The Bad Book Affair: A Mobile Library Mystery by Ian Sansom Page A

brick walls and a concrete floor and an asbestos roof, a room that Israel had worked on and worked on over the past year and had managed to transform into a…room no more than twelve feet by twelve feet, with bare brick walls and a concrete floor and an asbestos roof, with rugs and a bed and some books. A room of his own, to be sure, with his own enamel plates and cups. But no window. Fortunately, he wanted no window. For there was nothing out there to see.
    Outside the coop was the yard, and the Devine farmhouse, and the garden sloping southward, and the old glassless glasshouse, and the row of cold frames broken down, and the couch grass and nettles where once had been blackcurrants and berries, and the walls of the walled garden, pitted with nails where apples and pears had once been carefully trained, and where there was now just mud, mud everywhere, and everywhere mud.
    The Devine family farm wasn’t just deteriorating, it was sinking: the heavy and seemingly continual rain duringthe summer had not been kind to the two-hundred-year-old building. Parts of it had begun quietly to slip away—irreparable damage to outbuildings with leaky roofs and big old wooden doors and hardboarded windows that had swollen up like weeping eyes. And even in the main house, old carpets had had to be removed—the place was unprotected, like a sponge, the damp infecting and soaking in through the render and seeping down the walls providing the perfect environment for mold and for mushrooms. A fair crop of little crumble-capped fungi had sprung up on the wallpaper, and old Mr. Devine had simply brushed them off with the back of his hand, and scooped them up and tossed them onto the fire, and they’d filled the house with a sour, soapy smell that—mixed with the stench of damp cardboard and cabbage and chickens—was overwhelming, organic, fundamental: the unmistakable stench of decay. Israel gagged every time he went into the kitchen, which was decay, plus dogs, plus fat, plus Irish stew. Black mold, dry rot, condensation. Sum total: miasma. George did everything she could to maintain the property, but she was fighting a losing battle: it was simply impossible to fix everything that needed fixing, and paint everything that needed painting, and clean everything that needed cleaning. She often crawled into bed at midnight and then was up again at five to begin the day’s chores. The animals were cared for, but the windows were rotten, and the floorboards were rotten, and the walls were rotten; even the septic tank was rotten. There was continual surface runoff from the fields, and groundwater levels were rising; the farmhouse was like a rusting ship in an unforgiving ocean, and George was like Sisyphus, Tantalus, and Captain Smith of the Titanic . She could not cease in her lonelytask, couldn’t leave her post, could not desert her command. Her duty was to the farm—and “the farm” they all called it, not “our” farm or “our house” or “our home.” It was “the farm” like the church was the church, and the government was the government, and the law the law. It was an entity, a being, an institution. It was not a way of life, it was life.
    The farm was where George had grown up. It was where she remembered her parents living, and where she’d played down by the stream and had run around in the fields. The farm was her entire world: she could imagine no world without it, although outside, the world was passing it by, superseding it, speeding up and crashing, colliding, collapsing, and rapidly remaking itself. Outside was progress, for better or for worse; inside, the Devine household was stasis. The furniture was heavy and inherited; the carpets were orange and thin. Mr. Devine would sit in the good front room by the fire, with crumbling, swirling turquoise wallpaper coming slowly down upon him, with a large pair of foot-operated bellows made of wood and leather at his feet. There was still a butter churner in the kitchen,