The Bookbinder

by Pip Williams

‘Your sister is welcome to come here too, if she’d like,’ Miss Garnell offered. ‘Maude’s not really interested in reading,’ I said. ‘I’m sure I could find something for her to

Wao. Miss Garnell. An absolute angel

‘Double trouble, double trouble, twice the fun but trouble doubles.’ Maude started up the familiar refrain, repeating it in a singsong voice,

The truth is, your attachment to Maude made her life easier. She didn’t like the idea that one day you might leave, but it also terrified her to think that you wouldn’t.

‘The words used to describe us define our value to society and determine our capacity to contribute. They also’ – and again she poked at the translations – ‘tell others how to feel about us, how to judge us.’

‘Quite,’ said Miss Garnell, and she closed each book. ‘In my opinion, the men who translate Homer have not always served the women well.’ ‘An opinion you have formed because you can read the Greek,’ I said. ‘Well, yes.’

‘And of those you’ve folded, have you a favourite?’ ‘Right now, it’s Love of learning, or overmuch study, with a digression on the misery of scholars, and why the muses are melancholy,’ I recited.

‘What does Burton say that interests you?’ ‘That too much learning will make me lonely, send me mad and keep me poor.’ ‘And yet you persist.’ ‘Study is a curse but it might also be a cure, according to Burton.’ I thought of Bastiaan. ‘I’m damned if I do, and damned if I don’t.’

Dear Miss Jones, it said. There were more words than I could commit to memory but I felt the impression of those that mattered. Failed. Not permitted to take up scholarship at this time. Shade and light were soon replaced by shadow.

Ohhhh. For sure

Three women. I searched the local papers but there was no roll of honour. Their lives are barely recorded, Ma had said once, when I asked what happened to the women of Troy. So their deaths aren’t worth writing about.

I made the bed, then sat in Ma’s armchair and pulled a book from her shelf. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Anne Brontë.

The books, sections and manuscripts. They made Calliope even smaller, even tighter. They will expand your world, Ma had said. But if I hadn’t read them, I wouldn’t know how small my world was.

But she continued to look toward my window, and when her lips moved I breathed the words with her: ‘Read the books, not bind them.’