Page 48 of The Bookshop Ladies

Fern turned over in bed, to face the little window in the eaves. The only view from here was the distant sky. Today, because she’d cried herself to sleep and fallen into a series of fitful dreams, her eyes burned against the brightness. She began to cry again, a soft keening noise, it felt as if her heart was actually breaking.

Only yesterday, in the most unlikely of places, on the path outside the bookshop, surrounded by the local art circle, it was as if she’d turned a corner of sorts. She’d painted something that had felt good. She had enjoyed the artists’ circle, far more than she wanted to admit to herself, but today it was as if that was a phoenix returned to the ashes. She never wanted to paint again. Actually, she never wanted to get out of this bed again, but of course, that was not an option.

Life would see to that. She had to somehow put things right with Robyn. She needed to face the fact that even though he was gone, Yves Bachand was back in their lives.

She wondered for a second what Joy would do; go back to Paris, probably. Hopefully, now that she’d come here and ruined everything.

Downstairs, in the kitchen just beneath her bedroom, the sounds of Robyn moving about stirred her from her thoughts. She’d gone out for a run earlier. Fern had looked out the window and seen her jogging along the shore. An ungodly hour, but there were others on the beach too, walking dogs and a local group paying homage to the rising sun, stretching their limbs in tai chi movements.

‘Wakey wakey,’ Robyn pushed through the bedroom door. She carried a tray laid with the small coffee pot, a pastry fresh from the bakery and a few tragic-looking daisies in a little glass that she must have picked up after her run. ‘Come on Mum, it’s time to face the day.’

‘I can’t think of one good reason to face it and you, Robyn, are far too bloody chipper, I thought you’d be…’ Fern tried to make her words sound funny, but she knew, she just sounded old and weary.

‘I don’t know what I am, but we have to keep going. I’ve been down to see Joy already and…’

‘Oh!’ It wasn’t a question, rather it was surprise. The last person Fern wanted to see was Joy Bachand or Blackwood or whatever she called herself.

‘I couldn’t sleep, so I went for a run and it seemed like the right thing to do, I talked to Joy. She was going to leave, but we had breakfast up at Leo’s, and…’

‘You didn’t ask her to stay, did you?’ Fern hated the fact that her voice betrayed a sliver of the fear in her heart. Suddenly, it dawned on Fern, like a huge weight falling on her chest and taking her breath away, Robyn hadn’trun intoJoy. She had gone looking for her.

‘Yes I did. And before you ask, I have put things straight with her, or at least I hope I’ve started to…’ She had a look that told Fern what was done was done, whatever she’d said to Yves’s wife was said and there was no taking any of it back.

‘And how… how did she seem?’ Because in spite of the fact that she hardly knew how she, herself, felt about anything this morning, a little part of Fern didn’t want to add to the hurt she’d already caused Joy. Even so, she couldn’t imagine ever standing in the same room as her again. ‘What did you talk about?’

‘Everything.’ She levelled a look at Fern that was almost defiant in its forthrightness. ‘You might as well know the truth of it. It seems about time we started having more of that around here,’ Robyn said shortly and Fern knew that, in spite of the fact they’d put their arms around each other the previous evening, Robyn was still devastated. She’d been lied to for years and maybe it explained the way her relationship with Luc had always been a disappointment to her. ‘I went there to have it out with her, I was as angry with her for lying to me as I was with you, last night, but…’

‘But…’ Oh God, somehow, Joy had got around her where Fern hadn’t managed to.

‘Well, I believe her.’

‘You believe what – that she was married to Yves and came here to give you a painting but somehow never got round to it…’ That was just crazy. ‘Seriously, Robyn, she’s been here for weeks. How on earth could she not have had an opportunity to tell the truth?’ Fern stopped. Hadn’t she had years to tell Robyn about Yves?

Robyn raised an eyebrow.

‘Okay, I know, I’m throwing rocks from a glasshouse, but that’s different…’

‘I believe she chickened out that first day.’ Robyn held up her hand to stop her mother from interrupting. ‘I actually saw it myself, she came to the bookshop twice before she had the guts to enter and Mum, whether you want to believe this or not, she never actually asked for a job, I ended up talking her into it and…’

‘Oh, come on, Robyn, seriously, what sort of nonsense is that?’ But of course, if Joy had really wanted to stir up trouble, she’d have spilled the truth much earlier and revelled in the notion that Fern had lied to Robyn from day one.

‘It’s the truth and here’s another thing, she’s done nothing but good since she arrived. She has helped me to turn the bookshop around. She’s brought in more business and it is business that’s going to keep coming back, she’s worked so hard to get the shop off the ground and she’s done that to help me.’

‘But why? Have you asked yourself that? Really…’ Fern stopped because deep down, she knew, her own experience with Joy had been similar. Joy had listened to her, tried to make her feel better. She might not have set out to do it, but somehow she had given her back the gift of painting again. Fern still remembered feeling that turning point, that night they’d sat on the pier together, that was the start and it was that simple unburdening that freed her up to lead the artists’ circle. When she’d talked to Joy about her affair in Paris all those years ago, it was the first time she’d told anyone since confessing to Margot and Peggy. And the next day, she was painting. Everything had become so much easier, overnight. It was as though her spirit had been set free; unleashed between spilling her worries to Joy and the experience of painting with a group at the front of the bookshop.

‘Come on Mum, you have to see it, she’s not the wicked stepmother you want to think she is…’

‘Is that what you think?’ Fern said, but the words were more a whisper than anything else.

‘It doesn’t matter any more what anyone thinks, we’re connected in a way I hadn’t realised before and, all right, so maybe she wasn’t able to tell us straight away, but…’

‘It’s too soon for me to take this in. Any of it, I can’t think straight…’ Fern said and pushed the tray away. Robyn might be able to forgive and forget but Robyn wasn’t carrying half the baggage from the past that Fern was and she didn’t have nearly so much to lose by letting this woman into her life. When the door closed behind Robyn, Fern began to cry. All she could think of was that she would give anything to have Margot and Peggy here, she missed them so much.

32

After everything that had happened there was no other choice.

Joy decided she would leave the painting with Albie. Robyn had left without it this morning. To be fair, they were all in a complete tizzy. It felt as if there was a fragile truce of sorts, but that was a long way off making peace with Fern. Joy had packed her bags four times, trying to make sure everything fitted. Somehow, apart from a few books she’d bought in the bookshop, it seemed impossible to fold back what had fitted with room to spare only a few weeks earlier.