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“You have to go to Fell’s,” Derek said, with a glint in his eye that made Frankie slightly dizzy. “It’s practically a rite of passage at the Slade. And you’re bound to hit it off with Mr Fell. A dealer in curious volumes, dear boy.”
Quoting again; or maybe this was another piece of queer argot Frankie ought to know and didn’t. Derek always made him feel hopelessly young and ignorant. The gulf between nineteen and twenty-five was only part of the reason for that.
“If you can get through the door,” Colin Lacey said, scowling. His new horn-rimmed specs made him look more than ever like a disapproving owl. “I’ve never found the place open, and I’ve been trying for months. Ignore him, Frank; he ought to know better, sending a first-year on a wild goose chase like that.”
Derek grinned. “Do you know, I think Frankie might just have better luck than you did, Colin.”
“Oh, piss off!” Colin glared even harder.
“I have to go,” Frankie said, with a hasty glance at the hall clock. “Theatre design with Snow at eleven.”
“Ah, memories,” Derek said, smiting his forehead dramatically. “Give the old duffer a kiss from me.”
Looking back, Frankie wasn’t sure if Derek meant Peter Snow or the mysterious Mr Fell. Not that he was going to kiss either of them. But the conversation had piqued his curiosity, and when design class was over, he cycled down to Soho in search of A Z Fell & Co.
There was a long and complicated notice about opening hours on the bookshop door, but as he began to read it the sign turned around to read OPEN. Colin would be cross; serve him right, the patronising so and so. Frankie pushed the door open and went in.
Mr Fell, the dealer in curious volumes, looked a little like Frankie’s art master at school: fussy bow tie, buff-coloured (or possibly écru) three piece suit, cherubically fluffy white-blond curls. He smiled at Frankie and gestured encouragingly at the bookshelves.
“Do feel free to look around.”
Frankie didn’t need a second invitation, or even a first; he gave himself up to the ecstasy of browsing. Derek was quite right, the place was a book-lover’s paradise. Frankie had never seen so many volumes of Decadent poetry, letters, essays. A whole glorious shelf of Wilde and Wildeana. He picked up a small olive-and-gilt leather-bound copy of Intentions with reverent care, and opened it at random.
The world is made by the singer for the dreamer.
“A beautiful idea,” Mr Fell said, “but sadly not true.”
Frankie nearly dropped the book. Had he spoken the line out loud without realizing it?
“Forgive me,” Mr Fell said. “I recognized the place; it’s one of the loveliest passages dear Oscar ever wrote, don’t you agree?”
“Yes,” Frankie said, trying not to gawp at him. “Though I don’t think he’s right about art.”
The fluffy and cherubic Mr Fell looked briefly quite cross. Apparently he didn’t like anyone but himself criticising dear Oscar.
“I – I think art can show us those things,” Frankie said. “The ones he says only literature can. The body in its swiftness and the soul in its unrest.”
Mr Fell brightened again. “You’re an artist?”
“Studying to be one,” Frankie said. “I’m at the Slade.”
“Splendid!” Mr Fell positively beamed. “Next time you come you must bring some of your sketches.”
The conversation was brought to an abrupt end with the arrival of a stream of customers, all firmly shooed away or otherwise thwarted by Mr Fell. For a shopkeeper, he seemed extraordinarily determined not to part with any of his stock. Perhaps, despite his passion for Oscar Wilde, the whole business was a front for something else: gambling, or drug-running. It would be a good cover; Mr Fell looked so much like the last person you’d suspect of anything shady. As Frankie’s grandmother Vernet used to say, “on lui donnerait le bon Dieu sans confession.”
Frankie looked at his watch and sighed; his lunch hour was over. He put Intentions reluctantly back on the shelf. There was no way he could afford it, and no point in pretending otherwise.
“Oh, must you go?” Mr Fell said. His disappointment seemed odd in someone who had just chased half a dozen customers out of his shop. “Do come again, Mr – ”
“Garnet,” Frankie said. “Frankie Garnet.”
