The Winter Vault by Anne Michaels Page B

approve of her living alone on the island, but she would not leave her library and could not bear the thought of moving it. Within an hour of my arrival on that rainy late afternoon in November, I understood that I had been hired not for the simple task of keeping an old woman company by reading to her and cooking and helping her dress and bathe, but for a secret objective all her own. Over tea she said, with a tinge of triumph in her voice, that I was to help her catalogue her books, and that she had been preparing for this task for some time. Indeed, she had a table overflowing with neatly addressed piles of folded paper. Over the months, we slipped these notes and many others into the volumes as we went along: messages to her daughters, her son, and her eight grandchildren. We compiled her list for divesting each book – which child or grandchild would benefit most from a specific volume – her hope, as she told me, to provide a moment of solace or guidance or respite for the one who would open it some winter evening many years hence. ‘Though I hope my rosy-cheeked Thea’ – who was only six at the time – ‘might never need John Donne, there is something about her, a little shadow, that tells me she might feel the want of these words some day.’ And so the weeks went by, in this most peculiarly tender way.
    Annie had an astonishing collection of movable books for children, including several published by Ernest Nister in Nuremberg. She even had a copy of Meggendorfer's Circus , which her father had brought home from a trip to Germany when she was a child. With the outbreak of the First World War, British children's books were no longer printed in Germany, and Annie had some of the earliest movable books published in England between the wars, almost all the Bookano Stories and the Daily Express annuals from which animals popped out of their V-folds. I often regret that she didn't live long enough to see the work of Vojtech Kubasta, the Czech architect who studied in Prague and then turned his hand to children's pop-up books – I discovered these in London after the war – his Sleeping Beauty and Snow White among many others – where the eyes of dogs roll around in their heads, demonstrated Marina, and melancholic dwarves are suddenly restored to happiness by the agency of a tab, and where long, empty tables are, in an instant, magically laden with food, a particularly welcome device in those years of cravings and deprivations.
    It was because of Annie Moorcock, the extraordinary random chance of our connection, that I was able to join together the two things she loved and gave me to love: painting and children's books. Sometimes I feel she would not approve of what use I have made of her kindness, rendering images that would have turned her head away in despair. But then there are other days when I feel her blessing as I work, because she was the most acute human being I have ever met and this gift of hers was overlooked by almost everyone who knew her, until her library spoke for her, with such eloquence and such love, after her death.
    I met William and his father for the third time in three days, said Marina, at Mr. McKechnie's shop when I was picking up the post. They were collecting supplies for the arduous walk to Corryvreckan.
    They invited themselves to tea. Annie took an instant liking to them. She knew William and his father were both engineers and, after they explored the library, she set out her collection of movable books on the dining table. The three of them fell into a discussion of paper engineering – pivot points, rocker arms, angle folds, closed tents, wheels, and fulcrums. In her face, a transformation, a restoration worthy of one of her magical books – complete fulfillment, as if she'd been waiting decades for just this single afternoon of conversation – as William and his father sat with their teacups teetering excitedly in their laps, bearing avid witness to her life's work. After