The Museum of Literary Souls

CHAPTER SEVEN

Mr. Berger returned to Caxton Library shortly after 10:00 a.m. the next morning on the basis that this was a reasonably civilized hour at which to appear, and if the Caxton was still in business, then it was likely that someone might be about at this time. The Caxton, though, remained as silent and forbidding as it had the previous evening.

With nothing better to do, Mr. Berger began making enquiries, but to no avail. General expressions of ignorance about the nature of Caxton Private Lending Library & Book Depository were his sole reward at the newsagent, the local grocery, and even among the early arrivals at the Spotted Frog. Oh, people seemed to be aware that the Caxton existed, but nobody was able to recall a time when it was actually in business as a lending library, nor could anyone say who owned the building, or if any books still remained inside. It was suggested that he might try the town hall in Moreham, where the records for the smaller hamlets in the vicinity were kept.

So Mr. Berger got in his car and drove to Moreham. As he drove, he considered that there seemed to be a remarkable lack of interest in Caxton Library among the townsfolk of Glossom. It was not merely that those to whom he spoke had forgotten about its existence until Mr. Berger brought it up, at which point some faint atavistic memory of the building was uncovered before promptly being buried again; that, at least, might be understandable if the library had not been in business for many years. What was more curious was that most people seemed to be entirely unaware of its existence and didn’t care very much to investigate further once it was brought to their attention. Glossom was a close-knit community, as Mr. Berger was only too well aware, for comments about hallucinations and train delays still followed him as he asked about the library. There appeared to be only two types of business in the town: everybody’s business, and business that was not yet everybody’s but soon would be once the local gossips had got to work on it. The older residents of the town could provide chapter and verse on its history back to the sixteenth century, and every building, old or recent, had its history.

All, that is, except Caxton Private Lending Library.

The town hall in Moreham proved to be a source of little illumination on the matter. The library building was owned by the Caxton Trust, with an address at a PO box in London. The Trust paid all bills relating to the property, including rates and electricity, and that was as much as Mr. Berger could find out about it. An enquiry at the library in Moreham was met with blank looks, and although he spent hours searching back issues of the local weekly paper, the Moreham & Glossom Advertiser, from the turn of the century onward, he could find no reference to Caxton Library anywhere.

It was already dark when he returned to his cottage. He cooked himself an omelet and tried to read, but he was distracted by the fact of the library’s apparent simultaneous existence and nonexistence. It was there. It occupied a space in Glossom. It was a considerable building. Why, then, had its presence in a small community passed relatively unnoticed and unremarked for so long?

The next day brought no more satisfaction. Calls to booksellers and libraries, including to the grand old London Library and the Cranston Library in Reigate, the oldest lending library in the country, confirmed only a general ignorance of the Caxton. Finally, Mr. Berger found himself talking to the British representative of the Special Libraries Association, an organization of whose existence he had previously been unaware. She promised to search their records but admitted that she had never heard of the Caxton and would be surprised if anyone else had either, given that her own knowledge of such matters was encyclopedic, a judgment that, after an hour-long history of libraries in England, Mr. Berger was unwilling to doubt.

Mr. Berger did consider that he might be mistaken about the woman’s ultimate destination. There were other buildings in that part of town in which she could have hidden herself to escape his notice, but the Caxton was still the most likely place in which she might have sought refuge. Where else, he thought, would a woman intent upon repeatedly reenacting the final moments of Anna Karenina choose to hide but an old library?

He made his decision before he went to bed that night. He would become a detective of sorts and stake out Caxton Private Lending Library & Book Depository for as long as it took for it to reveal its secrets to him.