“I haven’t got time to—”
“Read it,” she urges. “Go on. Just read it . . .” She tails off as she remembers she doesn’t know his name. She’s worked there for two years and she doesn’t know any of the librarians’ names.
“Rory.”
“I’m Ellie.”
“I know who you are.”
She raises her eyebrows.
“Down here we like to be able to put a face to a byline. Believe it or not, we talk to each other, too.” He looks at the letter. “I’m pretty busy—and personal correspondence isn’t the kind of thing we hold on to. I don’t even know how it ended up in there.” He pushes it back to her, looks her in the eye. “That’s t-h-e-r-e.”
“Two minutes.” She shoves it at him. “Please, Rory.”
He takes the envelope from her, pulls out the letter, and reads, lingering. He finishes, and looks up at her.
“Tell me you aren’t interested.”
He shrugs.
“You are.” She grins. “You are.”
He flips open the counter and motions her through with an expression of resignation. “I’ll have the newspapers you want on the counter in ten minutes. I’ve been putting all the loose stuff in garbage bags for throwing away, but yes, come on through. You can plow through them, and see if you can put anything else together. But don’t tell my boss. And don’t expect me to help.”
She’s there for three hours. She forgets the 1960 newspaper file, and instead sits in the corner of the dusty basement, barely noticing as men pass her carrying boxes marked “Election 67,” “Train Disasters,” or “June – July 1982.” She works through the garbage bags, peeling apart reams of dusty paper, sidetracked by advertisements for cold cures, tonics, and long-forgotten cigarette brands, her hands blackened with dust and old printing ink. She sits on an upturned crate, stacking the papers around her in chaotic piles, searching for something smaller than A3, something handwritten. She’s so lost in it that she forgets to check her mobile phone for messages. She even forgets, briefly, the hour she had spent at home with John that normally would have stamped itself on her imagination for several days afterward.
Above, what remains of the newsroom is rumbling on, digesting and spewing out the day’s news, its newslists changing again and again within the hour, whole stories written and discarded, according to the latest digital alterations of the newswires. In the dark corridors of the basement, it might as well have been happening on a different continent.
At almost five thirty Rory appears with two polystyrene cups of tea. He hands one to her, blowing on his own as he leans against an empty filing cabinet. “How’d you get on?”
“Nothing. Plenty of innovative health tonics, or cricket-match results from obscure Oxford colleges, but no devastating love letters.”
“It was always going to be a long shot.”
“I know. It was just one of those . . .” She lifts her tea to her lips. “I don’t know. I read it and it stayed with me. I wanted to know what happened. How’s the packing going?”
He sits on a crate a few feet from her. His hands are ingrained with dust, and there’s a smudge on his forehead.
“Nearly there. I can’t believe my boss wouldn’t let the professionals handle this.”
The chief librarian had been at the newspaper for as long as anyone could remember, and was legendary for being able to pinpoint the date and copy of any newspaper from the most vague description.
“Why not?”
Rory sighed. “He was worried they’d put something in the wrong place or lose a box. I keep telling him it’s all going to end up digitally recorded anyway, but you know how he is about hard copies . . .”
“How many years’ worth of newspapers?”
“I think it’s eighty of filed newspapers, and something like sixty of clippings and associated documents. And the scary thing is, he knows where every last one belongs.”
She begins to move some of the papers back into a garbage bag. “Perhaps I should tell him about this letter. He could probably tell me who wrote it.”
Rory whistles. “Only if you don’t mind giving it back. He can’t bear to let go of a single thing. The others have been sneaking the real junk out after he’s gone home, or we’d have to fill several more rooms with it. If he knew I’d given you that file of old papers, he’d probably sack me.”
She grimaces. “Then I’ll never know,” she says theatrically.
“Know what?”
“What happened to my star-crossed lovers.”
Rory considers this. “She said no.”
“Oh, you old romantic.”
“She had too much to lose.”
She cocks her head at him. “How do you know it was addressed to a she?”
“Women didn’t have jobs then, did they?”
“It’s dated 1960. It’s hardly the bloody suffragettes.”
“Here. Give it to me.” He holds out his hand for the letter. “Okay, so maybe she had a job. But I’m sure it said something about going on a train. I should think a woman would be much less likely to say she was headed off to a new job.” He reads it again, pointing at the lines. “He’s asking her to follow him. A woman wouldn’t have asked a man to follow her. Not then.”
“You have a very stereotypical view of men and women.”
“No. I just spend a lot of time here immersed in the past.” He gestures around him. “And it’s a different country.”
“Perhaps it wasn’t addressed to a woman at all,” she teases. “Perhaps it’s to another man.”
“Unlikely. Homosexuality was still illegal then, wasn’t it? There would have been references to secrecy or something.”
“But there are references to secrecy.”
“It’s just an affair,” he says. “Obviously.”
“What’s this? The voice of experience?”
“Hah! Not me.” He hands the letter back to her, and drinks some of his tea.
He has long, squared-off fingers. Working hands, not a librarian’s, she thinks absently. But what would a librarian’s hands look like anyway? “So, you’ve never been involved with anyone married?” She glances at his finger. “Or you are married and have never had an affair?”
“Nope. And nope. Never had any kind of affair. With someone involved, that is. I like my life simple.” He nods at the letter, which she’s tucking back into her bag. “Those things never end well.”