The Clocks

As he went out he asked, ‘By the way, who chose your niece’s Christian names, Rosemary and Sheila? Your sister or yourself?’

‘Sheila was our mother’s name. Rosemary was my sister’s choice. Funny name to choose really. Fanciful. And yet my sister wasn’t fanciful or sentimental in any way.’

‘Well, good night, Mrs Lawton.’

As the inspector turned the corner from the gateway into the street he thought, ‘Rosemary-hm…Rosemary for remembrance. Romantic remembrance? Or-something quite different?’

Chapter 13

Colin Lamb’s Narrative

I walked up Charing Cross Road and turned into the maze of streets that twist their way between New Oxford Street and Covent Garden. All sorts of unsuspected shops did business there, antique shops, a dolls’ hospital, ballet shoes, foreign delicatessen shops.

I resisted the lure of the dolls’ hospital with its various pairs of blue or brown glass eyes, and came at last to my objective. It was a small dingy bookshop in a side street not far from the British Museum. It had the usual trays of books outside. Ancient novels, old text books, odds and ends of all kinds, labelled 3d., 6d., 1s., even some aristocrats which had nearly all their pages, and occasionally even their binding intact.

I sidled through the doorway. It was necessary to sidle since precariously arranged books impinged more and more every day on the passageway from the street. Inside, it was clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down. The distance between bookshelves was so narrow that you could only get along with great difficulty. There were piles of books perched on every shelf or table. On a stool in a corner, hemmed in by books, was an old man in a pork-pie hat with a large flat face like a stuffed fish. He had the air of one who has given up an unequal struggle. He had attempted to master the books, but the books had obviously succeeded in mastering him. He was a kind of King Canute of the book world, retreating before the advancing book tide. If he ordered it to retreat it would have been with the sure and hopeless certainty that it would not do so. This was Mr Solomon, proprietor of the shop. He recognized me, his fishlike stare softened for a moment and he nodded.

‘Got anything in my line?’ I asked.

‘You’ll have to go up and see, Mr Lamb. Still on seaweeds and that stuff?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well, you know where they are. Marine biology, fossils, Antarctica-second floor. I had a new parcel in day before yesterday. I started to unpack ’em but I haven’t got round to it properly yet. You’ll find them in a corner up there.’

I nodded and sidled my way onwards to where a small rather rickety and very dirty staircase led up from the back of the shop. On the first floor were Orientalia, art books, medicine, and French classics. In this room was a rather interesting little curtained corner not known to the general public, but accessible to experts, where what is called ‘odd’ or ‘curious’ volumes reposed. I passed them and went on up to the second floor.

Here archaeological, natural history, and other respectable volumes were rather inadequately sorted into categories. I steered my way through students and elderly colonels and clergymen, passed round the angle of a bookcase, stepped over various gaping parcels of books on the floor and found my further progress barred by two students of opposite sexes lost to the world in a closely knit embrace. They stood there swaying to and fro. I said:

‘Excuse me,’ pushed them firmly aside, raised a curtain which masked a door, and slipping a key from my pocket, turned it in the lock and passed through. I found myself incongruously in a kind of vestibule with cleanly distempered walls hung with prints of Highland cattle, and a door with a highly polished knocker on it. I manipulated the knocker discreetly and the door was opened by an elderly woman with grey hair, spectacles of a particularly old-fashioned kind, a black skirt and a rather unexpected peppermint-striped jumper.

‘It’s you, is it?’ she said without any other form of greeting. ‘He was asking about you only yesterday. He wasn’t pleased.’ She shook her head at me, rather as an elderly governess might do at a disappointing child. ‘You’ll have to try and do better,’ she said.

‘Oh, come off it, Nanny,’ I said.

‘And don’t call me Nanny,’ said the lady. ‘It’s a cheek. I’ve told you so before.’

‘It’s your fault,’ I said. ‘You mustn’t talk to me as if I were a small boy.’

‘Time you grew up. You’d better go in and get it over.’

She pressed a buzzer, picked up a telephone from the desk, and said:

‘Mr Colin…Yes, I’m sending him in.’ She put it down and nodded to me.