Chapter Two
Gabriel Sharma frowned as he walked into the back office of Sharma’s Private Academic Library and Book Depository and saw the head librarian’s desk.
Or rather he couldn’t see the antique desk because its scuffed mahogany surface was obscured by many teetering piles of books, several piles of paper, which had already teetered, and a, thankfully empty, packet of nappies, a thoughtful gift from his twin sister, Ella.
Long before it was enshrined into Employment Law, the library and the Sharmas had been forward-thinking enough to believe that people shouldn’t have to work until they died. Also, that the eldest Sharma child should assume the reins of responsibility, whether they were a man or a woman.
However, they’d reckoned without Gabe and Ella’s mother, Sally, who refused to say which one of them was born first. Their father, Hari, had been stuck in traffic and had finally arrived a good ten minutes after the second twin had emerged, so he was no help on that score.
‘The time on the clock when I birthed you both is between me, God and the midwife,’ Sally was fond of saying when the subject arose, which it often did.
More so as their father Hari had got nearer to retirement age.
‘You’re both number one in my heart; that’s the important thing. ’
It wasn’t something that had ever bothered Gabe. He was sure that Ella was the eldest because she was the bossiest of the two of them, although she insisted that he had to be the eldest because he was so stuffy and ‘I’m clearly a classic free-spirited second child.’
Hari had taken retirement six months ago, and after a fraught meeting with the library’s trustees, who were mostly Gabe and Ella’s aunts and uncles plus three senior partners from the legal firm that had represented the library since 1811, they’d both been appointed head librarian.
Inconveniently, Gabe already had a job; one he had no intention of quitting.
Or could afford to. He was a professor of philosophy at Thameside University on the South Bank.
Ella was VP of Marketing at a sustainable fashion company, a job which she was also keeping, although that had been moot.
The day after they’d been sworn in, solemnly promising to be faithful servants of the library and to leave no stone unturned in the quest for knowledge, Ella’s waters had broken.
Six hours later, she’d given birth and was now officially on maternity leave from both her jobs.
That didn’t stop her from coming into the library during the day, while Gabe was busy philosophising, and causing absolute havoc, which she left for Gabe to clear up. Just as it had always been for the course of their thirty-seven years on earth.
With a sigh, Gabe hung his jacket on the old-fashioned coat stand (everything in the library was old-fashioned), placed his leather satchel, not a man bag – he couldn’t stress that enough – at its base, then rolled up his sleeves and approached the desk.
His other desk in his large, airy office with windows that overlooked the Thames was also full of books.
Gabe respected those books enough to shelve them on the bookcases that lined his office rather than piling them up high.
Organised by discipline: epistemology, ethics, logic, metaphysics and so on. Then alphabetically by author.
You had to have a system. Without a system, there could be nothing but chaos.
Gabe did not like chaos and yet Ella seemed to thrive on it. Brightly coloured Post-it notes did not a system make.
‘For the bookbinders!’ she’d scribbled on a lurid pink sticky note and attached it to the most teetering pile of books.
The ones whose spines had split or whose pages had come loose from their moorings.
A copy of volume four of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon had a stain on it.
Gabe held the book up to his nose for a good sniff.
Coffee. Even though food and drink were expressly forbidden from being consumed in the library.
He made a mental note to look in the ledger at the Loans Desk and ban the borrower from ever setting foot in the library again.
Gabe made short work of the piles. Order was always easier and quicker than chaos. Much more satisfying too.
Once he’d finished, he messaged Ella on the head librarian group chat, which Ella insisted on renaming on a daily basis. Today it had been called I Like Big Books And I Cannot Lie, until Gabe had changed it back.
Gabe Sharma: Are you unfamiliar with the alphabet?
He attached a picture of the open drawer of one of the filing cabinets, in case she was also unfamiliar with the concept of filing.
Ella Sharma-Banarjee: Can’t believe you would hassle me about work when you know I’m on mat leave.
Gabe Sharma: It’s funny how being on mat leave doesn’t stop you from coming into the library every day and clearly summoning up some kind of tornado to whip through the back office and make an unholy mess for me to tidy.
Ella Sharma-Banarjee: Just one of my many talents. No need to thank me!
