Chapter Text
There is a theory — not a very good theory, and certainly not one you would find in any peer-reviewed journal, though there are one or two academics who have scribbled it on napkins late at night and then thrown the napkins away — which holds that the universe has, on occasion, a vested interest in putting certain people in the same room.
Not all people. The universe is not, on the whole, a matchmaker. It has fourteen billion years of hydrogen, helium, and escalating complexity to manage, and it doesn't have time to arrange dinner reservations. Most people meet because of geography, or circumstance, or the mutual inconvenience of wanting the same taxi in the rain.
But occasionally — very occasionally, on a Tuesday afternoon in Soho, for instance — something that might charitably be described as narrative asserts itself, and two people find themselves in the same secondhand bookshop, and the gears of something enormous and patient tick over one notch, and it turns out that fourteen billion years of escalating complexity had, in fact, been building toward precisely this.
The universe, for what it's worth, would deny all of this if asked.
It would be lying.
The bookshop was called A. Z. Fell & Co., which was slightly peculiar, since the man who actually owned it was called Derek Armitage and had no particular literary inclinations beyond a fondness for biographies of minor Tudor monarchs and the vague suspicion that the shop was making him money in ways he didn't entirely understand. He had inherited the shop from a great-uncle, and the great-uncle had inherited it from someone else, and there is a strong argument to be made that the shop had, over a very long period of time, accumulated a kind of institutional memory — a sense of self — that had very little to do with whoever nominally held the deed.
The shop smelled of old paper and dust and, on certain mornings, inexplicably of cocoa, and it was situated on a narrow street in Soho that most delivery drivers had to consult three different maps to find. It had a bell above the door that rang when people entered, a tendency to be closed at inconvenient hours with no explanation, and the unsettling quality of always seeming to have exactly the book you needed, even if you hadn't known you needed it.
Derek kept the finances. The order was kept by Asa Fell.
Asa Fell was — and this is not a physical description so much as an impression, the sort of impression one receives when looking at a person and feeling a flicker of déjà vu one cannot account for — difficult to date. He had a face that might have been thirty-five or fifty-five, and hair that had gone somewhat-white at the temples in a way that looked dignified rather than aged, and he wore clothes that suggested he had dressed himself from a wardrobe frozen at some point in the mid-twentieth century and had never seen any compelling reason to change.¹
He wore bow ties. He wore them without irony. This alone set him apart from most of contemporary London.
He also wore, most of the time, an expression of mild and genuine delight at the world, as though existence had consistently exceeded his expectations and he expected this to continue. People who did not know him sometimes assumed this meant he was simple. People who did know him understood that he had simply arrived, somehow, at the conclusion that the world was, in the main, rather wonderful, and that this conclusion was not naivety but something that had been arrived at through a great deal of quiet thought and was therefore more solid than it looked.
He was, in short, the sort of person who made a secondhand bookshop feel, on the inside, approximately three times larger than it appeared from the street.
On the particular Tuesday afternoon in question, Asa was engaged in the extremely important task of putting a first edition of Wodehouse back in the wrong place on purpose, so that the right sort of person might find it. This was not officially part of his job description. It was, however, one of the things he was best at.
The bell above the door rang.
The man who came in was tall — conspicuously tall, the kind of tall that required doorframes to briefly consider their life choices — and thin, and dressed entirely in black in the way that suggested either a deliberate aesthetic or a very small, very curated wardrobe, or both. He wore dark glasses. Not sunglasses, precisely — the lenses were too dark, too absolute, the sort that made it impossible to tell where he was looking, which might have been unsettling if his general manner hadn't been so thoroughly, almost aggressively nonchalant.
He had extraordinary cheekbones and red-brown hair and the kind of restless energy that suggested he had never, in his entire life, stood still by accident — only ever by a very deliberate act of will, and even then it clearly cost him something.
He stood in the doorway for a moment, looking at the shop with an expression that the glasses made it impossible to fully read, and then he moved inside with the particular confidence of someone who has walked into a great many buildings and found most of them disappointing but remains, against all evidence, perpetually willing to be surprised.
