Читать книгу The Little Bookshop of Lonely Hearts: A feel-good funny romance - Annie Darling - Страница 7

Bookends was situated at the northern tip of Bloomsbury. People walking from Holborn down Theobalds Road, towards the Gray’s Inn Road, often missed the tiny cobbled Rochester Street on their right. If they did happen upon it and decide it was worth exploring, chances were they’d pause as soon as they came to the delicatessen to look at the cheeses and sausages and brightly coloured edibles in glass jars all lovingly displayed in the window.

They might browse the boutiques full of pretty dresses and soft and cheerful winter knits. Then the butcher’s, the barber’s, the stationery shop, until they came to the pub on the corner, the Midnight Bell, across the road from the fish and chip shop, There’s No Plaice Like Home, and an old-fashioned sweet shop, which still weighed out pear drops and lemon sherbets, aniseed balls, winter nips, humbugs and liquorice allsorts and poured them into little candy-striped paper bags.

Just before the end of this delightful street, like something from a Dickens novel, was a small courtyard on the right: Rochester Mews.

Rochester Mews wasn’t pretty or picturesque. There were weather-beaten wooden benches arranged in a circle at the centre of the courtyard, planter pots full of weeds … even the trees looked as though they’d seen better days. On one side of the yard was a small row of five empty shops. From the peeling, faded signs, it would seem that in another life the premises housed a florist, a haberdasher’s, a tea and coffee merchant, a stamp shop and an apothecary. On the other side of the yard was another, larger shop, though it looked like a collection of shops all joined together to make a jumbled whole. It had old-fashioned bow windows and a faded, black-and-white striped awning.

The sign above the door read Bookends, and on this particular day in February, with the afternoon sun already sinking and the shadows lengthening, a small, red sports car turned into the yard and came to a halt outside.

The door opened and a tall man in a dark suit and a shirt the same shade of red as his car unfolded himself from the driver’s seat, complaining bitterly all the while that the cobbles were playing havoc with the suspension of his vintage Triumph.

He strode around to the passenger side, pulled open the door and said, ‘Morland, I haven’t got all day. I drove you home, I’ve done my good deed for the day, now can you shift your bloody arse?’

A young woman in a pink dress stumbled from the car, then stood there swaying slightly on unsteady legs as if she was still getting used to dry land after months spent at sea. In one hand she clutched a cream-coloured en-velope.

‘Morland!’ The man snapped his fingers in the woman’s face and she came to with a start.

‘Rude!’ she exclaimed. ‘So rude.’

‘Well, you’re standing there like one o’clock half struck,’ he said, then slouched against the wall as she rooted around in her bag and produced a bunch of keys.

‘I won’t come in now,’ the man said. He gestured at the courtyard, neglected and unloved. ‘What a dump. I suppose we’ll have to chat this out quite soon. Can’t do much with the mews with you as a sitting tenant in the shop, can I?’

The woman was still struggling to get the door open but she turned to look at him. Her face pale, eyes wide. ‘But I’m not a sitting tenant, am I? I thought I was the owner. Well, for two years at least …’

‘Not now, Morland. I’m a very busy man.’ He was already walking back to his car. ‘Laters!’

She watched him drive away with a crash of gears, then opened the door of the shop and stepped inside.

Posy had no memory of leaving the club with Sebastian, getting in his car, doing up her seat belt – none of it. It was as if there’d been some breach in the space-time continuum as soon as she folded up Lavinia’s letter and placed it back in its envelope.

She was still clutching it now as she stood in the dark shop, the familiar shape of the shelves, the stacks of books, the comforting smell of paper and ink all around her. She was home and suddenly the world was back in focus, but still Posy stood there, not sure that she was capable of walking, much less able to think of where her feet should carry her.

Then Posy heard the bell above the door tinkle. It made her jump and she turned around to see Sam, school bag slung over one shoulder, anorak undone despite the cold and the fact that she told him every morning to do it up.

‘My God, you frightened the life out of me!’ she exclaimed. It was completely dark now; she didn’t know how long she’d been standing there. ‘You’re home late.’

‘It’s Tuesday. Football practice,’ Sam said, moving past her, his face in shadow but his steps slightly crabbed, which made Posy’s heart sink because it meant his shoes were getting too tight and he didn’t want to tell her because she’d only just bought him new ones in the January sales.

