Special Collections

The special collections room was on the top floor of the library, at the end of a corridor that got quieter the further you went along it, as though the building were lowering its voice.

There was a glass door with a buzzer, and a desk inside it, and a row of grey lockers for bags, and a notice on the wall in capitals that said PENCILS ONLY, and under it, smaller, No pens, no food, no drink, no exceptions, and under that, smaller still, in somebody’s handwriting, This means you, Professor.

The librarian at the desk was the one with the white cotton gloves. She was a small woman of about sixty with her grey hair cut very short and reading glasses on a chain, and she looked up when Frederick came through the door at five to nine, and looked at him for a moment over the glasses, and said, “The Lord Marcher’s report. Nineteen ninety-four. The November before last.”

“You remember.”

“You read it twice,” she said. “Most people photograph the four pages and go.” She turned the register round on the desk. “Sign, please. Name, date, and capacity.”

Frederick looked at the column headed Capacity.

Above his line, in a hand he did not know, somebody had written Graduate student, and above that Faculty, and above that, two weeks ago, Independent researcher (retired). He wrote HANOVER, F., and the date, and in the third column, Student.

The librarian read it upside down and did not say anything, which he thought was the most tactful thing anybody had done for him all year.

---

Ashby came at nine exactly, with the canvas bag and a list on a sheet of lined paper and the green tie, which was already loose, and stood in the doorway looking at the room as other men look at a cathedral.

“Oh,” he said. “It’s, um. I’ve never been up here.”

“You’ve been here two years,” said the librarian.

“Thirteen months. I kept meaning to.” Ashby looked at the long tables, and the foam cradles laid out on them for the books, and the tall windows with the blinds half down against the sun, and then at the wall at the end of the room, where there was a single photograph in a plain black frame, very large, in black and white: a canyon, seen from the air, from high up, so that the river at the bottom was a thread and the walls went down in steps and shelves and shadows for what looked like a mile.

“His,” said the librarian, following his eyes. “He took it from his own aeroplane. He used to say it was the only thing he ever did that nobody argued with.” She held out her hand. “Bag in the locker. Pencil?”

Ashby looked at his hands. He had a pen in one of them.

“I knew it,” said the librarian, without any satisfaction, and gave him a pencil from a jar.

---

Alexander came at two minutes past nine.

He came along the quiet corridor in the linen jacket, buttoned, with Kessler a pace behind and a pace to the left, and at the glass door Kessler stopped and stood beside it with his back to the wall, outside, where the notice said nothing about him; and Alexander came in alone, and looked at the notice about pencils, and took a pencil out of his shirt pocket and held it up, as a man shows his ticket at a barrier.

The librarian looked at the pencil. It was a soft one, very sharp, and it was the only pencil that had been held up to her that morning without being asked for.

“Thank you,” she said.

Alexander signed the register. He wrote HOHENZOLLERN, A., and the date, and then he looked at the third column for a moment, and at the line above, and wrote, in the same small exact hand, Student.

“You’re the other one,” said the librarian.

“Yes,” said Alexander.

“Hm,” said the librarian, and turned the register back round. “Pencils parallel to the edge of the table when you’re not using them. It stops them rolling off onto the documents.” She took a pair of white cotton gloves out of a drawer and put them on. “Not you,” she said to Alexander, who was looking at the gloves. “Paper doesn’t need them. I do. I’ve got the box.”

---

There were four boxes.

They were grey, archival, the size of a large dictionary, with typed labels on the ends, and she brought them out on a trolley from a door behind the desk one at a time and set them down on the long table in a row, and laid a folder on top of each one with a list of what was in it.

GOLDWATER, B. M. Series III. Correspondence. 1974. Box 1 of 4.

“July to December,” said Ashby, reading the lists, very quietly, as though somebody in the room might be asleep. “By correspondent, alphabetical within the month. Carbons of his outgoing, originals of the incoming.” He looked up. “He kept carbons of everything.”

“He kept carbons of his laundry lists,” said the librarian. “There’s a series of them. Nineteen fifties. People come from Phoenix to look at them.” She stood back. “One folder out at a time. Flat on the table. Turn the pages by the corner. If you want a copy, you fill in a slip and I make it. If you find anything that makes you want to shout, go and shout in the corridor.” She looked at Ashby. “I’m told that’s happened.”

“Not to me,” said Ashby.

“Not yet,” said the librarian, and went back to the desk.

---

They split it three ways. Ashby took July and August, because that was the resignation and he wanted it, he said, for its own sake, apologetically, as a man asks for the slice of cake he has been looking at. Frederick took September. Alexander took October to December.

The letters were mostly not about anything.

