The Stargazey (9 page)

Browne looked as if he could spit. His voice full of venom, he said, “I can't have my books come back torn and smudged all over.”

“No, I expect not.” Melrose looked the book over for identifying marks, found several he clearly remembered from young Sally's debacle with
Patrick, the Painted Pig,
and said, the taste of the words more delicious than chocolate on the tongue, “Only, this book”—Melrose held it up and tilted it back and forth—“this book doesn't belong to
you,
Mr. Browne.” Melrose could scarcely remember when he'd been more tempted to jump up and click his heels. But he kept his feet on the floor.

“It most certainly does. Here's my library card in back.” He flipped the book to the back cover, where he'd placed a pocket to hold the lending record.

“Oh, yes, it was yours
once. Originally
yours. But have you forgotten, when Sally brought it back several months ago—also, alas, late—that I purchased it from
you
and gave it to
her
?”

Browne opened his mouth, closed it, opened it, stood speechless. Finally, he said, “Well, but then why is young Bub here bringing it back?”

Young Bub, however, was no longer “here.” The moment he'd seen that an adult was at hand to take up the cudgel, he'd departed on greased feet.

“I'll hazard a guess: Mum found it, had no idea anyone had actually bought and paid for it, and, as Bub happened to be there to take the flak, hurriedly sent him round with it. Only a guess, of course, but does it matter?”

Theo Wrenn Browne clearly thought it mattered. His complexion was mottling from misty gray to pale umber to a flush of pink as his blood rose like a sunrise over the Norfolk Broads. “Well. That whole family's careless as can be. The mum doesn't teach those kids manners any better than a mongoose!”

Melrose thought for a moment about mongooses while Theo Wrenn Browne punched his computer, entering the price of Melrose's magazine
and reminding him, with a leer, that he'd also taken a KitKat, as if this would leave Melrose with no recourse but to stand on the corner with a begging bowl. He fingered and fingered the computer—it simply amazed Melrose that the machine supposed to take the pain out of all sorts of niggling jobs took more time to perform a simple one than it would have taken Bub to do by hand ten times over. The computer sent its morsel of information to the printer and the printer spit it out, a receipt as long as Magna Carta.

Seeking revenge, Browne looked at the magazine and said, “I wouldn't have thought you'd have much interest in this.” He shook out a brown bag, placed the lowly (and garishly colored) astrology magazine in it, and added, “I'd've expected you to take Caesar's line.” He looked at Melrose with his crimped little smile.

Melrose didn't know what he was talking about.

“Well, my goodness, Mr. Plant, a
well-read
person such as
yourself,
you should know
that:
‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.' That's sound advice, now, ain't it?”

Melrose shrugged as he picked up the bag. “I wouldn't know, not being an underling.”

 • • • 

He whistled a tuneless tune and crossed the street to the Jack and Hammer, which would be open by now. Long Piddleton had not gotten around to keeping London hours and probably never would. The pub kept to the old eleven o'clock opening; it was now nearly noon, and Melrose felt the need of a preprandial Old Peculiar.

Dick Scroggs was, as usual, reading the local paper. As he watched the level of Old Peculier rise in the glass, Scroggs told Melrose that it was “disgraceful” what that Browne fellow was doing to the library's business and therefore to Miss Twinny, the librarian.

“I mean, she's at our little library forty years, ain't she? Well, they've been looking for a reason to close it down and that Browne's given 'em one.” Dick frowned over Melrose's half pint of dark brew and went on. “I mean, that job's her
life,
innit? Oh, sure, she'll get her pension—if
anyone's
going to get a pension, these days; you never know, do you?—but it ain't the money with Miss Twinny.”

Melrose wondered how Dick, who had never mentioned the woman from one year's end to the next, had got on such friendly terms with Miss Twinny, ever since a so-called editorial had appeared in the Sidbury paper calling for “library reform.” It had probably been ghostwritten by Theo Wrenn Browne.

Dick set the glass before him, and Melrose said, “And a small glass of water, please.”

