Page 6 of The Bookshop Ladies

‘Yes. I believe it’s in Ireland somewhere…’

‘Of course,’ she whispered, as a hot ball of emotion rose up and caught in her throat. She would not cry here, she had plenty of time to do that in the privacy of her apartment, instead her gaze darted about the room, trying to find something to distract her from the awful pain surging through her. This is what loss really feels like, she thought, and then she straightened her back, hardened her heart. No. This is what betrayal feels like.

Joy was not sure how she managed it, but she did not cry. Instead, she fastened her lips together firmly. Once she had signed everything and asked Pierre to send on his bill, she wandered out into the little street. She didn’t know which was worse, the fact that she was a widow, or that Yves had kept the most disloyal of secrets from her during their marriage. That he’d had a child – the one thing she’d craved above all others and the only thing he couldn’t seem to give her. She wondered if every grieving mother felt as if the earth had shattered beneath them, or if her own son had lived, would this all just feel a little tawdry? Nothing more or less than an indiscretion hidden from her, something she could live with, even if she didn’t like it. Would it simply be Yves’s dirty little secret rather than a soul-destroying betrayal? It felt as if she had peered inside Pandora’s box and what she saw there changed everything she knew about Yves and her marriage. True enough, they were hardly spring chickens when they married. She knew, by marrying a man in his fifties, there would have been liaisons. She had actually been relieved there wasn’t a string of ex-wives. Had she even asked him if there were children?

And now? Now it was too late to ask. Yves was gone and she was left here alone with a broken heart and too many questions even to know where to start. Joy wandered back to her apartment. She knew she should probably stop off at the supermarket and buy something for dinner, but the truth was, nothing tasted the same now and, anyway, there was still half of last night’s chicken left in the fridge. Would she ever get used to cooking for one?

Instead of heating up the left-over casserole from the previous evening, Joy let herself into the little office that had been Yves’s domain. She hadn’t come in here very often during their marriage and even less since he’d passed away. It was a room that needed to be tidied up. She should go through his papers, take out the neatly filed folders and make sure there weren’t outstanding bills or correspondence. It was six months since he’d left her. It was even longer since he’d let the gallery go and yet still, when she stood at the door, she felt as if she was somehow intruding on his personal space. This was the warmest room in the house, it was situated next to the immersion heater and the narrow window faced south, gathering up what there was of daily sunshine. Yves kept the radiators on all year round, preferring to open a window rather than bend down and turn off the heating. It was one of those things that had infuriated her when they were first married, but, like so many other things between couples, she got used to it and, after a while, she hardly thought about it at all. Whenever it niggled her, she would remind herself that he could have worse habits. Now she was not so sure.

It wasn’t the office she came here to check on. Instead, she closed the door and drifted towards the comfortable chair where Yves had spent much of his time sitting and reading. She ran her fingers along the spines of a stack of books. They were all art history, all hardback. That had been another of his passions. He ordered them directly from Librairie Galignani. A wander around the Jardin des Tuileries always involved an afternoon in the First Arrondissement bookshop. She picked up a book from the top of the pile. He had left a bookmark halfway. God. A tear came to her eye as she realised he would never finish this book, just as he would never start the next one in the pile. She sighed, replacing the book exactly as she had found it, as if he might come back at any moment to reclaim this space that was so uniquely his. Her gaze travelled around the little room. Suddenly she felt hungry for the pain that had marked out these last months. Surely that would be better than this feeling of betrayal. When her gaze finally stopped it was on that wretched paintingThe Seine. She gasped. Joy wasn’t even sure who had painted it – how on earth could she not know that?

She shot up from the chair and the abruptness of her movement startled a pigeon that fluttered away from the window. She took the painting down from the wall. It was heavy and dusty. It had been so long since this room was tidied. She placed it on the edge of the desk. Now she examined it closely to see if there was an artist’s signature. She was rewarded with a faint black line in the bottom right-hand corner and a date. 2001. In 2001 they had already met. She had believed they were madly in love with each other. Somehow that made the disloyalty even greater. Perhaps she was being completely irrational, but she had a feeling that, deep down, the reason she had always hated this painting was not because of its bleakness, but rather because her intuition had told her there was more to it than just a piece of art her husband had fallen in love with. She left the painting on the floor; stood back from it now as if its proximity might scorch her.

She stayed there for some time examining it with fresh eyes. It was oil on canvas of a river – you’d never know it was meant to be the Seine, unless you’d seen the title. This painting wasn’t a celebration of Paris, so much as an examination of what lay hidden beneath the city. There was discarded debris floating on the water and intricate vines were growing up, as if about to pull not just the debris, but the whole city, maybe even the artist down into the murky depths. It was a medley of browns and greens and greys. Even the banks were not the beautifully washed sandstone she loved. They were murky and grim and it was obvious the artist did not intend to sit there and watch the world go by.

