17. Treasure trove

Quint looked up. What was Ann doing here? This wasn’t right. He looked at Mrs Campbell for an explanation.

“This is Miss Ounce, from Ounce Books,” she said. “You know, down at the shops.”

She wasn’t helping.

Ann stepped in. She was regarding him with an odd sort of look. The sort you’d give to a child.

“Sorry, William,” she said. “Mrs Campbell invited me in to give a quote on whatever’s left over after you’ve gone through her library. She didn’t say you hadn’t finished yet.”

That made sense.

“I’ve got the morning off,” she went on. “How about we each do one side of the room, pull out anything that looks interesting, and I’ll be able to make an estimate on what the rest are worth?”

“Oh I didn’t know you two were acquainted!” Mrs Campbell said. “I’ll bring in the tea things, and we can all chat.”

Quint didn’t want to chat. Just get on with the job. Ann shot him a look, and when the old lady left for the kitchen, she explained, “She’s lonely, William. No husband, you see. I’ll talk with her.”

Ann followed Mrs Campbell out of the room, both of them reappearing some minutes later with tea and biscuits on a tray. Quint mechanically took a biscuit, stirred sugar into his tea, and went on sorting through the books, careful to keep them away from any liquid. He listened with half an ear to the women talking, listening for anything that might have a bearing on the books. There were a lot of old books in leather bindings that really needed specialist examination.

“Of course, none of the suburb was here fifty years ago,” Mrs Campbell was saying. “Just open paddocks. They put up that eagle first, and it was all alone for years before the first of the Army offices went in.

“Before that, we used to ride over from Kingston to go to church. St John’s in what is Reid now, but it was just Canberry when we were young.”

“I’ve seen some of the old photographs,” Ann said. “It was farmland here until after the Second World War. I had someone in the shop who was talking about dairy cattle on Red Hill only a few years ago.”

“They used to say Canberra was a good sheep station spoilt,” Mrs Campbell smiled. “And so it was. It was our family’s sheep station, and my parents used to talk about the old days. But oh, the flies!”

“You’ve lived in Canberra all your life, then?”

“Born and bred here. I remember Parliament House being opened. All those men with whiskers! And the soldiers and the bands. There was an aeroplane crashed that day. Terribly exciting. And we ate meat pies for a week afterwards. We had a picnic place here, just we children, with some of the cousins visiting from New Zealand.”

Quint tuned out, working steadily through the shelves. The women chattered on through another pot of tea, until eventually he had worked his way through the room, Ann’s share of the bookshelves included.

He had a sizable pile when he’d finished. What was left wasn’t dross, but would give Ann some headaches in disposing of the lot.

The women were still chatting. Some long-dead friend named Elfie, jolly picnics and horse-races on the flats. Ann occasionally nodding her head and murmuring something.

“Mrs Campbell? I’ve finished now. I’ve got seventy six books I’d like to buy from you. I’ve left the older ones because they may be worth a lot of money and they need to be checked over by a specialist dealer. I’d be cheating you if I took them for what I can afford to pay you.”

He passed over a card on which he had written his offer. It was far less than what the books would fetch on the open market, and a long way short of what he himself hoped to realise by reselling the books to Ann and other dealers, but that was the way the bookscouting business worked.

Mrs Campbell passed the card over to Ann, who glanced at it, looked over at Quint’s stacks and nodded to the old lady. “That’s reasonable. I’ve known William for years, and he’s very particular.”

“Well then, young man. You’ve bought yourself some books.”

“How many books are left, William?” Ann asked.

“There’s two thousand, two hundred and five, though I didn’t count all the romance paperbacks, just estimated those shelves.”

“Two thousand dollars for the lot, Violet?” Ann asked. “I can have someone around to clear them this afternoon.”

“You have yourself a deal, young lady! I must say that this has been far less difficult than I imagined.”

“It’s been a pleasure talking with you! You must come around to my store some time. We can have coffee. Or tea, if you don’t mind teabags.”

“To tell the truth, Ann, I have teabags when I’m by myself. I only bring out the teapot for guests.”

Quint eventually escaped. Some stout shopping bags were produced, his selection loaded in, and he and Ann wobbled out, shoulders bowed under the load.

“A good thing it’s all downhill to your flat, William!” Ann said, pausing a block down Monash Drive to rub some life back into her palms.

Quint looked at her. She was smiling. That was good.

“I could have made two trips. But thank you for your help, Ann.”

“Thank you, William! I’ll make a ton of money on those books. And these, of course. We’re almost partners.”

“I like that,” Quint smiled back. He remembered something. “And hey, I agree about the magpies. There’s an old lady in the next flat gives them bits of bacon. Where are they going to build their nests in spring?”

There was a slice of the ASIO site visible ahead, framed neatly between Quint’s block of flats and one of the office blocks on Constitution Avenue. Ann nodded at it, hoisting the book bags again.

“Violet used to come and camp down there as a girl. They had a tent and horses and pretended they were cowboys. Cowgirls. Burn sausages over a campfire. Make hot chocolate. Bury treasures. Like something out of Swallows and Amazons.”

Swallows and Amazons. A great buy if you could find an early edition with a dustjacket. Children across the British Empire had been raised on it and the sequel novels about children sailing on an English lake all on their own, camping on an island, having adventures. Even the modern re-issues were pricey.

Ann was near exhaustion when they reached Quint’s flat. Books were heavy, one of the drawbacks of the job. She gratefully accepted his invitation to come in, sit down with some fruit juice for a rest.

Quint kept a clean flat. His own books were lined up – in alphabetical order of authors – on a bookshelf. Such a minefield of decisions in arranging books. Samuel Pepys had ordered his library by height, even to the extent of having book cabinets made especially for them. His will had specified that they not be altered, and by some miracle, three hundred years later they were still in order in the same bookcases.

CDs were less trouble. They were all the same size, mostly, in their plastic cases. Quint selected a compilation, one he’d bought at Starbucks when they were still in Canberra, and put it on. Chet Baker singing You Make me Feel so Young. Hard to imagine Mrs Campbell as a schoolgirl, galloping through the trees, firelight on her face, burying pirate treasure.

“Did she say what sort of treasure, Ann?”

 

Copyright © 2009 Peter Mackay