It’s different when Andy and Leo, our part-timers, are there. They like to play music and talk about the jobs in hand. It’s still comfortable, but different. Less symbiotic.
I measured the available space on the book’s spine with my dividers, then checked it by eye. However carefully and accurately the lettering is placed, if the result looks wrong to the eye then it is wrong. I put the board back on the stand and slipped the foil out of the way. I pressed the handle forward gently to make a blind pull, just an impression of the letters lightly tapped into the cloth that I could rub away if they were misplaced. When I examined the result I saw they were indeed in the wrong position. About a millimetre too high.
I sighed and clicked my tongue, and Penny heard me.
She glanced over her specs at me. ‘Let me do it.’
‘Pen, I want to do it myself.’
I rolled the bar down by what I calculated to be the right amount and did another blind pull. This time it was exactly right.
Even though this was a routine machine-blocking job that I had done many hundreds of times before, I still had to summon up some courage to make the gold pull. If I got it badly wrong there was no chance of a repair. The boards would have to be made and covered all over again, and with the margins Penny and I operate on, and the backlog of work waiting to be done, we can’t afford the time. I took a steadying breath and pressed the operating lever forward. The type kissed the blue cloth and I pressed harder, going in with a smooth bold movement, and the gold tape frazzled as the letters burned out of it. I eased the handle back and bent forward to see the result.
There it was, The Life of in strong, gold, block capitals on the dark-blue cloth. I’d gone in a little too heavy, perhaps, and laid on a touch too much foil, but I could fix that. I stood back in a glow of satisfaction.
However many times I do it, finishing always gives me the most pleasure of all the stages of binding a book. I love the shape and balance of the letters, and the grace and infinite invention that are possible within the conventions of traditional tooling and decoration.
‘Good,’ I said.
Penny finished her rounding and backing job with a final burst of tapping. She took off her glasses and ran her hand through her short hair with the result that it stood up on the top of her head like a grebe’s crest. I knew about grebes from one of Jack’s bird posters. ‘How did it go?’
What do you say about a funeral? ‘It was … well, processed.’
‘I know what you mean. Coffins on a conveyor belt. Mourners by numbers.’
‘A bit like that. Sort of next please! Jack made a speech, though.’
‘Did he?’ Penny was surprised, not surprisingly.
‘About pigeons. It was Ted who set off his interest in birds by telling him about the way pigeons live in London. He made a whole address out of it at the ceremony.’
‘I think that’s very appropriate.’
She was right. I was proud of Jack.
‘And then, at the drinks afterwards, everyone clapped and sort of cheered and tapped their feet when I made a toast to Ted.’
‘Ah.’
I took up the second cover and squinted at the panel where I would place the blocking. This second volume was thicker than the first and I would have to make an adjustment to positioning. I pinched at the spaces on the spine with my dividers, not wanting to expose my feelings to Penny.
She put her book in the press. It was a good edition of Keats’s Letters that we had restored and were going to rebind in full calf. Tomorrow she would paste a backing on the spine and cut the endpapers. I planned to hand-finish the leather binding with gold and blind tooling, the full works. It was a tasty job, as one of our old tutors at college would have said. If only we had a few more like it, as well as our regular bread-and-butter work of binding Ph.D. theses, law reports, photographers’ catalogue boxes and presentation Bibles.
‘I’m going to head inside,’ Penny said. ‘Evelyn’s going out and she wants me to give Cassie her tea and put her to bed.’
‘See you tomorrow,’ I said.
I made the pulls for the second and third volumes, using just the right pressure this time, then discarded the type and set up Lord Curzon. I loved the quiet in the bindery on evenings like this. Behind me, the tall window that looked out over the canal darkened and the pale struts of the gasometer supports briefly glowed like the skeleton of a spaceship.
If I was thinking about anything as I worked it was Penny. We had met as art students at Camberwell and had learned the principles of bookbinding together. We hadn’t a clue how to do the job, even when the course was finished, but we both went on to work in other binderies. I found a job as a very junior assistant to Arthur Bromyard, one of the great artist-bookbinders, while Penny went into a busy and aggressive trade bindery where most of the other workers were men. She was bullied there and responded by becoming even more superficially prickly and defensive than she had been at Camberwell. We stayed friends, just about, but she was scathing about what she regarded as my sheltered and arty-farty existence under Mr Bromyard’s gentle tutelage, and I thought she was wasting her talents banging out dozens of legal buckram-bound law reports day after day and standing up to the taunts of brutal men who didn’t understand her manners or motives.
I blocked in the rest of the title and the author’s name and the volume number on each of the three books, then laid out the results on the bench to examine them. The first pull had indeed been a bit too heavy. I took my little ivory-handled penknife out of my drawer and scraped very gently at the gold to loosen the excess. The penknife had once belonged to the Old Man, Anthony Phebus, who had given it to Ted. Years later Ted had handed it on to me, asking offhandedly if I could find a use for it, and I had discovered that it was good for just this purpose. I blew the dust away and rubbed my blocking lightly with a duster. Perfect, even though I had to pass the verdict myself. Within the constraints of time and resources, of course.
I found a paste tray and a roller, and briskly applied PVA glue to the boards. Once the books were glued into their finished covers I could go home. The sky against the window was completely black now.
Half an hour later I was placing the bound volumes in the old wooden press, neatly interleaving them with paper so the moisture in the glue didn’t cause any cockling, when the door opened again. I began turning the screw to tighten the pressure and looked to see who it was. I could hear running feet, but I couldn’t see anyone.
A second later Cassie burst round the corner of Andy’s bench. ‘Sadie! Sadie!’ she shouted.
Cassie was nearly three, the daughter of Penny’s partner Evelyn and a musician from Grenada. It was a year since the lovely but distracted Evelyn had left Jerry and brought herself and Cassie to live at Penny’s.
I had never seen Penny happier than she was with Evelyn. In fact, I didn’t think I had even seen Penny happy at all before, although there had been a series of women, even in her miserable days at the blokey bindery.
‘What are you doing here?’ I demanded.
‘Seeing you,’ Cassie yelled triumphantly.
I swung her off the floor and she sat astride my hip. She was wearing a zip-up fleece
