Long Sonata of the Dead Read Free Page B

known copy in a collection that was accessible to the public, though there may have been a few in private hands.
    The Voice of Angels was valuable not just for its rarity and for the extra poem. This particular copy had penciled marginalia by Youlgreave himself. Some of them are illegible, but not all.
    Best of all, on the endpaper at the back, Youlgreave had jotted down a number of disjointed lines and clusters of words—fragments, I believed, of a poem he hadn’t lived to write. One phrase leapt out at me when I first saw it: the long sonata of the dead.
    I recognized the phrase. This was going to be one of the main revelations of my biography. Samuel Beckett had used the identical words in his novel Molloy , which he published nearly half a century after Youlgreave’s death. It was too unusual to be dismissed as coincidence. To clinch the matter, “The Children of Heracles” included the line: What words and dead things know. Beckett had used an almost identical phrase in Molloy.
    There was only one conclusion: that Beckett had somehow seen The Voice of Angels, this very copy that I had found in the London Library, and he had admired it enough to plagiarise at least two of Youlgreave’s lines.
    Now I had to face the possibility that Adam was going to take that from me too.
    All this passed through my mind as I stood there with Adam’s phone in my hand.
    I still had one thing in my favor: The Voice of Angels was safe on my shelf at home. It wasn’t listed in the library’s computer catalogue yet, only in the older catalogue, which consists of huge bound volumes with strips of printed titles pasted inside, the margins of the pages crowded with hand-written annotations by long-dead librarians. But, if Adam were serious about Youlgreave, sooner or later he would track it down and put in a request for it. Then I would have to return it to the library.
    It was possible he wouldn’t notice the discrepancy in the title. It was possible, even, that he wasn’t doing anything significant on Youlgreave. That was what I really needed to find out.
    I thought of Mary right away. She would know—she was credited as a researcher on the documentaries and in the books. And it would give me an excuse to see her, which was what I wanted to do anyway.
    But did I want to see her? The very thought terrified me. Since Adam had walked into the London Library, all the comfortable certainties that shored up my life had crumbled away. Would she even talk to me after all these years? What would happen if I showed her the message on Adam’s phone and proved to her that her husband was having an affair?
    I had a practical problem to solve first of all. I didn’t even know where to find her. Adam hadn’t included his private address in his Who’s Who entry. The library would know it but members’ addresses were confidential.
    That was when I remembered the crumpled envelope I had found in the Burberry. I took it out again. It was a circular addressed to Adam. There was the address: 23 Rowan Avenue.
    I glanced over my shoulder. No one was looking at me. I slipped the phone into my trouser pocket.
    The library kept a London A-Z. Rowan Avenue was out towards Richmond, not far from Kew Gardens.
    I gave myself no time to think. I took my coat and left the library. I cut across Pall Mall and the Mall and went into St. James’s Park. Hardly anyone was there because of the rain. My hair and my shoulders were soaked by the time I reached Queen Anne’s Gate. A moment later I was at the Underground station. I was trembling with cold and, I think, excitement.
    Proust was right about his madeleine.
    Once something unlocks the memories they come pouring out. I was drowning in mine just because I’d seen a man standing in the rain outside the London Library.
    Adam had always been a bastard, I thought. People don’t change, not really. As time passes, they just become more like themselves.
    I didn’t have to wait more than a couple of minutes for a