It is a relief to switch to the sigla and ISBNs of professional librarianship, the furtive codes of scholarly commerce. The day passes in a pleasant blur of ur-texts and catalogue prices, book-trade gossip and musical trivia. By the time the tea-trolley comes round, I have secured the biggest orders and could well go home, mission accomplished. But I am committed to the evening’s dinner and have arranged in my mind to spin out the rest of the week with a tour of small accounts that will justify my absence to Myrtle and the taxman. Small shops, small change. But it gives me the sense of stealing time for myself, time that is mine to own and to squander.

That’s what I lost when the genius left – the mastery of time. Like death, it is a loss that cannot be repaired, a hole in the heart of things. I trudge back to my hotel in slashing rain, the shop-lights twinkling on glossy pavements. It is a two-minute trudge, not long enough for reflective anticipation of the evening ahead. When the blow falls, it will fall without warning. Nothing in this final day of normality has deviated from the norm, nothing warns me that the monotony of my half-life is about to be shattered, that I am to be brought face to face with the thing I most fear and long for – the golden part that was gutted from my subsequently empty existence.

Chapter 2

2

It’s About Time

I always pack black tie and tails, just in case. Also a spare three-piece business suit and a woolly muffler to ward off chill winds from the polluted Taw estuary. ‘Take care of yourself,’ was Myrtle’s instruction, and I do my best.

It has been, all told, a subdued day, punctuated by hourly reports from a war in the Persian Gulf, a fight that demands no great act of national sacrifice but none the less exposes bitter national divisions. ‘They send five armies to reconquer a Kuwaiti sheikh’s oil field, but won’t lift five fingers to save our coal industry,’ grumbles the Director of Education, a phlegmatic polymath with a night-school degree. I mutter something politically ambiguous as he signs my order in laborious triplicate.

‘What a farce,’ observes the director of Libraries, his patched jeans betraying fashionably leftish sympathies. ‘First we sell arms to Iraq, then we bomb them to bits, then we’ll sell ’em some more.’ It won’t be long before he is signing Socialist Worker petitions demanding western aid for ruined Iraq. I bite a lip and nod hypocritically until the signed order is tucked into my slightly tremulous hand.

‘Good day, sir?’ asks the Royal Tawburn barman, as he pours me a quick one.