Chapter Four
This woman.
This Tessa Harding.
She was impossible. Indefatigable. Incorrigible.
No wonder she was so keen to test drive The Love Library scheme, like that was even a thing. She must have scared off every flesh-and-blood man within a twenty-mile radius and had now set her sights on men who weren’t flesh and blood … or rather they were … except …
It was all very complicated and Gabe wasn’t going to explain the details to someone who wasn’t even affiliated to a university.
‘I am the manager,’ he said in the icy tones which always made his undergraduate students quake where they sat. ‘I’m Gabriel Sharma, the head librarian.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Gabe’s adversary snapped.
She barely came up to his shoulder. She was soft-looking with limpid blue eyes, her hair pale and fluffy, even though it was clipped back from her heart-shaped face with yet more things that were pink and sparkly; but how she looked was an illusion.
Personality wise, she was imperious. Very chippy.
Also, Gabe knew that he’d seen her somewhere before, but he couldn’t quite place her.
‘Being the head librarian isn’t something that I would lie about,’ he told her sharply. He was still holding her phone and he glanced down at the email again.
‘Where’s Ella? The email says that she’s the head librarian.’
He’d only read the middle paragraphs of the infamous email. Now Gabe scrolled to the top.
‘I really enjoyed your piece in The Sunday Sentinel on the travails of modern dating. I’m sure it struck a chord with the thousands of women who’ve read it.’
Of course! That was where he’d seen her before. Gabe looked down at the woman, Tessa. No. Tess. Even in the muted light of the library, her hair really was the most extraordinary shade of blonde. Like the glow of the moon on sheaves of wheat.
‘We’re both the head librarian,’ Gabe said slowly, slightly discomfited by his inner voice, which was never usually so poetic. ‘Twins. Who job share. Although only one of us does the job and the other one causes trouble.’
‘Well, where is the other head librarian?’ Tess demanded, putting her hands on her hips.
‘I’m here! I’m here,’ cried a familiar voice.
Gabe looked past Tess Harding – no, that still wasn’t right – Tess Hardy to see his sister barrelling through the library door.
‘I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to be late.
The little fat baby was fussing and it was ages before I could leave. Tess? So pleased to meet you.’
Tess turned round as Ella rushed towards her with hand outstretched. ‘I was worried I had the wrong place. This is The Love Library, right?’
‘It is,’ Ella assured her. She glanced up at Gabe, her eyes narrowed as she dared him to say otherwise.
‘It is not,’ Gabe insisted.
‘Well, is it or isn’t it?’ Tess asked. ‘Who’s in charge?’
‘I am,’ Gabe and Ella both snapped.
‘It’s hard to explain,’ Gabe said and not just because it was quite hard to talk when you were grinding down on your back molars.
‘It’s not that hard,’ Ella said, actually having the nerve to roll her eyes at Tess, like the two of them were already in league against him.
‘The head librarian role is handed down to the eldest Sharma child, except we’re twins and our mother, in an act of feminist micro and macro aggression and also because she was furious with our father for not getting to the hospital in time, has always refused to say who was born first. So, we’re both head librarian. ’
Tess nodded. ‘Your mum sounds cool.’
Finally, something they could all agree on.
‘She is,’ Ella said, curving her arm around Tess’s shoulder. ‘Let me show you into the library and we can get you started on your first loan.’
Gabe planted himself firmly in their path. ‘That’s not going to happen,’ he said in his most uncompromising voice, which alas, never stopped his sister in her tracks. She just rolled her eyes again.
‘Why are you still here? Go away!’ she hissed, trying to shove him, but Gabe wasn’t for shoving. ‘This is nothing to do with you.’
‘It’s everything to do with me. We discussed this and agreed that this … this … Love Library nonsense of yours wasn’t going to happen,’ he reminded Ella, who tossed her head.
‘We agreed no such thing,’ she said, squaring up and shoving Gabe again and he had to let her pass on account of the fact that she wasn’t above pinching him to get her own way and also she had had a baby relatively recently. ‘Come on, Tess!’
Tess shot Gabe a sideways look, that wasn’t very friendly, as she edged past him. Gabe followed them into the library because he wasn’t going anywhere. Not when people, his own sister, was trying to abuse the sacred tenets of the library.
But also, one of the things that Gabe loved most about the library was watching people who got to see it, take it all in, for the first time. Just as Tess was about to.
