The Reading Room

The green door, when she finally walked through it, was not green on the inside. It was not, in fact, anything; she had braced for marble, or the dark wood of a club, or the particular fluorescent shame of an institutional corridor, and got instead a vestibule the size of a coat cupboard, with a coat cupboard's smell, in which a small woman she had never seen took her name without writing it down and pointed, with the back of a pencil, at a second door. On it, in letters small enough that one had to lean in, was the word READING.

The Reading Room was, at first glance, a library, and at second glance an argument with the idea of one. It ran the length of three terraced houses whose adjoining walls had been quietly removed by someone who had not, at the time, asked the council. The shelves did not run along the walls, as shelves in libraries do. They ran across the room, in low ranks no higher than a tall man's chin, so that one could stand anywhere and see the whole room over the tops of the books, and could not, anywhere, hide. The light came from above, from a long skylight let into the roof by a person who had loved both books and weather and decided, against all conservatorial wisdom, that the books would prefer to be read in real light and would accept the cost. There were no desks. There were armchairs, and a few low stools, and one chaise with a tartan blanket, and at intervals small round tables that did not match each other or, Iyla suspected, anything anywhere. A fireplace at the far end was not, today, lit. Along one wall stood a long table with a tea urn and a tin of biscuits and a hand-lettered sign that said, in the upright hand she was now learning to recognize, TAKE TWO, NO MORE, in a tone that did not, on inspection, brook negotiation.

There were perhaps a dozen people in the room when she came in, distributed across the chairs the way readers distribute themselves when none of them is, technically, with any of the others. None looked up. This was, she understood, the courtesy of the place: one was permitted, here, to arrive without being noticed.

Saroya took her around the shelves with the brisk affection of a person showing off a garden she had not herself planted. They were arranged, she explained, not by author or genre but by what she called readership density — the most-read books in front, the least-read at the back, with a long middle stretch in which the principle was, she admitted, more art than science. "The front shelves" — she gestured at a rank of paperbacks that included three editions of Pride and Prejudice and a Dickens with its spine taped — "are what we call the high streets. Anyone can walk into them. We keep them for new travelers, and tired travelers, and the days when one wants a thing that is simply easy." She moved them on. "The middle is where most of the work is done. The back" — she stopped at a shelf of books Iyla did not recognize, in languages she did not read, bound by people who were not, primarily, in the binding business — "is where we send people who have begun to think they are clever. It is, on the whole, where they stop thinking that."

"And the books that aren't here," Iyla said.

Saroya looked at her sidelong. "Yes," she said. "Hold that question too."

It was at the third table that she met them, because they were sitting at the third table and, even by the standards of a room containing twelve readers in twelve postures of avoidance, doing a poor job of being quiet. There were three of them, three open books between them and four mugs, which suggested either that one of them had recently been joined or that one of them was, on principle, ahead. Saroya took her over with the careful neutrality of a woman delivering a parcel to a household she suspected of opening one another's post.

"Iyla," she said, "these are some of the others. Penn. Maro. Kettle. They are, between them, approximately your age, and they will, I am told, be useful to you, though on any given afternoon I would not place a wager on which one and in which direction. I will leave you. Penn, do not bully her. Maro, do not recruit her. Kettle, do not feed her anything she has not asked for." She went.

Penn was the tallest, in the way some people are tall — as a position taken. He sat as if he had been told once, by a person whose opinion he trusted, that he had a good profile, and had not since been given reason to revise. In front of him was a hardback whose title Iyla could not see, and on top of it a notebook in which he was writing, in a hand both small and showy, what appeared to be footnotes to his own footnotes. He looked Iyla up and down with the unembarrassed appraisal of a man who had been told, by the same person, that his attention was a compliment.

"An Author," he said. "How thrilling. We don't get many of you. Tell me, do you find you've been reading less, since? Most new Authors stop almost entirely. It's a great pity."

"Penn reads," said the girl beside him, without looking up from her own book, "the way some people own dogs. For the way it looks from the street."