Mr Fell gazed at him, misty-eyed. “You remind me of a young man I used to know, oh, centuries ago. Dear Rass, he had just your – ”
If Mr Fell said one word about Frankie’s skin, that would be the end of it, Oscar Wilde or no Oscar Wilde. Frankie had already had quite enough of being treated as an exotic by half his fellow students.
“ – your curiosity about life,” Mr Fell finished. “Come any time, dear boy.”
Between his studies and his Saturday job at the library, Frankie could not very well come any time, but he came back surprisingly often over the next few months. The shop was always open, even if it looked closed from across the street. Colin must just have been unlucky, or else he was exaggerating again.
The first time Frankie produced his sketchbook, Mr Fell’s smile grew so beatific that Frankie almost expected him to break into the Hallelujah Chorus. Or perhaps one of those Jazz Age numbers he liked to play on his wind-up gramophone, a seemingly inexhaustible supply of 78s.
Frankie tried sometimes to sketch Mr Fell, but could never capture him as anything more than a faint outline in the depths of the shop. Even his clothes refused to be committed to paper. In the end, Frankie gave it up as a bad job and took to sketching the customers instead, those Mr Fell allowed to stay for more than a couple of minutes.
The favoured customers were mostly elderly queens who called Mr Fell “Zira” and gossiped in Polari. Frankie didn’t let on that he understood.
“Ooh, life is naff, Freda. Here’s me, dear little Alice Blue Gown, pushing seventy, nanti riah, lallies creaking like a five bar gate, and there’s that Zira, just vada her eek, she doesn’t look a day over forty.”
“She must have a portrait in the attic, ducky, it’s the only answer. Here, Zira, you got a portrait stashed away in your lattie?”
In the warmer summer weather, when Alice was less troubled by rheumatism, they’d dance around the shop to Sam Browne singing I Must Have That Man, or to Gwen Farrar and Norah Blaney duetting on If I Had A Girl Like You. Mr Fell would smile at them, fond and a bit wistful, but never joined in the dancing.
“What d’you make of this new Act then, heartface?”
Frankie didn’t have to wonder which one. All the queers he knew had been talking about it for weeks.
“Nanti change for any poor omis going cottaging, is it, Freda? You’re still going to end up in the arms of Lily Law. Remember that time in the Blitz, Zira?”
Mr Fell didn’t answer; he seemed lost in thought, and Alice and Freda left soon afterwards.
“It’s not going to change anything for me either,” Frankie said gloomily. “Not for another two years.”
Mr Fell smiled at him, the way older people did when you showed yourself up by being young. They didn’t usually look so sad about it, though.
“It’s a long time for you, dear boy, I know.”
Mr Fell sighed, and put another record on the gramophone. Big instrumental to start, jumping all over the place till finally it settled. Frankie didn’t recognize the tune, though the man’s voice sounded vaguely familiar.
I’m like a weeping willow, weeping on my pillow, for years and years, there ain’t no sweet man that’s worth the salt of my ba ba da da wah da ba ba da da ba ba ba da wah dow! Down and down he dragged me, like a fiend he nagged me, for years and years, there ain’t no sweet man that’s worth the salt of my ba ba da da da wah do…
“Bing Crosby,” Mr Fell said, astonishingly. “He regretted it later, of course, when the times had changed. Went round trying to buy up all the copies, but by then it was too late.”
Frankie leaned against the Travel section, his head spinning. He was torn between boggling about Bing Crosby, who he mostly associated with White Christmas, a cardigan, pipe and slippers, and wondering why the word tears appeared to be taboo when the rest of the song wasn’t.
“I think you’d better go, dear boy,” Mr Fell said, surreptitiously wiping his eyes. “I’m – not in the mood for company today.”
“Goodbye, Mr Fell,” Frankie said. “See you on Monday.”
He was practically knocked over on the doorstep by a skinny red-haired man in dark glasses, dressed all in black with – were those snakeskin shoes?
