Page 19 of The Bookshop Ladies

2023

Of course, it was all very well talking about new starts, but quietly, Fern wondered if there was any such thing. The whole experience seemed to throw Robyn off kilter and it felt as if there was no way to fully get her back on track. Somehow, even in college, while there was a circle of people to go to events with, she never appeared to have a close bunch of friends. No one like Margot.

‘Phew!’ Margot blew an exasperated sigh when Fern tried to explain it to her. Margot had only popped over to Ballycove for a week before taking up a residency in one of the smaller arts foundations in Paris. Fern knew, she shouldn’t be loading all of this on her friend, who had only come to visit for a break from her own stresses. ‘You worry too much. She will have friends. I mean, she has Kian, hasn’t she? They are still friends, aren’t they?’

‘Well, yes, but it’s not the same thing at all.’ Fern sighed. It was all very well, but you couldn’t compare a friendship with someone who was more like a brother – or at least that’s how Kian saw himself. Sometimes, she wondered if perhaps Robyn wasn’t just a little in love with him as much as him being her best friend.

‘Look, she graduates soon, why not ask her what she’d like to do and maybe then you could stop tying yourself up in knots worrying over things that you can do nothing about,’ Margot said softly.

‘Hey,’ Robyn had popped her head round the door. Perhaps she guessed they were discussing her, because she pulled her headphones from her ears as she stood before the bookcase and gazed at its contents for the umpteenth time in the day.

‘I was just asking your mother if you had plans for when you graduate?’ Margot had always been a great woman for diving right in. She patted the sofa next to her and Robyn folded herself into the cushions beside her.

‘I’d like to open a bookshop one day,’ Robyn said softly to Margot. ‘Do you think I could do that…’

‘In Paris?’ Margot sounded doubtful.

‘No, there are far too many bookshops in Paris and I’m not sure that…’ Robyn began, because Paris bookshop owners were a breed apart, all of them either philosophers or failed poets and she was neither. ‘If I could I’d love to take over where Douglas left off, I mean, no one else has asked to take it over.’ She looked hopefully at Fern, the shop was spread across the front room of theground floor of the building they called home here in Ballycove. ‘Perhaps I could get a loan to buy the stock from Douglas’s niece, if the bank will allow that?’

‘Really, that’s what you want to do, bury yourself in Ballycove?’ Luc glanced up from the paper he’d been pretending to read. He obviously couldn’t see the attraction for a girl with all her life in front of her. His own boys had travelled the world, so much so that they seemed to forget where home was these days.

‘But that’s just all old tat. I mean, of course, you can take over the shop, but the stock, do you really want to take on all those old books?’ Fern asked.

‘I love that old bookshop, I mean, I’ve always loved it.’ Robyn was in earnest and Fern remembered all those hours she’d spent among the faded books with Douglas Howard, the crusty old boy who’d run the place for almost as long as Fern could remember.

‘I doubt it makes any money, though?’ Fern glanced uncertainly between Margot and Robyn.

‘You might be surprised, there were a couple of big collections there, even if you wouldn’t know it. Kian says, these days, with the specialist categories on the bookselling sites online, you can reach any niche audience. I’d be good at that part and I’d enjoy making it into a place people would call in to…’

‘But, really, darling, who wants to read books about the world wars or trains that have been out of commission for the last fifty years?’

‘Oh, Fern, those things never go out of fashion. There are a lot more train and war enthusiasts out there than you’d imagine,’ Luc said and, of course, he would know. He had an insatiable appetite for non-fiction.

‘And then there’s… well, wouldn’t you rather something that didn’t put you out front and centre and dealing with the public?’ Fern was trying to be diplomatic.

‘I can’t hide away forever, Mum,’ Robyn reached across and squeezed her mother’s arm, just as Peggy would have done years earlier. ‘And of course, in the beginning it might be hard, but I don’t want to feel as if I never tried.’ And Fern thought her heart might break for this beautiful brave girl she adored above all else.

‘I think Douglas would certainly approve, if he was still alive.’ Margot reached out and pulled her only godchild towards her and so it was settled. Robyn would open up the bookshop in Ballycove, if the Howard family would sell the stock on to her.

Fern watched these two women who meant the world to her and thought of Peggy. Not for one moment did she imagine that, within a year, Margot would be snatched from her.

The call arrived early on a Wednesday morning. Fern, walking to her studio, had just picked up a latte, her thoughts filled with a meeting she had pencilled in with a gallerist for later in the day.

‘Mrs Tessier?’ The voice was strong but hesitant, heavily accented. Greek? She should have known then, but Margot’s trip to Greece was way down on her list of priorities that morning.

‘Yes?’

‘I am so sorry, my name is Police Lieutenant Leander Galanis, I am ringing you with sad news today.’

‘Margot?’ she knew immediately.

‘Yes. You are her next of kin?’

‘Next of kin?’ she wasn’t sure if she’d even said it, but she must have, because then she managed to confirm. ‘Yes, yes, I am her next of kin, we’ve been…’ But how do you sum up a lifelong friendship to a stranger so far away? ‘What happened? Is she there, with you? Put her on the phone…’

‘I am so sorry. Margot Hocquarts drowned this morning. We have just recovered her body…’ He kept talking, but Fern couldn’t hear the words and she crumpled to the ground right there in the middle of the pavement, latte spilling across her jacket and down into a nearby drain. Margot. Gone. She’d never get over it.

2024

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