So Much Blood Read Free

coincidence. I’ve only moved into this house recently and I sold my previous one in Meadow Lane to a lad called Willy Mariello. Have you met him yet?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜No doubt you will. He’s with this lot. Well, the conversion here was more or less finished, but the summer’s not a good time to get permanent tenants—holidays, the Festival and so on. So when Willy said this crowd was looking for somewhere, I offered it for the six weeks.’
    â€˜Brave.’
    â€˜I don’t know. They pay rent. There’s no furniture, not much they can break. And they’ve sworn they’ll clean everything up before they go. I just hurry in and out and don’t dare look at the mess.’
    â€˜What about noise?’
    â€˜This flat’s pretty well insulated.’
    â€˜Largely by books, I should imagine. And this has only just been converted too? I can’t believe it.’
    The Laird glowed. Obviously Charles had said the right thing. But the flat did seem as if it had been there for centuries. Brown velvet upholstery and the leather spines of books gave the quality of an old sepia photograph. A library, an eyrie at the top of the building, it reminded Charles of his tutorials at Oxford. Dry sherry and dry donnish jokes. True, the sherry was malt whisky, but there was something of the don about James Milne.
    â€˜You like books?’ He half-rose from his chair, eager, waiting for the slightest encouragement.
    Charles gave it. ‘Yes.’
    â€˜They’re not first editions or anything like that. Well, not many of them. Just good editions. I do hate this paperback business. Some of the Dickens are quite good. And that Vanity Fair is valuable . . .’
    Charles wondered if he was about to receive a lecture on antiquarian books, but the danger passed. ‘. . . and this edition of Scott might be worth something. Though not to the modern reader. Nobody reads him nowadays. I wonder why. Could it be because he’s a dreary old bore? I think it must be. Even we Scots find him a bit of a penance.’ He laughed. A cosy-looking man; probably mid-fifties, with a fuzz of white hair and bushy black eyebrows.
    Charles laughed, too. ‘I’ve read half of Ivanhoe . About seven times. Like Ulysses and the first volume of Proust. Never get any further.’ He relaxed into his chair. ‘It’s very comforting, all those books.’
    â€˜Yes. “No furniture is so charming as books, even if you never open them or read a single word.” The Reverend Sydney Smith. Not a Scot himself, but for some time a significant luminary of Edinburgh society. Yes, my books are my life.’
    Charles smiled. ‘Wasn’t it another Edinburgh luminary, Robert Louis Stevenson, who said, “Books are all very well in their way, but they’re a mighty bloodless substitute for real life”?’
    James Milne chuckled with relish, which was a relief to Charles, who was not sure that he had got the quotation right. ‘Excellent, Charles, excellent, though the point is arguable. Let me give you a refill.’
    It turned out that the Laird had been a schoolmaster at Kilbruce, a large public school just outside Edinburgh. ‘I retired from there some five years ago. No, no, I’m not as old as all that. But when my mother died I came into some money and property—this house, an estate called Glenloan on the West coast, a terrace of cottages. For the first time in my life I didn’t have to work. And I thought, why should I put up with the adolescent vagaries of inky boys when I much prefer books?’
    â€˜And inky boys presumably don’t appreciate books?’
    â€˜No. Some seemed to—appeared to be interested, but . . .’ He rose abruptly. ‘A bite to eat perhaps?’
    Half a Stilton and Bath Olivers were produced. The evening passed pleasantly. They munched and drank, swapped quotations and examined the books. Their