Page 2 of Happily Ever After
She had a printout of my emailed application on the table in front of her. She’d printed it in twenty point, so I could see it quite clearly, even upside down, past the piles of books that cluttered the surface of the not-nearly-wide-enough table that separated us. I wriggled.
‘No, but your job advert said that you didn’t?—’
‘That I value literacy and a familiarity with books over O Levels or HMRCs or whatever you call them these days, yes. I don’t want some hoity-toity university person thumbing through my valuable collection.’
The collection in question was mostly hidden by the sepulchrous darkness of the room, velvet curtains and dust, so I couldn’t comment. There was a slight smell of fish too.
Lady Tanith ran her eyes up and down me again. I was beginning to feel like a lame pony and almost offered to let her feel my legs, but her stare was so beady you could have made a necklace from it, so I didn’t. Her close contemplation convinced me I was sweaty and rumpled. My dress wasn’t the cool, stylish interview-wear I’d envisaged when I’d ordered it; it was shapeless and creased and I had the awful feeling there was a damp patch down my back. ‘Hmm,’ said Lady Tanith, down her nose.
I wriggled again on the dreadful chair. The smell of fish had intensified. I had nothing against sardines, but I preferred them to stay where they were rather than smell as though they were advancing on me and I wondered whether Lady Tanith, immaculate in her cotton shirt and trousers as she was, had a personal hygiene problem. I wriggled again, and the smell suddenly arrived on my lap, surrounded by the person of a rotund Siamese cat, who pulled a lot of linen threads as it arrived and then stood, perched awkwardly across my knees, its not-inconsiderable weight concentrated into four ridiculously tiny paws.
‘Ah!’ Lady Tanith’s face lost the crease of frown. ‘The Master likes you!’
I found myself being stared at. The cat had creamy fur, with espresso-coloured nose, ears and paws and the bluest eyes I’d ever seen. ‘He’s…’ Heavy? Stinky? Fortunately I didn’t need to say anything, as she went on, filled with enthusiasm. ‘Well, that quite settles it. I may be a little dubious, but The Master is an excellent judge of character.’
A pink mouth, filled with teeth that looked as though they would be more at home being brought back from a jungle expedition as a trophy, yawned in my direction. Sardine-scented air puffed lightly around my face, and then the cat settled down against my chest, kneading the front of my dress into a tangle of loose threads with an air of total self-satisfaction.
‘What’s… his… name?’ I struggled to breathe past the implacable weight. I refused to believe that anyone gave their cat the name The Master. Unless they were a Grade ADoctor Whofan, and Lady Tanith had the air of someone who hadn’t watched TV since Richard Dimbleby.
‘Oh, we never speak his name.’ My interviewer was watching the ruination of my clothing complacently. ‘He wishes to be known only as The Master.’
The cat finally pulled the last thread and settled down, paws tucked under his rumbling chest, and blinked at me. I’d never had any particular feelings about cats in general, but was working up a real dislike for this one, which seemed not so much cat as an anchovy-scented boulder wrapped in fur. ‘Oh,’ was all I could say, but inside I was whole-heartedly agreeing with my erstwhile taxi driver.
‘I’ll have a room made ready for you.’ Lady Tanith stood up. ‘You may find that The Master wishes to sleep with you. He’s a dreadful flirt, I’m afraid.’
With that, she swept out of the room, closing the door behind her and leaving me in the semi-darkness of drawn curtains, with an enormous cat attempting to suffocate me.
I looked at The Master. The Master looked at me, long and unblinking, as though he were assessing his opportunities.
‘You are not sleeping with me, sunshine,’ I half-whispered, just in case Lady Tanith had her ear to the keyhole. ‘So you can get that idea out of your head.’
My bottom was going numb between the bulk of the cat and the knobblyness of the chair, my nose was itching at the dust and the fur and the dim glimmers of sunshine that managed to squeeze past the curtains weren’t allowing me much more than a glimpse around the room. I had been told it was the library and would be my workplace for the duration of my job.
Job! I would have laughed if the cat hadn’t been suppressing my lungs. Lady Tanith wanted someone to catalogue her books, but the airy library, crammed with first-edition classics, that I’d imagined had been subsumed beneath reality. This library was crammed, but in the same way a hoarder’s house is crammed. The vague rays of light which tiptoed between the heavy velvet drapery showed me piles, heaps and tottering mounds of volumes. The books were on shelves, on the floor, on the table, and weighting down the ends of floor-length curtains across the windows. They were stacked on window ledges and propped against the legs of my chair. Spines hung and flopped, half-detached from their volumes, like so many torture victims and some of the book mountains had slumped to form literary foothills of bent pages and collapsed covers. This did not, in short, look like a room where cataloguing was going to be a matter of scanning barcodes and checking dates. I began to suspect that my new job was going to be basic data entry, trapped in this room which felt like somewhere Poe would have deemed slightly too Gothic. Lady Tanith too had a horror vibe about her. She was playing the part of Lady of the House to such extremes that it couldn’t be real. Nobody could bethatposh. But this was, to be honest, all I was fit for with my lack of any qualifications and my desperate desire for a live-in job that meant I wouldn’t have to live in a bus with a leaky roof and no toilet.
I sighed, and the cat rose and fell with the movement, adjusting his paws as he went. ‘Well you can’t stay there,’ I told him. ‘I ought to… do something.’
No answer. Just a rumbling purr, which came and went as though he had a motor underneath that I could feel through my insides.
The door opened. ‘Have you finished, Mother?’ a voice said from the oak-lined passageway outside. ‘Oh. She’s gone.’
The outline of a man stepped into the room, noticed me, and took a half-step back. ‘Who the hell are you?’
‘My name’s Andi Glover. I came to be interviewed for the library job.’
A job that I was now most uncertain whether I wanted to take, as my taxi driver’s assessment of the situation here seemed to have been understated to an almost criminal degree.
‘Oh! She said – but I thought you were a man.’ The shape, outlined by the sun which came in from the window at the end of the hallway, wandered into the room. ‘Sorry. It was the name, you see.’
‘It’s short for Andromeda,’ I said wearily. ‘My parents are rather alternative.’
‘Well then, hello, Andi.’ The man approached me, holding out his hand. ‘I’m Hugo. My parents were rather traditional. Gosh, it’s dark in here.’
A brief handshake and then he moved over to the window and was tugging at one of the twelve-foot lengths of velvet which draped the aperture like the wrapping on an exclusive parcel. Dust billowed extravagantly, there was a ripping noise, and a curtain fell gracefully to the floor like an exhausted ballerina. ‘Oh. Whoops.’
But at least now I could see better, although that wasn’t much of a recommendation. The library was wood panelled; in addition to the piles of books on the floor, every wall was lined with shelves below the panelling and every one of those shelves was crammed with books to the extent that they lay three deep in some places. A set of library steps curved upwards on one corner, volumes heaped on each step and the blinding sun illuminated dust, some faded furniture, and Hugo who was still standing with one arm raised but now curtainless.
The place didn’t need cataloguing. It needed an industrial hoover, a shovel, and a furnace. Or bell, book and candle, because exorcism was also a possibility.
