The librarian arrived at the orphanage thirty minutes early. Tom Riddle's keen ears heard the Rolls-Royce before anyone else, so he decided to report it to the matron. The woman was asleep as she used to be after her evening glass of sherry.
Luckily for her, the housekeeper had made sure that each orphan was showered by then. Cold showers, since in mid-April they didn't heat the water, but showers nonetheless. Tom had tried to tell them that he had washed himself alone to avoid having to share space with thirty naked bodies in a confined space, but the order had been given subjecting all exceptions to the urgency of the moment. It was one of the many disadvantages of being institutionalized, and it didn't seem like his problems were going to be solved that day. Judging by the cardboard boxes that he brought with him, the individual in question was not a potential family as they had been told to behave properly, but a simple benefactor.
He wondered what all the fuss was about. If the goal was to obtain more resources, why not just show their daily misery? The matron had probably been put on notice about a possible investigation and had to pretend that her profession meant something to her.
Tom imagined that they would bring second-hand belongings and clothing. Maybe toys like that Christmas lot of pitiful stuffed animals and ugly rag dolls that some stupid bourgeois had selected last year with the intention of appearing in the good deeds section of the local newspaper. Nothing worth tempting his curiosity.
The matron ordered them to stand orderly at the front stairs to greet the newcomer. As the woman did not specify, most made a pretense of placing themselves in the only formation they knew, that of the choir, in an order of height increased by the steps. Tom glared left and right. They offered a ridiculous image that he did not want to be associated with. If they had begun to sing, what would have come out of their mouths would have been a cry for divine disgrace. Miss Longslade, a music teacher at the local school, had tried to make them either a female, mixed or white voices choir, but she ended up given up, claiming that their vocal cords had paid the price for the sins of their parents.
The benefactor was an elderly man, too old to be the father of the girl who accompanied him. There was a faint, out-of-date glow about him from his cream suit to his cream shoes, and he had a dry-eyed look that made him seem perpetually sad. The girl must have been around his age, although one could never be quite sure living among children with obvious developmental delays. She was wearing a white floral lace dress with puff sleeves and a long pleated skirt that fluttered like a white butterfly on the dry grass.
The matron reminded the orphans not to approach the visitors. Tom knew the reason was the fear of ordinary citizens of catching typhus in an orphanage. The librarian and the girl introduced themselves as Mr. Holloway and Lyra. Tom and the rest were too large a group to bother to introduce them in full. Besides, no one wanted to see them as anything more than a bunch of orphans.
Three of the five boxes they had brought contained ladies' clothing. Lyra wanted to show them off herself, and the less shy girls came over to take a look at those expensive and beautiful clothes that they would never have obtained through means other than charity. The other two, to Tom's delight, were laden with books. The books inside the two boxes already outnumbered those kept in that dusty room that the matron insisted on calling a library.
Mrs. Cole gave Tom the task of escorting Mr. Holloway to the library. Tom savored the fact that he had been set above the rest at the mere mention of his name. Though he was far from the strongest, he was one of the few who knew how to read and write properly, as well as her trusted orphan whenever the situation called for making a good impression. He then clenched his jaw angrily behind his pantomime smile. Seeking validation from a woman as incompetent as the matron was undignified.
Tom took the heaviest box in his arms and headed inside, urging the man to follow him using the formulas that he had learned in a book of good manners. The man had already gone ahead to carry the remaining box, refusing the belated offer of a younger, stronger arm in a weary tone that made the matron wonder if she had offended his manhood. Tom realized that his voice was simply muffled from the effort. Still, between breaths, he asked:
"It's very heavy, isn't it?"
"Books are never heavy enough, sir."
The lobby was empty except for one or two cleaners bustling with the clothes left in the showers. Tom looked at the man out of the corner of his eye. He had to observe an individual alone, behind closed doors, to get a more accurate idea of his character. His concern about the weight he could carry had been sincere and very enlightening. He must have been one of those subjects who were moved by morality and gave special importance to the virtue of compassion. That didn't necessarily make him a better person. The category to which people in his class belonged were rife with the faint-hearted who sought to compensate for his meager willpower with that hallowed, mind-numbing chemical mismatch they called compassion. The vast majority did not even feel compassion as such, but sensed it as a phantom limb, or let themselves be carried away by mere moral duty, or by a kind of feigned mercy with aspirations to salvation or social validation. The few who acted out of genuine compassion actually wanted to feel more sanctimonious than the average or to make amends for past sins. Ultimately, it was about satisfying the ego.
They passed through the circular main hall, the emptiness of which offered a curious contrast to the ornate façade of the last century. The most striking was a chipped checkerboard floor that matched the worn plaster of the bare walls. A few years ago, the hall had served as a ballroom and celebration hall and for such occasions used to be decorated with large mirrors covering the walls from floor to ceiling. Now there were no balls, or anything worth celebrating to compensate for the risk of having mirrors of such magnitude.
Luckily for the old man, who was starting to breathe in a worrying way, the library was on the ground floor.
