One Thousand Chestnut Trees. Mira Stout

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Hellfire Club, which I used on weekends and odd evenings. To keep up these two shelters, I held a full-time job uptown, with an antiquarian bookseller.

      

      In the mornings at nine-fifteen I took the crowded subway uptown to Fifty-ninth and Lexington, stopped in at Frankie’s for my styrofoamed coffee and salt-bagel with cream cheese, and entered a modest doormanned building with my grease-spotted paper bag.

      Through the bronze elevator doors awaited Oliver’s morocco-lined apartment, alias Cadogan Books, steaming with the force of three leather-preserving humidifiers. I let myself in with a key, and generally found Oliver, ruddy-faced, in a dark suit, tie, and half-lenses, sitting at the kitchen table sourly consuming a bowl of Frosted Flakes. He would be depressed about the uselessness of his life, occasioned by having spent another evening escorting a Mayflower matron to a dull gala at the Met.

      Being a handsome, albeit impecunious Englishman of leisure, Oliver Flood was popular with various Pamelas, Aprils and Brookes. Although he felt himself well above being a walker, he was quite unable to refuse invitations, however repulsive he found them. Newly divorced, he was flattered by any reasonable attention, and admitted to being rather lonely.

      After our usual morning banter, I would sit down at an elegant mahogany desk and attend first to the opening of Oliver’s mail, which he could not countenance without a human shock absorber. Sometimes plastic charge cards arrived snipped in two. Oliver confronted the arrival of credit card statements with the ritual of cowering in the kitchen doorway, half-lenses glinting, grunting softly, like an anxious primate. When the bill was very high, he hopped painfully from foot to foot, as if standing on hot coals.

      Then began the grinding, circumlocutory task of updating the Cadogan Books mailing list and card catalogue. With a sense of hopelessness, I typed and retyped on index cards the names of cautious collectors, second-hand bookshop-owners, and changing department-heads of a number of universities and their often peevish and grand librarians (to whom I had already written) to try to sell off some rare volume, but Oliver’s books were usually too rare or too common to tempt the holders of these immensely fat-budgeted university funds. Meanwhile, Cadogan Books limped along, each day a little closer to bankruptcy.

      Occasionally someone – Mrs Doris L. Vinehopper, for example, of 21 Mashpee Drive, Winnetka, Illinois 90987 – would mail-order two 1930’s editions of Omar Kháyyam’s Rubáiyát, and the fulfilment of Mrs Vinehopper’s desire would occupy the rest of the morning, dragged out with the aid of two further cups of coffee.

      The ritual of preparing the books for their journey to 21 Mashpee Drive lent a sense of purpose to my otherwise aimless days at Cadogan Books, and kept the mind from wandering to the unpleasant reality that one was not doing any painting at all. The sheer beauty of the books made me lethargic; their gilded embossing, the satin feel of the calf book covers, and their pages’ mysterious, mushroomy smell.

      But there was no slacking at Cadogan Books. Despite his considerable personal scattiness, Oliver was a stickler for book-wrapping formalities, hawkishly observing my erasure of extraneous pencil marks and smudges, the strategic insertion of a Cadogan Books compliments slip and invoice, cutting and snug taping of an underwear layer of sheet newsprint, followed by a vest of corrugated cardboard – Exact-O-knifed to precise cover dimensions – folded and taped to the tightest possible fit, and topped with a final overcoat of brown parcel paper, string reinforcement and sticky label: the book-wrapping equivalent of Jermyn Street winter tailoring.

      Oliver himself went to the Post Office to mail the books; this being one of the more glamorous of the day’s activities, and a rare chance for people to know that he was wearing a suit. But oddly, if there was an auction to attend at Swann’s or Sotheby’s – dizzyingly social events for us – Oliver would insist that I do the bidding. At first it seemed that he was being generous, varying tasks to minimize staff boredom, but it became apparent, from arch comments he made about rival dealers Ephraim Pastov and John Speed, that he found the openly mercantile aspect of his profession a bit grubby.

      While Oliver cut an enviable dash in the Post Office queue, selling books was one of his weaker points. His afternoons were generally spent attending art exhibitions, visiting the dry-cleaners’, lunching with potential clients, and sometimes listening to Puccini and Verdi, jotting down notes in an important hand for pedantic musical studies that he had been fine-tuning for years. Where such a desultory approach might be expected to yield limited results, Oliver was so annoyingly well-connected and clever that the books, however ordinary, and however long they might take to write, would be published by a decent house in England for quite a high fee, with no apparent negotiations undertaken.

      One January morning after the arrival of a particularly emasculating credit card demand, Oliver took in the bad news with uncharacteristic silence. He eyed a priceless book of 18th century botanical illustrations with stupendous colour plates.

      ‘Susan Yankowitz-Miller,’ he said, melodramatically announcing his intended sales target.

      ‘Do you have to?’

      He raised an eyebrow.

      ‘I suppose so,’ I said, glancing up from a new VISA statement. Perversely, Oliver appeared to hire his assistants for their flightiness and insubordination rather than their competence. My predecessor had been an London brewery heiress who dripped mayonnaise and nail polish onto the book covers, and conducted her intimidating social life on the phone in a particularly loud voice when introverted clients came to call.

      Oliver went into the kitchen, and after the usual noise of cascading dirty crockery that accompanied most kitchen visits, emerged with a half-empty bottle of vodka, settled into a cracked brown leather armchair near the telephone, and crossed his legs.

      ‘What are you doing? It’s only ten-thirty.’ Ignoring this obvious remark, he struggled to remove the cap. ‘She’s terribly pretty, you know, half his age,’ he said, taking a tense swig from the bottle.

      ‘Who?’

      ‘Susan Yankowitz-Miller. Airline hostess emeritus; richest wife of the year. Said she might be interested in the book.’

      ‘Since when are you and Susan Miller having chats?’

      ‘Yankowitz-Miller. She insists. Saw her at Nonie Warburton’s ghastly bridge evening … If she does bite, that would be a ready eight thousand in the coffers. You’ve got to ring her up for me now.’

      I protested.

      ‘You can. I pay you …’ Oliver handed me the bottle with a bland expression. I took an experimental pull. He passed me the number.

      ‘Meelair residence,’ said a distant Hispanic voice.

      ‘Hello, this is Mr Flood’s secretary calling for Mrs Miller.’

      ‘Mrs Meelair ees not home.’

      ‘May I please speak with her secretary?’

      ‘Chust a moment.’

      Oliver mouthed something. I waved him away.

      ‘Avedon Buckley speaking, Mrs Yankowitz-Miller’s personal assistant, may I help you?’ said a lockjawed, blaring female, as if guarding access to one of the more important Pentagon generals. A protracted and farcical exchange of rude evasions (secretary) and slimy begging (me) ensued, and at last the mighty Mrs Yankowitz-Miller consented to come to the phone, despite having no recollection of having been interested in buying a ‘book’ – a word she pronounced with СКАЧАТЬ