Brenda has worked the same library long enough that she knows the names of the regulars, their habits, their excuses, and which ones to bother trying to fine. She wears her glasses on a chain and uses them as a prop — tracking visitors over the rims with the particular focus of a woman who has learned to read a room without appearing to. She is on a committee of some kind; the telephone calls about it punctuate her working week with the regularity of a metronome. The pen moves in short loops across the notepad whether the call requires it or not. The notepad is her own, not the library’s.
What she has noticed, without having put it into words even to herself, is that the two households she serves most often have nothing visible to do with each other and yet keep her library in a way that’s difficult to ignore once you see it. Toby Knight is a regular in the Folklore & Theology section — the back, the tall shelves nobody else uses. Daniel Marsden is a regular at the microfiche, working through the local archives with the methodical patience of a much older person. The two of them have, on perhaps two occasions, been in the building at the same time without registering each other. Brenda has registered. She has not commented. It is not, in her view, the librarian’s job to introduce her readers to one another, and she has never been able to articulate exactly why those two would be the wrong introduction to make. She has simply not made it.
Her other regular, at the Wednesday book club, is Margaret Jenkins, who drives the seven miles in from Hope’s End for it. Toby Knight is also a fixture of that book club. Brenda runs it with the kind of low-grade authority that means nobody fights her on the choice of book. She is reliably the second-harshest critic in the room, after Margaret, and the two women have had what Brenda would describe as a productive disagreement about The English Patient for three years running. Neither of them is going to give it up. Brenda likes a working argument. She does not like every reader equally.
She has, over the years, formed a quiet impression of the people whose habits she catalogues without meaning to. Toby reads in registers that don’t go together unless someone has put effort into making them go together. Daniel reads with the focus of a child who is looking for something specific and has not told anyone what it is. Brenda has not asked. She has not, on the whole, been the kind of librarian who asks. Her library is a place readers come to be left alone with what they need to read. That is the agreement. She keeps her side of it.
