A Splash of Red by Antonia Fraser Page A

was that the British Library system of sending for a book from the stacks necessitated the possession of a seat before you could fill in a request slip.
    In the past, Jemima had enjoyed one concentrated and instructive spell working in the Reading Room. During a temporary lull in her television career, she had supported herself for three months researching in the Reading Room on behalf of an enterprising publisher who wished to launch a series composed of abridged versions of Victorian classics - out of the public mind, and also out of copyright. The series had never appeared and the publisher had disappeared. Jemima had gone back to television. But during the long days, Jemima had surreptitiously begun to study, on her own account, a topic more congenial to her own taste. This was the genesis of the book on the Edwardian lady philanthropists.
    She still remembered the curious stifling anonymous freedom of working in the Reading Room every day, as though going to some office where one was at the same time totally unknown and yet expected. She had also, during that original sojourn, learnt the Reading Room rules about looking up books, which had their own logic, not readily assimilable on the first visit, but like riding a bicycle, once learnt never forgotten.
    Jemima turned left and began to pace round the semicircle of seats radiating out from the central desk. They were arranged alphabetically, and she found herself beginning at L. The despised little central row of seats between each spoke were marked double L, double M, and so forth. The first three or four sections were too full to be inviting.
    From an old girlhood habit, she began to tick off the letters of the alphabet in her own personal superstitious terms - L for Love, M for Marvellous, N for Naughty but Nice, O for Optimism, P for Peace, R for Romance ... But as she searched for an empty seat, aware of a few people looking up at her with an air of vague disapproval as she passed on her high heels (or perhaps it was recognition or perhaps in the Reading Room the latter quickly turned into the former) she found imperceptibly that her litany was turning into something more macabre. V is for Violence, said the voice inside her head, and double V is for Victim of Violence. But V in Jemima's alphabet had always been for Variety, one of her favourite words, so much more diverting to the curious mind than the certainty of Victor)', the bull-headed sound of Valour.
    And then as she crossed over the entrance to the corridor which led to the North Library and began the alphabet again - this time at the beginning - she found herself reciting A is for Accident, B is for Beware ... C is for Chloe ... she found her mind automatically continuing. But at B for Beware and before C for Chloe was reached, Jemima suddenly found that B9 - the first end seat and thus her favourite for its slight extra feeling of space - was empty. Someone must have recently vacated it, for such a desirable position to be available so late in the day, by British Museum standards.
    August after all was notorious for an influx of overseas scholars. Valentine Brighton had warned her as much when she announced her intention of using the summer season to work on those ladies inevitably christened by him, with his characteristic penchant for trivialization by nickname, 'Goodies of the Golden Age'.
    'I assure you that you will find a mob of sweating scholars from Minnesota: they run package tours to the Reading Room in August.'
    'You've never been seen in the British Library in August,' retorted Jemima. 'You simply sit at Helmet in the world-famous Elizabethan garden, having patrician nightmares about the proletarian professors.'
    'My God, how wrong can you be? And I thought you were supposed to be an acute social observer, Jemima Shore, Investigator. I shall think twice about entrusting my Golden Goodies, to you, let alone old Aunt Emma Helmet's deeply philanthropic diaries about stamping out sex among the