He moved through the front stacks with the automatic ease of a person who is used to navigating spaces full of things that jut out at unexpected angles. He paused once, briefly, at a shelf of natural history books. His fingers touched the spine of something on vertebrate palaeontology — not taking it, just touching — and then he moved on.
Asa, who had been watching all of this over the spine of the Wodehouse, put the Wodehouse back in the wrong place and came around the corner of the shelf.
"Can I help you?"
The man turned. Even through the dark glasses, there was a quality to the attention he directed at you — a kind of focus — that made one feel slightly caught in a spotlight. Asa, who was not generally given to fanciful thoughts, found himself thinking, unexpectedly, of something coming into view through a telescope.
Then the moment passed, because the man said, "Yeah — I was just passing, and I saw the shop. I was wondering, do you have any books on astrophysics?"
Asa considered this. He had a precise and intuitive map of the shop in his head — a map that owed very little to any official organisational system and a great deal to a kind of bookseller's proprioception, a sense of where things were in the same way one always knew where one's own hands were.
"Derek," he called, "do we have any books on astrophysics?"
Derek's voice carried from the back office, muffled by two doors and what appeared to be a large biography of Henry VIII. "Er — ye — oh, it's in there. Beside Gardening. Opposite Philosophy."
"I knew that," said Asa, who had absolutely known that, but had occasionally found it useful to make Derek feel involved.
He led the man through the shop — through the stacks of History, pausing sideways to let them both through a particularly narrow gap between Miscellaneous Theology and what had been optimistically labelled Modern Political Thought² — and around a corner into the section that Asa privately thought of as The Back Corner Where Things That Didn't Quite Fit Ended Up Fitting Perfectly.
"Ah," said Asa. "Here we are."
The section was three shelves and a half, wedged between a flowering section on Cottage Gardening and a perfectly respectable Philosophy shelf that contained, for reasons no one had ever fully interrogated, three copies of Kant, two of Spinoza, and an entire shelf of Discworld novels that Derek had miscategorised in 1987 and no one had seen fit to correct.³
The man in the dark glasses surveyed the astrophysics shelves with the expression of a professor reviewing a student essay — not unkind, precisely, but with a certain sense of this is not what I would have done.
Asa reached past him and extracted a book.
"Um — Astrophysics for Everyone: From the Big Bang to the Pillars of Creation. We've had this for years. I think I could probably give it to you for half price."
The man went very still.
It was an unusual stillness — not the stillness of shock or offence, but the kind that preceded someone making a decision about how to handle something. A stillness that suggested, underneath it, a very quick mind moving very quickly.
"Hmm," he said, after a moment. "You have no idea how much that hurts me."
Asa looked at the book in his hand. Then at the man. Then at the book again, with the methodical and slightly guilty expression of someone reviewing a sequence of events and identifying the point at which they went wrong.
"Oh," he said. "Well — did I say something wrong?"
"No." The man shook his head, a small, self-deprecating gesture. "I shouldn't have said anything. Sorry."
"No, um." Asa turned the book over. Then he turned it back. "I wrote it." The man said.
He had not meant this to come out as a question. It had, slightly, come out as a question. In his own defence, it was a genuinely surprising piece of information, and Asa had always believed that the appropriate response to surprising information was to take a moment.
"Oh!" said Asa. "Well. Right." He seemed, now that Asa was looking more carefully, to be suppressing something — not quite a smile, but perhaps the infrastructure of a smile, the preparatory groundwork. "Yes, you — well, I mean, you don't want your own book. Probably already got a copy."
"Two boxes in the garage," said the man, and the infrastructure of the smile resolved, briefly, into an actual one, and it was a very good smile, the kind that happened quickly and was over quickly and left one feeling that one had seen something one wasn't entirely supposed to see.
Asa laughed — a small, genuine, delighted laugh, the kind that sneaks out before you've had a chance to decide whether it's appropriate.
"Um — well — how about this?" He was already turning back to the shelf, moving through it with the easy fluency of someone who has long since stopped needing to read spines. He extracted another book, older, its cloth cover worn at the corners to the pale weave beneath. "Yes — it's not exactly cutting edge, but..."
