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mysterious gazing upon flickering electronic screens. Further on, you went down a small staircase – and there suddenly beneath you was a vast subterraneous chamber exhibiting terrace below terrace of books in divine but intimidating abundance. Not only is the gate to knowledge strait. Knowledge itself is as a deep well.
    Boldly, George sought out Theology. It didn’t, presumably, bear as high a proportion to the rest of Blackwell’s stock as it would have done in any similar repository a hundred years ago. But there was still a lot of it – the presented spectacle, indeed, suggesting itself as most readily computable not in thousands of volumes but in hundreds of yards. And there was nothing second-hand about the exhibition. These were all new books – although many of them looked as if they had been that for a good many years. Hadn’t he as an undergraduate mugged up Elliott-Binns on The Development of English Theology in the Later Nineteenth Century? And what about Schaefer’s Die katholische Wiedergeburt der englischen Kirche: surely that had been on his own shelves for quite a long time now? There was rank upon rank of the heavy stuff, stiffly upstanding behind their gilded spines: armies of unalterable law. But fronting these, on a line of tables so long as positively to lend the impression of softening into distance, were exhibited, flat and face-upward after the fashion of a bookshop’s most readily vendible wares, innumerable sprightly-seeming paperbacks of popular devotion. Fifty years ago – George reflected – these would have been known as ‘religious tracts’, and they would have been got up to look as forbidding as was inexpensively possible. Every need was catered for. There was a book called What to Tell your Children about Jesus. There was another called Prayers for Busy People.
    George paused here before the evangelising labours of the late C.S. Lewis, who in point of proliferation appeared to be neck and neck with a former Bishop of Woolwich. Overcoming the professional’s unworthy predisposition to hold the work of amateurs in poor esteem, George examined some of Lewis’s books, and decided to buy one called The Pilgrim’s Regress. It appeared to be distinctly acerbic in tone, and might serve to attune him to Father Hooker. George then went upstairs again, found the current fiction, and chose the two longest novels on offer. He might be at Plumley, he was reflecting, for quite some time. He then wandered round the shop at random, wondering whether to pick up another book or two as he went. That was what you did. You accumulated as many books as you felt you needed, and then took them up to the electronic ladies.
    Thus meandering through the booky house, George was happy for the first time in weeks.
     
    ‘Ah, Naylor! A good afternoon to you.’
    George turned round and saw that he was being addressed by an old man who, like himself, had a pile of books under his arm. A very old man. Realising this, George offered his own ‘good afternoon’ with a deference that turned out to be entirely proper. For it was the Gumpher. It was the Gumpher, without a doubt.
    ‘Gumphy,’ the Gumpher said informatively, and with a hint of rebuke softened by a chuckle so high-pitched as to attract the attention of several of Blackwell’s browsing customers. Even mute, the Gumpher appeared unlikely to pass without remark. He moved with the aid of two sticks of awkward length, as if somebody was neglecting to chop the requisite centimetres from them every now and then to accommodate a general shrinkage of his person. Second childhood had befallen at least the Gumpher’s earthly tenement. His eyelids, distressingly everted, suggested a baby that ought to have been put to bed long ago. And he must literally have required bedtime attention, since it was impossible to imagine him successfully extricating his limbs from the stiff and snuff-bespattered carapace in which he tottered around. But he did so totter, and