This time last year he’d been the same height as her, but now he’d shot up by a good six inches; he was going to be as tall as their father. As Sam reached the counter and snapped on the lights, Posy caught sight of his grubby white socks, which meant he needed new school trousers too. She hadn’t budgeted for either new school shoes or trousers this month. And then she looked down and saw Lavinia’s letter still in her hand.

‘Are you all right, Posy? Was it awful?’ Sam leaned on the counter and frowned. ‘Are you going to cry? Do you need some chocolate?’

‘What? No. Yes. I mean, the funeral, it was hard. It was sad. Very, very sad.’

Sam peered at her from beneath his fringe, which he refused to cut, despite Posy’s threat to creep into his room with the kitchen scissors while he slept. ‘I still think I should have come. Lavinia was my friend too.’

Posy moved then. Stretched out her arms and legs, which were stiff from being still for so long, and walked over to the counter so she could brush the hair back from Sam’s eyes. They were the same blue as her own eyes, the same blue as their father’s. Forget-me-not blue, her mother had always called it.

‘Honestly, Sam, as you get older, you’ll have plenty of funerals to go to,’ she said softly. ‘You’ll be sick of funerals. And there’ll be a memorial service later in the year. You can go to that, as long as it’s not on a school day.’

‘We might not even be in London by then,’ Sam said, pulling his head back so his hair flopped over his face again. ‘Has anyone said what’s happening to the shop? Do you think they’ll let us stay here until Easter? What’s going to happen about school? I’ll need to know quite soon. This is a very important academic year for me!’

His voice squeaked then broke on the last sentence. It sounded painful and Posy gulped in sympathy. ‘Nobody’s going to come in and take the shop out from under us,’ she said. Saying it out loud didn’t make it sound any less unbelievable. Or true, because Sebastian seemed to have plans for the mews that didn’t involve Bookends or Posy. ‘Lavinia’s left the shop to me. I own the shop, so I suppose I own the flat above the shop too.’

‘Why on earth would she leave you the shop?’ Sam opened his mouth, probably to unleash a whole new volley of questions, then shut it. ‘I mean, it’s lovely of Lavinia to leave the shop to you, but you’re not even allowed to cash up unsupervised at the end of the day.’

This was also true, after an incident involving a missing one hundred pounds, which hadn’t been missing at all, it was just that the 0 key on the shop calculator was sticky because Posy had been eating a Twix while she cashed up. ‘Lavinia was being kind, wanting to make sure that we’d be all right, but I wonder if this was the best way to go about it,’ Posy admitted. ‘Oh, Sam, I can’t even think in whole sentences right now. Have you got any homework?’

‘You want to talk about homework? Now?’ Posy was sure that Sam was rolling his eyes. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

Where to start with that one? ‘Mostly, I’m hungry. I haven’t had anything to eat all day. Shall we have fish-finger sandwiches for dinner?’ They always had fish-finger sandwiches for dinner when either one of them was feeling down. They’d had fish-finger sandwiches for dinner quite a lot recently.

‘Crinkle chips and baked beans too,’ Sam decided as he followed Posy through the back office and up the stairs to their flat. ‘Also, for English I have to pick a rap song and rewrite it in the style of a Shakespeare sonnet, so can you help me with that?’

Later, after fish-finger sandwiches had been eaten and Sam’s English homework had been accomplished with a glass of wine and only a small amount of flouncing and door slamming (mostly from Posy), she crept back downstairs to the shop.

Sam was meant to be getting ready for bed, but she could hear the faint but tinny sound of a computer game from his room. Posy didn’t have the energy for another argument though; not after trying to rewrite Jay Z’s ‘99 Problems’ in iambic pentameter.

Posy only put on the sidelights so the shop was mostly in shadow then slowly walked around the main room. Shelves lined the walls from floor to ceiling; there was a big display table in the centre of the floor, flanked by three sofas in varying stages of decay. Open arches to the left and right led to a series of anterooms sectioned off by bookcases. Posy suspected that the bookcases bred overnight. Sometimes she’d be poking around in one of the furthest reaches of the shop and would come across a bookcase that she swore she’d never seen before.

