The Auction

There have only been four visitors today, outside is cold and windy and raining and everybody is just running past the windows looking for their car keys.

But one man stayed for ages, looking for a copy of A Room with a View which is his wife’s favourite book. He told me that when he and his wife moved to their houseboat they had to sell all their books and there were thousands of them. (But now, come summer, they were moving and were going to make a library again, a haphazard summer library of everything!)

He said he remembered the day they sold everything, a cold and grey nothing sort of day and everything went up for auction and he was happy to see it all go (thank riddance, he had thought) but when the books went under the hammer he tried to just sit there but he couldn’t and so he went and sat in his car and looked through the windscreen and made himself not think about it but it wasn’t possible.