One of the many casualties Gwendolen had nursed during the war had been a man—a boy—who had taken hours to choke to death on his own brains after a sniper shot to the head, and he had certainly not been worrying about where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s new book on spirit photography should land in the Dewey Decimal System.
“You are so sensible, Miss Kelling,” Mr. Pollock often said to her. “Sensible” was a very uninspiring adjective in Gwendolen’s opinion, possibly bordering on insult.
The genteel and rather elderly coven of the Misses Tate, Rogerson and Shaw had exasperated her, but they meant well and so Gwendolen had suffered them sublimely, every morning donning a mask of docility, along with the librarian habit of lisle stockings, tweed skirt, woollen cardigan and one of her increasingly worn-out lawn blouses. She may as well have joined a holy order, so cloistered did her life grow between the Library and Mother.
* * *
—
Gwendolen was staying at the Warrender, a modest establishment near the Victoria and Albert Museum that advertised itself as “For Ladies Only” and was owned and run by a Mrs. Bodley, who was as stringent as an Army matron and, as with Army matrons, left Gwendolen feeling rather rebellious.
When she had booked the room, Gwendolen had hoped that her fellow guests would be independent, professional women with whom she would have stimulating conversations over the pre-dinner sherry. Or, at the other end of the spectrum of possibilities, perhaps she would be entertained by the sight of glamorous types being collected by their beaux every night to go dancing or to dinner. The reality was somewhat different. Apart from a straggle of tourists, the Warrender seemed to be primarily a permanent home for elderly residents or “Distressed Gentlewomen” as Mrs. Bodley referred to them, affording them capital letters.
Gwendolen had been pounced on that first night by the Distressed （she was “fresh meat,” she thought） and had already made up a fourth at Bridge and been the unwitting prey in a cut-throat game of Euchre. The Misses Tate, Rogerson and Shaw were lambs compared to Mrs. Bodley’s so-called Gentlewomen.
The Library had not been a career choice （after all, who would choose to be a librarian?） but a financial necessity after the family money was lost. No, not lost—stolen. Many things were lost—wars and keys and hearts and boys at sea—but family fortunes, even modest ones, were stolen.
Gwendolen couldn’t deny that at first there had been balm for her war-weary soul in the hushed oak of the bookshelves, but it was balm that sadly dissipated the moment she returned home at the end of the day for another endless evening of skirmishes with Mother and her list of complaints. She had lost her two sons to the war—Gwendolen’s two younger brothers—and wore her bereavement with triumph rather than sorrow. For a woman who reported herself to be at constant risk of fainting and who spent her fragile afternoons lying on a chaise longue, picking her way through one of Terry’s expensive “fancy boxes” of chocolates, she remained remarkably bellicose even after the end of the war. （As a family, they were loyal to Terry’s, not Rowntree’s, a fealty based on their house’s proximity to Terry’s factory on Bishopthorpe Road.） Gwendolen’s mother had been a foolish woman, inclined to believe any passing nonsense. Of such people were patriots made, in Gwendolen’s opinion. More’s the pity.
Before the war, the Kellings were well off. There had been five of them: Mother, Father, Gwendolen and her brothers, Harry and Dickie. They lived in a lovely house close to the Knavesmire and employed a cook, a scullery maid, a parlour maid and a gardener. There was a croquet lawn and a pond, an orchard of apples, pears and plums. The Kellings had been rooted firmly to the ground beneath them—it would have to be a great wind that could blow away such a life. And so it was. The war had been an awfully great wind.
The money came from the family business—a small wireworks that had been started by Father’s own father the previous century. It had prospered even before the war. “People will always want wire,” their father said. He could have had no idea just how much wire a world at war would want.
The wireworks had been in a grimy side street, more a snicket, really, in the centre of town. It was surrounded by medieval streets and buildings and was an unusual industry in a town that, if the breeze was right, carried the comforting scent of cocoa on the air from Rowntree’s factory or the uplifting perfume of sugar and strawberries being boiled down into their jellies.
Gwendolen often stopped by the wireworks on her way home from school. Their father had a glass-walled office that overlooked the busy, noisy workshop from a mezzanine. On one or two occasions in the recent past, Gwendolen would be scrubbing a pan with steel wool—she was extraordinarily skilled at burning sauces—and the metallic tang in the air would transport her back in an instant to the wireworks, to her father, to the past.