‘I don’t think I’d call it an obsession.’
‘Erm, you seemed pretty obsessed outside my window the other day.’
‘Oh, right. I suppose I did a bit. I’m writing a PhD proposal about lost manuscripts and why we’re so fascinated with them.’
‘Are we?’ she questioned, scrunching up her nose, then taking a large gulp of her Coke.
‘Come on, surely you can see the appeal? Look at Harper Lee, for example. All those years assuming that she had only written one novel.’
She looked at me askance.
‘To Kill a Mockingbird?’ I said, in case there was any confusion.
‘Oh right, yes.’
There was an awkward silence in which I realised that being an expert in rare books and lost manuscripts could sometimes be construed as quite boring.
‘Of course, there’s Sylvia Plath’s second novel, Double Exposure, which mysteriously vanished after her death.’
‘Who?’
‘You’re not much of a reader, are you?’
She stole a glance at me then, a mixture of spite and hurt in her eyes. I really had a knack for pissing her off.
‘Okay, listen to this. Let me tell you the story of Walter Benjamin. He was a writer, intellectual, genius of a man who also happened to be Jewish living in Nazi-occupied Paris. He didn’t have the right papers, so he had to trek south with other refugees, across the Pyrenees and into Spain.’
‘That’s awful,’ she said, turning her whole body to face me.
‘But there was one thing slowing him down on this perilous journey – a heavy black suitcase containing his manuscript. Speaking to a fellow traveller, Benjamin said that the contents were more valuable than his own life.’
Her face was so animated, as though she were on the journey herself.
‘What happened to him?’
‘Well, when he arrived at the border, Benjamin was informed by Spanish authorities that he would have to go back to France. He knew it meant certain death, so that night, he swallowed a bottle of morphine.’
‘Jesus!’
‘Indeed.’
‘And what about the manuscript? Did he give it to someone?’
‘After his suicide, there was no trace of the black suitcase. The manuscript has never been recovered.’
She shook her head and looked to be almost on the verge of tears. And just like that, she was bitten by the same bug. The unrequited love for what might have been, if not for these cruel acts of fate. I had told the exact same story to Isabelle and yet her only response was that she’d never had a properly good holiday in Spain.
‘So, for all we know, someone could have published it under their own name?’
‘Hmm. I’m not sure which scenario is worse – having lost the work for all time, or having it stolen by someone else.’
I would develop that idea in my paper when I got home.
‘There are so many more stories like that one – rumours of hidden books, forgotten drafts in shoeboxes or novels burned by the author’s family. Poor old Hemingway’s wife had his novel in a briefcase that got stolen from a train station in Paris!’
Paris. Paris. The lost generation. I wondered …
‘What is it?’ she asked, sensing my thoughts as they formed.
‘Oh, maybe nothing. It’s just I can’t seem to find any other records of Opaline Gray and now I’m wondering if she spent any time in Paris.’
She took out her phone, which I thought was rather rude but one can only capture attention for so long.
‘Is this her?’
‘What?’
She shoved her phone in my face, showing a grainy black and white photo from an old newspaper clipping.
‘Who is it? What did you do?’
‘Well, Mr Fancy-Pants Scholar, I googled the words “Opaline”, “books” and “Paris” and found this.’
I looked closer, hardly daring to believe my eyes.
‘This is Ernest Hemingway!’
She grinned like the proverbial cat, but did not meet my eyes. I read the caption underneath: ‘Sylvia Beach, proprietor of Shakespeare and Company, shop assistant Opaline Carlisle’. There she was; a young woman with dark cropped hair, halfway up a ladder with a book in her hand, Hemingway by her feet.
‘Carlisle? Oh my God, this is huge.’
‘You’re welcome.’
‘Oh gosh yes, of course, thank you.’ I moved to hug her but she jumped away from my clumsy attempt and I immediately felt her reproof. ‘I’m sorry, I just, you’ve no idea how much this means.’
‘I think I do,’ she said, then grabbed her phone back and picked up her bag. ‘Anyway, I better go.’
Chapter Ten
OPALINE
Paris, 1921
The weeks swiftly became months and, quite without realising it, I began to feel at home in Paris. I had become a part of Sylvia’s little patchwork family and my position at Shakespeare and Company became permanent, or at least I hadn’t been told otherwise. I rented a demi-pension, a room with half board that was close to the shop. On the weekends, having eventually permitted myself to succumb to his charms, I met Armand. He took me to the hidden corners of the city, like the flea markets in Saint-Ouen where rag and bone men who scoured through the garbage of Paris at night sold their wares. He called them les pêcheurs de lune, moon fishermen, which made me smile because I knew that I was caught in Armand’s net and the more I fought it, the tighter his hold on my heart became. Jane, in her letters to me, had encouraged the romance: ‘What was the point in flitting off to France if not to take a lover!’
One bright morning at the end of the summer, when the city was quieter as the locals retreated to the countryside, I was working diligently in the shop, shelving the latest books to arrive. Sylvia was in the back having tea with an American writer, Ernest Hemingway, discussing a literary evening they were planning. He was unbelievably handsome and everyone was enthralled by his intense magnetism, but there was something malevolent about him. He adored Sylvia, of course, whose respect was worth more than that of any critic. Still, I couldn’t explain it, but I didn’t like being in a room alone with him. Once, when I was on the ladder putting books on to a high shelf, I found him staring at me.
‘Yes?’ I asked, giving him a direct look that I hoped would shame him into looking elsewhere. It did not work.
‘You ought to be careful, Missy.’
Missy. Honestly.
‘And why is that?’
‘All writers are cannibalistic by nature.’
I wasn’t sure what he was driving at, but it didn’t sound very appetising to my ears.
‘Meaning?’
‘Keep waving that ass around here, you might find yourself a character in one of my books,’ he grinned, openly enjoying my vexation. Honestly, writers could be such egoists!
As I slowly lowered myself down the ladder, Sylvia and another man, a reporter, entered the shop and as quick as lightning, he took a camera out of its case and almost blinded the three of us with the flash.
‘There we are, I will have it in our next edition,’ he said, and the two men left, discussing Hemingway’s bruised fingers, which he said he’d got defending Joyce in a drunken brawl.