He Wants Read Free Page B

disappointing grade. He does not know where his old textbooks are though. He does not want to have to buy them all over again. He says to Ruth, ‘Do you know where my old maths books are?’
    â€˜No,’ she says. ‘What maths books? You don’t mean your old school books? What do you want them for? It’s all done differently now, you know. Everything’s changed since your day.’ She wanders over to the bookshelves. ‘You’re always losing your books.’
    He has only recently noticed just how many Bliss Tempest novels Edie managed to accumulate. They were just about all she read, and she read them repeatedly. She read them in bed; he would switch off his lamp and she would still be reading. There was always one on her bedside table. He has been finding them all over the house, in fact. He has been collecting them up and putting them back onto his wife’s shelf in the living room. She probably has the writer’s entire oeuvre. Some of them, she once told him, were out of print and could only be got from second-hand bookshops or private collectors. ‘They might be worth something one day,’ she said. The men in them always reminded her of Lewis. She mentioned this to him and he was amused to imagine himself as a character in a romance because he did not think of himself as a romantic man. He himself has never read these well-thumbed books of Edie’s. His books are on the shelves above – his literature, along with his father’s, the bibles and reference books.
    Despite his efforts, though, despite the returning of all these books to the shelves, there are still gaps where there should not be gaps, spaces at which he stares, wondering what is missing, becoming anxious about books that might have been borrowed and might never be returned.
    Edie used to drive the mobile library to the villages, scattering books, it seemed to Lewis, far and wide, driving off leaving them strewn, like the books she sometimes left behind in hotel rooms or on the roof of their car as they drove away. She claimed not to do this, but she did; the books went missing.
    Lewis remembers how the library tipped very slightly towards you as you entered, when you put your weight on the steps, and how it swayed underfoot while you were browsing. In the mobile library, the librarian still stamps the book’s paper insert, printing the date in black or purple ink, just like in real libraries in the sixties. In the town library now, you don’t take your books to the lady behind the desk, you put your books into an opening in a big, black machine that scans them. You can leave without speaking to a soul.
    When Edie retired, she missed driving the mobile library, doing her rounds, seeing the countryside, and so Lewis, who had not been to the smaller villages for a very long time, drove her out there. He remembers pointing out some cows he saw galloping across a field. ‘Cows don’t gallop,’ said Edie, who had not noticed them. But Lewis had seen them; he had seen them galloping through the thick grass. He loved driving through the countryside and the villages, slowing for horses, pausing to admire some particularly attractive cottage, coming to a stop outside the only house in a terrace that was not plastered and painted or clad, its bare bricks giving it an exposed and vulnerable appearance. Later, he went back on his own, although he found the drive lonely without Edie. Coming to a stop outside that unclad house, he sat gazing towards it, his engine idling. He eyed the fine yellow car parked in the street at the front, and peered down the side of the house towards the back door, which was ajar. He saw the grey head of a man bent forward in the garden, working his way along the borders. He could not see the man’s face. Lewis wound down his window, his engine still running. The man, slowly standing, a few dead plants hanging from his hands, looked out towards the street and,