How to Disappear by Duncan Fallowell Read Free Book Online Page B

upstairs where the Warden, Mr Lincoln Townsend, had his office. He was middle-aged and his manner combined Oxford don with Chief Scout, and it turned out that his family came from Leicestershire. Most impressive was the office itself whose proportions were archiepiscopal. Nobody could sit in quarters like that and be a wimp.
    â€˜I’ll take you for a drive in my jeep if you like,’ he offered at our first meeting.
    â€˜That’s very kind, Mr Townsend.’
    â€˜Lin, call me Lin, like the Chinese laundry.’
    It must have been a colonial-type joke. I noticed he cracked it whenever he met someone new, and I still don’t get it.
    â€˜Do you want to look downstairs first? You’ll find Roy Kugler there. He’s a fool, so I gave him the novels to sort out where he could do no harm.’
    At first Roy Kugler, thin and bony, was in amiable spirits, reminiscing about his Burmese trading days in a distinct Derbyshire accent. But a great gust of irritation suddenly overwhelmed him and he declared ‘To be honest, I have no patience with this sort of thing!’ – meaning my visit to the Library – but I was the only person there! – and he stormed off.
    Blinking, I go back upstairs and ask if I’ve done anything wrong. Lin says ‘Don’t mind him. I told you he was a fool.’
    â€˜Don’t you ever feel like going back to England?’
    â€˜I did go back once a few years ago when my father died. But I couldn’t live there any more, it’s been too long. It would be like being shut inside a kitchen garden. How should I exist? A tiny house on the south coast? I’d die! I still think of the UK as home but only at a distance.’
    He was speaking inside a colossal Victorian fireplace with ornamental overhangs from which he emerged like a majestic troglodyte when his manservant Monica (yes, that’s right) entered the room with a tray of coffee. Monica stepped across piles of books to reach Lin’s teak desk laden with ledgers and inkpots. When later I came to spend time working in this library, Monica would bring me a pot of coffee for one rupee a go.
    Lin, staring over his half-moon spectacles, asked ‘Do you take sugar?’
    â€˜Not usually. But to-day I shall.’
    â€˜Do you like India?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜What do you like about it?’
    â€˜Like isn’t the word actually. Sometimes it’s very hard work. But it doesn’t feel alien. This library for example reminds me of my school. And one is never asked to explain one’s presence. It’s as though one were expected.’
    â€˜Being an expatriate makes me realise that all life is temporary,’ he replied.
    â€˜Can I look round up here?’
    â€˜Do – do…’
    Copies of The Yellow Book were wedged against Marie Corelli’s thirty-seven-page rodomontade on Victoria, The Greatest Queen in the World (Skeffington’s of Piccadilly, 1900 – I read it during a violet, green and tangerine sunset); The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic, the Westminster, Edinburgh, and Contemporary reviews; Baily’s, Fraser’s, Blackwood’s; shelf upon shelf of royally bound obsolescence; and one morning a Scarlet Minivet chirruped in a cedar outside the window as I flicked through Louise Jordan Miln’s When We Were Strolling Players in the East. The character of the upstairs collection is that of the British Empire weekending and this is probably the last conservatory for it outside museums. I became particularly entranced by an old guidebook, Ooty and Her Sisters, or Our Hill Stations in South India, published by Higginbothams of Madras in 1881, authored by ‘Geofry’ (yes, spelt that way) whom Lin identified as Geofry Ryan, an English coffee-planter of those times. ‘Effect of Mountain Air on European visitors…To see him skipping like a deer over the heights you might fancy he had got invisible balloons under his