That was the first thing, and it surprised Frederick, though he supposed it should not have. He had thought, without thinking it, that the papers of a man who had resigned from a Cabinet in August and opposed a pardon in September would be about those things, the way a chapter of a textbook is about its title. They were about runways. They were about a constituent in Glendale whose son had been refused a commission in the Royal American Air Force, and a man in Prescott who wanted to know why the federal government was charging him to graze cattle on land his grandfather had grazed for nothing, and a long, cross, careful correspondence with somebody in the Transportation ministry about the instrument landing system at Flagstaff, which was in Goldwater’s opinion a disgrace and would kill somebody. Every outgoing letter was a carbon on thin grey onionskin, typed, with the faint blue smudge of the carbon paper at the edges, and none of them was signed, because a carbon is not signed; at the bottom, after Sincerely, there were only two typed initials and a space where the signature had gone on to the top copy and away.

B.G.

“Oh, this is wonderful,” said Ashby, very softly, from the far end of the table, to a letter about a runway.

Alexander did not say anything. He read the way he read the box from Berlin, at a speed Frederick had watched all his life and still found faintly alarming, one page and the next and the next, turned by the corner, flat on the table, the pencil laid parallel to the edge of the wood beside him and not once picked up; and by a quarter to ten he had finished October, and by twenty past he had finished November, and at half past ten he put the last folder of December back in its box and looked across the table at Frederick, who was on the eleventh of September.

“May I?”

“I’m only halfway.”

“Then I will take the second half,” said Alexander, and Frederick gave him the folders from the fourteenth to the thirtieth, and he began.

---

It was not in the second half.

It was in the first, in a folder Frederick had already been through, under F, which he had read at twenty to ten and passed over, because it was a letter to Ford and he had been looking for a letter about the King; and Alexander, who had finished the second half by eleven, had gone back without saying anything and was reading the first half again, as he read everything, to the bottom, including the parts nobody would ask about.

“Frederick,” said Alexander.

He said it quite quietly. He did not look up. He had the folder flat on the table in front of him, open, and his finger was not on the page, because the librarian had said not to touch, but a quarter of an inch above it, quite still, the way he had held the pencil over the last line of a programme in a bar at one minute to midnight, waiting for the minute.

Frederick got up and came round the table.

Ashby, at the far end, looked up from August, and saw their faces, and put his own folder down, flat, and came too.

---

It was a carbon, on onionskin, three pages, typed. At the top left, under the letterhead, which had come through the carbon as a pale grey ghost of itself, it said Phoenix North, and House of Commons, and under that, September 10, 1974.

Dear Jerry,

It was angry from the first line. Frederick could hear it. It was not the anger of the Flagstaff letters, which was a technical man’s anger at a thing that would kill somebody. It was older than that and sadder. It said that the writer had told Ford on Sunday night on the telephone what he thought and was now putting it on paper so that Ford could not say he had not been told. It said that a man who had been Prime Minister of the Realm ought to stand where a bus driver from Mesa would stand if a bus driver from Mesa had done what that man had done, and that health and age could be considered afterwards, by a court, and not before, by a friend. It said that the writer did not want anybody in jail for the pleasure of it. It said that Ford had shut the door on the whole thing before anybody had been allowed to see what was in the room, and that the country would wonder for fifty years what was in it, and that it would be Ford’s fault, and that the writer was sorry about that, because Ford was the most honest man he knew in politics and this was the most dishonest thing he had ever seen an honest man do.

And then, on the second page, halfway down, in the middle of a paragraph about something else, about how it had been done, about the speed of it, the Sunday, the instrument, the way it had all been finished before Monday’s papers, there was a sentence.

Alexander’s finger hung a quarter of an inch above it.

I know the King was told the night before, by Shirley, and asked her one question, in writing, and she made you answer it on paper, which is more than you did for the rest of us.

---

Nobody said anything.

The blinds were half down against the sun, and the light came under them across the long table in a bright band, and lay across the onionskin, so that you could see the weave of the paper through the type. Somewhere in the building a trolley went past with one wheel that squeaked. At the desk the librarian was writing something in a ledger, in pencil.

Frederick read it again.

He read it a third time, and then he read the rest of the paragraph, and the rest of the page, and turned the page over by the corner, and read the third page, which was about the CCU, and about the next session, and said at the end that the writer would vote with the government on the budget because the budget was right, and that Ford should not mistake that for anything else, and that he was, for what it was worth, still his friend.

B.G.

There was nothing else about the King. There was nothing else about the question. He went back to the second page, and it said what it said, and no more.

“It doesn’t say what it was,” he said.

“No,” said Alexander.

“One question. In writing. It doesn’t say what he asked.”

“No.”

“How did Goldwater know?”

Ashby, beside him, very still, with his hands behind his back as the librarian had told them, said, “It doesn’t say that either.”

---

Ashby did not shout. Frederick had half expected him to, and he did not. He stood looking at the carbon for a long time with his hands behind his back and his tie loose, and his face was not nervous at all. It was the face of a man in a church.

“That’s a primary source,” he said, very quietly.

“I know,” said Frederick. “It’s not me.”

Ashby looked at him.

“No,” he said. “No. It’s not.” He looked back at the page. “It’s, um. It’s better than you. Sorry. That came out.”

