Rare Books and Manuscripts

His name came as a gift to her.

She was walking down the stairs into the cafeteria; he was sitting at a table directly below them. His locker key was lying beside his cup and saucer, face up. She kept moving so as not to be in any way conspicuous. The number was easily readable, instantly memorable: 33. She almost fell down the second flight.

The cafeteria in the new British Library building, despite being new, and despite being in the British Library, was like any works cafeteria - tables too close together, conversations between people who meet too often. The talk here was a different kind of shop - ‘It’s not that I disagree with Jaspers...’ or ‘You know, CPE’s the really interesting one’ - but shop all the same.

It had been so easy, after all those weeks of adoring speculation - it had been so easy for her to stroll shakily down to the lower ground floor, look in the battered folder where readers signed out locker keys, find the number 33 and finally discover her truelove’s name and, as a bonus, his reader’s card number. She memorized both: Heinz Feldman, 126153FEL. And then, when discreetly hidden in a cubicle in the women’s loos, she wrote them down on the ludicrous pretence she might forget them.

Heinz - not the name she’d fantasized for him, though she’d overheard him and his friends often enough - in the canteen, in the queue for the cloakroom - to know he was German. Heinz - not a particularly romantic name, reminding her more of baked beans than of its blue-eyed owner.

Yet he remained as delectably lovely as when first she’d spotted him. On that day, one of the earliest of winter term, he had arrived and sat down at the desk immediately facing her own. Never since had she dared sit so close, and as he always tried to get the same desk there was no danger of their coinciding by chance.

Everything about him - everything, at least, that she could see - was long: face, fingers, hair. He looked - the word was aristocratic.

She listened that first day to his breathing, which was quiet and slow. She was convinced that she would smell him.

When, for half an hour or so, she saw that he was away from his desk, she worked up courage to have a passing look at the books upon it. There were five biographies of Schubert. She fell in love.

From then on, she watched him. He was delectable. He always looked so existentially anguished, especially when bored; his long fingers raking up hanks of his thick blonde hair. He was lost, without the energy even to disguise the fact.

All of which gave her a thrilling desire to comfort him, to offer him the paltry solace of her flesh, the forgetfulness of the clasp and clutch, the brief self-absence - or total self-presence - of orgasm.

She did not allow herself to go that far in thought. But it was what she meant when at night she hugged herself close - and the idea of Heinz even closer.

She felt herself to be, in comparison, a terribly inconsequential thing, a little white bubble, a blob of blubber, a blubble.

What gave definition to Heinz were his long straight lines, and she had none of those.

Them together, say at the altar, would make a sentence comprised of a capital letter I and a full stop.

It did not escape her notice, or fail to contribute to her hopes, that such a sentence was - despite its somewhat ludicrous appearance - grammatically comprehensible.

That famous day she left early, taking his name home with her like a wallet of developed but unlooked-at photographs. All afternoon she had deferred her own pleasure, denying herself the full ecstasy of contemplating it, him, Heinz, uninterruptedly.