The Silver Bough (4 page)

I
T HAD BEEN
raining in Appleton for four days solid.

Locals took the rainy weather as inevitable; some even welcomed it after a summer they’d found “close” or “too dry.” “Can’t complain,” they said cheerfully, bringing their books up to the library counter to be stamped out. “We had a lovely summer, and here it is almost October. Makes a break from the heat. The ground was awful dry, you know; my garden’s been crying out for it.”

When she heard this, Kathleen had to smile and bite her tongue. As a newcomer to Appleton she didn’t want to sound critical; nobody had made her come here to live. But her own opinion of the summer just past was that it had been far from dry, not to mention unseasonably chilly—and she
liked
rain. Growing up in the dry American Southwest, she’d found wet days refreshing. The smell of rain in the air made her hopeful. Even ten years spent living in England had not cured her of these feelings, but life on the west coast of Scotland might.

A child swathed in a large, shiny red slicker came in, banging the door loudly, holding a plastic bag up to the desk. “Here, I put my books in a bag to keep ’em dry, see?”

“That was clever.” She smiled and moved to take the bag, but he’d already started pulling books out, and his jerky movements released torrents of water from folds in the stiff, shiny fabric of his sleeves, drenching the books. She went on smiling and handed them on to Miranda, the assistant librarian, already waiting with a cloth.

The relentless, steady drum of raindrops on the roof, a sound she’d once found soothing, now made her prickle anxiously at the thought of more leaks. She had discovered three since the rain began, and her supply of buckets was now exhausted. She didn’t know what she’d do if a fourth one appeared. She’d reported the leaks to the head office, faxed through as
urgent,
but her hopes were not high. In a building as large and old as this one, repairs could be expensive, and everybody knew the county council was strapped for cash; they’d been cutting corners and eliminating “nonessential services” for more than twenty years.

Things were tough all over; having worked for nearly a decade in locally funded libraries, Kathleen was used to being on the receiving end of budget cuts, but Appleton had, in addition, its own particular problems, in consequence of its situation: “the farthest from anywhere, the closest to nowhere” as the local description had it. It had seemed a wonderfully distant and romantic place on her first visit. She’d been bewitched by the scenery, charmed by the clean, bright emptiness of the landscape and the peaceful, old-fashioned little town, and three months of living here had only made her fondness for it grow. But there was a price attached to living so far from everywhere else—a hundred miles from library headquarters, the farthest-flung of all council outposts. Even the most basic supplies cost more and took longer to arrive. The drivers of delivery vans didn’t like going to Appleton. It was the end of the road; nothing to do when you got there but turn around and go back. There were no alternative routes—nothing but a private airfield used mostly to ferry patients to hospitals in Glasgow—and the only road was no motorway but a narrow, winding, often badly rutted track that ran along the sea, where it was swept by high waves during storms, except when it climbed to higher, rocky ground, where there were a couple of tight and dangerous bends.

“Hear the weather report this morning?” Miranda asked when they were alone again.

“Let me guess: set to continue.”

“Worse, actually.” She put on a broadcaster’s voice: “Bad news for listeners in Scotland, with the fine, bright weather coming to an end as a heavy band of rain sweeps in from the west, affecting all parts by early Saturday morning.”

“
What
fine, bright weather?”

“That’s what they’ve been having in Glasgow, apparently. A real Indian summer. It was even on the news. Sunbathers outside the People’s Palace, didn’t you see—” She stopped, giving Kathleen a slightly wary look. “Um, do you
have
a television?”

“Oh, yes. But the reception in the Library House is terrible—the walls are too thick or something. I can’t get cable, because you’re not allowed to fix a satellite dish to the wall of a listed building; there’s even a problem with putting an aerial on the roof—it might pose a risk to the museum skylights…” She frowned. “You’re looking relieved. That’s not kind.”

“I was worried in case you were like Mr. Dean, with a
thing
against television.” Mr. Dean was the previous librarian. He had died six months short of his anticipated retirement, and seemed to have been an eccentric character, not generally adored.

“Of course, television wasn’t the only thing he disapproved of,” Miranda went on. “Although he was always railing against
old-fashioned superstition,
he also hated anything
too modern.
It was all decadence to him; I’m sure we could have had computers in the library by now—I’m sure there were central government funds available for that Millennium project to get everybody online—but, thanks to Arnold Dean, Appleton Public Library remains stuck in the past.” She picked up a date stamp and crashed it down savagely onto a pad of pink Post-its. “We’ll
never
get funding for it now; not from the council.”

Fraser Mann, the head of library services for the county, had told Kathleen before he hired her that both a computerized checkout system and Internet access for the public were in the pipeline at long last. Appleton Public Library would be the last in the county to go online, but the day was coming—although he wouldn’t be drawn into giving a specific date. He’d stressed that, although the salary was low compared with what she’d been making in London, she shouldn’t imagine she was walking into an undemanding job. The library was at present antiquated and underequipped, and, despite funding problems, it had to be brought up to date and into line with modern needs. Should she accept the job, Kathleen would be in the enviable position of presiding over the dawning of a new era in Appleton.

But since she’d taken on the job more than three months ago she’d not heard another word from him on the subject. She decided to say nothing about it to Miranda now, but to raise the issue with Fraser next week. She was well settled in now, and it was time to look to the library’s future.