"Maro reads," Penn said, "the way some people pray. With great seriousness, and to no one in particular."

"Maro reads," Maro said, "to find out what the writer was afraid of. The only honest reason to read anything. Penn reads to find out what the writer wanted to be admired for, which is the second-most honest reason, and a very tiring one to be in a room with."

She was small and dark, with the kind of stillness Iyla recognized, with a small internal flinch, from her own mirror. She was reading, Iyla saw when she leaned slightly, a Middlemarch whose margins had been so thoroughly written in that the printed text had begun to look like the interruption. She read with a finger on the line, the way Mr. Behr did. She did not look up; but she moved the finger, very slightly, to make it easier to see, which Iyla understood to be a greeting.

The third one, Kettle, was eating a biscuit — slowly, methodically, with a kind of attention that a plain digestive, which exists primarily as a delivery mechanism for tea, did not on the face of it deserve. He had a book open too, but it was not, Iyla saw with a small private delight, a novel. It was The Constance Spry Cookery Book, in an edition so battered the cloth had gone soft at the corners, open to a page about consommé.

"Don't mind them," Kettle said, without looking up. "They've been having this fight since they were sixteen. It is not, despite appearances, a fight about reading. It is a fight about whether one is permitted, in this life, to enjoy oneself. Penn thinks one is, provided one looks good doing it. Maro thinks one is not, on principle. I think one is, provided the biscuit is fresh. I am," he added, "Kettle. I read cookbooks. Saroya disapproves. She is too polite to say so. You can tell because she introduced me third."

"She introduced you third," Penn said, "because she introduces in order of seniority, and you have been here the shortest."

"She introduced me third," Kettle said, "because she was hoping I'd have left the room by the time she got to me. I disappointed her. I do, on the whole."

Maro turned a page. "Tell me," she said to Iyla, in a voice so quiet Iyla had to lean in, "what did you read when you were nine."

"The Apple Orchard at Mereham," Iyla said, without thinking, because the question had been asked in a tone that did not permit thought.

Maro nodded once, as if a thing she had suspected from the doorway had been confirmed. She made a small mark in the margin of her Middlemarch. She did not, Iyla noticed, ask what Iyla read now.

"Margery Whitlock," Penn said, brightening. "Underrated. Or — no. Correctly rated. But correctly rated is, in our culture, a form of injustice. I wrote a piece, two years ago —"

"Penn," Kettle said, "wrote a piece two years ago. It is the piece he writes about every book. You can identify it by the third paragraph, which is always about Penn."

"You haven't read it."

"I have read it three times. I read it the way I read instructions for things I do not intend to assemble. With pleasure, and without consequence."

Iyla, who had not sat down and had not been asked to, found she had begun, at some point in the last minute, to smile. It was the first time she had smiled in the building. She tried to put it away, because she did not yet know what smiling in this room cost, and Maro, without looking up, said: "You can sit. The chair next to Kettle is the safest. Penn's chair is not a chair, it is a stage. Mine is a confessional, and you are not, today, in the mood." She turned another page. "Sit by Kettle. He will offer you a biscuit. Take one. Do not take two. He counts."

"I do count," Kettle said, equably, pushing the tin a half inch toward Iyla. "Sit down. You've had the lecture about Travelers and Anchors and Authors. You've had the lecture about the high streets and the footpaths. You've had, I imagine, the lecture about the patina, which is Saroya's favorite. What you have not had is anyone telling you what it is actually like, on a Tuesday afternoon in November, to be one of us. Penn will tell you it is glamorous. Maro will tell you it is a moral emergency. I will tell you about a stew."

"A stew," Iyla said.

"A stew," Kettle said. "It is, in my view, the most useful thing one can say to a new person on her first afternoon. Sit."

She sat. She took, when it was offered, one biscuit. Kettle, without comment, noted it; Penn, without comment, did not; Maro, without comment, turned another page of her Middlemarch and moved her finger, again, very slightly, in what Iyla now understood was the gesture by which Maro made room.