It was no good. She couldn’t cry here, anger and resentment stabbed her chest and felt as if they might boil over into heartburn or, maybe, and she really felt this,a heart attack. The perfect irony to finish her off. Urgh. It was a moan more than anything else. She was trapped. She knew it. Here in this apartment, surrounded by memories she couldn’t trust any more. She began to back away from the painting that had brought up such a confusion of emotions. A few short steps, that’s all it took until she felt the door handle behind her. She stood still for a moment. She’d have to come back in here to get the damned painting, package it up and send it on to this Robyn Tessier person, whoever she was.

It was as she was about to turn away that she noticed the small ray of light, in the top left-hand corner of the painting. It was nothing, just a glimmer caught by the dying sun. A streak of silvery gold cutting into the darkness and somehow it made her catch her breath. Was this what had captivated Yves about it? Surely it was more than that. She found herself being drawn back towards it again. She knelt down, looked at it more closely, really examined it.

Suddenly, it was not depressing, but something completely different. That ray of light was like a beacon, binding her into its hopefulness, and she felt her spirits lift just a fraction. Her heart began to beat slightly more quickly and, after a moment, she realised her lips had even curved up into a smile, although she couldn’t say she felt happy.

Yves was pointing her in the direction of something that might heal her. She couldn’t run away from this and she needed to follow the light. She took a deep breath. She knew what she had to do. She had to deliver this painting to Robyn Tessier in Ballycove in Ireland. And she needed to do it as soon as she could get a flight. Maybe, if she confronted this woman, shouted and screamed and vented the terrible rage and hurt she felt, maybe she could find a semblance of normality. She shivered. She felt as if Yves was very close, suddenly. And yes, she felt as if he was smiling at her because she had finally figured out what she should do, even if it was the very last thing she wanted.

5

Robyn Tessier looked out through the bookshop window. Rain was sheeting in across the cove. It already spattered the mismatched roofs of the cottages on the road curving down towards the pier. By rights, she should be cataloguing the mountain of books yet to be sorted in the section she’d set aside for wildlife, but it was perfect reading weather. Robyn curled up with the huge hardback she’d filched from a box that had arrived earlier that day. She was in luck, the latest Maggie O’Farrell. Usually, when boxes were left anonymously at the door (despite several signs in the window asking peoplenotto leave them there) they were more often than not bulging with unsaleable paperbacks too ragged even for the bookshop’s online free reads collection.

The only sound in the bookshop was the occasional hiss from a three-bar heater she’d plugged in earlier against the afternoon chill. Even on sunny days, cold crept into the bookshop from beneath the old gappy floorboards and permeated the heavy bookcases, easing out between the spines of books on the lower shelves. Robyn snuggled beneath the heavy woollen throw she usually draped over the rocking chair in the children’s section. Today, with a rogue draught blowing through the place, the chair creaked occasionally as it swayed.

Still, rain or shine, it was the most breathtaking view, the most amazing location for a bookshop. If only she could sell that instead of books.

Urgh. She shook herself, she couldn’t let it get her down again. She’d spent the previous evening sitting in the near darkness of the living room overhead, drinking white wine and making herself miserable with the knowledge that the previous day’s takings had only just covered the cost of the cappuccino and croissant she’d bought for her lunch break. She’d sold two hardbacks – random books about locomotives that had caught the eye of a visiting railway buff who’d gone on to pontificate about the dearth of decent new books on the subject. Honestly, Robyn thought she’d pass out, such was the intensity of the man. It was her own fault of course. She tended to glaze over just to cover her rising anxiety in social situations. To make matters worse, those books had been here when she took over the shop. She thought about it later, and realised she had no idea what she had taken on, not properly. Oh, she had begun to upload the stock to sites like Abe Books and WoB. She wasn’t a complete idiot. She’d even set up an independent store on the Bookshop site, but it felt as if she was crawling through the stock so slowly and when more books were unceremoniously dumped on the doorstep – well, sometimes it seemed like an impossible task.

The original owner, Douglas Howard, a softly spoken, bespectacled and stooped old dote of a man in tweeds, had developed a word-of-mouth reputation for books that you would not find in other shops. This was why books about trains, birds and trees spilled from every corner. Some of them might be rare enough to be valuable if she could only strike a route to genuine enthusiasts. So many books! There was a time when the children’s section flowed into the history shelves, although she had at least sorted out most of those now. Upstairs, there was a whole shelf of books that Douglas had given her as a child. All very old, but unlikely to be worth anything, classics likeThe Tale of Peter RabbitandThe Secret Garden, silly really, but precious because he’d made a big thing of wrapping them up and presenting them to her. She smiled at the memory. She was making progress sorting it all out, but it was taking a long time. Last Saturday, she’d sold an ancient copy ofGood Housekeeping Recipes for All Occasionsand a copy of the tides timetable – that was her lot for the whole day, all ten hours of it. Hah! She thought, busiest shopping day indeed.

