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The huddled group parted to create a path. Worryingly, several young men nodded as if to acknowledge her courage and stood almost like a guard of honour, forcing Claire to make an unintentionally grand entrance into the library.
Two dozen people were sitting on benches around the perimeter, and maybe a dozen more had taken low chairs and cushions in the centre of the room. There was Ronan, on the left-hand bench, with a book open on his lap. Like everybody else, he had looked up at her entrance. He closed the book and shifted sideways to make room for her. Claire crossed the room in three quick strides and sidled onto the bench beside him, like you might slip in late to mass, hopeful that no one would pay her much heed.
‘Would you introduce yourself, please?’ said a petite, white-haired lady standing in front of the window. She was counting teabags into teapots and lining up a motley collection of mugs and teacups on a table in front of her.
For a moment, Claire hoped the request was addressed to the room at large. Alas, it was not. Dropping her final teabag, the woman raised her head and looked directly at Claire. She glanced around the room. Everybody else must have already been through this admission process.
‘Emm, hello, I’m Claire.’
The woman’s eyebrows were raised expectantly. She wanted more, it seemed.
‘And I’m from Ireland.’ Claire hoped a declaration of nationality would suffice, because the only other thoughts in her head involved acts of violence against Saoirse Maloney and/or Alison Rafferty.
‘I don’t believe it!’ The woman’s face lit up with glee. ‘That man beside you is also from Ireland!’
‘Oh, I know,’ said Claire. ‘I’m married to him.’
The room erupted into laughter – relieved, Claire supposed, that someone else had said the silly thing.
‘I am Panmelys,’ said the white-haired lady, reclaiming control of her audience. ‘I am an artist and a poet.’ The room was hushed. ‘You are all welcome to our Sunday afternoon tea party, but you are obliged to make a contribution.’
Claire’s stomach turned over as Panmelys went on to explain that every participant must perform either a poem in English or a song in any language at all. Ah,shite, thought Claire. Public performance was not her thing. Whoever heard of an extraverted librarian? She threw a nervous glance at the doorway, but it was still blocked by the abstaining voyeurs.
‘Not one of you shall leave this room,’ continued Panmelys, deathly serious, ‘without a poem in your pocket and a song in your heart.’
Cue petrified silence.
Panmelys surveyed the room, then turned her back on them, bent down and switched on a row of three electric kettles that were plugged into an extension cord at her feet. Turning again to face her audience, she began to talk about her early life in Wales. It was akin to Frank McCourt’sAngela’s Ashes, she said, looking towards Ronan and Claire, as though they could confirm the deprivation of her childhood. Claire nodded, sensed Ronan beside her doing the same, and Panmelys carried on with what was obviously a well-rehearsed patter. She’d worked as a nurse but was very bad at it.
‘Too chatty,’ she said, and everyone laughed.
She’d been left a generous bequest by a fond patient, which financed her flight to Canada. Once there, she promptly fell in love with a Frenchman, who brought her home to Paris.
With impeccable timing, the smallest of the kettles made a high-pitched whistling noise. Without missing a beat, Panmelys unplugged it and began pouring boiling water into mugs, passing them out to the room, following them up with a bottle of milk and a bowl of sugar, talking all the time.
Some years later, she said, she’d been selling poetry pamphlets to tourists outside Notre-Dame, when she had seen a poster advertising poetry readings in the window of Shakespeare and Company. She had handed a sheaf of her poetry to the proprietor – a small, pointy-bearded man, she said – and had waited impatiently for his response.
Panmelys stood at the centre of her improvised stage now, hands clasped, performing the part of her younger self.
‘“I have to go home now,” I said to him, thinking of my three small children waiting for their dinner. And do you know what George Whitman said to me?’
Claire looked around at the crowd; they were all leaning forwards, hugging their mugs of hot tea.
‘“I have to go away for a couple of weeks,” he said. “Here are the keys.”’
Everyone laughed.
Panmelys mimed taking the keys from Whitman, then turned her back to gather up a tin of biscuits and a stack of books from the floor under the window.
There was poignancy in her timing, Claire thought, as though she needed a moment to recover from playing out her memories.
‘“Keep your face always towards the sunshine, and shadows will fall behind you,”’ said Panmelys, passing out the tin of English biscuits.
‘“It is I you hold and who holds you, I spring from the pages into your arms,”’ she said, holding aloft the top book of her stack. ‘Whitman’sLeaves of Grass. George used to tell customers he was related. Now,’ she said, ‘it’s your turn.’
What an impeccable routine, Claire thought, keeping her head down and nervously dunking a custard cream into her tea.
An American woman in her early twenties stood to read ‘Fern Hill’ by Dylan Thomas. She enunciated every syllable expansively and paused dramatically at the end of every line. Panmelys applauded rapturously.