“It’s all right.”

“It’s contemporary. It’s two days after. It’s from a man who’d resigned from the Cabinet and turned down the next one and had no reason in the world to be kind to anybody about it. And it’s a carbon, so it went, the top copy went to Ford, and Ford’s papers would have it too, if anybody’s looked for it, and I don’t think anybody has, because nobody was looking for the King.” He stopped. “Because the textbook says the King did it.”

“And my family says he didn’t know.”

“And he did know,” said Ashby. “And he didn’t do it.” He looked at the sentence. “He was told, and he asked, and somebody else did it.”

“Both,” said Alexander, from his chair.

They looked at him.

“The footnote is wrong,” said Alexander. “And the family is wrong. But not in the same direction.” He laid the pencil, which he had not used, a little straighter on the table, though it was already straight. “The textbook says that he did more than he did. The family says that he knew less than he knew. Both of them have moved him out of the room. The textbook moved him to the desk where the instrument was signed. The family moved him to a breakfast table in London with the papers.” He considered it. “He was in neither. He was at the end of a telephone, the night before, with one question.”

“Both,” said Frederick. “Differently.”

“Yes,” said Alexander.

---

Ashby filled in a slip for a copy, in pencil, at the desk, with the box and the folder and the date, and stood over the librarian while she made it, and then filled in a second slip, without being asked, and wrote at the top of it For Mr Hanover, and the librarian made that too.

“Shout in the corridor,” she said to Ashby, giving him his copy.

“I don’t think I need to.”

“You’ve gone white.”

“Have I?” Ashby looked at his hands. “Um. Yes. Right.” He went out through the glass door, past Kessler, who did not look at him, and Frederick heard him walk to the end of the quiet corridor, and stop, and say, not loudly, but quite distinctly, to the window at the end of it, “Oh,” once, and come back.

“Better,” said the librarian.

---

Frederick sat at the long table for a while after the boxes had gone back on the trolley, with his copy in front of him, face down.

Alexander sat across from him. Kessler was outside the glass door. It was a quarter to twelve, and Alexander’s car was at a quarter to three, for Phoenix, and he had his reading for Brennan in his bag in the locker, and he did not get up to get it.

“We say it at Christmas,” said Frederick.

“Yes.”

“Every Christmas. Somebody says it. Somebody always says Nixon, and then somebody says of course, Ernest read it in the papers, and everybody laughs, a bit, and somebody says poor Ernest, and the pudding comes.” He looked at the back of the copy. “And he was sitting there. At the table. Every Christmas. At the end. And he never said anything.”

“Did anybody ask him?”

Frederick did not answer for a moment.

He thought of a telephone call in January, a year ago, from Sam’s desk, under the tax brackets, about a pencil, and a man in London putting something down so as to have both hands, and finding a word, and setting it down, and then another: Never. Asked.

“No,” he said.

Alexander did not say anything.

“I always thought,” said Frederick, “the thing about it was that he wasn’t in the room. That was the story. That was the whole of the story. That they did it without him.” He turned the copy over and looked at the sentence. “And I was all right with that. I was all right with him not being in the room. That’s the job. He’d have said that was the job. Pencil in the corner. Read. Only. Read.”

“Yes.”

“I wasn’t all right with being wrong about it.” He heard himself say it, at a table in a reading room on the top floor of the library, in front of a photograph of a canyon taken from an aeroplane. “Not about whether he was there. About what the room was. I’ve been wrong about what the room was since I was about six.”

Alexander looked at him across the table for a long moment.

“That,” he said, “is what a historian minds.”

Frederick looked at him.

“I am only telling you,” said Alexander, “what I have seen. I am not telling you what to do on the fourth of May.” He stood up, and pushed his chair in, square with the table. “I have Brennan’s reading, and then Phoenix. Kessler will want his lunch.” He looked at the copy. “You should ask him.”

“He’s got four words a week.”

“Then you have time to choose the question,” said Alexander. “He did.”

---

At ten that night Frederick sat on the bed by the window with the textbook open on his knees at page six hundred and twelve, and the copy beside him, and the pencil.

Alexander’s light had gone off at half past ten the night before and would go off at half past ten tonight; it was ten now, and he was at the desk by the door, with the lamp, writing something in German for the box, and the pencil going.

In the margin beside the footnote, small, in the top corner of the space, it said in Frederick’s hand:

Chisholm. On advice.

And under it:

Told?

He looked at it for a while. Then he turned the pencil round, and with the rubber on the end, carefully, so as not to tear the paper, which was thin, he rubbed out the question mark, and blew the crumbs off the page, and wrote in its place, in pencil, small:

Told. Asked.

He looked at that too.

“Did you ever rub one out?” he had asked his father, a year ago, about the pencil in the corner of the page. And his father had said once, and then, with tremendous dignity, that he was not telling.

On the desk by the door Alexander’s pencil stopped, for a moment, and then went on.