Atlases

“You’re late,” said Mrs Pell.

“It’s nine.”

“It’s two minutes past.” She did not look up from the order book. “The blinds.”

He did the blinds. There were four of them, on the long window and the door, old canvas ones on wooden rollers that had to be pulled down an inch before they would go up, and he had learnt the trick of it in his first week and had never once been thanked for it. The morning came into the shop sideways, over the framed Chesapeake in the window, and lay along the plan chests and the globe stand and the bottom row of the travel guides, which were sun-faded on their spines in a straight line exactly where it reached.

Parliament was dissolved at ten o’clock that morning by proclamation, and Caleb was on his knees at the time, sorting a delivery of road atlases into the bottom shelf by the door.

He knew it was ten because the bell of the Treasury clock struck the hour across the roofs, and he knew it was the dissolution because he had read the proclamation’s wording in the Gazette over his breakfast and knew to the minute when it took effect. At ten o’clock he stopped being a member of a sitting House and became a member of a House that was not sitting. Nothing changed. He went on putting road atlases on the shelf in the order of their polities, Alabama to Wyoming, the way Mrs Pell liked them, with the March of Arizona between Maine and Maryland because the publishers alphabetised it under M.

The bell over the door rang. A man came in looking for a street plan of Baltimore and went out with one.

---

The atlas of the Territory had come out in the spring, from a New York publisher who had seen an opportunity, and it was the first atlas of the peninsula anybody had made since it changed hands. It had a photograph of La Paz harbour on the cover at sunset and the words THE TERRITORY OF LORETO in tall white capitals across the sky, and inside it had the five constituencies in five colours, the roads and the ports and the sierra, and a page at the back showing the old Mexican state boundaries in dotted lines, in grey, as if somebody had nearly rubbed them out.

Pell’s had taken six in April. In April and May and June they had sold one, to a woman from the Home Office who wanted it for her desk.

At eleven a young woman in a summer dress came in, looked round the shop as if she had never been in one like it, and came to the counter.

“Do you have anything on Loreto?”

Caleb took the atlas off the shelf behind him and put it on the counter.

She turned the pages slowly, with her lips a little apart. She stopped at the map of the whole peninsula, the long thin shape of it, twelve hundred kilometres from the line at Tijuana to the Cape, and put a finger on it as if to see whether it was real.

“It’s so big,” she said.

“A little smaller than Florida.”

“I didn’t know that. I thought it was, you know. A strip.” She looked up at him. “I’m going to have to vote about it. That’s what they’re saying. The whole election’s going to be about it.” She looked back down. “I thought I’d better see what it looks like.”

“That’s a good idea.”

“Is it?” She seemed surprised. “My boyfriend says it’s a waste of money. He says it’s just a map.”

“Everything’s just a map,” said Mrs Pell from the other end of the counter, without looking round, “until you need to find something.”

The young woman laughed, and bought it.

---

That afternoon a man bought two, one for himself and one for his father in Delaware, and on the Saturday a couple from the Treasury bought one between them and argued about whose desk it would go on, and Caleb sold the last of the six at a quarter to five on Monday to a schoolteacher who wanted it for the start of term.

“Order more,” said Mrs Pell.

“How many?”

She considered. She had a way of considering that involved taking her glasses off and looking at the ceiling, as if the answer were written up there in very small print. “Twelve,” she said.

“Twelve.”

“You heard me.”

He wrote it in the order book. Twelve copies, The Territory of Loreto, the New York publisher, the price, the date. Mrs Pell watched him write it.

“In forty years,” she said, “I have never ordered twelve of anything at once except the street atlas of this city and the tide tables for the Chesapeake. Twelve.” She put her glasses back on. “It’s an election. People like to look at the thing they’re voting about. Then they put it on a shelf and don’t look at it again for four years.”

“Some of them will look at it.”

“Some of them will,” said Mrs Pell. “That’s who we’re ordering for.”

---

On the Tuesday an old man came in at ten and stood just inside the door for a long time.

He was in his late seventies, perhaps, in a pressed short-sleeved shirt and a straw hat that he took off as soon as he was inside and held against his chest. He looked at the plan chests and at the globes and at the wall of travel guides as if he were checking them against something he remembered. Then he came slowly to the counter and put the hat down on it.

“Excuse me,” he said. His English was careful. “I’m looking for a map of Baja California.”

