1

Richard Bentley knelt inside his bookshop’s window case. Wizened hands adjusted a book here, a creased drape cloth there. He wore his favorite jeans, faded and soft and frayed along the bottoms, a split across each knee. The first sunshine in days lay on the sill like a newly dropped doily, cleaned, starched, and showing the lemony tints of age. Bentley’s hand moved through the sunlight, holding a book. His brown loafers were hooked over the platform edge in the attitude of a Sunday snoozer. His tie swung as he moved, not unlike Poe’s pendulum, he thought, but in this story only helping to dust the book heads. He stopped long enough to look through the window, his way of separating the day into many fragments between work, thought, rest, and a hot meal taken near ten at night.

Bentley breathed. Isn’t it enough to call out to the world I don’t know anything! and be happy with what you have? If said loud enough—in a caustic, soylent voice—you can find enough foresight to help plan the clothes-washing cycle and market shopping. Isn’t that enough? No, no. I’m not cut out to be a bum, he thought. Sometimes none of us knows what the hell we are doing, but I know where to buy used books and how talk to people dithering between titles held in their grabby, scales-of-justice hands, then send them out the door with both books in a bag, their cash in my pocket. That’s useful business and, okay, so take it all and five dollars, too, and you can buy a cup of coffee and … a used book. Not a bad way to spend time. He exhaled.

Outside, Heath-on-the-Wold had awakened late to this year’s spring, and nearing noontime now the sunshine had dried storefronts along High Street, their water stains fading into the brick façades and stone foundations, the eaves less weighted in their sag, windows smiling in blue tint, doors agape with laughter, all having felt the force of sheet rain for a full week running under green-blue clouds, like the scene on a William Turner canvas. Bentley was half-surprised not to see roots growing up from the ground, their white fingers reaching for the sun’s golden life force, shining and blinding. Across the road, a middle-aged mother in blue curlers and red tartan skirt towed her recalcitrant girl child away from a gift shop window. A pointed finger and chilling wail broke the calm warmth the sunlight had promised would stay for a few hours.

At least he liked his bookshop, Bentley thought. “There is that,” he said aloud—Bentley was saying a lot of things aloud lately that were meant for himself but where others could hear—he finished with “Every action has its consequence.” Shakespeare said: To business that we love we rise betime / And go to’t with delight. The shop has hardwood flooring that creaks to let you know it’s alive.

He picked up a 1962 edition of Borges’ Labyrinths, ran his thumb down its smooth brown spine, then placed the book upright on the black muslin fabric. His cottage, too, Bentley thought, he liked his two-bedroom cottage on Sycamore Lane with its garden he did not design and seldom saw in daylight anymore. He used them rarely nowadays—cottage and garden—because he found himself always working at the bookshop. Bentley even had doubts about his knowledge of Heath-on-the-Wold, a golden town by virtue of the particular shade of sandstone quarried from beneath the Cotswolds topsoil, stacked like sugar cubes and covered by slate tiles. Heath’s buildings glowed in morning and evening sun like the candlelight on a miner’s tin helmet. He knew Heath just as much as he needed to know to run a successful business, and so he ran with the idea that people were the same all over because he’d learned this was true, more or less, despite the human impulse towards pettiness and … Wasn’t the one description enough? Yes. So it was good that he liked his little bookshop, he thought again, a place for him to sort his books, shelve them, pack shipments, talk with customers about books and about stories and about reading—and talk of his “house music” came up, too—a place to avoid discussing “the society of watchers” England and America had become in the era where televisions are found in every room of the house. Bentley read some of his books, too. Who owns a bookshop and doesn’t open a few covers every hour or so, just to absorb that other place through the colored glass? He also liked the bookshop’s name, The Village Wit, a title that described all manner of rural life. If the name was pretentious it was so in a literary way, a forgivable gesture at marketing. He had thought about all these things a lot lately, which was also good for Bentley.

Only, the bookshop had taken over his life, of a sort. He had moved from the States not long ago to buy the storefront—eschewing a try in London for obvious reasons—to renovate the space, make it into a used bookshop exactly for a singular purpose: to have a business that could consume the hours, now that Nan was gone. Well, left. So he got what he had wanted, and was happy, mostly. His plan was working. But then what does happy really mean? The word was loaded with innuendo, riddled with assumptions. Both depended on who was being asked, and who was questioning. Bentley had thought about this a lot lately, too, which was less good for him.