Dick frowned. “For what?”

“For my sweet pea.” Dick eyed him as if Melrose were touched by the sun, slapped down a shot glass, and measured water into it. Melrose thanked him and walked to his favorite table, the one with the window seat looking out over the street. The window was crossed by vines of climbing white roses, brown-edged from November cold, which ran rampant over the pub's facade and had lately threatened to throttle the mechanism of the Jack and Hammer's sign: a wooden figure up high in a turquoise jacket, who, upon the hour, would stiffly raise and lower his hammer to a forge, simulating strikes of the clock. The hammer was raised halfway now, frozen in space as if Jack and everyone down here were held prisoner in some doomed village.

The door opened, ushering in Diane Demorney and a current of cold air made colder owing to its proximity to Diane. Her arctic impression was much augmented by her white skin and her white clothes. She always wore white or black and was always as perfectly groomed as a Derby winner, not a shank of her black razor-cut hair out of place, not a wrinkle in her dress, not an unpolished nail or shoe. Melrose always had the impression that Diane's Art Deco angularity was carved out of the surrounding air, leaving everything beyond it, by contrast, slapdash and slipshod. Melrose always had the impulse to tidy up any space she walked through.

Unfortunately, this sharpness of outline did not extend to her mind. Diane's thoughts settled like murky sediment in a dark tarn, stirred occasionally into life by someone's tossing into it a bit of juicy and mendacious gossip. It amazed Melrose that people actually thought her marvelously intelligent. As often happens, such people equated intelligence with knowledge, and Diane did know things. Strange things. To offset her sluggish thinking, she had taught herself a single, usually
arcane fact about every topic imaginable—or at least every topic that was likely to come up in the boozy environs of drinks parties. Since she chose obscure facts—such as the writer Stendhal fainting in the presence of great art—it was assumed she knew everything else about the man, when she couldn't even tell you a book that he'd written. Now she was into stargazing, and the interesting thing was that what she was writing was—well, interesting.

Melrose stood and drew out a chair for her. She always took such small attentions as her due.

Referring to a column of print, Dick said, “This ‘Seein' Stars' is quite rich this week, Miss Demorney.”

“Oh, good,” said Diane, with a total lack of enthusiasm, as she plugged a cigarette into a six-inch ivory holder. She accepted Melrose's light, then called over to Dick Scroggs, still bent over his paper. “The usual over here, if you don't mind. I shouldn't have to ask you twice, should I?”

Dick took umbrage. “Twice? You only just came in, you only just asked. That's once.”

“I had to ask you yesterday, didn't I?”

Diane's preference was buffalo grass vodka, which she herself supplied. Yet she still paid him full price for the drink. No one would call Diane stingy. Next to Melrose and Marshall Trueblood, she was the biggest contributor to the Long Piddleton Save-Our-Library Fund.

“And I'll have another half pint, when you get around to it, thanks, Dick.”

“Why do you always get
half
pints, Melrose? It only means bobbing up and down for refills.”

“I like to bob.”

Dick had come with Diane's martini—handicapped at twelve-to-one—and brought the
Sidbury Star
with him. Before he collected Melrose's glass, he opened it to “Seeing Stars” and asked, “Now, what sign were you born under, Lord Ardry?”

“The Jack and Hammer.” Melrose held up his glass.

Diane said, “Capricorn.”

Melrose frowned. “How did you know? Besides writing horoscopes, or what passes for them, have you become psychic too? Do Capricornian
emanations pulse from my being? Do I have all those queer manifestations of Capricornianism, such as drinking half pints instead of pints?”

Diane just looked at him. “You told me your birthday.”

“Oh. My drink, Dick?” Melrose held out his glass.

“It's the sign of the Goat,” finished off Diane.

“Oh, ha. In case I'd forgotten?”

Paying no attention to the glass Melrose thrust toward him, Dick attended only to Melrose's zodiacal sign. “Just you listen, Lord Ardry—”

Melrose had given up his titles, but some people seemed determined to give them back. He could not break Dick Scroggs of the “my lord” habit and had given up trying.

