Page 50 of The Bookshop Ladies

The old kitchen, little more than a galley corridor, was going to be the cookery and home-making section. It was Robyn’s idea to make it slightly kitsch and retro. Every time Joy walked into it, she felt as if she’d stepped across a threshold in time and emerged in an era where domestic goddesses had their husbands’ slippers at the ready and a casserole permanently on standby. Still, she had to admit, it worked. It was quirky and already the bookshop’s growing band of followers on social media loved the images Robyn had posted from that section.

Between them, they’d gathered up a huge collection of books that ran across the gamut from Laura Ashley catalogues to an early edition ofThe Personality of a Houseby Emily Post. The little kitchen was decked out in gingham and small table lamps sat on top of the mismatched shelves. A butler sink was filled with geraniums so there was a heady aroma of citrus rose in the air. Joy had stacked the little dresser with old-fashioned crockery, much of which had probably been here when Robyn’s great-grandmother was a girl.

‘Just when we thought we had them all?’ Joy laughed, but it was hard not to be a little weary at the sight of yet another box oftreasure. It seemed as if they had been cataloguing books forever at this point.

‘Yep, I found them stacked up behind the door.’ How on earth they hadn’t noticed them before this was anyone’s guess.

‘House clearance?’

‘It looks like it. Blair Hall, if the label is correct,’ Robyn said and she quickly filled Joy in on the Blair family. ‘All gone now, of course, but they started off the woollen mills to give employment during the famine, I think. The house is still standing, but it was sold a few years ago, good old Douglas must have picked them up then.’ She opened the first box and the dust made her sneeze.

‘Oh, well, nothing ventured, nothing gained,’ Joy said, peering into the box that Robyn had placed at her feet. ‘Wow, these are nice.’ She picked up a heavy bound book that looked as if it belonged in the Bodleian. Rich liver-coloured leather embossed with a slightly faded gold lettering. There were twelve in the box and, at the end, one stray old volume. An odd man out. Joy picked it up to take a closer look.

‘Are they all like this?’ Robyn bent down and pulled open the top of another box. ‘I’ve seen books like these on eBay and Etsy, interior designers go crazy for them,’ she chattered happily. It was a strange sign of the times when buyers were more interested in the look of the book than the actual contents. Robyn picked up one after another, naming them as she went along: ‘World history, European borders, topography of Spain, Italian royal families, there seems to be a set of encyclopaedias too…’

‘And they’re in great condition,’ Joy said, but she wasn’t looking at the leather-bound books that had captured Robyn’s attention. Instead, she was examining the little cloth-covered book in her hand. It was very old. Older than all the others put together – not that she was an expert, but she had a feeling about this book. Even the weight of it in her palm; there was something substantial about it.

‘These are numbered, as if they were covered specially and then catalogued in the Blair library,’ Robyn said, but Joy was only half listening. ‘So much lovelier than looking something up on the internet, don’t you think?’ She sighed wistfully. She hardly noticed Joy turning over the slim ancient-looking volume, holding it towards the light and then gently caressing the red cloth cover. It had that heavy cream paper that had gone out of fashion when books became commodities that everyone could own. ‘What?’ Robyn said, ‘aren’t we as bad as each other, just daydreaming about who might have held these before us?’ she said.

‘Oh!’ Joy exclaimed. ‘It’sAlice’s Adventures in… I’ve never read this one.’ Suddenly, she felt a little out of breath, as if all of the books were coming in on top of her and her head began to spin with possibilities she was too afraid to put words on.

‘Really?’ Robyn said. ‘I remember reading that as a child. I adored it. Douglas gifted it to me one Christmas. Of course, my copy had colour pages.’ She laughed. ‘It was a 1970s reprint and I re-read it so often that it probably died of dog ears and chocolate smudges.’

‘The best sort of books, really,’ Joy murmured.