Nan had told him she was happy, and that she loved him. She said so using soft voices, screeches, and coos nearly every day of their marriage, right up to the day she told him she wasn’t, and didn’t. Bentley thought that was a case of assumption. Just when they had hit their stride, gotten life working with them, not fighting the current, she decided that marriage was not what she wanted. Odd as her decision was to him that black day, and the gray days following, he felt she’d never meant any harm by leaving him. Before marriage, they had agreed that if either was no longer happy, the other would not prevent happiness being found elsewhere. Best-laid plans reads the cliché. Beside the point, really, because now another memory of another time came to mind. Its colors were deep river and autumn aspen leaves. He didn’t want to remember that event, so he closed his mind to the image pushing against the membrane he hoped had not grown thin.

Bentley fiddled with four of his newest books, rare volumes of English and Irish and Scottish tales. They stood paddle wheel style on a shelf he’d made with an empty wooden box draped in ivory muslin. Black and ivory columns, chessboard colors to seize attention. Five boxes surrounded him in the window case, each a different height, pedestals stacked with books for a casual glance or discriminate study: old fiction titles, not-quite-new fiction, children’s lit, Cotswolds history and countryside cookbooks, a few books on London, a few on Continental travel and American travel. The art of knowing the clientele’s tastes is the art of being a good merchant. While he adjusted the books he saw shadows pass across his hands, short fat shadows of people walking past the shop. He didn’t look up.

There was a time in his life, he recalled, girlfriend-less days at fifteen and sixteen years old, when he wanted nothing more than to lavish one woman with love, respect, care, and understanding. That had happened for him one-and-a-half times in his life. Hmm. And so … he was alone now—forty-seven and just about ready to send a postcard to the ex with a bon mot Thanks for my life back, lady. He loved his bookshop in little Heath-on-the-Wold, away from everything. This little round of England.

Bentley backed out of the window case, brushed the lint from his knees, heard the joints crack ligaments roll. His breathing sounded like the noise of a sleeper awakened from a falling dream; behind him a newspaper page was flipped in lazy haste. Then silence as his hearing moved from acute to passive. He walked outside. Songbirds were perched on stunted tree limbs of live oaks planted in sidewalk holes, flora and fauna yet loosening to this early spring. Looking at his window case, Bentley nodded at the effect he’d created with shelves and contrasted muslin, and the books.

Books don’t line themselves upright, like magic plays a role to draw eyes to gilt titles. Two hands put up their spines—the talking part of a book cover—so they attentively look through the window and say to sidewalk shoppers, “Buy Me!” Black covers, smudge-worn from use or neglect … or negligent use; they do not shine alone against the sun peaking over the windowsill. Form comes from careful attention paid by me: Mr Bookseller. Attention, too, for the townspeople and wanderers through the green fields and stubby hills surrounding Heath, stretching a dozen leagues in every direction: a beguiling English web where one could yet find clear bubbling streams, air scented by white campion and wild rose and lavender and helenium, winding black-earth footpaths leading through green bramble and shadowy forest, within which caramel-colored tits and white-bellied wrens poked for fallen seeds with competitive busyness, a land where gorse-strewn heath meets wooden fences and iron kissing gates, a place of bracken and heather, oak groves and juniper patches, all these bits that put in mind a midsummer’s night—fairies whispering behind yews—of idleness and mischief, knights’ tales & fated damsels, and moonlit creepies running against the blue-black. He coughed, went inside, and closed the door.

Standing again at the broad window, he watched the world beyond the word. A young man wearing a narrow-rimmed blue cap tripped on the uneven walk; a woman wrapped in brown serge watched him catch his balance in a lurch of shoulders and hips, then look with a stormed expression for witnesses; a green car slowed in one direction as a red car slowed in the other, and once stopped abreast, the drivers, two old men, called to each other between their rolled-down windows while waiting cars built up behind them like water forced into a clogged pipe; a group of children, boys wearing maroon blazers with a silver crest sewn over the breast pocket, rushed past his window going up High Street towards St Catherine’s College, all the while pushing tripping poking screaming dance-walking to the rhythms of their age; across the street a man struggling with his cane paused to look into the sky just as the sun passed behind a cloud that took away all shadows, only to reappear with a sudden burst of yellow light that forced his gaze back to the ground. Without all the people that walk by every day, everywhere, anywhere, writers would have no stories to tell, Bentley thought. The idea so amused him that he shoved his hands in his pockets and rocked on his heels. Promptly, he frowned.

