Free Wish Her Safe at Home by Stephen Benatar Page A

But her tone entirely lacked conviction.
    “And I could advertise too.” I had never in my life thought to advertise for anything. The words just seemed to come to me.
    “Yes, indeed.”
    “I could even go to the council.” Goodness, I sounded smug. There was clearly no end to my ingenuity. She nodded a bit uncertainly and I was going to enlighten her but suddenly I didn’t want to. It was nice to have one’s little secrets; it made one feel superior. This would be something solely between Horatio and myself. Just the two of us. I smiled.
    “Well, thank you for all your help. Thank you, at least, for having tried!”
    On my way out I passed the shelves bearing the encyclopaedias. There was no mention of Horatio Gavin in
Britannica
but I found a few lines about him in
Chambers
. I felt a tremendous leap of the heart. It was like the feeling you might get on seeing a well-loved face in the crowd when you hadn’t believed that it could possibly happen.
Gavin, Horatio (1760–1793), English social reformer associated with William Wilberforce in his campaign to eradicate slavery; died fourteen years too soon to see the longed-for abolition of the British slave trade.
    It was the shortest entry on the page, perhaps in the whole encyclopaedia, but what of that? I rushed back to the desk. “Look!” I cried. “Look!”
    I pointed triumphantly, realizing a little too late that I’d pushed in front of two women who’d just arrived to have their novels stamped. They stepped back and I apologized and all was sweetly smiling politeness. But although I knew it was less out of interest than a sense of duty that the librarian read the entry; although she said nothing more than, “Well, fancy—yes I’m glad you’ve found something!”; although as I walked over to the photocopier I was sure the three women were leaning their heads together in genteelly malicious gossip... none of this seemed to matter. I only felt that in some small way Horatio Gavin had been vindicated.
    But frustratingly I soon discovered that I needed help with the photocopier.
    For the third time I approached the desk.
    “Oh, incidentally, I’ve found a bar of soap here. I don’t know if anyone will claim it.”

17
    So he was just thirty-three when he died. The same age as Jesus. I was mildly disappointed—not I regret for his own sake but simply because I’d been picturing someone a little older than myself. Yet I quickly adjusted. In the library I had already felt protective. A fine man, his name linked with William Wilberforce. Of course from the beginning I had known that he was good. But the expression “the good die young” now occurred to me with more immediacy, more poignancy, than it had ever done before—even in connection with my father, or with Paul the picture framer.
    I suddenly wished I were younger. Well, one wished that fairly often but this time I experienced a feeling of nausea. There were so seldom any second chances. I had now missed out forever.
    “Just thirty-three,” I said. I spoke aloud. The nausea had briefly brought a fine perspiration to my forehead but now I continued with the preparation of my lunch. “What on earth could you have died of at the age of thirty-three?”
    I paused again in the act of peeling a potato.
    “Well, at that time I suppose you were one of the luckier ones to live even that long.”
    And perhaps I was one of the luckier ones too. A survivor. Unexpectedly strong.
    After lunch I went round the secondhand bookshops. And just before I stepped into the third, I positively knew that I was going to find it there. I scarcely felt dismayed when the owner shook his head. He was a wizened little fellow who good-humouredly invited me to browse. Yet I did so for barely a minute.
    The man stared at my discovery as though unable to believe what his eyes were telling him. “I’d have sworn I hadn’t seen one of these in years!”
    I felt so pleased. “It was right there in the middle. The shelf was