Her fingers trailed over the shelves, the spines of the books, as she did a silent inventory. The very last room on the right, accessed through a pair of glass doors, had once been a little tearoom. Now it was a curtained-off store room; its tables and chairs stacked to one side, the cake stands and china lovingly sourced from charity shops, antique fairs and car boot sales, packed away in boxes. If Posy closed her eyes, she could imagine it as it had once been. The smell of coffee and freshly baked cakes wafting through the shop, her mother weaving through the tables, her long blonde hair escaping from its ponytail, her cheeks pink, green eyes sparkling as she dispensed coffee and tea refills and took away empty plates.

In the shop, her father would have rolled up his shirtsleeves – he always wore a shirt and waistcoat with his jeans – and could usually be found halfway up the rolling ladder as he selected a series of books for a customer waiting down below. ‘If you liked that one, then you’ll love these,’ he would say. Lavinia had called him the King of Hand-Selling. As Posy reached the poetry section, her eyes immediately searched for the three volumes of poetry that her father had written, which they always kept in stock. ‘I think, if Ian Morland hadn’t been taken from us so cruelly, so suddenly,’ Lavinia had written in his obituary, ‘then he would have become one of our greatest English poets.’

There’d been no obituary written for her mother, but that hadn’t meant she was missed any less. Far from it. As Posy retraced her steps to the main room again, she wasn’t wandering through a shop, but through her home, memories of her mother and father alive with every step she took.

In the back office, one of the walls was covered with the signatures of visiting authors, everyone from Nancy Mitford and Truman Capote to Salman Rushdie and Enid Blyton. The notches on the doorjamb faithfully recorded the heights of the Bookends children, starting with Lavinia and her brothers and ending with Posy and Sam.

Outside in the courtyard, they’d have summer fetes and Christmas fairs. Posy remembered how the trees would be strung with fairy lights for launch parties and poetry readings al fresco. They’d once held a wedding reception out there after two customers had fallen instantly and madly in love over a copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Under the shelves in a corner by the counter was the cubbyhole where her father had built her a little reading nook. Posy’s mother had made her four plump cushions to lounge on while she read.

It was in Bookends that Posy had met some of her best friends. Pauline, Petrova and Posy (whom she was named for) Fossil from Ballet Shoes, her mother’s favourite book. Not to mention Milly-Molly-Mandy and little-friend-Susan, the girls of St Clare’s and Malory Towers and the Chalet School. Scout and Jem Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird. The Bennet sisters. Jane Eyre and poor, mad Cathy ‘mopped and mowed’ about the moors as she searched for her Heathcliffe.

And it had been a night very much like this one, but far, far worse when she’d wandered around the darkened shop, still dressed in her funeral black, still seeing the two coffins slowly being lowered into the ground. That night, unable to sleep, determined not to cry because she knew that she’d howl and she didn’t want to wake up Sam, she’d plucked a book, a random book, from the shelves and crawled into her cubbyhole.

It had been a Georgette Heyer novel, Regency Buck. A beautiful flighty girl, Judith Taverner, locks horns with the sardonic, dandified Julian St John Audley, her legal guardian. Judith launches herself on London society, has madcap adventures in Brighton, meets and charms Beau Brummel and the Prince Regent, and has many spirited disagreements with the arrogant Julian, until they’re both compelled to admit their love.

It had pushed buttons that Posy didn’t even know she had. The Heyer Regency romances weren’t quite up there with Pride and Prejudice, which was the gold-star, triple-A standard of romance novels, but they came quite close.

Over the next few numb weeks when just getting through each day intact was a major triumph, Posy had read every single Regency romance Georgette Heyer had written. She’d begged Lavinia to order more and when she’d finished them all, Posy took to the internet to find other writers who were considered Heyer’s successors: Clare Darcy, Elizabeth Mansfield, Patricia Veryan, Vanessa Gray – they couldn’t match Heyer’s exquisite attention to detail or her wit, but there were still flighty young heiresses and sardonic men trying to lord it over them until love prevailed.

