The Silver Bough by Lisa Tuttle Read Free Book Online Page A

relentless downpour and the faint, eerie whistle of the wind in the eaves. She liked having the library to herself, felt both stimulated and at peace in the company of all the silent books. She loved the look, the heft, the weight, the smell, and the fact of books—all those miniature embodiments of other lives, other times. Thoughts and dreams preserved for posterity, to be summoned back to life through the act of reading. The buzz these days was all about the Internet, the world of online, digital knowledge, the necessity of being connected. But even though she accepted that the Net was not merely the wave of the future but the fact of present-day life, and did miss the access to it that she’d taken for granted in her old job, on an emotional level it could not compare, for her, with the magic of an old-fashioned, printed, real book. It was that, and a childhood fantasy of being able to live in a library, which had really decided her choice of career, no matter what sensible reasons she might tell other people.
    She walked among the shelves that housed the local collection, touching the backs of old books, occasionally taking one down. Some remnant of childhood animism made her feel sorry for those which were overlooked, left too long untouched. She’d been pleased to see
The Ancient Volcanoes of Great Britain
taken out at last. Now, like a determined matchmaker, she browsed for something else to tempt Graeme. There were some volumes of the
Scottish Journal of Geology
and
Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow
with essays about this area, but nothing looked as exciting as underwater volcanoes.
    A sudden howl startled her. It might have been a banshee wailing upstairs, but looking through the street-side window she saw the fronds of the palm trees along the Esplanade shaking wildly in a sudden, fierce gust of wind. It had grown dark; the line of yellowish lights strung along the harbor front shuddered and bounced. She was lucky she didn’t have to go far in this weather. But this reminder that it was past time for going home did not move her. She
was
home, standing right at the heart of it.
    The job had not been appealing by objective standards, and her friends and former colleagues all thought she was mad to take it. The salary was considerably lower than what she’d been earning in London, and although the title of Area Librarian implied a grander job than her old one (where she had been just one of six librarians), and seemed to give her more authority, she actually had only three part-time assistants, none with qualifications in library science, and all the really important decisions were made at headquarters, and handed down to her. According to the advertisement, the new Area Librarian would “preside over the modernization of the system and help to bring Appleton Library up to modern COSLA standards; a demanding and rewarding task.”
    “Translation: you will be overworked and underpaid, and we expect you to be grateful for the opportunity,” said Louise, a children’s librarian and her friend for the past four years.
    She sent off her CV with the application anyway, and despite all the well-meaning advice from her friends, held her breath and wished on a star and felt enormously grateful when she was called for an interview.
    The bleak truth was that she didn’t have a lot of choice. She couldn’t stay in the job she had. Even with the “London weighting” on her salary, she could not afford to live in the greater London area without a husband to share the mortgage. It hadn’t been easy even when she and Geoff were together, and now that they’d split up it was impossible. She’d thought about moving back to America, but the economic situation, or employers’ attitudes, had changed a lot in the decade since she’d left. Out of forty applications, she received only one offer, and that was for a one-year contract in Indiana. She got the message. Like Thomas Wolfe said,
You Can’t Go Home