Living In Perhaps by Julia Widdows Page A

bare skin. Her insteps
were high and pale.
    I sat upright on the middle of the big settee. It had carved legs,
a high back and scrolled arms. It was prickly and unyielding.
Barbara had told me it was stuffed with horsehair. I imagined it
stuffed with the taut flesh and hard bones of horses, too.
    'Would you like a book to read while you wait?' Isolde asked
me. She was the perfect dental receptionist in embryo.
    I nodded.
    'Behind you.'
    I turned round and knelt up on the seat. Covering the wall
behind me were two huge bookcases with glass fronts, and
between them an alcove also filled with shelves that were stuffed
with books.
    'I don't know what to choose,' I said, looking back over my
shoulder for guidance.
    Isolde shrugged, a magnificent loose shrug. 'Take anything you
like.'
    But it was like trying to find a particular headstone in an endless
cemetery. There were no signposts and much of the writing
was hard to make out. The titles meant nothing to me: A Tale
of Two Cities , Antic Hay , Life of Marie Curie , Dr. Box's Book of
Remedies , Tropic of Cancer , The Treasure Seekers , Saturday in
My Garden , The Way of All Flesh . The bindings were mostly old
and dull, some with flakes of gold or ornate patterns pressed
into their spines. They looked like books picked up at secondhand
shops and jumble sales, books that had sat unopened for
years.
    I was about to reach for one called Birds of Northern Europe ,
which at least looked as if it must be about what it said, when
Isolde pulled out Alice Through the Looking Glass . 'This is funny,'
she said. 'Have you read it? Alice in Wonderland comes first, really,
but it doesn't matter. You can borrow it if you like.' She shrugged
her shoulders gracefully, and dropped the book in my lap with the
careless generosity of one who has far more of everything than
they will ever need. And she left me to it. I was still reading when
Barbara at long last came bouncing into the room.
    I treated their house like a public lending library after that. I
carried Alice home and read it by the summer daylight that came
through my bedroom curtains in the evening. It took me ages to
finish. I was a slow reader. Barbara said it didn't matter how long
I borrowed it for, nobody else wanted it. But the speed of my
reading improved by leaps and bounds. I found you didn't have to
sound every word in your head. You could breathe in the words,
whole sentences, paragraphs, suck them off the page with your
eyes. And reading was fun, it was good, it was a delight . I liked
Alice, cussed, confused Alice, and I loved the talking Tiger Lily,
and the wicked greedy Walrus and Carpenter.
    Next I took home not one but four books, in case what I had
chosen (without Isolde's advice) turned out not to be interesting.
I kept them under my bed so that I wouldn't have to explain them
to Mum. I forgot that she vacuumed under there regularly. When
she asked I said they came from the school library. I blushed as I
said it. I worried that she might have known I was lying. But she
didn't. She didn't notice my hot face or the artificial tone in my
voice. It's weird how adults don't suspect the most obvious
duplicities. I was only an apprentice liar at this stage, but even so
she didn't notice anything. After that I didn't bother to worry
about her finding them.
    And anyway, it was true: those first four books did have library
cards inside the front covers. One had a page full of old date
stamps, the others had little cardboard pockets for the slips to go
in. I asked Barbara about this.
    'Oh, our books come from all over,' she said. 'Patrick picks
them up when he's out and about. Anything that takes his fancy.
Some of them are old books the libraries sell off. He says he's
going to read them all one day, when he's an old, old man and has
the time. And then Isolde and me used to play libraries,' she went
on. 'Isolde had us make cards for all the books and we would
check them in and out if people wanted to look at them. We sat at
a