He held it out. The man took it, and for a moment they were both holding it, and something passed through the room that was probably just the draught from an ill-fitting window and definitely wasn't anything more than that.
"This — I've always wanted a copy of this."
The book was Arthur Eddington's Space, Time and Gravitation. Second edition, 1921, which made it approximately a hundred and four years old and not, Asa was fairly certain, available for half price. But it was in rather good condition for its age, and there was something in the way the man's hands had closed around it — something careful, something that recognised what it was holding — that made Asa feel that it had been waiting for exactly this.
"Wonderful," said Asa. "This is my lucky day."
The man looked up from the book. The dark glasses made it impossible to read his expression. "How so?"
"Because I, um —" Asa found, to his mild surprise, that he was searching for words, which was unusual. He was generally rather good with words, having spent most of his adult life surrounded by them. "Have a book you want."
A pause. "Fair enough," said the man, and something in his voice had changed in a way Asa couldn't quite place — a kind of attention, the same quality he'd noticed in the doorway, but warmer now. More specific.
"Oh — twenty pounds, wonderful, thank you."
The transaction proceeded. Derek materialised briefly from the back office to suggest additional volumes ("Did you see we've got a couple of Brian Cox's? And that big book of Astrophysics for Everyone —") and was gently informed that the gentleman was, in fact, the author, and retreated with the expression of a man who has stepped into a social situation he didn't sign up for and would be thinking about it later.
The man paid. He took his book. He thanked Asa with a kind of offhand warmth that nevertheless managed to feel entirely genuine, and he went back through the shop, and the bell above the door rang again, and he was gone.
Asa stood at the till for a moment.
He was still holding the copy of Astrophysics for Everyone: From the Big Bang to the Pillars of Creation, which he had not, in the course of events, given back. He looked down at it. On the cover, in letters that were, now that he looked at them, really rather large: Professor Anthony J. Crowley.
There was a photograph on the back, slightly blurry in the way of author photos that had been taken by someone's graduate student in a university corridor. It was unmistakably the man in the dark glasses, if one allowed for the fact that in the photo he was not wearing the dark glasses and had an expression of profound exasperation that suggested the photographer had said "smile" one too many times.
"Well," said Derek, from somewhere behind him, in the tone of a man who had been watching all of this with great interest and had been waiting with admirable restraint for an appropriate moment, "aren't you going to go after him?"
Asa looked up. "Why would I possibly go after him?"
Derek gave him a look. It was the look of someone who has known a person for a number of years and has consequently accumulated a great deal of relevant data. "You liked him," he said simply. "And it looked very much like he liked you."
Asa considered a number of responses to this. He considered noting that the shop did not run itself and he had a Wodehouse to misfile. He considered the general principle that one did not chase strangers out of bookshops because of an interesting conversation about Eddington. He considered several other things too, all of which were sensible and well-reasoned.
He put the book under his arm and went out the door.
Outside, the afternoon had that particular quality of London light in late spring — not quite golden, not quite grey, but something in between that manages, if you're in the right mood for it, to look rather like the beginning of something.
Crowley was about thirty yards down the street, walking at the pace of someone who walks quickly by habit but is not, at this particular moment, in any actual hurry.
Asa, who was not a running sort of person under normal circumstances, found himself doing something that was not quite running but was definitely faster than walking, and arrived slightly out of breath at Crowley's shoulder.
"Oi — " He caught himself. "Excuse me. Stop."
Crowley stopped and turned, and for a moment there was genuine surprise on his face — unguarded, the dark glasses not quite enough to hide it. "Oh — sorry, did I leave something? Is everything okay?"
"Oh." Asa, now that he had caught up, found that he needed a moment to remember what he had decided to say, which turned out to be a more complex question than it had seemed from inside the shop. Crowley saw that Asa was holding his book, again, not again and started: "I told you, two boxes —"
"I know." Asa's voice was careful.
