Page 12 of The Battle of the Bookshops
Even with that patient listening ear, Jules remembered, she had felt too hotly humiliated to tell Freya’s mum the sorry tale of the stuck, trailing loo paper and the hilarity of Roman and his little gang. Even now, it had the power to turn her cheeks pink. Why, after all these years, did she still even mind? Old scars went deep, it seemed.
“But seriously, doesn’t coming back to Portneath feel weird?” insisted Freya, bringing Jules back to the present. “Neither of us could wait to get away, remember?”
“I do,” agreed Jules. She had counted down the days until she left for uni, even though it had been devastating to leave Flo and the bookshop. Leaving her mum and the little Middlemass cottage? Not so much.
“But that was then,” said Freya, contentedly rolling onto her back and splaying out her arms. “I was like you, I was forced to come back. But then, when I got here, I thought,Yeah, this could be good.”
“Plus, you hooked up with Finn pretty quick, from what I understand,” teased Jules, shoving her in the ribs.
“I did, didn’t I?” agreed Freya happily. Then, suddenly, she looked anxious. “We’re okay, right? About Finn I mean?”
“What are you talking about? Of course, we’re okay.”
“But you remember...?”
Jules sighed and rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “That was then,” she said, turning to pull a face at Freya. “I mean, the preposterousness of the idea anyhow! Me calling dibs on Finn, and you promising not to go near him? Ridiculous. Like he even took a second glance at either of us then. Ha!”
“And, in any case, you refused to admit it, butIalways thought that Roman was the object of your unquenchable lust,” said Freya happily, not seeing Jules’s expression.
“We were both kind of ridiculous,” agreed Jules, keen to change the subject. “So, you and Finn, then? Give?”
“Well, it’s all amazing, obviously.” Freya sighed, gazing adoringly at the ceiling as if Finn’s face were floating directly above her. “Just soright, you know? As soon as I saw him again, it just felt totally incredible, and thank goodness, he felt the same... although it was a horrible time.” Freya’s face clouded.
“Your mum dying,” said Jules. “I can’t imagine... What a terrible reason to have to come home.”
“Yeah, so... it was a lot,” said Freya, dabbing sudden tears and sniffing, “and Finn was pretty much the first person I bumped into. I was surprised he remembered me,” she reminisced with a smile. “I mean, ten years! And obviously, as you have seen, he is nowevenhotter. And”—she gave Jules a cunning, sideways look—“I’ll tell you whoelseis looking even hotter, now that he’s back...”
“Go on then, who?” Jules sighed, knowing perfectly well and wondering what she had to do to get Freya off the subject of Roman.
“Roman Montbeau. Oh. My. God,” Freya opined, her eyes closed in ecstasy, and then her eyes snapped open and her face fell. “I can’t believe I just said that,” she gabbled. “I completely forgot—the bookshop...”
“I wishIcould forget,” said Jules wryly. “And yeah, he’s objectively hot. But he’s also a horrible, horrible person, remember? He was an arrogant twat then, and how about what he is doing now? It doesn’t matter what he says, he didn’t have to open a bookshop opposite Capelthorne’s. That’s a declaration of war. But then he’sa Montbeau. They’re a greedy, ruthless, entitled family, and he’s no exception. If he had a portrait in the attic, it would be looking pretty terrible by now.”
“So, you would never...?” Freya teased.
Jules’s expression gave her the answer.
Next morning, in recognition of her London life collapsing so disastrously into a pile of rubble, Jules summoned up her resolve and messaged the house WhatsApp to let people know she was detained in Devon for the foreseeable. The housemates, whom she had never really got to know well, rallied around touchingly, commiserating and promising to pack up her few belongings to move them from her little box-room to the attic as soon as a new housemate could be found. Thankfully, this was achieved within the following twenty-four hours, with her replacement taking over the rent. That only left her belongings to collect at some point. With such a tiny room, Jules lived with as few possessions as possible, so a trip up to London with an average-sized car would do it. Not that Jules had a car. Anyhow, it was a problem to deal with another time, she decided. The last thing she needed in Portneath was her basic wardrobe of work-smart suits and her carefully curated book collection. Books, she definitelywasn’tshort of in her new life.
Okay, so Jules might be washing the windows in the door a little more than strictly necessary, i.e., every morning for the last week. And so what if she was rubbing harder than she needed to, possibly out of the fury she felt whenever her gaze fell on The Portneath Bookshop across the road. Which it did. Quite a lot. And who was that irritatingly immaculate blond girl who was turning the sign on the door to “Open” on the dot of nine o’clock? Who swished their perfect, straight, shiny blond hair that much anyhow? Was it some kind of physical tic? What was with all the swishing?
“Stop glaring at the enemy!” Aunt Flo called out, laughing, from her perch behind the till. “That’s authentic Georgian glass you’re polishing. You’ll wear it clean through if you’re not careful.”
Jules summoned up an answering chuckle with difficulty. “I was just thinking,” she said, “maybe we should be opening the shop at nine o’clock rather than nine thirty? What do you reckon?”
“You mean, like The Portneath Bookshop does?”
“Do they?” Jules replied, unconvincingly vague. “Well, it wouldn’t do any harm.”
“It would domeharm,” Flo protested. “It takes an age to get washed and dress with all this clobber on me.” She waved a plastered arm. “Nine thirty opening suits me very well, thank you. And anyhow, can you honestly say they’ve actually had any customers in during that half hour? I ask because if anyone knows, you do, standing right at the front of the shop...”
“Fine, point taken,” admitted Jules, turning away from the window reluctantly. “Just a thought.”
Flo was right, she was hyperalert to any commercial advantage the loathsome Roman might be gaining on her. Without her busy, stressful London job to think about, Jules’s mind was brimming—day and night—with ways to transform Capelthorne’s fortunes. It was helpful that Jules had experience of the little shop’s systems from her Saturday job there as a teenager, but it was alarming to see that nothing much had changed in all the years since. The book ordering and stock system was on its knees and crashed routinely several times a day. And there was a huge backlog of unsold stock that should have been returned to the publishers long ago. Jules had been slowly working her way through the online stock system, packing and returning books they couldn’t hope to shift before it was too late to claim a refund.
And that wasn’t even the worst of it. The more she looked into things, the worse they seemed to have become. It was clear Flowas rarely troubled by sales reps nowadays, but that was less of a blessing than it sounded. It meant the little shop’s relevance and visibility was dwindling among book distributors and wholesalers. To address this, Jules spent a fair bit of time on the phone to the main distributors and publishers, sucking up and generally reminding them of the presence of Capelthorne’s, but the mood music was obvious: Capelthorne’s was not a big player and couldn’t compete with the major chains, with their paid promotional slots and outlets in all the big cities.
All the big publishers and distributors talked the talk, of course—independent bookshops were lauded extravagantly—but a lot of it was just that. Talk. Portneath, being on the coast, was at the end of the line, too far from Exeter to make it onto the sales rep routes, let alone the itineraries of the major writers out on their book tours. It seemed that Capelthorne’s—which used to have its reputation go before it, in a modest way—was now an irrelevance. Jules even called an old mate in the marketing department of Farquarson and Trimble who—once she had got past the breathless, sotto voce imprecation to dish the dirt on what had precipitated her sudden departure—promised to bear Capelthorne’s in mind when planning marketing activities. Time would tell whether she would stick to her promises. Jules wasn’t holding her breath.
