Free Jerusalem the Golden by Margaret Drabble Page B

Town Hall, but he would not elaborate upon it. (She found the remark, years later, in Betjeman.) The other girls laughed at this erudition, but Clara did not laugh, for she could imagine a scheme of events in which such knowledge might be an asset.
    One of the moments which remained most strongly in her memory took place in the town’s most learned book shop, a charming building that dated, almost alone in the town, from a pre-industrial epoch: it was tall, and narrow, and its windows were so small that it could display only ten books at a time, and those ten were changed but once a month. Clara had visited this shop many times, and had stood for hours surreptitiously reading C. P. Snow, Tolkien, D. H. Lawrence and the poems of T. S. Eliot. She regarded it as an unofficial library, as remote and as municipal as the library itself. And then, one Saturday morning, she went into it with Walter Ash, to look at (not to buy) the text of Anouilh’s
Ring Round the Moon
, which was being currently performed at the local rep. While they were there, an elderly man came down the stairs from the upper floor (with its second-hand books and books of local interest), and started to wander around, absent-mindedly. Clara could tell from a certain straining of attention on Walter’s part that he was trying to catch the old man’s eye, and eventually he succeeded in doing so; the old man nodded and smiled, with a bare minimum of recognition, and Walter said, ‘Good morning, Mr Warbley.’ When the old man had wandered upstairs again, with a book under his arm, Clara whispered,
‘Who was that?’ and even as she whispered she realized that it could be no other than the book shop’s owner, and added hastily, ‘That must be A. J. Warbley, I suppose?’
    ‘No, it’s his son,’ said Walter, shepherding her out into the street. ‘The old man founded the book shop, and that was his son. Don’t you know about the Warbleys?’
    ‘Well, not much,’ said Clara, wisely unwilling to betray her total ignorance. ‘How do you know them?’
    ‘I don’t, really,’ said Walter. ‘My parents know him, though. He used to come round to the house, a few years ago, before he took up so much with the Labour Party.’
    And Clara, who could see no elegant way of enlarging this tantalizing scrap of information, had to make do with it – she dared not ask any further, for she knew nothing about the Labour Party, nor about the elder Ash’s political views, nor about A. J. Warbley himself, beyond the fact that his name was written up in black Gothic letters over his son’s shop door. But the hints and intimations which it conveyed to her, stretched far, far away, into the past and the future, and she had a sudden, piercing, painfully beautiful vision of a life where men with book shops called upon friends for the pleasure of society, and quarrelled with those friends upon topics as elevated, as unworldly and as magnificent as the Labour Party. Her desire for such a life was so passionate, and her gratitude to Walter for this glimpse of it was so great that she could have kissed him in the street, and later that day she did in fact allow him to undo her brassiere strap without a word of protest.
    For her parents had no friends. Nobody ever visited their house except through obligations, and such family celebrations as still persisted had been transformed into grim duties. Christmas came, and the family groaned, and dourly baked its cakes and handed round presents; birthdays came, and useful gifts were unfailingly proffered. Nobody ever dropped in, and her parents never went out, save to large and joyless civil functions, or to the cinema. Clara could feel her friendly spirit choking her at times; she had affection in her, and nowhere to spend it. Sometimes she dared to wonder at the causes for this way of life, for she could see that it did not represent a normal
attitude towards society, though it was so deeply bred in her that all aberrations from it