Page 27 of The Battle of the Bookshops
“So sorry.” Jules cringed, stuffing her anger and discombobulation at seeing Roman with Cally back in their box, with difficulty. “Am I late? Are you wanting to close?”
“I don’t mind a bit, my darling, I promised I’d stay open for Freya,” Belinda told her. She was a comfortable lady in her mid-fifties, always impeccably polished, who did good business in pre-loved designer clothes with a sideline in dress rentals.
“I’ve found an absolute treasure,” Freya said excitedly. “I knew it was perfect as soon as I saw it.”
“Your wedding dress?” asked Jules. “Are you going full bridezilla meringue?”
Freya laughed. “No, not a meringue. I’ve got this beautiful dress that belonged to Mum. I wanted to somehow have her there, in a sense, so it’s perfect...” She trailed off, looking sad. And then she recollected herself: “This is a dress for you. It’s going to look so amazing, but if you don’t like it you have to say, promise?”
“Show me,” Jules said, smiling. “If you love it, I’m sure I’ll love it.”
With some ceremony, Belinda whisked out a custard-yellow dress in satin with some sort of floaty, chiffony overlayer in the same color, holding it up reverently for the other two women to admire it.
“The color issoperfect,” Freya said breathlessly. “I’m having a mainly yellow bouquet, did I say? Mixed late-season daffodils from this flower farm in Cornwall—the benefit of getting married inspring. So when I saw this... What do you think? Try it on?” Freya looked anxiously at Jules, who had managed to plaster a sickly smile onto her face.
“Of course,” she said, allowing Belinda to wave her to a little curtained cubicle at the back of the shop.
When she put it on and looked in the mirror, Jules’s heart sank. Now the dress looked even worse than it had on the hanger. It bagged at the waist, puffed out oddly at the widest part of Jules’s hips, and ended at just exactly the wrong length below the knee. As a final visual insult, the egg-yolk yellow was not a color Jules, with her red hair and green eyes, would willingly wear in a hundred years.
But this wasn’t about her.
She came out and gave Freya a twirl.
“Don’t you just love it?” Freya asked, eyes shining and hands pressed to her cheeks. “Mum...” She swallowed and stopped for a moment. “Mum would have adored it,” she said, tipping her chin up defiantly and impatiently dabbing tears from the corners of her eyes. “Grr, alwayscrying,” she told herself distractedly.
“I think it’ll be great,” said Jules, giving Freya a fierce hug. How could she say anything else? “Well found,” she added, with all the warmth she could muster.
“What are you and Finn doing for a honeymoon?” Jules asked Freya as they walked back down the street together. The despised yellow dress, in a polyethylene cover, now hung carefully over Jules’s arm.
“Bit of a busman’s holiday,” Freya admitted happily. “We’re doing a tour of Ireland in this beautiful little hired camper van. Just me, Finn, and the open road. He wants to take me on a food tour of Ireland—I’ve never been—and there’s such amazing produce out there: shellfish, cheese and butter, soda bread... Some ofmy chef heroes run restaurants in and around Dublin, and there’s quite a few traditional recipes that the big names have refined in their menus. Finn’s made reservations—we’re eating in all the cool places—plus Finn’s signed me up to a cookery school weekend with Declan Kelly!” Freya’s eyes shone at the thought.
“Wow!” said Jules. She was no foodie, but evenshehad heard of Declan Kelly. “Won’t he be a bit daunted, having a chef from another Michelin-starred restaurant turning up to his course?”
“God no,” Freya said, laughing. “Little me? Hardly. Plus I’m not in Paris now, and Freya’s doesn’t have a star, not surprisingly...”
“Don’t do yourself down,” Jules told her. “And make sure you drink loads of Irish whiskey while you’re there too.”
“Ooh yes, Irish coffee! Yum! Finn’s a big Murphy’s fan. I don’t like to tell him I prefer Guinness—he might decide not to marry me.”
“Nothing’s going to make that man decide not to marry you,” Jules reassured her, giving her friend a loving squeeze on the arm. It was so wonderful for Freya that her life was going right. Finn was an absolute treasure. And after all, Freya—like Jules—had come home to Portneath after years trying to build a life elsewhere. Maybe being in Portneath in the longer term was the right thing for her too. Maybe she could find her very own Finn and settle down to a new life.
Nah. Pigs might fly.
Back at the shop, where Flo was just finishing up for the day, Jules briefly filled Flo in on her little expedition. Then, after supper together, suddenly fatigued beyond words, Jules went to curl up in bed with a book. She had a new, long-awaited thriller by one of her favorite writers that had just come in that morning. She wasn’t allowed to put it out on sale for another week, but there was nothing stopping her from reading it herself.
There were definite compensations to running a bookshop.
Jules was delighted, the following morning, when children’s library coordinator Jess, from the local primary schools, popped in, as she occasionally did, to look at any new children’s books that might have come in.
“Distract me!” Jules pleaded. “If you won’t sit down and have a cup of tea with me, I’ll have no excuse not to get on with the invoices.”
When they were settled in the little office with their steaming mugs and a packet of fig rolls, Jules outlined some of her ideas for celebrating Capelthorne’s centenary.
“I’d love to do a writer in residence or two,” she said. “I don’t suppose you happen to have links with any local writers? Doesn’t have to be novelists—could be poets, memoirists—and self-published is fine...”
“I’ll have a think,” said Jess, “but the person who springs to mind instantly is a children’s book writer and illustrator. Would that be any good?”
“Totally! Who?”
