Page 1 of Twilight at Croftwood Library
1
Croftwood Library was housed in a grand Victorian building with an overgrown, slightly neglected garden at the front. The windows were so high up that there was no way to sneak a look inside, so Lois Morgan propped her bike against the wall, locked it up, and took a deep breath as she stood in front of the heavy oak doors.
When she’d gone to work that morning at the Hive, a city library in Worcester that encompassed the Worcester University library and was and one of the biggest in the Midlands, it had been a normal day. Now here she was in a little town that was only six miles from Worcester but which in terms of the library might as well be on the other side of the world, it was so different from the huge library she was used to.
As she took a step closer to the doors, they opened automatically and the scent of an old library which was ingrained in Lois’s memory enveloped her and briefly transported her back to the Saturday mornings of her childhood. It was a combination of things that were indescribable and had been lost from the library where she worked now because it was too new. It was stillness, silence, time and so much more, as well as the books themselves, all wrapped up in that smell that hits you when you walk into a library of a certain age.
She inhaled deeply and took a second to enjoy the nostalgia that washed over her. A million tiny memories flashed through her mind too quickly to dwell on but leaving her with a sense of contentment at being somewhere that felt so familiar.
The information desk was centred in the entrance so that customers were channelled down one side to enter and deposit their returned books, and down the other side to exit. It was like entering a time warp. It had been years since she’d been in a library like this one. She could see why it was listed for closure because it was so behind the times. It had been forgotten and overlooked in the wave of modernising and computerising of libraries and Lois knew it would be impossible to get any funding to help it now. It would always be cheaper to close it.
‘Are you a member?’ a woman barked from behind the desk.
‘Yes,’ said Lois, extracting her Worcestershire Libraries card from her purse.
The older woman peered at the card through her half-moon reading glasses. ‘No,’ she said.
‘Sorry, no?’ The card allowed membership to all the county’s libraries.
‘We don’t accept those new-fangled cards here. You will need to join this library.’
Lois wasn’t about to start an argument which she wasn’t sure she would win, even though she knew she was right. ‘Okay, thank you. I just wanted to browse today.’
The woman tutted and went back to what she was doing. Lois took that as a sign that she was permitted to enter and hurried past the desk.
She spotted another lady re-shelving some books in the fiction section.
‘Hi, can you recommend a good crime novel?’ Lois asked, smiling.
The woman looked like a rabbit in the headlights. ‘Can I recommend a crime book?’
Lois suddenly felt like she was in an alternate universe where libraries weren’t what she thought they were at all. If not that, it was certainly like stepping back forty or fifty years in time.
‘Or whatever you’ve read recently that you enjoyed?’ Maybe it was the crime request that had thrown her.
‘Gosh, I can’t remember the last time anyone asked me to recommend a book to them. How lovely,’ she said in hushed tones. ‘I don’t read much crime, but I very much enjoyedThe Flatshareby Beth O’Leary.’
‘Oh, I’ve read that, it’s brilliant,’ said Lois. ‘Clever concept.’ Lois would never have expected that to be on this woman’s reading list which just went to show that you should never judge a book by its cover.
‘I have to admit,’ the woman said, glancing over her shoulder before she continued, ‘I love contemporary women’s’ fiction.’
‘Do you have a section for that here?’
‘Goodness no. Barbara Taylor Bradford is about as contemporary as we get in these parts.’ She smiled, then realising she had relaxed for a nano-second too long, immediately became flustered and said, ‘Anyway, I must get on.’
‘It was nice talking to you,’ said Lois, slightly stunned to hear that less than six miles from Worcester, contemporary fiction was considered racy.
The only nod to modern times was a large table with a cluster of four elderly computer terminals and a printer on it, all of which were switched off. Not that there was anyone in the library to use them. Despite the nostalgia that Lois had felt when she walked in, now she felt like it was quite a sad and lifeless place. Could she bear to spend the next six months here?
‘I’ve had a request from County Libraries,’ her boss, Robert had said when he’d called her up to his office earlier that morning. ‘It seems they are suddenly lacking a librarian in Croftwood. I have been tasked with lending them a capable member of staff until such time that it’s resolved.’ He’d looked expectantly at Lois.
‘Oh right. So, you want me to fill in for a couple of weeks?’
‘Actually, it’s a little longer than that. To be completely frank, Lois, Croftwood Library is on the list for closure. Their librarian is retiring, and they need someone to step in for a few months. Just until the decision is made one way or the other.’
It was always sad when a library faced closure and Lois’s heart had gone out to the little town that could lose its hub, but now that she had seen it for herself, she could understand why the decision had been made. It could be a particularly depressing secondment with nothing to do apart from wait until the end came.
‘Can you do without me here?’ Lois had asked, uncomfortably. She hated to over-estimate the value of herself to the Hive, but could they really lose a deputy manager without noticing?
