Long Sonata of the Dead by Andrew Taylor Read Free Book Online

I HADN’T SEEN A DAM in the flesh for over twenty years. I had seen him on television, of course—it was increasingly hard to miss him—but the last time I had met him in person was when we picked up our degrees. Mary had been there too.
    “Well,” he’d said, punching me gently on the arm. “Thank God it’s over. Let’s find a drink. We need to celebrate.”
    “No,” I’d said. “I don’t want to.”
    Mary hadn’t said anything at all.
    I don’t deny that it was a shock to see Adam after all this time, and it wasn’t a pleasant one. It was the first of the three shocks that happened in swift succession that afternoon.
    I was standing at one of the tall windows of the reading room overlooking St. James’s Square. It was a Tuesday afternoon in February, just after lunch, and it was raining. I was watching the domes of umbrellas scurrying like wet beetles on the pavements and the steady clockwise flow of traffic round the square. Adam must have walked across the garden in the middle. He came out of the gate in the railings on the north side. He paused for a moment, waiting for a gap in the traffic.
    That’s when I recognized him. Despite the rain, he didn’t have a hat or umbrella. He was wearing a Burberry raincoat but even that was unbuttoned. He had his head thrown back and his legs a little apart. He was smiling as if the weather was a friend, not an inconvenience.
    He had been standing like that the very first time I saw him, which was also in the rain. That had been the first day of our first term at university. I was staring down from my room at the cobbled court below and wishing I was still at home. There was Adam, looking as if he owned the place. Thirty seconds later I discovered that he was my new roommate. He was studying English, too, so we saw each other for a large part of every day for an entire year, apart from the holidays.
    The traffic parted before him like the Red Sea. He strolled across the road, swinging his bag. I realized that he was coming here, to the London Library.
    Adam looked up at the windows of the reading room. He couldn’t have seen me looking down at him—I was too far back from the glass. But I turned and moved away as if I had been caught doing something wrong.
    It will help if I explain about the London Library before I go on. It’s a building, first of all, an old townhouse that was turned into a private subscription library in 1841. Its members included people like Dickens and Thackeray, Carlyle and George Eliot. Over the years it has been extended down and up, sideways and backwards, until the place has become a maze of literature.
    The pillared reading room on the first floor still has the air of a well-appointed gentleman’s library, with leather armchairs in front of the fireplace, racks of the latest periodicals and galleries of bookcases far above your head. In all the years I have known it, I have never heard a raised voice there.
    There are over a million of books, they say, in over fifty languages, marching along over fifteen miles of shelving. Nowadays they have an electronic universe of information to back them up. But it’s the real, printed books that matter. I often think of the sheer weight of all that paper, all that ink, all those words, all those meanings.
    The London Library is, in its way, a republic of letters. As long as they pay the subscription and obey the few rules, its members have equal rights and privileges. Perhaps that was the main reason the place was so important to me. In the London Library I was as good as anyone else. Since my marriage had broken up three years ago, I felt more at home in the library than I did in my own flat.
    Over the years the collection has grown. As the books have multiplied, so has the space required to house them. Members have free access to the stacks that recede deeper and deeper into the mountain of buildings behind the frontages of St James’s Square. Here, in these sternly utilitarian halls of