Taking over the bookshop was a risk; for one thing, her social anxiety was off the scale now she had to deal with actual people coming through her door. The vast majority of her income so far had come in online. At least she had technology on her side. For another thing, she had to raise a loan to pay Douglas’s niece, Diane, the grand sum of ten thousand pounds for the stock in the shop and what Diane called the goodwill of the business. Neither of them had a clue what the true value of the books was at the time. However, since she’d started to familiarise herself with the pricing on Abe Books, Robyn had already found a few unexpected treasures. Only a week ago, she turned up a signed first edition of an eighteenth-century book calledBridges and Steel Work in Europe– it sold within a half an hour of going online for the princely sum of two hundred and fifty euro. Of course, that was one small miracle amid a daily trudge of disappointments.

Douglas had loved this place, he had regrouped when he moved here from his little house on the square. He brought with him thousands of books and some glass-fronted cupboards, but mostly, he filled up the shelves that were already here from the old-fashioned grocery and haberdashery store her grandparents had operated before they died. He may not have made a fortune, but her mother was glad to have him renting out the shop on the ground floor of what was once her family home on Patrick Street. Douglas was not a man to change things and so the original fixtures still stood in place, so long now, that they had come back if not into fashion, at least into their own. The shop had a charm that was enduring and maybe, if you were a book lover, enchanting.

She suspected now, that Douglas had lived the last few years of his life mostly on his pension. She had hoped to create sections at the front of the shop for new books. In hindsight, this looked like wishful thinking. She’d hardly seen a local come through the doors since she’d opened up.

Did no one in Ballycove read at all? Surely they must, after all, there was a doctor’s surgery, business people and a solicitor. There were hotel guests and it wasn’t even as if the nearby supermarket carried much by way of paperbacks.

She had believed, naively it turned out now, that her bookshop would become a hub for readers dropping in, not just to buy the daily newspaper or the latest bestseller or celebrity autobiography, but to pre-order books they were really looking forward to. She’d had notions that she would become one of those wise booksellers who just knew exactly how to guide you to that perfect treasure of a book that you’d love.

She wasn’t holding out much hope of that now. The bookshop had confirmed the problem: she was much better online than in real life. When customers did come through the door, she wondered what to say to them, when to speak and when not to; it was as if every single intelligent thought deserted her. She reminded herself that no one liked to be hounded while they were considering making a purchase. Deep down she knew her reticence had little to do with the customer and everything to do with her own debilitating introversion.

Not that she was going to go under this week. Robyn had been lucky. So, she owed the bank some money, but she had this place. This beautiful Georgian building had belonged to her grandparents and was now owned by her mother and it had been given to her rent-free. Every book might be second-hand but many were in perfect, almost mint, condition. Some were signed by authors; some had obviously never been read – which actually made her feel quite sad. The children’s corner was filled with classics. It was the perfect reading nook, if only she could get children through the door to enjoy it. There was a large section of new poetry gifted to the shop from Margot Hocquarts’ publishers. Margot had been her mother’s best friend in the world. Truth be told they were closer than sisters, maybe closer than husband and wife. Fern was still reeling from having lost her in a drowning accident two years earlier. Robyn thought Margot’s loss was one of those they’d never get over. Her mother had pretended to be fine, but she really wasn’t, there was no hiding some things, no matter how hard you try.

The sound of the brass doorbell ringing shook Robyn from her dismal thoughts. She looked up to see a cloud of white hair and a familiar stooped shape in the doorway.

‘Aww, Uncle Albie, what has you out in this weather?’ and then, when it took longer than it should for him to push through the door, she looked down at the spot near his feet where Dolly Parton, his huge sulcata tortoise, stood looking around the shop as if searching for a book to buy.

‘Ara, don’t be daft will you, that’s not even proper rain.’ He jerked his head towards the encroaching French blue clouds. ‘And, sure Dolly here needs the walk, otherwise things don’t move as they should.’ He was referring to her bowels, despite being convinced that the tortoise didn’t like him to discuss her private business in public. ‘And even if it was pouring down, what harm? I wanted to see you anyway, it’s been days since you’ve been up to the bakery. If your mother rings me, what am I going to say? That we’ve fallen out?’

‘She’d know you were lying, we’d never fall out!’ Robyn laughed. That was the great thing about her great-uncle Albie, even if the forecast was leaden; he would always manage to think of the sunshine just above the clouds. And he was wise. Sometimes, she wondered if she shouldn’t just ask him how to make the bookshop more successful, but she always found herself stumbling over the words. Not that he’d judge her, he never would, but he was in his eighties, he had enough to be fretting about without her stupid worries. ‘If you told her that, she’d think you were either up to something you shouldn’t be or you were doting.’

‘Well, it might be about time for me to start doting, what do you think?’ he peered around the shop. He never mentioned that whenever he came in, it was always empty.

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