“
This week you had better be extremely careful! With the Moon transiting Aries, your sex life is even more defunct than usual. You depend entirely too much on time, tides, and the stars to sort out your problems, especially your cold-footed approach to the opposite sex.

“
Get a life
.”

Dick thought this was extremely risible and added (never the one to know on which side his bread was buttered), “Oh, you got him right, there, Miss Demorney.” Then he collected Melrose's glass and, still chortling, went back to his beer pulls and optics.

“ ‘Get a life'? Why does that strike me as something a bona fide astrologer would
not
say?”

“Because most of them refuse to upset people”—a thing Diane would never hesitate to do, if it got her a soupçon of what she called “amusement.” She, who had always been languor's handmaiden, had taken over the horoscope column of the
Sidbury Star.
In the classified section of that paper (where she had been scanning the Personals in hopes of securing
WM, tall, ageless, loves travel, good food, spending money),
she had come upon a job offer to replace the woman who was retiring and leaving her column—“Seeing Stars”—in need of a writer.
Experience . . . wisdom . . . ability to relate to others.
None of this deterred her from applying, of course. But she made a gross error: she was under the impression the column's heading meant that the journalist would spend her time in the
company of celebrities—film folk, theater-and-music folk, savvy politicians, and artists.

She was hired on the spot, for who could possibly resist the soignée, cool-spoken, richly garbed, beautiful Diane? When she finally found out the column was to be written by the astrology consultant (herself), she gave it a whirl anyway, lacking anything better to do.

Diane's prognostications were always downers, ranging from the dour to the diabolical. There was no room for the glad tidings of the usual daily horoscope column: no inheritances, handsome strangers, promotions, cures, new jobs, money—none of that. The news was always bad. That or the reader had to put up with being preached at. And yet people appeared to like this approach. Melrose had heard circulation had increased a good twenty percent after Diane had “come on board.”

“I thought you'd like that,” said Diane, rinsing her olive in vodka. “I wrote it just for you.”

Melrose was about to tell her that star signs were not a just-for-you thing, when the door opened and another stiff wind shoved in Marshall Trueblood, as if the natural world didn't want him in it; yet in his customary vibrant colors he resembled Alice Broadstairs's garden. What could one call that shirt but periwinkle purple? That tie but sweet-pea pink? And that muted windowpane Armani sports coat: Could it be anything but love-in-a-mist blue?

Trueblood was in one of his Campari-and-lime moods, which is what he told Dick to bring him. Campari went with boredom and desuetude. He yawned, then asked, “Do you think I should go up to Oxford and read law? Perhaps that's what I'm meant to be—a barrister.” He'd been making these noises ever since his brilliant chamber-pot defense. “Yes, perhaps the law is really my destiny after all, and all these years I've been messing about with antiques.” He plucked the sweet pea from the shot glass and held it against his coat. “It just matches.” He plunged it back in its water and sighed. “Thank you, Dick.” Dick Scroggs had set his drink before him.

Diane looked shocked when Trueblood mentioned “reading” and “Oxford.” “Surely you're not serious! It would be masses of work, wouldn't it, Melrose? It could take you a whole year, maybe even more,
shut away in that gray tomb of a school with nothing but those screaming spires driving you mad.”

“ ‘Dreaming' spires, Diane,” said Melrose.

“Well, you've found your proper work, Diane,” said Trueblood. “That column of yours is extremely entertaining.”

“
Work
? I hope not. I hope I've managed to purge it of
work,
for heaven's sake!”

“By not knowing anything about astrology, yes,” said Melrose, still smarting from his weekly dose of Capricorn.

“Naturally. But writing horoscopes isn't the job I
applied
for, if you recall. If that's what the job turned out to be, it's no fault of mine. And it's been done quite well without going to some school to
read
something.” She turned to Trueblood. “Really, Marshall, don't even consider it. I'm almost sorry I wrote that nice little horoscope for you.”

“You never write a nice one for anybody, Diane. That's what makes it good.”