Chapter 27
The Bookshop
Sometimes the biggest moments in a lifetime are also the smallest, pondered the Ghost.
And sometimes people don’t quite know they are the biggest moments until you are able to step out of a train and look back at them.
BOOKSELLER WANTED – MUST BE CLEAN AND OBEDIENT. That had been the sign he’d seen in the window of Bagdale’s. So he’d gone the next day – this day – looking as clean and obedient as a collie at a dog show.
Agnes Bagdale had died a few weeks before, which had prompted Arthur to get a bit more serious about the shop and hire extra help. Of course, Wilbur was a little worried. Mr Bagdale, after all, had told Wilbur off for reading books without buying them countless times.
So it was lucky that Arthur Bagdale’s eyesight wasn’t great these days and he didn’t seem to recognise Wilbur. Especially as Agnes was no longer there to defend him.
So Wilbur had a general conversation with Mr Bagdale and the grouchiness he had so often seen him display was only just discernible.
Things went even better when he found out that Wilbur’s dad had been in the RAF.
Mr Bagdale told him it was a scandal widows were taxed out of their war widows’ pension.
‘I lost a lot of my friends in the war,’ he said. ‘A lot of good men. My best pal was in the air force. He got killed somewhere over Cologne. Poor Jonesy.’
He stared into space for a while, then pulled a hip flask out of his pocket and swigged back, closing his eyes as if in deep prayer.
Then, hip flask back in pocket, he told Wilbur that he’d get the job if he could go up to a customer in the shop and hand-sell a book.
‘Um, what? Right now?’
Mr Bagdale tutted, the grouchiness returning. ‘No, lad, when they land a man on the moon. Of course, right now.’
‘All right. Yes. Um. No problem!’
Wilbur scanned the shop and found a young, bespectacled, sleek-haired, arty-looking man from out of town. He went over and chatted to him about the John Coltrane record that he spied in a bag under his arm. Wilbur didn’t really like jazz but could feign a convincing interest.
The man told him he was a trumpet player with a London quartet who were playing at the jazz club in the basement of the Hallamshire Hotel.
‘Have you read Absolute Beginners?’
‘No, man.’
‘It’s about the scene in London. It’s about youth and life and jazz. It’s got everything.’
The man read the first page and nodded as if listening to music. ‘This is my bag, my man. This is the book for me.’
The Ghost felt sad for a moment, thinking about that first sale. The joy of selling books. The joy of joining the right book to the right reader. Like when Charlie had been bullied at school and Wilbur knew he would find strength through the swashbuckling words of Alexandre Dumas.
That was his skill. Like a travel agent of the imagination.
And it was a skill he kept through the 1960s.
The idea that a novel was a dead daydream that came alive through reading.
The joy of matching A Clockwork Orange or The Bell Jar or The Spy Who Came in From the Cold to people who would appreciate them was a fine art and he had loved it.
Meanwhile, the living Wilbur took the man over to the till.
‘Well,’ Mr Bagdale said a little later from somewhere beneath his eyebrows, ‘my mother used to do that. And I’ve never seen anyone else do it quite so well … She would hire you. I know she would. I think, young man, you have yourself a job.’