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

and earthen bowls, and old brass candlesticks, and a big old mahogany wall clock, with a TV in teak to match. At night George used a brass bed pan with a long wooden handle to warm her in her loneliness, and next to her bed sat an old-fashioned automatic tea maker, her only companion.
    George’s bedroom was her sanctuary, or the closest thing to it, and she’d arranged it exactly as she liked: old Roberts radio next to the bed, and her library books in their thick plastic protective covers, and her one concession to luxury, a Cath Kidston floral bedspread that she’d had sent over from London, a concession not merely to luxury, indeed, but toherself: an allowance. Weighing heavily against it was the old woodworm-wracked pine clothes cupboard, made by her father and not made to last, and her parents’ old double bed—a rickety iron frame affair that had been in the farmhouse for generations. Inheritance. She’d been born in the bed and would probably die there too, just like her grandmother before her. The only picture in the room was a poor watercolor, painted by George’s mother when she was young and first married and had come to live there, a painting of the farm, all pure white against green fields and blue skies, expressive of all her hopes of the life she was going to live. Big dreams. Dark red Donegal tweed curtains hung at the windows and down over the deep window ledges, which had been painted over so many times that where the paint was chipped it was possible to see years of colors going back, from whites through creams and down to deep dark browns, like geological strata. Sometimes George would sit picking at the paint, staring out at the fields spread before her, wondering about her own deepening layers, and she would listen to the trills and calls of the birds, and if she closed her eyes she could see her father still, in rolled-up shirtsleeves, tall and spare, always on the go, out in the garden, or in the distance on the tractor. She’d kept all the old accounts books, their covers smudged with white mold, and sometimes she would read through them in bed, reading her father’s, her grandfather’s, and her great-grandfather’s careful detailing of income and expenses. She did all of the accounts on a laptop now—Brownie helped her when he was home from university. But she knew that ultimately it was pointless, that the forces of decay and modernity were about to overwhelm her and the farm and sweep them all away, and there wasnothing she could do about it, that what had once been a farm employing half a dozen men was now little more than a small-holding and would soon become nothing.
    And of course she spoke of this knowledge, these fears, to no one. And certainly not to Israel Armstrong, whose lodgings in the chicken coop brought the Devines almost half of their monthly income.
    Israel had got up late, as usual, this Sunday morning, neurasthenically, and had washed, and dressed and not shaved, and had eaten his customary spoonful of peanut butter and drunk his customary pot of coffee and had now wandered, aimlessly but much refreshed, outside to the yard, where George was busy working, paintbrush in hand.
    “What are you doing?”
    “What does it look like I’m doing?”
    “Erm. I’m guessing here…Painting?”
    “Whitewashing,” corrected George.
    “Is that the same as painting?”
    George just looked at him, eyes wincing.
    “Well, anyway,” continued Israel. “Sorry about Friday night, by the way.”
    “It’s fine.”
    “I…”
    “It’s really fine.”
    “I just had one or two too many.”
    “It’s fine.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Yes.”
    “OK, then. We’re fine, then?”
    “Yes.”
    “Well. That looks like fun.”
    “Really?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Fun?”
    “Absolutely. Nice way to spend a morning—”
    “Afternoon.”
    “Whatever. Painting, though. Brightening the place up a bit. Looks very satisfying.”
    “Does it?” said George. “Well, here, you satisfy