As soon as they were through the arch and into the main room of the library, she let out a breath, her mouth falling open, a hand to her chest. ‘Wow!’ She mouthed the word as she turned slowly on the spot.
It was impossible to tell from outside the library or even from the entrance hall just how vast the main room was.
Modelled on the ancient library of Alexandria, enormous pillars reached up to embrace and support the vaulted ceiling, which looked down upon their books.
So many books. Leather-bound, gilt-edged and displayed on shelf after shelf that stretched to stack after stack.
There was a mezzanine level and they had not one, not two, not even three, but six rolling ladders.
No natural light was let in. Sunlight was a book’s mortal enemy.
Instead, the room was illuminated by the sympathetic glimmer of an immense chandelier which hung from the centre of the room, plus hundreds of downlighters.
The electricity bill, not to mention the cost of all those lightbulbs, was equivalent to the GDP of a small emerging nation.
All in all, it was an impressive sight. Tess was still open-mouthed and awestruck and she’d yet to see the reading rooms or the lecture theatre.
She wasn’t going to be seeing them though. Not if Gabe had his way.
‘This Love Library thing … Like I said, you’ve had a wasted journey,’ he told Tess while she was still happily silent. ‘It goes against everything that the library stands for, why it was created.’
‘Hello! It’s the twenty-first century in case you hadn’t noticed,’ Ella said, which was a weak and specious argument as Gabe had told her many times before.
He leaned against one of the central pillars.
‘I’m very well aware of that. Which is why my idea of harnessing the truly transformative power of the library’s greatest works will steer the world towards a renaissance of knowledge, the definitive Information Age.
’ Gabe frowned. ‘Although I’m sure that when William Caxton introduced the printing press to England in 1476, the populace thought that they too were living in the information age. But I digress.’
‘He does that a lot, the digressing,’ Ella murmured to Tess, who wasn’t looking quite so enthralled now. ‘I bet the medieval peasants didn’t call it the Information Age.’
‘Maybe they called it Ye Information Age?’ Tess suggested, straight-faced.
Ella giggled. This was all getting out of hand.
‘As I was saying, my idea will engage minds and inspire the leaders of today and tomorrow as well as being financially lucrative. Just imagine it! The greatest philosophers civilisation has ever known on a speaking tour. We’ll start in Europe.
Plato and Wittgenstein will be able to speak in their native tongues; then off to America.
’ Gabe rubbed his hands together as he warmed to his theme.
‘Socrates will absolutely kill on the self-help conference circuit. Who better to talk about self-actualisation than the man who––’
‘That does sound impressive,’ Tess interrupted, her face still impassive; but Gabe had the sense that she found his scheme amusing. That he was amusing to her. Gabe had not been put on this earth to be a figure of fun to pink, sparkly women.
‘I think what you meant to say is that it sounds very boring,’ Ella muttered. She and Tess shared a look. A conspiratorial look of half smiles and raised eyebrows.
It was clear that though they’d only met ten minutes earlier, they were already a bad influence on each other.
‘It’s not at all boring.’ Gabe straightened up, squared his shoulders and clenched his jaw in preparation for the battle ahead.
‘It’s much more useful than filling people’s heads with silly notions about love.
Philosophy is the tool we need to truly understand the paradox and complexity of human thought, and thus, will make the world a better place. ’
‘When he starts using “thus”, it’s best to take cover,’ Ella advised. ‘To think I asked Mum and Dad to babysit. Now I’m wasting valuable time listening to this. Again. Go home, Gabe. This has nothing to do with you.’
‘It has everything to do with me …’
‘You’re not the boss of me!’
‘And you are definitely not the boss of me!’
‘You’re wrong, you know,’ Tess said sharply, breaking up their sibling bickering, which never had any real malicious intent.
‘I haven’t read much philosophy but I know for certain that you can learn far more about life and love and humanity by reading Pride and Prejudice than you ever could from Plato’s The Republic. ’
It was Gabe’s turn to stand there awestruck. Although it was more thunderstruck. Something struck anyway. No one, outside of his immediate family, ever dared to argue with him. Especially about philosophy. Which, by the way, he was a professor of.
‘He hasn’t read a novel in over twenty years. Not since he did Animal Farm for GCSE English,’ Ella informed Tess. ‘Can you believe it? He’s actually proud that he doesn’t read fiction.’
‘It was a very pedestrian text,’ Gabe remembered with a frown. ‘The novel is a very inefficient vehicle for critical thought.’