Posy had taken over one room of the shop and filled it with novels by Julia Quinn, Stephanie Laurens, Eloisa James, Mary Balogh, Elizabeth Hoyt and others. And when Posy had read every Regency romance that she could find, there were other books, lots and lots of them, where the girl didn’t just get the boy, she got the happy ever after that everyone deserved. Well, almost everyone. Serial killers and people who were cruel to animals and drunk drivers – especially drunk drivers, like the one who had careered over the central reservation of the M4 and ploughed into her parents’ car – none of them deserved happy ever afters, but everybody else did.

It turned out that a lot of the women who worked in nearby shops and offices and browsed Bookends in their lunch-hour were also suckers for a well-written romance. Since no one was buying enough misery memoirs or stodgy books on military history to warrant the shelf space, Posy persuaded Lavinia to allow her to take over two more rooms of the shop.

But these days, people weren’t buying enough books of any kind. Not from Bookends anyway. In her letter, Lavinia had seemed sure that Posy would immediately devise a bulletproof scheme to entice people back into the shop to buy books in great quantities, when nothing could be further from the truth.

Suddenly, Posy couldn’t bear to be in the shop a moment longer. It had always been her happy place, her lodestar, a comfort blanket made of wood and paper, but now the shelves upon shelves of books taunted her. It was so much responsibility and Posy wasn’t very good at responsibility.

She turned off the lights in the shop, shut the door that separated the shop from the stairs that led up to their flat, which was usually left open, then slowly climbed the stairs. She was about to open Sam’s door without knocking, but remembered just in time the ‘knock first’ rule she’d instigated after Sam had barged into the bathroom and caught her in the shower, screeching ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ into her shampoo-bottle microphone.

‘Sam? Are you decent?’ Dear God, don’t let him be doing indecent things, because she wasn’t ready for that. ‘Can I come in?’

She heard an affirmative grunt, and tentatively pushed open the door. Sam was lying on his stomach on top of his duvet, staring at his laptop. ‘What’s up?’

Posy sat down on the edge of his bed and looked at his bony shoulders hunched over the computer screen. Even now, though he’d been in her life for fifteen years (their miracle baby, her parents had called Sam, though at the time thirteen-year-old Posy had been mortified at the prospect of what her parents had been doing to produce a miracle baby) she still sometimes had an overwhelming urge to squeeze Sam until he squeaked, such was the depth of her love for him. She settled for reaching out to ruffle his hair but he twisted away from her. ‘Get off me! Have you been drinking?’

‘No!’ Posy settled for nudging him with her elbow. ‘I need to talk to you.’

‘But we’ve already talked about Lavinia and I already told you that I’m sad and everything about it sucks, but really, Pose, I can’t take any more speeches about feelings and emotions.’ He pulled a face. ‘Can we just not?’

Posy was sick of making speeches about feelings and emotions, so that worked out fine, but still, she was the big sister. The parental figure. The designated adult. The responsible one. ‘But, you know, if you did want to talk, you can. You can tell me anything.’

‘Yeah, I know.’ Sam looked up from his screen and gave her a wan smile. ‘Are we done now?’

‘I wanted to talk to you about something else, actually.’ It worked both ways. She was meant to be able to talk to Sam about anything – except her period, her weight, her love life or lack thereof (he’d drawn up a list) – but this was proving harder than expected. ‘I know you haven’t had much time to think about it, but how do you feel about me taking on the shop? I could make a go of it, right? After all, bookselling is in my blood. Like, if you cut me, I’d bleed words, so who better to take over Bookends than me?’ Posy’s shoulders slumped. ‘Though I suppose, it would mean being very grown-up and responsible.’

‘Hate to be the one to break it to you, Pose, but you’re twenty-eight, so technically you are grown-up.’ Sam hoisted himself up on his elbows so Posy could see the doubtful look on his face. She made a mental note not to come to Sam if she ever needed a character witness. ‘And I suppose you are responsible … in your own way. I mean, you’ve been responsible for me for the last seven years and I’m still alive and I don’t have rickets or anything.’

It wasn’t quite the validation that Posy had been after. ‘What about being responsible for the shop, though? I have two years to turn it round. Make it into a viable business.’

‘Less than two years really, because the shop isn’t doing very well, is it? It hasn’t made a profit for ages and it was only because Lavinia had family money that it’s kept going as long as it has.’ Sam shrugged. ‘That’s what Verity told Tom when he asked if he could have a pay rise.’

