Читать книгу Confessions of a Bookseller - Shaun Bythell - Страница 40

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Today was Anna’s last day before returning to America, so we went to visit Jessie, who runs the Picture Shop in Wigtown. She has been in hospital for about three weeks, and looked quite frail. We—perhaps optimistically—decided it was her medication rather than failing health that was the cause. Afterwards we returned to the arboretum at Galloway House ‘one final time,’ where the rhododendron buds are fattening up, ready to flower, then along the deserted beach at Rigg Bay. Home at five o’clock in the thickening winter twilight.

Despite the cultural chasm between rural Scotland and suburban Massachusetts, Anna dropped into life in Wigtown as though she’d been born to it. She has befriended everyone, and her relentless good nature has endeared her to the place and its people. One of her favourite characters is Vincent, who owns the petrol station in town. When she first moved here, she realised that she was going to need a car, so Vincent—famous for his fleet of wrecks—found her a Vauxhall Nova which she adored, and happily drove around in—initially, nervously and painfully slowly (with her face close to the windscreen and her body visibly tense) but latterly at considerable speed and with wild abandon, once she’d grown used to driving on the left. On one occasion she decided to go to the auction in Dumfries on her own (I must have been busy with something) and was almost at the saleroom when she heard a loud metallic noise like an explosion. In panic, she instinctively pulled over to the right, rather than the left, into what could easily have been oncoming traffic. When she got out of the car, she spotted almost the entire exhaust in the middle of the road. She never made it to the auction, but Vincent kindly arranged for her to be picked up by a Dumfries mechanic who repaired the car so that she could drive back to Wigtown.