‘Let’s see it then,’ she put out her hands to look at it. ‘Gosh it’s old, isn’t it? Cute, but unlikely we’d ever sell it, who’d want a book with faded illustrations and a spine that could give on the second reading?’ She turned it over, considering it for a moment. ‘Maybe we could put it into a social media post?’ She placed it on the floor next to Dolly Parton and took a snap just as the tortoise yawned lazily – it was classic Dolly!

‘Hmm, maybe,’ Joy said, diving to pick it up quickly. ‘Could I borrow it? Just for a night or two?’

‘Of course, have it for keeps, if you’d like,’ Robyn said. ‘I have enough books here to be going on with, I’ll hardly miss that old one.’

‘NO! God, no I couldn’t possibly!’ Joy said softly and she slipped the book into her bag to take a closer look at it later.

33

The days after the big revelation were surreal for Robyn. Only her uncle Albie could make any sense of it all. He said the Keeling and Turner families were always as big as they needed to be to take one more chick into the nest. Still, as strange and all as it was to comprehend, over the next few days, Robyn was reminded of one thing over and over again. Joy was amazing. She was working so hard to make the bookshop a success. She was tireless, as if she was putting in this huge effort because there was a finish time when she would be handing back the reins to Robyn in a permanent and irreversible way.

Now and then, she caught Joy gazing around the shop, as if she was committing it to memory for a time when she wouldn’t be here any more. The place would feel weirdly empty without her. The truth was, she had become fond of Joy in a way she hadn’t been fond of anyone before. Making friends had been a challenge for as long as she could remember, but with Joy, it was completely different. Most of the artists’ circle had popped back into the shop over the past few days. There wasn’t one of them under sixty, but they were lovely and already giving broad hints about good-looking grandsons they had stashed away at home. Not that she was interested, but the banter was light relief and, with it, she was opening up other conversations, other connections. More importantly, they were all looking forward to the next meeting. Robyn hoped her mother wouldn’t bail out at the last minute.

That would be such a shame. It was obvious Fern had enjoyed it as much as any of them. The icing on the cake was that she’d been really happy with what she had produced too. Robyn was no critic, but she knew it was as good as anything her mother had ever produced.

Leo had hung the painting from Joy and Yves in the bookshop – it seemed apt. Her mother had scoffed, it’s only a painting. But Robyn remembered, Fern had been moved to a silence so deep it seemed to resonate like a tuning fork on the taut air when she saw it again. It must be, Robyn thought at the time, a little like finding a lost child you never thought you’d see again.

It was painfully obvious that Fern was avoiding Joy since the big revelation. She was behaving like a wounded animal. She moped all day long in the flat and then pretended that everything was fine – as if she could pull the wool over her own daughter’s eyes.

She was hurting badly. But Robyn knew part of the reason for that was her own fault and yes, she hated to say it, but it was down to her own lies. Her mother had told the biggest of lies and now she was paying the balance owed. Robyn suspected she’d probably always felt the weight of it. It was why she’d never been properly able to create anything to touch that earlier work. Robyn’s heart broke for her, but Fern needed to decide how she was going to deal with it.

It was Albie who encouraged Robyn to ask Joy to stay for longer than just the bookshop launch. ‘You could be sorry otherwise.’ He said it in the mild way he spoke when actually, he really wanted you to listen, but didn’t want you to feel pushed into something. ‘Life is short.’Another of his favourite sayings.

It was a revelation to Robyn, the way he and Joy seemed to have bonded. In the short time she’d lived upstairs, they had grown very close. But then, it was hard not to like Uncle Albie, he had a way of getting right under your skin.

‘Seriously?’ Robyn wasn’t sure she actually believed Joy had talked him into the story hour for the village children on Saturday mornings.

‘Of course, he’s even offered to do a reading at the reception, if you’d like him to…’

‘If I’d like him to? I’d love it. Has he thought about what he might do?’

‘He had a piece picked out within ninety seconds of being asked.’ Joy smiled.

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