Fourteen

Cullen’s funeral was held at the crematorium in Moray, and there seemed to Toby to be a good attendance, the congregation of mourners full of faces he’d never seen before, as well as a few that he recognized from the Fretted Goose. The regulars banded together around Rachel. She had arranged everything, including finding a charity that supported the distribution of books to children in deprived areas of the UK. She’d asked for donations to be given in lieu of flowers, something she knew Cullen would have preferred.

Toby sat next to Ron at the funeral and noticed the old man’s hands shaking in his lap. Since Cullen’s passing, Toby had found himself taking over as Ron’s regular chess partner, his game improving vastly in the short time he’d been following his new friend’s tutelage. As they played, they talked, mainly of Ron’s own history because Toby found his difficult to enunciate, an irony his chess partner was not shy to point out.

‘For someone writing an autobiography, you aren’t keen on talking about yourself,’ he’d observed during one such conversation, a moment or two before taking Toby’s king.

Toby knew Ron was right. He needed to become comfortable in talking about himself, not least because if Sylvie was right and this book sold, there would likely be press junkets where someone would ask a question he’d either not thought to address or had deliberately excluded from the text itself.

‘Just saving it all for the book,’ he said. ‘Don’t want to lose a customer by telling you all the interesting stuff before it’s published, do I?’

‘Oh, I don’t read,’ Ron said. ‘Haven’t picked a book up since school.’

Toby had laughed. ‘What are you talking about? You spend all your time in a bookshop.’

Ron waved a hand at the board and then at Toby himself. ‘No one actually reads in a bookshop, do they? They flick, they pick, they take their choices home.’

‘But why?’ Toby asked. ‘Why don’t you read?’

‘Just never took to it. Found it difficult to learn, and the struggle put me off, I suppose. It’s never been a pleasure to me, just a chore, and the minute I didn’t have to do it, I stopped. I read enough to get by, what else do I need?’

Toby wondered how many other students of Ron’s age had been so ill-served by a rigid educational system. He wondered how many children were in the same boat now, and hoped the situation had improved while suspecting it hadn’t.

He’d asked Rachel about the conundrum of Ron’s refusal to read. She’d given him a wry smile.

‘Ron and Cullen went around and around about it,’ she said. ‘They must have had that conversation a million times or more since they met. Cullen never gave up, and Ron never gave in. It didn’t matter what Cullen would recommend; Ron was never interested. I think it became a point of principle.’

‘But then, what did they have in common?’ Toby asked. ‘Cullen’s life seemed to revolve around books. What was their friendship based on?’