Look at Me Read Free Page A

telling me what to do? I don’t tell you what to do, do I?’
    ‘You just have,’ says Olivia, who is never less than totally composed, and after that they subside for an hour or two, until dissension breaks out again over the matter of whether Mrs Halloran gets a cup of tea or not. Oddly enough, Olivia quite likes her, although I suspect that she finds her life in the Library rather painful at times. But she never says anything. How could she? Apart from her unspoken love for Nick, there is her unspoken dislike of his behaviour. Neither, of course, will ever register with him. It is when I think about this that Icongratulate myself on not being in love with anyone. I am not in love with Nick. I am not in love with Dr Leventhal (difficult to imagine) or Dr Simek (even more difficult) or even with James Anstey, even though he is tall and ferocious-looking and presentable and not married and undoubtedly what Mrs Halloran would call a bit of a handful.
    I used to make my mother laugh when I went home in the evenings and described the characters who came into the Library. ‘My darling Fan,’ she used to say, her eyes widening, ‘I think you have a gift.’ She knew all their habits, and where they lived; it was like a serial story to her. She encouraged me to write it all down, and so I bought the usual large exercise book and kept a sort of diary, and I like to think that one day I will use this material and write a comic novel, one of those droll and piquant chronicles enjoyed by dons at Oxford and Cambridge colleges. I could do it, I know. Since my mother died, I have had no one to talk to about these things, no one who is so interested, who knows the characters, who wants to find out what happens next, who responds with such delight. So I tend to write a bit more, these days, when I get home in the evenings, although it is not the same, and I have to struggle to keep a note of despondency out of what gets put down. In fact sometimes I have to struggle quite hard, because I do hate low-spirited people. I would even say I hate unfortunate people, which is why I do not enquire too closely about Dr Simek. I have put all that sort of thing behind me.
    And it seems that I am right to do so, because a short story I wrote – actually about the Library, although heavily disguised, of course – was once published. I was not on the whole as pleased with it as everyone else seemed to be, but I’m glad that my mother knew about it before she died. It was one I hadn’t read to her, whichin an odd way may have been just as well. She always took people more seriously than I try to do.
    So the days go by in an orderly fashion. I get up, I come to work, I have lunch with Olivia, I stick on the photographs, I even try to work out some of the pictures for myself. I find the power of images very strong, even when I do not understand them. Sometimes an image stands for something that will only be understood in due course. It is a mnemonic, a cryptogram, very occasionally a token of precognition. I pay very great attention to images, both at the Library and away from it. I spend a lot of time on my own, and the contents of my mind, which is nothing out of the ordinary, amaze me with their random significance. That is why I like the Library, not only for the task of classification which is its main purpose, but for the potency of its images, like the Fool on the Tarot card, or Melancholia with her torn book, or Goya with his doctor.
    The day goes on very peacefully, and eventually it gets dark and we start to tidy up. The light goes out in Dr Leventhal’s office, and we ask Dr Simek which photographs he wants kept out for the following day. After a time he puts on his old tight foreign overcoat and his astrakhan hat, ties his grey muffler, smoothes his heavy brown gloves over those permanently shaking hands, bows slightly to both of us, and leaves. Mrs Halloran asks if either of us is coming round to the Feathers, which she patronizes in