“I get my news from the radio,” she said, bringing the conversation back to their original point. “I can even get Radio Four if I put it on the windowsill in the living room and point the aerial just exactly
so.
But I didn’t hear about the sunshine in Glasgow. I don’t hear much of the Scottish news, I’m afraid; I’m kind of a ‘Today’ addict. Very London-centric of me, I know.”

“My dear, you don’t have to apologize to
me
!” Miranda was English, and still had a rather posh, home-counties accent despite having lived in Appleton for eighteen years.

Kathleen glanced up at the clock and saw it was only half an hour until closing time. “I’d better go check on the buckets again.”

“I’ll write the notices so I can post them on my way home. Somehow, I don’t think I’ll be interrupted.”

They both gazed around the empty library and sighed. It was a day for sitting indoors with a good book, not going out in search of one, she mused, as she went out of the main room of the library into the imposing foyer. It was a large, echoing space with a high, vaulted ceiling, and felt as grand as a cathedral. Her eyes were naturally drawn upward, even when she wasn’t concerned about leaks. But she could hear the sound of splashing, and so for once did not pause to admire the magnificent stained-glass depiction of Adam and Eve and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil above the front entrance, but instead snatched up the mop she’d left close at hand and dealt with the puddle that had spread around the red plastic bucket.

Next she marched off to monitor the problem in the Ladies’ Reading Room. Although it had not been reserved for the use of females only since before she was born—it was now officially “the reading room”—she preferred to think of it by the name etched into the beautiful, glass-paneled door. It was not the coziest of rooms, although she imagined that it might have been, once, when fires were lit daily in the big fireplace (now boarded up). And there would have been a regularly changing display of magazines, and at least a dozen newspapers hanging from the reading poles instead of the three the current budget allowed for. The many-paned, leaded-glass windows, rattling under the assault of wind and rain, gave a view of the wide, palm-tree-lined Esplanade and, beyond it, the harbor. Today the view was a murky one, the sea and sky both grey and practically indistinguishable. She turned her back on the depressing sight to admire the panel above the fireplace. It was a mixed-media work, an oil painting on wood inset with colored glass and metal, depicting the Judgment of Paris in the faintly eerie, elegant Art Nouveau style that had been all the rage when the library was built.

Neither of the two leaks in this room seemed any worse than in the morning, when she’d discovered them. There was no mopping up required, and the buckets would likely be all right until morning. Much relieved, she went back to the counter in the main library where she found Miranda gazing thoughtfully at some sheets of paper.

“You look worried.”

She looked up, shaking her head. “I just found this. It’s a photocopy from the British Library—a reader’s request. I think it must have come in last week with some other things, only it slipped down behind the shelf, and I’m not sure if Connie sent out a notice about it—I know
I
didn’t.”

“Who’s the reader?”

“Mrs. Westray.”

Kathleen bent down to the card index of membership details kept on a shelf below the counter and pulled out the drawer marked
T-Z.
For her first few weeks in this job the reliance on such a traditional system of file cards and ledger books and book tickets had seemed impossibly primitive, as if she’d been thrown back in time to an age of hand-drawn water and quill pens, but by now it was second nature.

“The thing is,” Miranda went on, “I can send her a card, of course, but she wouldn’t get it until Monday, when we’re closed, and if she’s in any kind of hurry for it—she’s already had to wait, and it’s only a few sheets of paper. It wouldn’t cost more than a second-class stamp to mail it to her.”

Kathleen had found her card:

Westray, Eleanor Rowan (Mrs.)

Orchard House

Fairview Hill

Appleton

tel: 777 802

“Remind me who she is?”

“American lady, early thirties, attractive, rather tall, doesn’t say much, favors classics and the more literary modern fiction.”

“Oh, I know who you mean. I’ll give her a call.”

Miranda put the photocopy down on the desk in front of her, and Kathleen ran her eye over the top sheet as she waited for the phone to be answered. It was an extract from a book and an author completely unknown to her:
Pleasures of the Table
by Percival M. Lingerton.

“Hello, is that Mrs. Westray? It’s Kathleen Mullaroy from the library here. I think you requested something from the British Library…a photocopied extract…”

“Oh, yes.”

“Well, it’s arrived. Now, I could mail it to you, or—”

“I was planning on coming in tomorrow.”

“Oh, that’s fine! You can pick it up then. Just ask at the counter. You know our opening hours?”

That settled, she wrote “Mrs. E. Westray” on a Post-it note and stuck that to the top sheet before putting it on the shelf allotted to readers’ requests. Then she picked up her heavy ring of keys, and told Miranda, “I’m just going to check the museum and lock it up now; somehow, I don’t think we’ll get a last-minute surge of visitors today.”

“That does seem a bit unlikely.”

The entrance to the museum was located at the far end of the room, just past the children’s section. The big wooden door had been carved with a riot of Celtic-style intertwined forms, animals, birds, and foliage revolving around a central tree of life. Beyond it, the roof-lit museum was a dim and shadowy chamber, despite the banks of spotlights, echoing to the relentless drum of the rain. Ignoring the high-hanging oil paintings and the glass cases with their displays of stuffed birds, old coins, tools, and pottery, she peered up at the vaulted ceiling, painted a Wedgwood blue between the white struts and skylights, and held her breath to listen for the sound of an intrusive drip. A swift but careful circuit of the long gallery satisfied her that it was all still watertight, so she switched off the lights and locked up.