Because Ella wasn’t there to see it, Gabe smiled. She was annoying but he was also very fond of her.
Ella Sharma-Banarjee: Btw, have you had a chance to read the piece in The Sunday Sentinel? I left it out for you.
There had been a newspaper among the flotsam and jetsam on the desk but it was Sunday’s and today was Tuesday, so Gabe had put it in the recycling.
He wasn’t much inclined to retrieve it either.
Ella’s idea of an interesting newspaper article differed wildly from Gabe’s own.
The last one had been about the opening of a new bookshop in Notting Hill that specialised only in romantic fiction.
She clearly hadn’t let go of her latest far-fetched, harebrained scheme to raise funds for the library.
The library definitely needed a large injection of cash but Ella …
Gabe didn’t want to blame baby hormones, he refused to be that guy.
Instead, he blamed Ella’s husband, Sanjay.
For being a devoted husband, a doting father, a great cook, excellent wage earner and for making Ella so loved up on a daily basis that she wanted everyone to be equally loved up.
Hence the fascination with romantic fiction, not that they had those sort of books in the library. Their small selection of fiction consisted of the greats of classic literature. Besides, Ella knew that they were hampered by copyright concerns and …
No! Gabe had had this discussion with Ella many times and he certainly wasn’t going to have the same discussion with an imaginary Ella in his head. He had far more important things to do.
He left the office to do a slow tour of the library.
The familiar and comforting scent of old books and beeswax accompanied him.
In the huge, cavernous space of the main room of the library, a veritable temple of learning if ever there was one, dust motes danced in the air as Patrick and Mona, former students of his, worked the Loans Desk.
Three of their five reading rooms were occupied; the sound of lively debate coming through the panelled wood of each door was music to Gabe’s ears.
Opinions exchanged, ideas discussed, knowledge acquired. That was why the library existed. Why it had been founded by his great great, great, great (and possibly another great) grandfather over two hundred years ago.
Gabe had almost finished his rounds when a harried-looking man entered the library, nodding at Gabe, who nodded back. He was a lecturer in probate law from King’s College, a frequent visitor.
‘Back to borrow my usual,’ he said glumly. ‘I should just have all four original volumes of Commentaries on the Laws of England by William Blackstone on permanent hold.’
‘I don’t envy you,’ Gabe said. ‘William Blackstone is very dry.’
‘The dryest,’ the man agreed.
‘And I speak as someone who does a module on deontological ethical theory.’
The law lecturer managed to raise a weak smile. ‘Oh well, in that case, it could be worse.’
Gabe, unlike the majority of his students, quite enjoyed deontological ethical theory, but it was definitely an acquired taste.
Everything seemed to be in order in the library.
It wasn’t raining, so that meant the roof wasn’t currently leaking and the alarming smell of damp wasn’t rising up from the basement, so he retreated to the back office to parcel up the books to be sent off to the bookbinders.
They used a specialist firm in York. Nobody else could be trusted with the library’s precious collection.
That done, Gabe decided to call it a night. But as he put the excess brown paper in the recycling bin, the newspaper caught his eye.
It could have been something important that Ella wanted him to read. Maybe about Arts Council grants because Lord knows, they could do with one of them. Or perhaps there was a review of the new Nicholas Rescher book, who wasn’t so bad as modern philosophers went.
Gabe followed the trail of bright pink Post-it notes to page ten and felt a flicker of foreboding.
‘I’m holding out for a hero,’ he read out loud, his lip curling. His eyes skimmed over the contents. Girl dinner. Mansplaining. Free weights.
Modern life really was terrible. As were modern men. No wonder this poor woman was single. She had a nice turn of phrase, Gabe would give her that. His lips stopped curling to briefly smile. The man who’d told her that she wasn’t even a six needed his eyesight checked and a very frank talking-to.
You shouldn’t assign people a number based on a purely subjective and extremely arbitrary scale. People, women, were more than just the sum of their outside parts.
Gabe scrutinised the photograph of the writer of the piece.
Self-confessed single gal (his lip curled again) Tess Hardy.
She was lounging on a bed in a red dress, which in Sunday Sentinel speak, flaunted her enviable curves.
