Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

         Dark and capacious as its namesake’s castle, Dracula's occupied two gloomy floors in a Georgian building across the street from Tariq’s Indo-Pak Restaurant and conveniently just down from the Meadow Bar, our local when on campus, and, less conveniently, the French Department, where most of the lectures I was supposed to attend (but usually didn’t) took place, finding myself distracted en route by Tariq’s or the Meadow Bar…or Dracula’s, frequently in that order (grub, a few pints, a spot of shoplifting).

         Old Dracula himself was an ex-lieutenant in the Scottish Borderers who’d been invalided home from Arnhem in ’44, having stepped into a barrage from the SS. He was never, as they say, quite the same again, and his wife left him for a Canadian sailor sometime in the early ‘50s. In due course, having regained sufficient mental and physical stability, he united into a single, unruly, ungoverned and ungovernable bookshop his two inheritances: a former jam factory from his mother, a McVitie, and the library from his father’s house in Berwickshire. He moved into the flat on the top floor and descended the stairs every morning to unlock the rickety old glass-and-brass front door.

         Shoplifters were welcome at Dracula’s, and came to reign supreme. Indeed, it was a mystery how or when stocks were replenished; by magic, or perhaps they reproduced in the wee hours. Old Drac himself spent most of the day seated in front of an old iron stove, drinking tea, smoking Players, warming his feet and reading selections from his enormous, if dwindling, stock. A wheezy old Border Collie at his feet came alive only to snap at passing rats or shoplifters. (I’m tempted to say the dog’s name was Renfield.) The place was a labyrinth of long- or forever-unread volumes and cobwebby nooks and crannies and unidentifiable mounds looming up in corners at the end of alleys of tottering bookcases. Old overcoats and musty scarves lay draped across the backs of chairs like the cast-off garments of Miss Havisham’s guests. From the walls the heads of stuffed animals—a deer, a fox, a wolf—glassily observed the proceedings, an entertainment for the soul. There was little in the way of actual commerce, but shoplifting went on from one end of the shop to the other with the mindless, continuous industry of a beehive, reaching a peak at rush hour after mid-afternoon pub closing when the entire bookshop filled up with the silent jostling of furtive, beer-scented kleptomaniacs, mostly undergraduates. Then the raids on the shelves and bins would begin in earnest. Any old book likely to bring a quid or more somewhere else was doomed. Collected editions of (say) Mrs. Beeton’s recipes were smuggled out under raincoats; dusty Douai Bibles or Victorian editions of John Knox’s Psalter found themselves transported into the open air via plastic carrier bag or satchel; greasily-thumbed second editions of Tauchnitz primers or M. Girodias’ Traveler’s Companion Series were whisked away in an inside pocket.

         There were occasional cash transactions, as if to deflect old Drac’s suspicions; but he knew; he knew. Once he intervened to irritably pluck from my hands a Penguin Classic edition of A Nest of Gentlefolk that I actually had no intention of purloining, having already read it; I was simply admiring the classic Germano Facetti Penguin-Classic cover.  But Old Drac snatched it away with the remark, “Give it back to me Jimmie, I havenae read it yet.” And one afternoon Bill Thomson was leaving the premises after an energetic session at the nearby Meadow Bar, slightly unsteady on his pins but, as he thought, proceeding with the utmost discretion despite being laden like a water-bearer with two volumes of an illustrated nineteenth-century edition of Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, one under each arm, both arms well concealed beneath the heavy folds of an old RAF greatcoat, when Dracula rose dramatically, as from the grave, from behind something or other (a stack of magazines, a coat rack, a bookcase), fixed Bill with a gaze as glittering as that of the stuffed beasties on the wall and looked him slowly up and down.

    “Hullo, laddie,” he said. “Found what ye were lookin’ for, then, have ye?”

    “Eh. Oh aye. I mean: No. But ta for asking. Right, then. Cheerio,” said Bill, and hastened away, shoulders bowed under Vasari’s weight, to the sound of dry papery chuckles and a wheezing bark or two.