The Thursday Customer — Perşembe Müşterisi

Halloran's Books occupied a narrow, crooked building at the bottom of a lane in York, and it smelled, as all good second-hand bookshops do, of dust, damp paper and slow time. Defne had answered the handwritten notice in the window during her first week in the city, half expecting to be turned away. She was doing a master's in medieval literature and could not afford to buy the books she needed, so working among them seemed the next best thing. Mr Halloran, a tall man in his late seventies with a cardigan that had clearly survived several decades, hired her after a single question. "Do you read in the bath?" he asked, peering at her over his glasses. "Never," said Defne, which was a lie, and he nodded as if she had passed an examination.

The work was gentle and mostly solitary. She priced paperbacks in pencil, dusted the poetry shelves, and learned that a customer who said "just browsing" usually meant it for exactly forty minutes. Mr Halloran spent his afternoons in the back room, repairing spines with a patience she found almost unbearable to watch. It was in her second month that she noticed the Thursday customer. She was a small woman of about eighty, always in the same camel coat, always arriving a few minutes after three. She never browsed. She walked straight to the counter, rested her gloved hands on it and asked, in a voice like folded linen, whether anyone had brought in a copy of Evening Songs by Margaret Vane. And every Thursday, Mr Halloran would emerge from the back room, shake his head with real regret and say, "Not this week, I'm afraid." "Next week, perhaps," the woman would reply, and leave without buying anything.

Defne, who could not leave a mystery alone, looked the book up that evening. Margaret Vane had published a single slim volume of poems in 1963, and then, as far as anyone could tell, nothing at all. Only a few hundred copies had been printed, and none were for sale anywhere online. It was the kind of book that does not so much go out of print as quietly vanish, like a stone sinking into a pond. She began to feel personally responsible for the woman's disappointment. She checked every box of donations that came in, every carton from every house clearance, with the fervour of a treasure hunter.

In November, Mr Halloran caught a cold and stayed at home for a week, leaving Defne in charge. On the Wednesday, looking for glue in the back room, she opened a drawer she had never opened before. Inside, wrapped in tissue paper, lay a small blue book with faded silver lettering: Evening Songs. For a long moment she simply stood there, holding it as if it might dissolve. On the flyleaf, in faded ink, someone had written: "For Peter, who listened. M." Peter was Mr Halloran's first name. Defne sat down heavily on a crate of encyclopaedias. So the old man had had the book all along, and every week he had looked that woman in the eye and lied to her. She felt a flush of indignation on the stranger's behalf, followed, more slowly, by curiosity.

The next afternoon, at a few minutes past three, the bell above the door rang. The woman in the camel coat came to the counter and seemed faintly surprised to find only Defne there. "Mr Halloran is unwell," Defne explained. "Nothing serious." "Ah." The woman hesitated, and then, out of habit, began her question: "I don't suppose anyone has brought in..." Defne had rehearsed this moment all night, and yet when it came she simply reached under the counter and laid the blue book in front of her. The woman looked at it for a long time without touching it. Then, to Defne's astonishment, she smiled, and the smile was not one of surprise but of a fond, weary recognition. "Oh, my dear," she said softly. "I know he has it. I've always known."

Her name, she said, was Margaret, and she had written those poems when she was twenty-two. Peter Halloran had been the only person to come to her one and only reading, in a cold room above a pub, and he had stayed to the end. They had nearly married; life, as it does, had made other arrangements. She had married someone else, a good man, and had been widowed for nine years. "When I came back to York, I couldn't simply walk in and say hello after fifty years," she said. "It seemed so presumptuous." "So I asked for the book instead. And he said, 'Not this week.'" "Which meant, of course, that I would have to come back the next week." Defne stared at her. "And he knows that you know?" "Of course he does. We are old, not stupid."

Defne felt her face grow hot as she realised what she had nearly done. With one well-meaning gesture, she had almost ended the only conversation these two people had found a way to keep having. "I'm so sorry," she said, and reached to take the book back. Margaret placed her gloved hand gently over Defne's. "Put it back in his drawer, dear, exactly where you found it," she said. "And tell him I'll come next Thursday as usual." At the door she paused and added, with a glint that made her look, for one second, twenty-two again: "Though you might mention that I would accept an invitation to tea."

When Mr Halloran returned the following Monday, coughing and cross, Defne delivered both messages. He listened in silence, then went into the back room and closed the door. On Thursday he wore a tie that Defne had never seen, and at a few minutes past three, he was already standing at the counter.