All Souls by Javier Marías Page A

interrupted only (but frequently) to gaze with intent interestvia her screen upon the lower levels of the bookshop (almost always empty, always uneventful) the amounts of money handled by the Alabasters must have been vast and the accounts accordingly complex. Mr Alabaster, the husband and original bearer of the name, was equally smiling but his smile was more like that of the strangler's anonymous victim just before he realises his fate. He was a good-looking, well-groomed but casually dressed man still blessed with a thatch of immaculate grey hair and with the slight air of an ageing, theoretical Don Juan (of the type prevented by social class or by an early, rock-solid marriage from ever savouring the charms of the role), who still retains a suggestion of the coquetry and cologne of his less hypothetical years. But, despite the fact that he too was almost always in the shop, I can't recall him ever once answering my questions or queries. He would smile and greet customers in the manner of an energetic, lively man (his whole bearing was intrepid) but he delegated anything requiring a reply, however insignificant, to the greater knowledge and authority of his wife. He would turn to her and repeat with great vivacity and exactitude the question he'd just been asked - appropriating it as his own, as if he were the one interested in knowing the answer: "Have we had anything in by Vernon Lee, darling?" - adding only that one word, "darling". While she enjoyed the benefits of the desk and a comfortable armchair, he had to content himself with sitting on one of the stepladders from which I myself, not without a twinge of guilt, would often dislodge him in order to browse along the more neglected and less accessible upper shelves. He would remain standing until I'd finished up above and then, after wiping down with a cloth the one step that was his seat, he would sit down again without even a hint of impatience. Every time I went into the shop, I found them there, in the same immutable places and positions, she scribbling numbers in a huge ledger or scanning the television screen with her fierce eyes, he leaning back a little on the ladder, his armscrossed (I never saw him reading a book or leafing through a newspaper, still less talking to Mrs Alabaster) in an attitude of expectation, his most strenuous activity (which he shared with his wife) being that of (indirectly) surveying the basement. The cheerfulness and urbanity with which Mr Alabaster greeted any customer entering the shop indicated that, in his role as passive subaltern, the mere appearance of someone through the shop door was the highlight of his day, and his effusive greeting of that customer its most glorious and sociable moment. For, as I have said, the fact is that subsequently he was incapable of answering the simplest question or even of indicating the shelf the buyer was looking for ("Have we got a travel section, darling?") Their absorption in the televisual observation of their basement made me wonder if the Alabasters were not perhaps empowered to see something invisible to other mortals. Often, when inspecting the basement, I would spend less time examining the books than peering into corners and at the floor in the hope of discovering some tiny animal they kept there or of hearing the tenuous breathing of a ghost. But I never saw or heard anything and when I descended to that cobwebbed basement to rummage around in the half-shadows, I imagined that the appearance on their boring screen of my figure — seen in the flesh upstairs only seconds before - would have the Alabasters catching their breath with excitement and more than once I was tempted to perform some prank or steal a book just to provide them with a little entertainment or to arouse alarm. In fact I did neither but I would try to loiter there as long as possible and move about the basement swiftly, randomly, unexpectedly, or repeatedly take my gloves off and put them on again, button and