prue thanked her. She never asked to come again.

Partly, Tooly had engineered it this way. Friends required a life story. Your past mattered only if others sought to know it — it was they who demanded that one possessed a history. Alone, you could do without.

That was why she and Fogg got along so well. He accepted her evasions, never pried.

“What are you mastering tonight, then?” he inquired.

She held up her ukulele.

“To be brutally honest, I’m not familiar with a large oeuvre of ukulele compositions,” he said. “What led you to pick up the instrument?”

“Just decided one day,” she replied. “When you lock up, bring in the barrel, I think.”

Already on the drive to Monmouth, rain poured down. At the home of her teacher, she rushed from the car, ukulele and sheet music under her shirt. On her request, they practiced “The William Tell Overture.” She played one part, her teacher accompanied, then they switched. What delight, this synchrony, the development, leaning into the phrases, a melody emerging from black dots on the staves, marks inked there in 1828, communicating across all this time! It was such excitement that, at times, she could barely strum.