Showdown at the Library of Babel

THE HOUSE of Knowles-Smith is in disarray. We have been found out as charlatans and thugs; such is our standing in the community that Cyril Pollockill, a local fishmonger who owns the butchers, threw a bucket of unusable offal over my brogues as I walked past his shop the other morning. Indeed, such was his outrage that he ran out a good few minutes after I passed his window, not having a bucket of such slop readily close to hand, and stopped me in the street. His reproach was an unusual - as we are miles from London, and he’s no cockney - ‘Take that, guv’nor’. A cheer went up from the other passing villagers and I hurried away up the hill to lament our familial fall.

Our great shame, if I dare utter it, is this: we have been discovered as a house with not a single work of Jorge Luis Borges and none-but-one volume of Emile Zola, and that’s in the original French. Who knew that the tastes of provincial village-folk were so exacting? Once the word was out, we had a crowd rampaging through the library and other bookshelves, pissing on the Stephen Donaldson, tossing the Isabel Allende aside, desperately trying to see if maybe even an inferior Giovanni translation of Borges’ Fictions had been pushed behind some other volumes, but, alas, no. Before I blacked out from shock, I vaguely recall the village wolf-keeper, with a hint of pity in his milky eyes, dropping several works by Marmaduke Pickthall at my feet before straightening his flat cap and waddling off home for some beans and sausages on toast.

My neighbouring friend Edmund Prygge, lepidopterist and bigwig at the local amateur-Gilbert and Sullivan company, offered a kind word and a cup of weak tea but I could tell he thought we’d brought it on ourselves, and that he laid the responsibility with me. After all, hadn’t he warned me about the 93 year-old woman who had been thrown into the river by a mob last May for having a disproportionate ratio of Flaubert to Julian Barnes novels? Good man that he is though, Edmund didn’t bloviate for too long, he just passed the Battenberg.