Caleb reached for the atlas of the Territory, which had come in that morning, all twelve of them, and stopped with his hand on it.

“Of the Territory?” he said.

“No.” The old man shook his head. “Of Baja California. The way it was. My father is ninety-four. He came from Ensenada in nineteen fifty-one. He wants to see it again before he dies, and he can’t travel, and my daughter showed him the new one on her telephone.” He made a small flat gesture with one hand. “He says it has your lines on it. He doesn’t know them. He wants the old one, with the old lines.”

Caleb took his hand off the atlas.

“Wait a moment,” he said, and went to the plan chest at the back of the shop, the one with the drawer of second-hand foreign maps that Mrs Pell bought in lots at house sales and priced in pencil on the corner and almost never sold. He went through it on his knees. France. Two of Ireland. Ceylon. A road map of Sonora from the nineteen-seventies, folded so many times it had worn through at the creases. Then, near the bottom, a Mexican government road map of the state of Baja California, nineteen eighty-eight, in Spanish, with the coat of arms on the front and the old state boundary across the peninsula at the twenty-eighth parallel in a heavy black line.

He brought it back to the counter and unfolded it.

The old man looked at it for a long time without touching it. Then he put one finger on the coast, south of Tijuana, and moved it slowly down to Ensenada and stopped.

“Aquí,” he said, to himself.

“¿Es aquí donde vivía su padre?” said Caleb.

The old man looked up sharply.

“Sí,” he said, after a moment. “En la calle Ruiz. Cerca del puerto.” He looked at Caleb’s face, and then at his hands on the counter, and then at his face again, as if trying to place him. “¿Usted habla español?”

“Un poco. Lo estudié el año pasado.”

“¿Por qué?”

Caleb thought about how to answer that. “Por el trabajo,” he said.

“¿Qué trabajo?”

“Vendo mapas,” said Caleb.

The old man looked at him for a moment longer, and then laughed, quite suddenly, a short dry laugh that seemed to surprise him. He picked up the map and folded it carefully along its old creases, the way it had been folded by whoever had owned it before him.

“How much?” he said in English.

Caleb turned the corner over. Mrs Pell had pencilled 4.00 on it, years ago, in her small upright figures.

“Four pounds.”

The old man paid with a five-pound note and would not take the change. He put the map inside his shirt, against his chest, and his hat on his head, and went out into the street. The bell rang behind him.

Mrs Pell was at the other end of the counter with the order book. She had not looked up during any of it.

“You speak Spanish,” she said.

“Some.”

“Hm,” said Mrs Pell, and turned a page.

---

She did not ask why. She never asked why about anything. In nearly two years she had never asked him where he went on Wednesdays and Thursdays, or why a young man with a degree from King’s College and a good coat wanted to stand behind her counter for what she paid, or why he sometimes came in on a Friday with a file under his arm marked with a portcullis. She had asked him, in his first week, whether he could lift a plan chest drawer full of charts without putting his back out, and whether he could tell a Mercator from a Lambert at ten feet, and whether he knew what a nautical mile was. He had said yes to all three. That had been the interview.

He had wondered sometimes whether she knew, and decided she probably did, and that it was the kind of thing she would consider his business.

On the Friday at five she turned the sign on the door to CLOSED and took the transistor radio down from the shelf behind the till and turned it on, quietly, for the news. She did that every Friday. It was the only time he had ever heard it on.

The news was about the election. The parties had published their programmes. The Conservative and Crown Union promised to settle the Territory and did not say how. Labour promised to settle it when the campaign in the sierra was finished and did not say when. The Liberal Federal Democrats and the Greens promised to consult. The Left and Solidarity Bloc wanted the Territory’s people counted before anybody decided anything, and had printed it on a poster, and the poster was going up on hoardings in every city in the Realm.

“Count them,” the newsreader said, which was the poster’s slogan, and moved on to the cricket in London and the baseball at home.

Caleb was taking the cash drawer out of the till to count it, and stopped.

Mrs Pell turned the radio off and put it back on the shelf.

“Well,” she said. “That’s somebody with some sense, at least.” She looked at him over her glasses. “Are you counting that drawer, or are you going to stand there holding it?”

He counted the drawer. It came to four hundred and six pounds and fifty pence, which was the best Friday the shop had had since Christmas, and nine copies of The Territory of Loreto had gone, of the twelve.

“Order twenty,” said Mrs Pell.

He wrote it in the book.