Read Alphabet for Free Online Page A

else there’s this kind of thing.’ He opens the book on Rodin and as it happens there’s a photograph of sculpture called ‘The Kiss’, and someone’s drawn in the hidden bits. He flicks through the others.
    â€˜These cost fifty quid a throw. I can get ten books on weight-lifting for one on Picasso and more people read them.
It’s the way of the world, I’m afraid.’
    â€˜I don’t damage books,’ Simon tells him.
    â€˜You probably don’t,’ Travers says. ‘As ever, everyone has to suffer because of a few selfish people. Libraries are about sharing, so far as I’m concerned, but there you are.’
    â€˜What do you suggest, then?’ Simon asks. All the while, he’s kept his eyes on Travers’s thin, shiny face, giving him nowhere to hide. Now he watches him get his pen out of his shirt pocket. He wears these little short-sleeved shirts in polyester, all of them roughly the same but in different checks. Because he forgets the cap and puts the pen in head down, most of them have blots at the bottom of the pocket.
    â€˜I don’t mind sticking my neck out just once to see how it goes,’ Travers says. The library screw is in the office having tea served to him by the orderly, but even so Travers looks over his shoulder when he says this, as if someone might be taking notes.
    â€˜Something general,’ Simon suggests, ‘about the Modern Period plus any of these you can find.’ He hands over the list he copied from the back of the Picasso. Travers pulls a face.
    â€˜These’ll have to come from Boston Spa,’ he says. ‘I’ll see what I can do. Keep it under your hat and don’t hassle me.’
Travers has seen some of the Pre-Raphaelites, he says, in Birmingham and in the Tate in London. Dreadfully detailed,
he says, must have been such a headache to do, but he doesn’t like them, or only one, ‘The Scapegoat’ by Holman Hunt. He goes to show it to Simon in the book, but just as he said, it’s been torn out. In the encyclopedia there’s a tiny reproduction, about the size of a postage stamp.
    Simon walks past the TV room on his way back, zonked-out bodies slumped in rows like it was the cinema, except the chairs are hard, there’s a few hundred watts of fluorescent light picking out every line on every face and every speck of ash on the floor, and of course there’s a screw instead of an usher watching from the doorway. Slack faces, soaking up soap before the switch gets thrown at eight-thirty. He thinks of a mushroom farm. He thinks: suckers. He’s on to something better, doing something for himself.
    He doesn’t like Picasso, props Pendez open over the sink, so he can study a picture a day and make his mind up. Pendez lived 1889–1959, in Barcelona with his sister. Over half the pictures are of her, a plump girl with her hair up in a knot. They’re roughly done, not trying to be exactly real. You can see the brush marks, and bits where he’s gone over and over the same thing. Simon can’t work out if they’re actually any good, but that means they probably are, because normally he knows straight away when he dislikes someone or something.
    A name comes to him in the middle of the night: Joseph Manderville. It suits the address: 3 Sandringham House, Mile Road, London SE22. In reality, it’s a council estate, but since the number’s low she need never guess. Joseph Manderville is very polite. He holds open doors for women. He uses cups and saucers, not mugs, and he’s clean and tidy, competent around the house, without being fussy. He’s forty-seven: Simon thinks Vivienne would like someone just a little but not too much younger than her. He reads a lot and has got a serious, lined sort of face and wears hand-made shirts open at the neck – Simon has seen adverts for the kind of shirt in the quality press. Also, Joseph would use a