Page 2 of The Battle of the Bookshops
So, it had been idiotic of her to want to impress him. A pang of her exquisitely painful teen longing returned as she revisitedthat agonizing moment, making her heart beat faster and her face color up. She had held herself aloof as she walked past them, returning from the loo—so hopelessly overdressed next to their hoodies and their jeans, just the right shade of blue. If only she could have shored up her fragile sixteen-year-old ego with a moment of objectification from them. Even a wolf whistle would have been validating. Instead, there had been that hateful burst of laughter and then another as Freya—darling loyal Freya—pointed urgently at her foot, and she looked down to see the length of toilet paper stuck to her heel. You could have fried burgers on her flaming cheeks. She had sat frozen for several minutes and then—in defeat—gone home to cry hot tears of mortification. For months, even years, that incident had caused her face to flush scarlet at every recollection. It had at least been a blessing that Roman left Portneath shortly after, heading off, she had heard, to his fancy Ivy League school in the United States. Because that was what young men from the Montbeau family did.
And now he was back. Great. Because she needed extra complications like a hole in the head, and nothing good ever came of a Capelthorne having anything to do with a Montbeau.
After an endless time that would have been only ten minutes, they pulled up outside the pub. Pushing her last ten-pound note into Terry’s hand—determined not to be indebted to the enemy for the fare—Jules clambered out. The car swept away, the arc of the headlights briefly illuminating the whitewashed facade of the Middlemass Arms, now closed and shuttered for the night. In a moment, Jules was left shivering and alone in the dark. Even the very few village streetlamps were off now, meaning it must be well past midnight. She suddenly had a thought that her mother may not even be at home.Of course!Jules realized. She would be wherever Aunt Flo was breathing her last, perhaps even in PortneathHospital—in the little town Jules had just left—and now she had organized to have herself dropped several miles away in her home village of Middlemass instead. Idiot. It was Roman’s fault. At the sight of him every sensible thought had dropped right out of her head.
Darn it, why couldn’t her mother answer her phone? Setting off down the narrow, rutted lane that led to her mother’s cottage—her childhood home—Jules could only hope the spare key would still be under the stone frog by the doorstep. Draining the last few drops of battery power on her phone, she used its flashlight to illuminate her path, night creatures skittering away from the narrow beam and rustling noisily into the safety of the dark.
Jules breathed a sigh of relief as she approached the little cottage, set sideways on the dusty lane, with its low, thatched eaves and whitewashed cob exterior. Even several feet away, she could see the glow of lamplight in the low, lattice-paned window. Peering in, she saw the fire was lit in the grate against the chill of the March night, and the lamp by the plump, shabby yellow sofa was on. Despite these encouraging signs, the room was, nonetheless, empty of human life. She picked her way down the flagged path to the back door, the one that everyone used—Jules couldn’t remember the front door being opened in the twenty-five years her mother had rented the place. That was nearly her whole life... Gamekeeper’s Cottage was the only home she remembered.
Looking through the window by the back door, Jules saw, with a flood of relief, none other than Aunt Flo herself. Clearly reports of her near death had been exaggerated. The old woman was sitting in the rocking chair in front of the Aga stove, one leg, in a plaster cast, propped on a hard wooden chair.
“Aunt Flo!” Jules exclaimed as she tried the door, which was so unexpectedly unlocked, Jules burst dramatically into the room, nearly falling. “I thought you were on your deathbed.” She droppedher handbag on the floor and went over to give the older woman a hug, breathing in her comfortingly familiar scent of geraniums and roses.
Straightening, Jules looked down at her aunt. It was not just the plaster cast on her leg that was unusual; Flo had one arm in plaster to the elbow too, and her normally neat gray bun was rushed and clumsy, with stray tufts of hair sticking up at all angles.
“What on earth have you done to yourself?”
“Ugh, too boring for words,” said Flo, waving her unbroken arm dismissively. “Clumsiness. Gravity. But never mind me—how areyou, my darling girl?”
“Fine, fine,” said Jules impatiently, dragging another of the wooden dining chairs noisily across the earthenware-tiled floor nearer to her aunt and plonking herself down in relief. It had been a seriously long day. “Mum was texting that I should rush down here before it was too late. ‘Life and death,’ she said...”
“Ha! You know what your mother’s like,” explained Flo, rolling her eyes, “always the drama queen.”
“You’rethe drama queen,” retorted Jules’s mum, Maggie, appearing from the darkness of the hallway. “You’re here,” she observed, stating the obvious, as mother and daughter gave each other a dead-eyed duty hug, arms stiff, bodies a decorous three inches apart.
“I’m here because you told me to come,” said Jules with a note of accusation. “You said Aunt Flo was nearly dead.”
“Never mind her.I’mnearly dead from all the running around,” Maggie complained, holding the back of her hand to her forehead in a performative attitude of exhaustion. “I’ve been working my fingers to the bone, cooking, cleaning...”
Jules looked pointedly at the remains of supper on the kitchen table, two plates smeared with the remnants of baked beans on toast. It wasn’t exactly Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons. Therewasevidence, though, that supper had been accompanied by at least a couple of glasses of red wine each.
Maggie picked up the bottle from the table and waggled it experimentally. “I’ll just get another one of these,” she said vaguely, wandering back toward the hallway. “I expect you could do with a drink after your journey...”
“No thanks,” Jules started telling the disappearing figure, but Flo, reaching to grab Jules’s wrist, stopped her protestations in their tracks.
“Your mother’s driving me insane,” she hissed. “You’ve got to get me out of here before we kill each other.”
“How?” protested Jules in a whisper. “I don’t even have a car.”
“Bus, taxi, whatever—I need you to help me,” Flo went on, her eyes imploring. “The bookshop’s been shut for a week while I’ve been stuck here being alternately patronized and neglected by your mother. She says she’s been going in to feed Merlin, but I’m not sure I believe her. She’s always hated that cat. Plus, I can’t afford to miss out on the Easter holiday trade. If I don’t get the shop open soon, it won’t open at all. Ever.”
“Surely not?” Jules asserted soothingly. This must be her great-aunt taking her own opportunity to be dramatic. Things couldn’t be that bad, could they?
“Thingsarethat bad,” insisted Aunt Flo, as if Jules had spoken her thoughts aloud. “Never worse... and here I am, stuck... I’m not getting these blasted casts taken off for at least another five weeks, and they say my leg is going to take months to recover. It’s a disaster. Look,” she pleaded, “just get me back to the shop and we’ll work it out from there.”
“I’ll go down there first thing tomorrow and see what’s what,” promised Jules, resting her hand on Flo’s good arm comfortingly. “But with three flights of stairs up to the flat, I honestly don’t see how you are going to manage.”
The specter of not being back at her desk by eight in the morning on Monday floated before her eyes. How on earth was she going to sort out this mess in a single weekend?
A thought seemed to strike Maggie as she came back into the room with her prize: another bottle of red wine. “How did you get here from the station?” she queried.
“Taxi. I’d have asked you for a lift if you’d been answering your phone,” said Jules accusingly, seeing her mother’s phone, dark and lifeless, on top of a pile of junk mail on the end of the kitchen table.
“Too busy. Forgot to charge it,” her mother admitted without remorse.
In the face of interrogation, Jules revealed, in dispassionate tones, how Roman had insisted on sharing the one taxi and how, in extremis, she had been forced to agree.
“Howcouldyou?” Maggie exclaimed, clutching the bottle of wine to her chest in outrage. “Now we are indebted to the Montbeaus, of all the ghastly people.God, what a nightmare.”