"Um." Asa held out the book. "Sorry, a bit — bit puffed." He was, it turned out, considerably more puffed than he usually liked to admit. He was a bookseller, not an athlete, and the universe had not given him the sort of legs that were designed for impromptu pursuit. "No — I bought it. Would you — could you sign it for me?"
A pause. It was a very particular kind of pause, the sort that contains a great many things that are not quite being said.
"Of course," said Crowley. "What's your name?"
"Fell. Asa Fell. With an S."
"Right." Crowley was patting his pockets. He looked at Asa with an expression that was, now, recognisably and helplessly amused. "Um — do you have a —"
"Oh! Yes. Sorry." Asa produced a pen from his breast pocket. It was the kind of pen that lives in breast pockets and is available at all times, which is the sort of pen that only certain very specific people carry and which tells you a great deal about them.
Crowley took the pen. He opened the book. He wrote. He handed both back.
Asa looked at Crowley with the dark glasses and the good cheekbones and the expression of someone who has decided to take a risk and has committed to it, and he said:
"I need you to write your number down too. For me." A beat. "So I can ask you to dinner." Another beat. "And you'll say no, and — sorry — but at least I'll have asked."
Asa looked at the inscription in the book. He looked at Crowley. He looked at the pen in his hand.
The afternoon light did the thing it sometimes did in London, the thing that wasn't quite golden and wasn't quite grey, and somewhere nearby, from a speaker in a café or a passing car or possibly from no identifiable source at all, the opening bars of something began to play — a song, not quite audible, just the shape of it, the sense of it, there and then gone.
"I'm not going to give you my number," said Crowley.
Asa absorbed this. His expression did not change, which was the expression of someone who had expected this and was being very good about it.
"No," he said. "No, no, no, sorry. I —"
"I'll wait for you," said Crowley.
Asa blinked. "Sorry?"
"For dinner." Crowley said. Asa put the pen back in his pocket. He tucked the book — signed now, he noted, For Asa — who sells me my own books at half price. A.J.C. — under his arm with a small expression of satisfaction. Then Crowley added: "Where are we going?"
And Anthony Crowley, Professor of Astrophysics at University College London, author of a popular science book that he had been systematically buying back for three years, looked at Asa Fell — bookseller, wearer of bow ties, person who had just chased him down a Soho street to ask him to sign a copy of something he privately considered one of his better metaphors for the incomprehensible beauty of the universe — and found, to his considerable surprise, that he was smiling.
Not the quick, controlled smile from earlier. A different kind. The uncontrolled kind.
"I have no idea," Asa said.
They walked back in the direction of the shop together, and from somewhere — a café, perhaps, or a car, or the particular resonance of a London afternoon in late spring when something is beginning — a song followed them. Something by Cyndi Lauper, as it happened, which seemed appropriate, or perhaps inevitable, or perhaps both.
Flashback, warm nights, sang the city.
Almost left behind.
Later, Derek would tell this story to anyone who would listen, which included his sister, his dentist, and a man at a pub in Hammersmith who had not asked.
He would always end it the same way: "And they just walked off together. Down the street. Talking. As if they'd always known each other."
He would pause here, usually, for effect.
"Which," he would add, thoughtfully, "thinking about it — maybe they had."
Background Notes, for the Careful Reader
Asa Fell was born in 1973 in a house full of books in Oxfordshire to a mother who read aloud at the table and a father who was largely absent in the way of men who are physically present but whose thoughts are permanently elsewhere. He had been, as a child, the sort of boy who got on better with libraries than with other children, which is not a sad thing, necessarily — libraries are excellent company and make fewer demands — but which had given him a self-sufficiency that occasionally looked, from the outside, like coldness, and was not.
He had been, at various points, a student of English Literature at Oxford (where he had quietly loved it and publicly pretended he found it merely interesting), a cataloguer at the British Library (where he had been, by general consensus, extremely good at his job and slightly terrifying to work with, in the affectionate sense), and for the last eleven years a full-time presence at A. Z. Fell & Co., which Derek owned and which Asa, in any practical sense that mattered, was.