"Here it is," Tom said, trying to sound a little embarrassed. "According to Constanten, the library should not be located in a room with only one such small window. It shouldn't be near plumbing either. This is all we got."
The librarian was silent for a few seconds. Tom knew exactly what the old man was thinking. He was amazed that a mere orphan would mention the greatest German scholar of library science and saddened by the way society restricted brilliant minds from lower strata. He knew everything just by looking into his pathetic blue eyes.
Tom decided to delve deeper into his compassion by reminding his that there was nothing alike private property in an orphanage, and with false innocence he wondered if this was what communism wanted for vulnerable children in Britain, knowing how ordinary men hated that word. Sadness coupled with outrage gives rise to action, Tom thought, pleased to corroborate empirically one of his earlier observations.
Compassion was like a thread. Just as there are threads of different thickness and resistance, compassion manifested itself in different ways in each individual. He could tighten the thread, but he knew that doing it too hard would break it; appearing unhappy in excess generated rejection, especially among men of good family, who ended up reasoning that the unhappy person must somehow be to blame for his condition. At some point he diverted attention from his circumstances, allowing the librarian to see more clearly his heroic independence, that he was a boy without resources or legacy who happened to be fascinated by his field of study. A promising young man who would unleash enormous potential with the help of a jog. Tom's flattering interventions were intended to make him feel part of the change.
The thread turned out to be more flexible and resistant than Tom had thought. There were certainly significant details. While the librarian hadn't been able to help but admire the views of the estate, he had refrained from commenting on how lucky they were to have them. Nor had he said any of that advice that other adults loved to say with the intention of healing their souls, like that it didn't matter that they didn't have proper families because orphans had each other and therefore they should take care of each other and love each other as if they were a fucking family. (If said healing began with a stomach pump, Tom had to recognize its effectiveness, because advice like that made him want to vomit). For now, the librarian seemed to possess more tact and empathy than the average visitor. And Tom intended to make the most of it.
"Let me thank you again for his charity work, sir," Tom said. "I always have hunger for knowledge, and you have provided me with a feast."
"Keep in mind that I'll come back with as many books as I can bring."
Finally, the librarian shook his hand and left like someone who has to put off an important conversation with a respectable individual. Tom sat down in the limp chair with the triumphant air of a king who comes out the winner in negotiations with a neighboring country.
A murmur of voices from the other side of the window caught his attention. He detected in them anguish, surprise and admiration, very similar to the prolonged note of collective admiration that was playing in his mind at that moment. Tom jumped up from his chair and looked out the window. The girl, of course, being the crème de la crème of the place. The huddle around her was larger and some of the boys had joined. Lyra kept pulling outfits out of boxes and displaying them like priceless ancient manuscripts. Tom tried to made up his mind about who seemed more despicable to him, the boring rich girl in need of attention or the mediocre ones who dispensed it by indulging in servility. He decided to hate them all equally.
He turned his attention to his books, in whose company he would find more understood. The new books, of course. The ones that sat on the rickety shelves were like an extension of the misery that abounded in the orphanage. Very similar and at the same time with nothing in common except for the dust and the deterioration in different degrees, which could perfectly have served as classification categories. Marx was wrong in his defense of an equality based on the abolition of classes if the logical consequence of this was to end up in the same bag as the other filthy ones. Some of the books had fungus on them and it would soon spread it to those around them.
The lot was varied and in good condition. There were mostly novels of evasion, among which adventures with attractive illustrations of exotic places stood out. He was not as interested in love stories, but they would certainly add a touch of delicacy to the whole with their art nuveau details. He was glad to see books about history, science, and biographies of illustrious people who weren't saints, and other heavy wrinkled leather books sprinkled with jasper that dealt with subjects of law and government. The librarian surely had a surplus in his deposit.
Now he could expand the ordering system with more complex groupings. On the other hand, he didn't like the idea of making them available to others. It was not good for the delicate cellulose of the pages to be in contact with dirty fingers and runny noses. A brilliant idea came to his privileged mind with the usual alacrity. He would set up a registry in which he would include the ones he considered most suitable for common use, leaving the most interesting ones for his personal and private use. If by some chance an adult noticed the missing books, Tom would see that they were found in a different room from his own. He did not believe in communism or the false premise of equality, but he could not deny that in some contexts it served as an excellent cover. Basically he was doing them a favor.
The noise outside brought him out of his thoughts again. That annoying girl again with that commanding little voice of hers. She was sharing fascinating tidbits about her rags. Tom couldn't resist listening for a while. He thus discovered that the girl, in addition to being presumptuous, was a liar. Blackbeard's daughter's petticoats. A cursed jacket that set fire to anyone who put it on without its owner's permission (at least she had lift the curse). The ballet shoes of Anastasia, the lost princess. Suddenly, one of the children started questioning her. Tom didn't expect Benjamin Cowell, who had a lump of sawdust for a brain, to be the voice of reason, but he was glad someone stood up. He even seemed to experience something akin to what some called class consciousness.
