“Mrs. Spencer put Woolf next to Arnold Bennett?” she clucked. “Woolf couldn’t stand the man. She thought him hideously old guard.”
“I’m sure you can take it up with Mrs. Spencer. Perhaps she’ll permit you to rearrange the books according to each writer’s complaints and position of envy.”
“I’ll pass, in the interest of my sustained existence. Obviously she doesn’t want us in here, if it’s hidden away like this.”
Pru stroked the spine of a Cocteau, then a sequence of Conrad.
“Wow,” she said. “Wow.”
“Look what I’ve got,” Win said and raised a book, tall and thin. “The famous collection of sexual renderings by D. H. Lawrence.”
“You would find that one,” Pru said and rolled her eyes.
She lugged a stool from the corner and climbed on top to examine the upper shelves. Forster, Wells, Shaw, Wharton. The gang’s all there.
“Oh!” she said, stretching to the right. “Is that? I can’t believe she has this one!”
Pru tugged a book out from between two others, and then held it to her chest.
“One of my favorites.” She breathed in its scent. “Sailing Alone Around the World. It was my parents’ favorite, too.”
“I’m not familiar,” Win said and took a few steps closer.
Book in hand, she hopped down from the stool.
“It’s a memoir by Joshua Slocum,” Pru explained. “He was the first person to sail the world alone. His book was an enormous hit when it came out.”
She pried open the cover and ticked through several pages.
“His publisher built him an onboard library for the journey,” she said. “How neat is that?”
I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else.
“Books were always my friends,” she repeated with a goofy yet winsome smile.
“Ah.” Win set the literary pornography on a shelf. “You like seafaring tomes. I s’pose it makes sense for a Boston girl.”
“I’m not a Boston girl,” Pru said, staring into the book. “I grew up in Sausalito. It’s a former fishing village just outside San Francisco.”
As for myself, the wonderful sea charmed me from the first.
Even a decade later Pru could still picture her home. She could catch glimpses of the wind kicking up water, the morning fog gripping the roads. She closed her eyes to conjure the sun as it rose and cleared out the gloom, washing the world clean. Inhaling through the books, Pru could almost smell the sea.
“It’s odd,” Win said. “In all of our conversations, I don’t think you’ve once mentioned your childhood. Or your parents. On bad terms, are you?”
Pru shook her head.
“No terms,” she said. “As a child I adored my parents. They were beautiful and careless, but oh such fun.”
“Gatsby-esque?”
“Something like that. They were sufficiently well off to appear rich, but in absolutely no position to spend with the abandon that they did. I suppose my mother was like Mrs. Spencer’s, minus the slain lovers. But, gosh, they made it seem so simple and happy with their clothes, and their boat, and all that champagne spilling into the bay.”
“That’s why your family was so fond of the sailor,” Win said, pointing to the book still in her hands. “You were bred for the sea.”
“Or irony. When I was nine, my parents took our boat Day in the Sun out onto the water and never returned.”
“No!” Win said, mouth gaping. “Surely that’s not true.”
“Unfortunately, it is.”
“That’s horrific!”
“They eventually found the boat upturned, bobbing along in the bay, their bodies likely sunk to the bottom, if not eaten by sharks.” Pru pitched the book onto the stool. “Joshua Slocum, the author, disappeared on his boat, too.”
“Miss Valentine.” He clutched his chest. “I’m gutted. Truly. I wish I possessed the slightest of couth. I haven’t the faintest clue what to say.”
Pru shrugged.
“There’s nothing to say, really. I was at school when it happened, which was noteworthy as my parents thought experiencing life was far superior to sitting in a classroom. Luckily, I was a bit of a nerd. Of course I didn’t always feel so lucky, having been in school and not with them that day.”
“Oh Miss Valentine,” Win said and looped an arm around her shoulders.
He felt strong. Steady. Secure.
“I wish there was something I could do.”
He squeezed tighter and Pru was surprised to find herself snuffle-nosed and weepy-eyed. It’d been so long since she’d cried about them. Of course, as of late, all her tears had been for Charlie.
“What happened after?” Win asked. “Who raised you?”
“I went to live with my aunt and two much older male cousins,” she said. “They might be as old as you are, even.”
“And they’re still alive? Someone call Ripley’s!”