She had soft ethereal features, her hair was a very light blonde, her eyes a bluey-green or a greeny-blue; Gabe couldn’t be expected to know which was which.
There was something quite pre-Raphaelite about her facial features and dreamy expression while the curves put him in mind of a Rubens.
He came to with a start as he realised that he was practically leching over this poor woman, even if it was in quite an intellectual way.
He finished reading the piece and as he reached the closing paragraphs and the woman’s quite unhinged fantasies about some of the male protagonists from classic literature, he thrust the paper away from as if it was coated in hydrochloric acid.
As if she had a sixth sense about these things – or more likely, had installed some kind of spyware in the office – Gabe’s phone rang, his sister’s name and face appearing on the screen.
‘Yes, I read it and no, absolutely not,’ Gabe said because they’d shared a womb for nine months and they didn’t need to bother with niceties like ‘hello’ and ‘how are you doing?’. ‘We’ve talked about this …’
‘You didn’t let me talk about it. You just used your most pompous philosophy professor voice to forbid it before I could even go into detail,’ Ella said. ‘But I’m head librarian too, even though technically I should be on mat leave …’
‘I have noticed that since you’ve been on mat leave, you keep making phone calls which really should be emails,’ Gabe pointed out.
‘It’s very hard to write emails one-handed,’ Ella said forlornly, ‘while my other hand holds the baby. Your nephew, Gabe. Who doesn’t even know that his uncle won’t listen to his beloved mother’s brilliant idea to monetise the library’s collection so that they’ll still be a library for him to inherit. Poor little …’
‘Fascinating though this is, I’m going to have to love you and leave you.
’ Ella was good at guilt trips, but Gabe had been guilt-tripped by her far too many times for the tactic to be even a little bit effective.
‘I’m actually very busy putting together my proposal for a series of philosophical lectures featuring the libr––’
‘Oh my God, no. Stop talking. I’m going before you bore me to death.’ Ella hung up, which had been Gabe’s plan.
He didn’t hear another peep out of her for the rest of the evening and counted himself lucky as he did the last rounds before locking up.
It was a quiet night, so he’d sent Patrick and Mona home.
No point in them hanging around when they didn’t have any appointments in the book.
He loved the library after hours; the creaks and sighs of the building as it settled after a long day of learning.
He could take his time to notice and appreciate all the little details that made the place so unique, from the ornamental carving––
Gabe’s appreciation was interrupted by the unwelcome chime of an incoming message. He pulled out his phone to see that Ella had sent a picture of fat little baby Avi sticking out his tongue.
Ella Sharma-Banarjee: That’s what he thinks of his stuffy uncle Gabe.
Also, the parents are having Avi for the night but Sanjay is away on a business trip so I don’t mind covering the late shift next Wednesday.
Maybe organise a hot date or something. Are you STILL in your celibate era? It can’t be good for you!
Ha! Like Gabe had a stable of willing women just waiting for a hot date with him.
He very much didn’t. His last girlfriend had dumped him very graciously and very kindly six months before, citing ‘intellectual differences’.
It was true that her maximalist lifestyle (did anyone need that many scatter cushions, especially in so many tonally opposing colours and patterns?) had clashed with Gabe’s minimalist mindset.
His passionate defence of the Spartans had fallen on deaf ears.
Since then he’d been single. Gabe preferred to think of it as his Stoic, rather than celibate era.
Not that the Stoics had been against relationships, as Marcus Aurelius had famously said: ‘love the people with whom fate brings you together’.
But as Gabe wasn’t currently on the apps, fate was not bringing any potential partners his way.
Gabe was fine about that. What with the demands of both his jobs, maintaining his fitness, seeing friends, he didn’t have the time or inclination or energy for all that relationship stuff.
Getting to know someone, trying to establish a rapport, common ground. It was exhausting, just thinking about.
The one drawback to his so-called celibate era was that Gabe did rather miss sex.
He missed how soft all women’s secret places were.
The bits that they always moaned about that he loved: the cushion of their bellies, the plump flesh of their inner thighs.
There was also something quite nourishing about female companionship that Gabe missed, but at least he could get all the intellectual stimulation he needed from his philosophers.
Right now, his life didn’t have space for any other kind of stimulation.