Here comes a character now, he saw, “And she’s about to die.” Said with the same drama he’d use ordering toast and coffee.

Mina Daily, seventeen years old and plump and perhaps not long for this world, walked into the street with a bit of a hitch to her step, directly into the path of a truck. She stopped to dance, hands up, hips swaying to a beat known only to her, but one she was willing to teach the truck driver. Then the truck’s horn alerted all living things. Wheels locked, tires leaped across the pavement, leaving black hyphens on the street. Mina jumped a foot straight up. It would have been one hell of a dance step, Bentley thought, if she had thrown it for real. Name it The Sheer Terror. He flinched as the truck’s fender clipped her trailing skirt just as she found her feet and bolted forward.

“Her savior watches from the fiery depths,” Bentley breathed out in a low voice. The words came from his dreams of the Grim Reaper tapping a candidate on the shoulder at those least-expected times.

A second horn blast disturbed birds on a wire, sending them in different directions, wings beating the air in silence beyond Bentley’s window. Mina ran onto the sidewalk in front of the store. There she pulled tiny earphones from the drape of her black hair. The shadow-faced driver yelled something from his cab as he jumped the clutch in a cough to move it along. Mina turned and waved. Was this thanks for not squashing her like a piece of spoiled fruit?

Within three heartbeats, all became ordinary again in the street. Death cheated out of a dark delight this time, Mina looked at the bookstore and recognized Bentley through the window. She flashed him a rose-cheeked smile. He grinned at Mina, but it was not that kind of Hallo, how are’ya?! squeezed across his lips.

Mina’s little white teeth showed behind the window like Huck Finn’s picket fence, mounted between black-painted lips greased over as she liked to do with a Picasso flare beyond the ordinary. The shade of her makeup nearly matched that of her tooth enamel. She looked to have shimmied herself into a green seaman’s jacket, tailored at the waist, with a big red stocking cap that slung down across the left side of her head, in the fashion of a 1930’s chambermaid out on a day trip, perhaps. A single rope of raven hair showed at her collar, like an asp hanging from a tree branch.

He grimaced at the black lace hosiery covering a pair of thick legs jutting below the hem of a short, pleated skirt, also black. The holes in the stockings looked like cobwebs pregnant with desire, obviously the point intended, though he knew she would not have found that metaphor herself. Her description might have come out as, “It looks fucking mental, do’nit?”

Bentley hadn’t minded any of Mina’s costuming, even though the Goth thing seemed passé by a good few years for her set. But he knew kids were kids and they all went through phases. He had done so himself (tattered letterman’s jacket with a big tennis racket on the back, unwashed for two years) so why step on a kid’s right to nonconformity? It toughened them for the larger world on the far side of mum & dad’s care, as did simple experiences like being fired from a job. Well, Mina was nearly past her Ms Dark phase, he thought; her renewed sense of color in fashion belied the whole bats-in-the-night element that seemed integral to a Goth’s image.

Bentley reached over and flipped the lock catch on the door just as Mina gripped the handle. Her smile faded.

“Hey—what’s this all about now?” She pushed on the handle but got no satisfaction. “Right. Open up!” She rattled the knob.

Bentley shook his head. He had an expressive face, people had told him, and sometimes he used it consciously. His communications often came with a series of fluid smiles, frowns, puckers, and all sorts of animal-kingdom ticks, letting people know, subtly or not, when-how-and-even-what he was thinking. In one look he revealed how he might answer, at the next he gave the answer, his voice electric with enthusiasm, even if the subject were death, sexual excess in rural England, or home repair. He had no fear of self-contradiction because he liked a good argument, even with himself. He moved in front of the glass door and spoke to her through the barrier.

“You’re fired, Mizzz Dark.”

The news smoothed the wrinkles of spreading glower. She looked up at her boss, tilting her head as a puppy does to her master, an expression of insistent questioning—where is the ball? WHERE is the ball?! Bentley held up his hand, fingers spread wide for Mina to see clearly.

“That’s five days in a row, Mina. More than an hour late each day! I don’t need another slacker. Come pick up your wages on Friday, past noon.”

Mina’s cheeks got pudgy with a show of regret. This might have comforted Bentley with the possibility that he’d just taught her a valuable lesson, only she stopped short of striking that image when she raised her right hand in a fist, flipped him her middle finger, and tapped the window. The black nail had chipped ends. She turned with a swirl of her short skirt and walked off. Bentley watched her pleats bounce with her bobbing hips.

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