Free Wish Her Safe at Home by Stephen Benatar Page B

even at eye level.”
    “Was it now!”
    “You know what must have happened? Whenever you had your back turned this wise and precious book made another little jump towards the centre!”
    And I couldn’t have explained it but I almost believed in what I was saying. Only when he answered, “Yes, a lovely little game of leapfrog!” did I fully acknowledge its absurdity.
    But how my heart had bounded—and for the second time that day. Even despite my certainty.
    There was no price pencilled inside, no sticker on the thin fawn cover. The man shrugged and said, “Oh... 20p.” I was immensely moved. He had seen how much I wanted it. He could have asked for ten times that amount and I would willingly have paid. People were sometimes so very kind. I walked home in a glow, almost skipping, almost dancing, nearly as much on account of people’s kindness as because I had the book.
    I didn’t start to read it straightaway. I made myself a pot of Lapsang Souchong and carried this upstairs as I did almost every afternoon. My sitting room looked warmly inviting with its many polished surfaces, its softly filtered light and quantities of fresh flowers.
    I set the tray down on a small gateleg table with a red chenille cloth, stood at one of the windows for a moment enjoying the geraniums on my balcony, then glanced appraisingly in the antique mirror over the Adam fireplace—after lunch, before going out again, I had changed into a cooler dress. At last I poured the tea and carried it across to my chair. I didn’t want a biscuit. When I had taken a few appreciative sips I placed the cup and saucer on an occasional table by the chair.
    I picked up my purchase of the afternoon.
    The book had fewer than sixty pages and its print was large. Even then much of the prose was irrelevant, the style long-winded and pontificating. I read the whole thing in an hour.
    Nevertheless it was an hour during which I lived intensely.
    There plainly wasn’t a lot known about Horatio Gavin. The author had probably consulted whatever records he could find but most of the work was surely based on supposition. One paragraph I liked in particular: “He may have thought, that fine Spring morning, as he cantered past the cathedral, of all the faith and hope and backache that had gone into its creation, this immense project begun in one man’s lifetime, perhaps not finished even in his grandson’s. He may have thought of all the myriad small miseries of daily life, so erosively familiar to anyone in any age, like headache, constipation, haemorrhoids, or family tiffs. Young Gavin may have thought of all these stirring things as he cantered past—yet, on the other hand, it seems unlikely that he did, since his mind that morning must have been very full of what he was about to say to Wilberforce.”
    A biography like that, even with nothing more to offer, must soon become a favourite on anybody’s shelf!
    But this one—at least to someone like myself—had a great deal more to offer. It told the story, however fictional, of a lonely brooding idealistic young man, son of a merchant in Bath, who upon his father’s death had moved with his mother to live near a widowed aunt in Bristol. It told of his championship of the underprivileged, his entry into politics, his meeting with Wilberforce and of the instant rapport established between them. It told of his tender feelings for a Miss Anne Barnetby and of the great blow when on the eve of their nuptials she eloped with some far more worldly man: a shock from which, averred the Reverend Lionel Wallace, the young Horatio had never quite recovered. The author speculated that when he had died—as the result of a burst appendix—he had not found anyone to take her place.
    “I say a burst appendix, where another man might say a broken heart. I claim, however, that that other man would be mistaken. Hasn’t he yet discovered the balm of self-immersion in a noble cause?”
    When I had finally closed the book I sat