Library

The next day was Wednesday, the pub's day off. The weather deteriorated drastically. There was no storm, but a leaden November gray had already settled across the sky in the morning and wiped out any thought of the sun from the previous days. Moist air pushed from the sea into the bay and condensed in the streets and alleys to a mist that swallowed everything.

In the morning Gina looked out the window and sighed, although that wasn't really what she was like. She hadn't planned on anything special for her first day off, but she definitely didn't want to sit in her room all the time. She would see the weather develop. For now, she decided to swap the skirt for warm trousers, pulled a solid sweater over her blouse and went into the kitchen.

She had hoped a little that she might meet Francis at breakfast today. Then she might have taken heart and, if they had been alone, asked him about the feelings he caused in her, although it would not have been in keeping with her upbringing, nor would her mother have agreed.

She considered it absolutely inappropriate for a woman to speak to a man about her feelings. Such conversations, of course, the man had to begin. On the other hand, according to Gina, her mother was living in a completely different century anyway.

But Gina did not need to muster up this courage, because not only Francis, but also his parents were not there and had only put a short letter on the kitchen table for her, in which they explained that they wanted to visit a bedridden relative together and before late evening wouldn't be back. Gina looked out the kitchen window. The fog seemed to have grown even thicker in the past few minutes, so she could only hope that it was either a regional problem or that the Drakes had left early enough to avoid the soup.

Without further ado, she prepared a hearty breakfast and enjoyed it extensively while leafing through the newspaper. She deliberately ignored the first few pages, which were mostly about politics, reports of tragic accidents and the oil crisis, devouring the pages of gossip and social news and, inevitably, sport. Because one thing had long been clear to her, if she wanted to have a say as a waitress in a pub, she just had to know how Arsenal had played against Tottenham at the weekend and why.

Afterwards she briefly considered lying back in her bed and reading after looking out of the foggy window, but the thought of the only book she had with her at the moment drove the idea away. She felt the unfortunate impression that the novel was getting worse from side to side, and she simply needed a replacement badly.

She threw on her coat, grabbed her handbag and a house key, turned off the lights everywhere, and stepped out into the street.

This time she turned away from the harbor, which could no longer be seen anyway, and went straight up the little alley that, she had found out on her last walk on Saturday, would come to the Harbourlane a few hundred meters away.

She felt her way forward over the uneven sidewalks and the slippery cobblestones, dodging garbage cans and lantern falls at the last moment and battling the strange feeling that a distance stretched from a few hundred meters to kilometers, which she always crept when she passed through the fog had to stumble across barely recognizable streets.

At some point, happily without any major accidents, she arrived on Main Street, which she only recognized at that moment by the fact that she discovered the café on her left side, where she had had tea on Saturday. Blurred light from the other side of the street shimmered through the haze where Gina assumed the library was.

With the best will in the world, she couldn't see whether a vehicle was approaching, but she couldn't hear anything either, and who would be so stupid as to venture out into the street in this fog. So she bravely crossed the street, arrived safely on the other side, and entered the library.

This library was a real find. While the library in her hometown consisted of just a single reading room the size of a living room, which was filled with a few shelves and tried to arouse interest in reading with a few new and many old books, this collection was enormously larger.

You couldn't tell from the outside, but by means of some wall breakthroughs and a large staircase it stretched over probably three old houses and two floors. It had many small rooms that a skilled librarian could use to summarize certain topics, and also offered a vast number of new titles or at least those that Gina did not yet know.

She rummaged through the departments, watchfully watched by a gaunt elderly lady who obviously thought she could do the worst and ran past her suspiciously with lists or stacks of books.

Gina had already picked out an older crime thriller that she had not yet read and had found a history book that dealt with local history when she arrived at the section dealing with medieval and early history heroes. Actually, she had decided to ignore this area entirely because the novel she had brought with her had turned out to be such a big failure, but then she stopped in front of a large book of Irish sagas.

This was particularly exposed on a lectern and showed a tall man with flaming red hair wielding a gigantic sword through the air. Involuntarily she had to think of Francis when his true nature broke out. Even if that was, of course, a completely inadequate description of the changes she had noticed in him twice, but nothing better did occur to her.

"Can you find everything you need?" The librarian had appeared inaudibly behind Gina and almost frightened her to death.

"Yes, yes!", She said a bit ungraciously and added a little more friendly: "I'll just rummage around a little."

"I've never seen you here before."