The Small Hand Read Free Page B

and senior posts, and none has ever struck me as likely to take a long lunch, or even in some cases a lunch at all. It is not their way. So I was delighted when Fergus McCreedy, a very senior man at the Bodleian, suggested we walk from there up to lunch at the Old Parsonage. It was a warm, bright summer’s day and Oxford was, as ever, crowded. But in August its crowds are different. Parties of tourists trail behind their guide, who holds up a red umbrella or a pom-pom on a stick so as not to lose any of his charges and language-school students on bicycles replace undergraduates on the same. Otherwise, Oxford is Oxford. I always enjoy returning to my old city, so long as I stay no more than a couple of days. Oxford has a way of making one feel old.
    Fergus never looks old. Fergus is ageless. He will look the same when he is ninety as he did the day I met him, when we were both eighteen and in our first week at Balliol. He has never left Oxford and he never will. He married a don, Helena, a world expert on some aspect of early Islamic art, they live in a tiny, immaculate house in a lane off the lower Woodstock Road, they take their holidays in countries like Jordan and Turkistan. They have no children, but if they ever did, those children would be, as so many children of Oxford academics have always been, born old.
    I had not seen Fergus for a couple of years. We had plenty to catch up on during our walk to lunch and later while we enjoyed a first glass of wine at our quiet table in the Old Parsonage’s comfortable dining room. But when our plates of potted crab arrived, I asked Fergus about his letter.
    ‘As you know, I have a very good client who has set me some difficult challenges in the past few years. I have usually found what he wanted – he’s a very knowledgeable book collector. It’s a pleasure to work with him.’
    ‘Not one of the get-me-anything-so-long-as-it-costs-a-lot brigade, then.’
    ‘Absolutely not. I have no idea how much he’s worth or how he made his money, but it doesn’t signify, Fergus, because he loves his books. He’s a reader as well as a collector. He appreciates what I find for him. I know I have a living to earn and money is money, but there are some I could barely bring myself to work for.’
    I meant it. I had had an appalling couple of years being retained by a Russian oil billionaire who only wanted a book if it was publicised as being both extremely rare and extremely expensive and who did not even want to take delivery of what I bought for him. Everything went straight into a bank vault.
    ‘So your man wants a First Folio.’
    Our rare fillet of beef, served cold with a new potato and asparagus salad, was set down and we ordered a second glass of Fleurie.
    ‘I told him it was more or less impossible. They’re all in libraries.’
    ‘We have three,’ Felix said. ‘The Folger has around eighty. Getty bought one a few years ago of course – that was sold by one of our own colleges.’
    ‘Oriel. Yes. Great shame.’
    Felix shrugged. ‘They needed the money more than the book. I can understand that. A small private library in London with a mainly theological collection, Dr Williams’s Library, sold its copy a year or so back for two and a half million. But that endows the rest of their collection and saves it for the foreseeable future. It’s a question of balancing one thing against another.’
    ‘If you had a First Folio would you sell it?’
    Felix smiled. ‘The one I have in mind as being just possibly for sale does not belong to me. Nor to the Bodleian.’
    ‘I thought every one of the 230 or so copies was accounted for?’
    ‘Almost every one. It was thought for some years that apart from all those on record in libraries and colleges and a few in private hands, there was one other First Folio, somewhere in India. But almost by chance, and by following up a few leads, I think I have discovered that that is not the case.’
    He helped himself to more salad. The room