The bell above the door gives a single soft note as you step in from the rain, and the door settles itself shut behind you on its slow brass hinge. The shop is warmer than the street by a few degrees, and darker, lit by two lamps with parchment shades and whatever grey light the bay window lets through. The air is paper and dust and a thread of beeswax polish from the front counter. A tortoiseshell cat is asleep on a low stack of green Penguin paperbacks by the till, one paw folded under its chin. Somewhere at the back of the shop, two rooms away, a man is humming a tune you almost know, breaking off to cough, beginning again.
You shake the rain from your sleeves and move into the first room. The floorboards are oak, dark with a century of feet, and they give under you with small considered sounds. Shelves go up to the ceiling on every wall, and where shelves end, stacks begin, piles of books on the floor arranged by some private logic of the proprietor's. You step around them. The spines closest to your shoulder are clothbound, faded blue and maroon and a green the colour of old ponds, their gold lettering rubbed to a suggestion. You tilt your head to read them. Essays. Sermons. A history of the canals of the Midlands. A slim volume on the grafting of fruit trees, its cover blooming with damp along one edge.
The rain comes harder for a moment against the bay window and then eases. The window is old glass, slightly warped, and the rain slides down it in long unhurried lines that bend where the glass bends. Through it, the street is a wash of grey and the brick of the building opposite has gone the colour of wet slate. A bus passes without sound, or with a sound so muffled by the shop's quiet that it reaches you only as a slow darkening of the window and then a lifting. You turn back to the shelves. At waist height, a run of poetry: Edward Thomas, Hardy, a Clare bound in cracked leather, a de la Mare with a child's pencil marks in the margin of one page, faint, numbering stanzas.
You take the Thomas down. The cloth is soft at the corners where many thumbs have held it, worn through in one place to the grey board beneath. The top edge of the pages is dusty and you draw a finger across and it comes away with a fine pale grey on the pad. Inside the front cover someone has written a name in brown ink, and a town, and a year, all in a small careful hand that slopes to the right. You do not read the name closely. You turn the pages, and the paper is thick and a little foxed, the print set generously, the margins wide. A pressed leaf falls out and you catch it in your palm. It is a beech leaf, brown, brittle at the edges, its veins still clear. You slip it back between two pages further on and put the book gently back on the shelf, spine flush with its neighbours.
Further in, the shop opens into a second room, lower-ceilinged, where the lamps are fewer. This is where the older stock lives. The smell changes here, deepens, goes more towards vanilla and mushroom and the faint mineral note of old leather. A brass lamp with a green glass shade sits on a table piled with folios, and its light falls in a pool on an open atlas, the paper the colour of weak tea, the coastlines hand-coloured in pale washes of pink and yellow and blue. You bend over it. The atlas is showing you a country that kept its shape but changed its borders, the rivers drawn finer than the roads, the place names in a copperplate so small you have to lean close. Your breath moves a corner of the page and you step back. The humming from the further room has stopped. A kettle clicks on somewhere and then, after a while, off.
You move between the tables. The floor here is carpeted, a red that has gone to rust in the traffic-lanes between the shelves and kept its colour only under the furniture. Your footfall goes quiet. You pass a glass case of older books laid flat on green baize, their spines turned towards you: a Boswell, a book of engravings of English cathedrals, a herbal with a title page you can read through the glass, the letters long and graceful, an S that looks like an f. On top of the case a brass weight holds down a sheaf of loose prints. You lift the weight and look at the topmost print. It is a woodcut of a hare in a field of wheat, the hare alert, the wheat done in small diagonal strokes. You put the weight back carefully, and the prints settle with a soft breath of their own.
The cat has moved. You find it now in the second room, on an armchair whose upholstery has gone shiny at the arms, curled against a folded tartan blanket. It opens one eye as you pass, a slow yellow opening, and closes it again. On a low table beside the chair there is a saucer with the remains of a biscuit and a cup of tea gone cold, a skin formed on its surface. The humming starts again, further off than before, from a third room you have not yet entered. Something about the tune has become familiar. A hymn, perhaps, or a folk song with the words worn away. Rain ticks against a skylight you had not seen, high up in the corner of the ceiling where the plaster is stained in a faint brown circle from some old leak long since mended.
You choose a book almost without choosing. It is a small clothbound volume on the lives of hedgerows, published in a year you do not check, its cover a dull green with a decoration of leaves pressed in darker green. You take it to the armchair opposite the cat, and you sit, and the chair receives you with a creak from somewhere in its wooden frame. The book opens easily at a page in the middle, as though it has been opened there often. There is a chapter on blackthorn, and on how the sloe takes the first frost to sweeten, and how the wood is used for walking sticks and for the shillelagh, and how the flowers come before the leaves in a white that looks, from a distance, like snow caught in the hedges. You read slowly. You are not trying to finish anything. The sentences are long and unhurried and the writer seems to have all the time in the world, and to expect you to have it too.
Outside, the rain thickens again and then thins. The light in the bay window, two rooms away, shifts by some small degree, grey going to a paler grey as a cloud thins somewhere above the town. In the second room where you are sitting, the green lampshade gives everything a faint underwater cast. The gilt on the spines across from you glints dimly. You turn a page. A moth, pale and small, lifts from behind a stack of books on the floor and drifts once around the lamp before settling again on the wall above it, folding its wings. You let your eye rest on it. After a time you go back to the page, and read about the ways a hedge is laid, how the stems are cut partway through and bent over and pegged, how new growth comes up through the old and thickens year by year into something that will hold a field.
The humming from the third room has gone again. The kettle, or another kettle, clicks on and then off. Somewhere at the front of the shop the bell gives its soft single note as someone else comes in or goes out, and the door closes on its slow hinge, and the sound of the street reaches you for a moment and then withdraws. The cat has turned over in its chair, showing the pale fur of its belly. The book has grown a little heavier in your hand. You set it open on your knee, your place kept by your thumb. The rain on the skylight is steady now, a small regular sound you no longer separate from the sound of the shop itself. The lamp pools its green light on the atlas, on the baize, on the edge of the carpet where the rust-coloured lane runs between the shelves, and further in, in the third room, the lamps are lower still, and the shelves go back, and the quiet goes back with them, and further