He had not been in love, in the full sense, since a man named Gabriel whom he had met at a library conference in Edinburgh twelve years ago and who had been, in retrospect, spectacularly unsuitable in ways that Asa had understood at the time but chosen not to.⁴ Since then he had been, in his own assessment, entirely fine — content, even, in the way that people who are good at being alone eventually become content: genuinely, with effort, and with only occasional exceptions at approximately three in the morning.
He was not, he would have told you firmly, waiting for anyone in particular.
He was, the universe would have told you, if it was the sort of thing that spoke, in the process of being found.
Anthony Crowley — Dr. Anthony J. Crowley to undergraduates, Tony to exactly four people, none of whom called him that to his face — was forty-three years old and had spent a significant portion of those years looking at the sky.
Not in a passive, occasional way. In the way of someone who has been doing something since they were seven years old in a garden in Bournemouth with a torch and a library book and a feeling — he couldn't have named it then, and he struggled to name it now — that there was something up there that was relevant to him, personally, in a way he couldn't quite articulate.
He had done his undergraduate degree at Cambridge (Astronomy), his PhD at Edinburgh (Stellar Astrophysics), spent three years in New Mexico at a telescope array that could see back to within a few hundred million years of the beginning of everything, and eventually returned to London because — and he had been surprised by this, when he examined it honestly — he missed it. The noise. The chaos. The sense that everywhere you went, things were happening.
He had also, five years ago, written a book. This had happened partly by accident (a bet with his department head, over something too petty to recount here) and partly because he had genuinely believed, and still believed, that astrophysics was one of the most beautiful things human beings had ever done, and that the beauty of it was not reserved for physicists, and that there was something morally important about making it available to anyone who wanted it.
The book had been more successful than he had expected. This was gratifying and also, in a way he couldn't fully explain, faintly mortifying — he had the strong feeling that the version of himself who wrote it was slightly more optimistic and slightly less guarded than the version who then had to talk about it at literary festivals, and that this was visible to careful readers in a way that made him want to buy all the copies back.
He had bought, at last count, forty-seven.
He had been divorced for three years from a woman named Harriet, who was brilliant and acerbic and had finally, after six years of trying, concluded that Anthony was fundamentally in love with a large, cold, impersonal universe and that she was not interested in being fourth to the Milky Way. This was not entirely fair. It was not entirely unfair either. They had arrived at an amicability that both of them privately found more comfortable than the marriage had been, and remained in occasional contact in the way of two people who had once meant a great deal to each other and had found a way to file that meaning somewhere accessible.
He was not, he told himself, in any particular state of waiting. He was forty-three. He had his work, his telescope, his flat in Clerkenwell with the rooftop terrace from which, on very clear nights, you could see the stars, and two boxes of his own book in the garage of his converted barn in Hampshire where he weekended when the city became too much.
He had, on the whole, everything he needed.
He had not, until approximately forty minutes ago, stood on a Soho street and been asked to dinner by a person who made him feel, inexplicably, like something had just aligned.
Planets, perhaps. Or stars.
Or possibly just two people, on a Tuesday afternoon, in a city of ten million, finding each other at last.
¹ He had, in fact, purchased one pair of jeans in 2019, as an experiment. The experiment had been inconclusive and the jeans were now at the back of a wardrobe, where they remained as a sort of monument to a road not taken.
² It had been labelled Modern Political Thought by Derek, who had bought a job lot from a closing academic bookshop in 1999 and filed it under Modern Political Thought on the grounds that most of the spines were the same shade of grey. Asa had never corrected this because he had a private theory that the presence of Hannah Arendt next to a collection of speeches by Disraeli was doing important work.
³ Terry Pratchett was, Asa had firmly maintained for years, genuinely philosophical in the deepest sense, and this was not a miscategorisation at all. Derek had decided not to argue, which was the correct decision.
⁴ Gabriel had been, among other things, extremely handsome, exceptionally certain of his own righteousness, entirely incapable of admitting fault, and constitutionally opposed to good food on the grounds that it was self-indulgent. Asa had known all of this within the first three months and had continued for another two years in the faint and ultimately unfounded hope that people changed. They did not, as a rule. Not in that way. Not Gabriel, certainly.