5

from: hg@insideoutrecords.com

to: nicholas_slopen@hotmail.com

cc: sinan@malevinart.org

subject: re: Johnsoniana

date: 26 April 2009 10.05 BST

Hi Nicholas,

Ouch! Trench mouth? I have no idea what that is, but it sounds awful …

Thanks for the report. I’ve passed on your points about the letters to the seller and he’s happy for you to take a look at the originals. I’m in NY for the next couple of weeks so I’m copying you both in to this message.

Sinan, Nicholas Slopen is the scholar I told you about who is helping me with my collection.

Nicholas, Sinan Malevin is a very old and dear friend with whom I’ve worked in the past.

I’m going to let you gentlemen arrange a time for Nicholas to inspect the letters. See you when I’m back from the States.

Cheers, H

6

The day after the first May Bank Holiday, I travelled to Green Park by tube to meet Sinan Malevin. The address I’d been given was in St James’s Square, which surprised me since, though I knew the area well, I wasn’t aware that it housed a rare book dealership. My puzzlement deepened when the destination turned out to be a large Georgian town house on the eastern side of the square that appeared to be a single private dwelling. A discreet closed-circuit TV camera was mounted above its portico and surveyed the handsome patterned tiling that led up to the entrance. As soon as I stepped up from the pavement, the huge glossy black door opened without warning. A tiny woman with a pale face emerged from the gloom behind it. ‘Professor Slopen?’ she said, in an accent that might have been Russian but that I couldn’t at that moment place with certainty.

‘It’s just Doctor, in fact, but I’m grateful for the promotion,’ I said. I was momentarily distracted from the grandeur of the dim interior by the oddness of my host. She was strikingly small and plain, not more than five feet tall, with a plump, unlined and oddly ageless face. Her frizzy hair was pinned up behind her head in a shiny brown corona.

She bustled across the vestibule, her heels clattering on the black and white marble of the floor. I followed her up the staircase, silenced by the vastness of the entrance hall, the profusion of mahogany and marble, gilt mirrors, oil paintings and rococo bronzes, and most of all by the realisation that this building was indeed a private residence.

The woman ascended rapidly, but with a slight limp. Her asymmetric steps beat a muffled iamb on the carpet, which was held in place by glistening brass stair rods. I tried to engage her in conversation by asking her name.

She came to a sudden halt and turned to me, favouring her good leg. ‘Telauga,’ she said, then once more turned abruptly and resumed her brisk and lurching ascent. When she reached the first-floor landing, she opened a door and gravely announced: ‘Dr Slopen is here to see you.’

We entered a room whose scale suggested that it must have once been a ballroom. The three sash windows that gave on to the square seemed almost twenty feet high, and the ceiling above us was at least double height; the room’s walls were newly panelled with oak.

‘You must be Mr Malevin,’ I said, stepping forward to offer my hand to an olive-skinned man of about my age. Malevin was slightly built, with the round-shouldered posture of the bona fide bibliophile, but a slightly dandyish demeanour; he had on an expensive-looking dark blue suit with almost imperceptible jags of white stitching on the collar, and was wearing his rather coarse black hair in a shoulder-length bob.

‘Sinan, please,’ said Malevin, leaving his hands by his sides and glancing somewhat disapprovingly at my offered hand: ‘We will be handling fragile manuscripts. For the same reason, I’m sorry I can’t offer you something to drink. Perhaps afterwards.’

‘I understand,’ I said. ‘Is there somewhere I could wash my hands before we start?’

‘Vera, take Dr Slopen to the washroom,’ said Malevin.

The washroom was of the same baronial opulence as the rest of the house; the faucets of the tub-sized washbasin looked like capstans and dispensed twin geysers of scalding and icy water. Everything was new. The designers had clearly been briefed to recreate the grandeur of a stately home, but without the dog-eared and faded quality that the British upper classes prize as the imprimatur of old money.

When I came back, Malevin was standing with his back to the door, unpacking manila folders from an archive storage box laid out on a long table parallel to the side wall. ‘Hunter tells me you are sceptical about the provenance of the letters,’ Malevin said, turning towards me with a disarming smile.

‘I’m a scholar,’ I said, ‘and I always like to work from primary sources if they’re available.’

‘Provenance is everything,’ Malevin said, laying the folders out in sequence along the table. I was silent for a moment, noticing for the first time Malevin’s white-gloved hands.

‘Gloves,’ I said.

‘A precaution. But one I’m afraid I’ll have to insist on. The paper, as you know, is very old.’ He handed me a pair of cotton gloves.

‘Of course,’ I said, conceding to Malevin’s request after a hesitation so brief that I hoped it was imperceptible.

‘Here they are,’ said Malevin, indicating the table spread with its cargo of folders.

I slipped a magnifying glass out of the right hip pocket of my jacket and approached the table. As I opened the first folder, I said casually, ‘I hope it’s not rude of me to ask, but I’ve been trying to place you and I can’t for the life of me figure out where you’re from.’

‘Provenance again.’

‘Just curious,’ I said absently, peering at the handwriting in front of me.

‘My family is from Dagestan.’

‘Dagestan?’

‘It’s part of the Russian Federation. We are a republic in the Caucasus,’ Malevin said.

‘I know. I’ve read Lermontov. Mountains and vendettas, right?’

‘Something like.’

The first folder of letters was indisputably Johnson. It’s strange how modern his handwriting is, especially compared to the Jacobeans and the scribble that passes as Shakespeare’s signature – the trail of a beetle meandering through inkblots. Johnson’s handwriting looks almost contemporary: firm and decisive, like an old-fashioned CEO, or a reforming public-school headmaster. Of course, it altered through his life, weakening and growing more illegible as his health failed. But these were in the mature hand from the years of his fame; the drudgery of his dictionary behind him; some measure of financial security gained; he’d befriended the Thrales and spent restorative weekends at their grand house in Streatham, eating forced peaches and being lionised; he’d acquired Boswell, the friend and biographer whose work would make him immortal.

Absent from the collection was the letter that had most intrigued me: the undated one that I had referred to in my email to Hunter. When I mentioned this omission, Malevin scrutinised the folders on the table and agreed that it appeared to be missing. He went across the room, unlocked a low cherrywood cupboard and wheeled out a trolley packed with a single row of storage boxes. As he began to examine them, the calm of the room was broken by the chirruping of a mobile phone. Though the ring was low and discreet, there was something jarring about the sound in these surroundings, which the furnishings and the technology of scholarship seemed to place in an older and slower century. Malevin took a nickel-coloured device out of his jacket pocket and answered in Russian. He paused with his back towards me, then excused himself and walked quickly out.