Perhaps the most ignoble love stories that had been donated to them, the gothic ones, came from the girl's personal collection. Young women who read Wuthering Heights or The Castle of Otranto used to have many birds in their heads. When they reached puberty they fled only to return months later arm in arm with a man twice their age. Being on the list of forbidden reading, he predicted that those books would last a few weeks here until the housekeeper discovered and moved them down to the basement, where some idle cleaner would enjoy them from time to time.
Astronomy books, Greek mythology and fairy tales wouldn't last long there either. The latter were Tom's guilty pleasure. The pleasure came from the concept of the manipulation of natural laws that some called magic, and the guilt had more to do with the attraction that magic aroused among less precocious children than with sin. When Tom was younger, shortly after learning to speak, he had asked for a book of fairy tales as a Christmas present. The book had arrived two years late, in a less sinful variant of children short stories: fables. Tom had hated it from start to finish. He didn't need to cultivate the virtue of patience with the teachings of a tortoise or be lectured by a fox on how bad cunning was.
The noise outside had changed, and now there was laughter and euphoric shouting in a symphony of bliss that would have changed Miss Longslade's mind about the lack of harmonic coordination in orphans. The group had grown even larger, housing the undecided. At first, seeing that they were scattered in two clear groups whose members skidded, feinted and backed up whenever they got too close to their opponents, he asumed that they were playing soccer, but there was no sign of the ball. Then he saw the two scarves nailed to the ground with a stick, about thirty meters from each other, in what must be the bordering territories. Catch the flag. From the way Lyra was yelling, she seemed to be in the lead. Tom was surprised to see Benjamin running along her with a goofy smile. What had she done to him? Well, Benjamin had never been very bright. But why didn't the housekeeper immediately stop such an offense against femininity? She used to say that practicing a sport in dress was shameful and that no woman could practice it wearing something that was not a dress; therefore, none had the right to do so. To make things worse, Lyra had dragged the other girls with her.
Was it allowed just because she had money and a good name?
The rich girl took the flag of the opposing team and everyone applauded. Lyra thanked her team for their work, naming each and every one of her members. At some point, she tilted her head toward the window where Tom was, and for a second their eyes met.
Tom turned away from the window. With his back against the wall, he pushed the hatch shut completely. A rule stipulated that the mansion should be kept adequately ventilated from the month of April, but it was the cleaners who were responsible of opening and closing the windows and they were the only ones who would be asked for explanations.
Tom resumed his reading of The Snow Queen. After half an hour, he realized that he had been reading words without paying attention to their meaning. His mind was still trapped in the scene that he had just witnessed. He wondered how he would have been able to beat Lyra. The mistake the other team had made had been to jump to catch the flag without a previous strategy. Lyra's team had focused on defense. The wise thing would certainly have been to mix a patient defensive strategy with an opportunistic offense to keep the other team off balance. Since they now accepted women on the team, he would have given the task of retrieving the enemy flag to Amy Benson, who ran faster than anyone else to watch the soldiers parade. He stayed like that for a while until he realized that someone was watching him from the doorway.
"Whar do you want?" he asked.
"I couldn't leave without saying goodbye to everyone. Tom Riddle, right?"
Tom squeezed his eyelids shut, aware of his slip. He couldn't risk destroying what he had accomplished with the librarian being rude to his daughter.
He nodded and briefly examined the mud that covered her from head to toe. She was to blame. If she hadn't suddenly appeared like that, Tom wouldn't have ended up thinking she was the ghost of a drowned girl in the river and therefore wouldn't have reacted the way he had reacted. Her expensive shoes crunched on the wooden planks purposefully. With her blonde curls and her hands hidden behind her back, she looked like Shirley Temple.
Shirley Temple if she was a fucking liar.
"Excuse me for speaking to you like that, miss. I was thinking about something very unpleasant that had nothing to do with you."
Tom managed one of his smiles. It was a half-formed smile that charmingly highlighted the dimples in his cheeks. The girls used to smile like fools. Lyra smiled widely, though Tom detected something anomalous about it, a shade of impudence that made it obvious she was beyond the influence of his charm.
"It's a shame you haven't joined the rest of your mates." Tom gritted his teeth at the emphasis on the word 'mates'. "We've had a wonderful time. I would have liked to play with you."
"Well, the truth is that I prefer quieter pastimes."
Lyra advanced on him without losing her cheeky smile. Tom's smile broke as he caught an unbearable stench in the air.
"I wanted to send you greetings from a friend. His name is Roger Parslow." Lyra's eyes gleamed with amusement. "He was in this orphanage until my father took him into my home as part of our service. Do you remember him?"
Tom didn't reply.
"He does remember you. And he has told me so much about you, Tom Riddle. That's why I didn't want to miss the opportunity to send you his regards. He preferred an ordinary greeting, but as I passed the corral something more appropriate occurred to me. A special greeting for a very special boy.
A couple of flies buzzed nearby. Tom took a step back, but it was too late. Lyra exposed her hands, wrapped in delicate white cotton gloves and smeared to the wrists with cow dung, and rubbed them into Tom's face.