The problem with Sam was that he was too smart for his own good. The other problem was that he heard things that he shouldn’t and then he worried about them when he didn’t need to. It was Posy’s job to worry for the both of them.

‘We don’t have to stay. I could give up the shop and then I guess we could move somewhere else and I could get another job—’

Sam’s head shot up. ‘What? No! I can’t leave school, not with my GCSEs coming up! And where would we live? What kind of money would you be able to earn? Have you any idea how much the average London rent is?’ He looked as if he might burst into tears. ‘We’d have to move miles and miles away. To, like, the suburbs.’

Sam made it sound as if the suburbs were just a fancy way of saying a cesspit. ‘Lots of people live in the suburbs, Sam. Or we could move to another big city but one that isn’t as expensive as London. Say, Manchester or Cardiff. If we moved back to Wales, we’d be close to the grandparents.’

‘But Manchester or Cardiff isn’t here, is it? Why would anyone want to live anywhere else but here?’ Sam asked with all the arrogance of someone lucky enough to have lived their entire life in Central London. Coram Fields was his back garden and the British Museum was his corner shop full of mummies and fossils and ancient weapons. In five minutes they could be in Soho or Oxford Street or Covent Garden. They could jump on a bus or a tube and the whole of London was theirs for the taking.

People who didn’t know London thought it was a cold and unfeeling place, but their London wasn’t at all like that. Posy and Sam knew all the shopkeepers along Rochester Street (Posy was even a member of the Rochester Street Traders’ Association) and got mates’ rates on everything from fish and chips to scented candles. They knew the names of their favourite assistants in the big Sainsbury’s opposite Holborn tube station. Posy volunteered at Sam’s old primary school, going in once a week for one-on-one sessions with reluctant readers, and Sam’s best friends, Pants and Little Sophie, who worked in Bookends on Saturdays, lived just around the corner on the sprawling Housing Association estate.

It was like living in a village without the inconvenience of living in a village. When they went to stay with their Welsh grandparents, everything shut at six in the evening, one o’clock on Thursdays, all day on Sundays, so God help you if you’d forgotten to stock up on chocolate.

‘So, you want to stay here, then?’ Posy asked, because they were in this together, she and Sam. ‘You reckon I could make a success of the shop?’

‘Yeah. You have to try at least, don’t you? It’s what Lavinia wanted.’ Sam looked at his laptop then sighed. ‘The only thing is … I’m not saying that it will, but if it all goes horribly wrong, what’s going to happen to us? We might end up owing money, instead of just being poor. And then what about tuition fees and things?’

The urge to squeeze Sam came over Posy again and she had to slide her hands under her thighs. ‘You don’t need to worry about that,’ she said, swallowing hard. ‘When they died, Mum and Dad … they had a life insurance policy. I haven’t touched a penny of it because I’ve been saving it for your university fees. There’s enough there to get you through a degree, maybe a postgraduate degree too, if you only eat Pot Noodles. So you don’t have to stress about that, OK?’

‘OK. Wow! I wasn’t expecting that.’ Sam let out a deep breath. ‘I’d been worrying about how we were going to pay for the tuition fees. Though if you really need the money to, like, pay the staff wages, then maybe I could skip university and get a job.’

‘You are going to university,’ Posy stated forcefully. ‘Are we clear about that?’

‘We are,’ Sam agreed, and Posy thought that maybe he was smiling, though his back was to her and neither of them had smiled much this week. ‘And until then, we’re staying here – which is good cause I hate it when things change.’

‘Yeah, me too,’ Posy said feelingly. ‘They never seem to be good changes, do they?’

Sam rolled over and propped himself up on one elbow. ‘About the shop …’ he said. ‘You’ll be fine. Better than fine. You’ll be amazing. You’ll be the best bookseller ever. You have to be, Posy, because otherwise we’ll be homeless right when I’m meant to be doing A-levels. What more motivation do you need?’

‘I think that’s more than enough motivation,’ Posy said, though rather than spurring her on, Sam’s words had put the fear of God into her. ‘Another half hour, then lights out.’

‘You can kiss me if you like,’ Sam offered magnanimously. ‘On the cheek.’

Posy settled for ruffling his hair, which made Sam squawk in outrage as she knew it would. That was the only reason she was smiling as she closed his bedroom door.