The House of Special Purpose Read Free

moments and I wondered whether I was debasing myself a little too much before him, but I had prepared these lines on my walk towards Bloomsbury in order to secure the position and thought them humble enough to satisfy a potential employer. I didn’t care if they made me sound like a servant. I needed work.
    ‘Very well, Mr Jachmenev,’ he said finally, nodding his head. ‘I think we’ll take a chance on you. A trial period to begin with, let’s say six weeks, and if we’re happy enough with each other at the end of that time we’ll have another little chat and see if we can’t make the position permanent. How does that sound?’
    ‘I’m very grateful, sir,’ I said, smiling and extending my hand in a gesture of friendship and appreciation. He hesitated for a moment, as if I was taking a tremendous liberty, before directing me to a second office where my details were recorded and my new responsibilities outlined.
    I remained in the employment of the library at the British Museum for the rest of my working life, and after my retirement I continued to visit almost every day, spending hours at the desks I used to clear, reading and researching, educating myself. I felt safe there. There is nowhere in the world I have ever felt so safe as within those walls. My whole life I have waited for them to find me, to find us both, but it seems we have been spared. Only God will separate us now.
    It is true that I have never been what you might term a modern type of man. My life with Zoya, our long marriage, was of the traditional variety. Although we both worked and returned home from our jobs at similar times in the evening, it was she who prepared our meals and took care of such domestic chores as laundry and cleaning. The idea that I might help was never evenconsidered. As she cooked, I would sit by the fire and read. I liked long novels, historical epics, and had little time for contemporary fiction. I tried Lawrence when it seemed daring to do so, but I stumbled over the dialect, Walter Morel’s dost s and nimbler s and threp’ny bit s, Mellors’ niver s and theer s. Forster I found more attractive, those earnest, well-intentioned Schlegel sisters, the free-thinking Mr Emerson, the wild Lilia Herriton. Sometimes I might feel moved to recite a particularly affecting passage aloud and Zoya would turn away from the sweating of the roast or the broiling of the pork chops to rest the front of her hand against her forehead in exhaustion and say What, Georgy? What is it you’re telling me? as if she had half forgotten that I was even in the room. It seems wrong that I did not play a greater part in the running of our home, but this was how family life was conducted in those days. Still, I regret it.
    I had not always intended my life to be quite so conservative. There were even moments, fleeting instances over more than sixty years together, when I resented the fact that we could not stand clear of our parents’ shadows and create our own individualized lifestyle. But Zoya, perhaps in recognition of her own childhood and upbringing, desired nothing more than to create a home which would fit in exactly with those of our neighbours and friends.
    She wanted peace, you see.
    She wanted to blend in.
    ‘Can’t we just live quietly?’ she asked me once. ‘Quietly and happily, behaving like others behave? That way, no one will ever notice us.’
    We made our home in Holborn, not far from Doughty Street, where the writer Charles Dickens lived for a time. I passed his house twice every day as I walked to and from the British Museum and, as I became more familiar with his novels through my work at the library, I tried to imagine him seated in the upstairs study, crafting the peculiar sentences of Oliver Twist . An elderlyneighbour once told me that her mother had cleaned for Mr Dickens every day for two years and that he had presented her with an edition of that novel with his signature upon the frontispiece, which she kept on a