The Museum of Doubt by James Meek Page A

spine creaked when he opened it and clumps of pages fanned out with a sigh. He pressed it to his face and breathed in. It smelled of damp earth.
    I know I said it was simple, but you won’t learn it by sniffing it, said Cate. If you could, all the cokeheads would have discovered perpetual motion by now.
    Ellsta, he said, and leaned over to kiss her.
    Ellsta! she said, wrinkling up her face.
    El-lsta.
    Closer but still way off. Ellsta!
    He flipped through the pages. There were no pictures. There were desires and needs in other lives that had never even comewithin sight of their own, before electricity, when the servants had no artificial servants, and couldn’t fool themselves. Mayryng, would you adjust the bedspread? Yoshua, would you bring fresh coals? Mr Ocksyng, would you shoe the brown mare?
    Brymdon anches ytr gastorst, he read out. Instead of laughing at his version of Ask that lamplighter to step over here she looked at him gravely and corrected his pronunciation.
    Is there a section where the master seduces the serving wench? he said. Come thee hither, bonny lass, and rowp thy postillion?
    Cate rested her head sideways on her bare arm, kicking, looking at him. Try page 228.
    He turned to page 228, quarter of the way through the book. Present pluperfect, he read out. Mercian tense structure in the present follows the pattern laid down in lesson 25:the future. I thought Mercian didn’t have a future.
    Read to the end and you’ll see, said Cate. Don’t be so fucking smart. If you read it to the end there will be a future, won’t there?
    Rowp thy postillion, said Adam, putting the book down carefully and moving over to Cate. He put his left hand into the fair curls of her hair, warm from her scalp, and it made an ultrasound like foil streamers a million miles long and a millimetre wide, crinkling and billowing in a solar wind, which only he and dogs could hear. Their tongues tasted each other and the fingertips of his other hand were running up the back of her leg.
    Y tess ley, he said. It was the only Mercian phrase he knew, the one he’d asked her to teach him the first time they went out, which was also the first time they slept together, and had learned straight off.
    Y tess leya, she said, and started to take off his jeans. Beforehe entered her she took him in her mouth, which he didn’t like, but this time he did, he barely stopped himself coming there, her grip between the tongue and the palate was so determined. Afterwards they lay on the settee together for half an hour, dozing off and on, watching the lights blinking stupidly in the branches of the tree, the fanheater thrumming against their thighs and creaking.
    It’s so old, said Cate. I was lucky to find it. A library was being merged out and they were selling off a load of old books.
    It’s great.
    Will you study?
    Of course.
    I’ll help you.
    Yes.
    I bought you a shirt as well.
    Food for the mind and food for the eh, the other thing.
    If you don’t want to learn it, it’s fine, there’s no reason for you to.
    I said I would, I want to, I want to be able to speak it.
    I know, it’s that I saw your face – not like you were disappointed, but that the book was old, like it’d been dug up and it’d been supposed to have stayed buried.
    I was hoping there’d be pictures.
    That’s because you’re a moron.
    They left the house at noon and took a cab to where Cate’s dad lived. As the last but one native speaker of Mercian he was to have been living in a beehive-shaped wattle and daub hut, strengthened with stone and brick in the latter generations, on a ridge among derelict cattle-pens, out poaching in all weathers, keeping the Sabbath and standing stock-still of a late summer afternoon in a cropped meadow of thistles andcowpats and horse-flies, scoured by the shadows of the clouds passing across him.
    Instead he lived in a one-room council flat in a cubic four storey block in a street with lots of space between the cars, a gasholder at one