The Reading Room

The reading room at St Aldric’s had been locked from the inside for thirty-one years, and the college had simply learned to walk around it.

Tobias Wren was told this on his first evening, over mutton and cold claret in a hall that could have seated two hundred and held eleven. Term had ended the week before. The undergraduates had gone home to their families and their central heating, and the fellows who remained ate at high table beneath a row of darkened portraits, speaking in the low, contented voices of people with nothing left to prove.

"You’ll want to leave it alone," said the Warden. Dr Hester Marrow was a narrow woman of about sixty, with cropped white hair and a signet ring she turned while she spoke. She had hired him by letter, on the strength of a thesis almost no one had read, to catalogue the papers of a professor who had died in 1994. The letter had not mentioned a locked room. "Everyone does, eventually. It’s an easy habit to acquire."

He asked why it was locked.

"Because Professor Halloran locked it," she said, "and then declined to come out." A fellow further down the table laughed, and stopped when she did not.

The rest he pieced together over the cheese. In the December of 1994, Aurelian Halloran had gone into the reading room with a lamp and a flask of tea and shot the bolt behind him. When he had not appeared for three days, the porters took the door off its hinges. They found him at his desk, pen in hand, the windows painted shut and the only key in his waistcoat pocket. The coroner said his heart. The college rehung the door, turned the key from the outside, and gave it to the Warden, who had kept it ever since.

Tobias’s rooms were at the top of the Old Court staircase: a sitting room with a coal fire that smoked when the wind came off the fens, a bedroom narrow as a pew, and eleven archive boxes stacked against the wall like a second, disapproving tutor. He lit the fire, made tea on the gas ring, and began, because he had never known how to sleep in a new place and saw no reason to start now.

The papers smelled of foxing and pipe smoke. Lecture notes, reading lists, a quarrel conducted over nine years with a man in Leiden about the dating of a psalter. Halloran’s hand was small and furious and slanted steeply to the right, and he wrote, always, in green ink.

It was past one when Tobias found the first thing that was wrong. A letter, filed out of order at the back of box seven, in the same green ink and the same furious hand. It was dated the fourth of March, 2003. Nine years after the man who wrote it had been carried out of the reading room.

He read the date three times. Then he sat very still, because he had seen that ink before, long before tonight.

Every Michaelmas of his childhood, a cheque had arrived at the charity school in Norfolk that had taken him in after his mother died. It paid his fees, his uniform, his train fare home to nowhere in particular. It came with no letter, only a compliments slip that read From a friend of your late mother, and it was signed, in green ink, with a name no one had ever been able to decipher. He had kept one of those slips in his wallet for twenty years. He did not need to take it out. He knew the angle of those descenders the way he knew his own face.

Many people use green ink, he told himself. It was the kind of thing a sensible man told himself at half past one in the morning.

Tucked into the fold of the letter was a key. Small and brass, worn smooth at the bow, with a paper tag tied to it by a length of faded ribbon. The tag said R.R., in pencil.

He did not remember deciding to go downstairs. He remembered the cold of the stone under his socks, the moon lying across the court in a single white slab, the way the fire door at the foot of the stair sighed shut behind him. The reading room was at the end of the east corridor, past the portraits of dead masters and a radiator that knocked like someone asking to be let in.

The door was oak, studded with iron, blacker than the panelling around it. Beneath it lay a thin line of light.

He stopped. The line did not flicker, the way a candle would, and it was not the flat grey of the moon. It was warm and yellow and steady, the light of a lamp turned low for reading. As he watched, something moved across it, a slow shadow passing from one side of the door to the other, and from inside the room came the dry whisper of a page being turned.

"I did say," said the Warden behind him.

She stood at the corner of the corridor in a plaid dressing gown, a candle in one hand, her face perfectly calm. He had not heard her come. He closed his fingers over the key in his pocket, and saw her eyes go to his hand and then, unhurried, back to his face.

"It does this in December," she said. "The electrician has been four times. Go to bed, Mr Wren." She turned to leave, then paused, the candle flame leaning toward the dark. "We’ll talk about your mother in the morning. I expect you have questions. I would rather you asked them of me."

Her footsteps went away down the corridor, and her light with them. The line under the door stayed where it was. The key had warmed in his fist. Inside the reading room, unhurried and unmistakable, another page turned.