“Angel!” the man shouted into the shop.
Mr Fell, who was not in the mood for company, nevertheless let the man in, possibly in order to stop him yelling “Angel!” in the street. He hardly seemed the type for camp endearments, Frankie thought – and found himself three streets away from the bookshop without quite knowing how he’d got there.
It was all of two weeks before he found the shop open again. The skinny red-haired man was lounging against the desk, as if he’d been there all the time. For all Frankie knew, he quite possibly had. The measuring stare he gave Frankie reminded him of Snow casting a critical eye over his latest backdrop designs for Don Giovanni.
“Well, well,” the man said, not particularly nicely, “if it isn’t Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia.”
Frankie turned around, bewildered, to look for signs of visiting royalty, before he realized it must be a joke.
“Frankie Garnet,” he said. “I’m at the Slade.”
“Frankie Garnet,” the man said, rolling the name on his tongue like a connoisseur at a wine tasting. Frankie half expected him to spit it into a handy bucket. “I don’t suppose your price is above rubies.”
He hissed a little on the ‘s’ sounds, which Frankie thought an unnecessary touch, and the look he gave Frankie now was quite a different thing, with a lot of sharp teeth in it.
“Crowley, what are you – oh, hello, dear boy,” Mr Fell said, appearing from the back of the shop just in time to stop Frankie from emitting an embarrassing squeak.
“Hello, Mr Fell.”
The mysterious Crowley continued looking at Frankie as if he might be lunch. Mr Fell looked awkward. They stood around in silence: il y a un ange qui passe, Frankie’s grandmother would have said.
“I – er. Was wondering about Wilde’s letters,” Frankie said. “The, um. Rupert Hart-Davis edition.”
“Unexpurgated,” said Mr Fell, approvingly.
“Better off with the expurgated ones,” Crowley said. “Shorter. He did go on, dear Oscar.”
“Foul fiend!” Mr Fell said, and smacked Crowley on the nose with a feather duster. “Show some respect.”
“Or what?” Crowley leered.
This was starting to feel like a conversation Frankie really shouldn’t be present at.
“How much is the book?” he blurted out, and could have kicked himself. He’d seen customers politely ejected from the bookshop for just that sort of crude question.
“Oh – I – I really couldn’t –” Mr Fell began.
“Yes you can, angel,” Crowley said, his look softening.
Frankie remembered that look for years afterwards; he hoped one day he’d find someone who would look at him that way.
“Come on, Aziraphale, give the boy his book and let him go, then you can close up for the day.”
Mr Fell – Aziraphale, what a name! – flushed a delicate shade of pink from his collar to his hairline.
“Well – I suppose –”
Frankie took out his wallet. It would almost certainly mean living on bread and jam for a week, but it would be worth it.
“I think this was the book you wanted, wasn’t it?” Mr Fell took the volume of Intentions down from the shelf.
Frankie’s heart thumped so hard he thought the bookshop would shake with it. He’d been coveting that book since the first day, but he couldn’t possibly afford it. Not if he lived on bread and jam for a month.
“Call it a gift,” Crowley said.
Frankie gaped at him, thunderstruck.
“From us both, dear boy,” Mr Fell said, holding out the book. “Oscar would have liked to know you.”
“ – to know you were reading it,” Crowley said, though Frankie had the feeling Mr Fell’s sentence was already finished.
“Thank you, Mr Fell, Mr Crowley. It’s very k–”
“Don’t mention it,” Crowley said, with a pained expression. He took the book from Mr Fell and thrust it into Frankie’s trembling hands. “Right, angel–”
“Oh yes,” Mr Fell said, his colour deepening from rose madder to crimson. “I really must get on.”
Frankie found himself on the other side of the glass door, clutching his precious volume. It was now wrapped in gold paper stamped with a pattern of green carnations. He had no idea when or how that had happened. Behind him, the door of A Z Fell & Co clicked firmly shut.