Page 41 of The Battle of the Bookshops
“Well, this is nice,” Jules told her mother valiantly, as Colin the innkeeper brought them plates piled high. They had both chosen his Sunday roast, and Jules had been checking out the puddings; she had her eye on a neighboring table’s sweet pink rhubarb crumble, drowning in creamy custard speckled with vanilla seeds. Faced with a dauntingly large main course, she was worried pudding ambitions might have to be shelved.
This week the roast dinner was pork from Hollytree Farm just up the road, Colin was telling them as they ate. With juicy meat, huge chunks of light-as-air crackling, along with the usual accompaniments, he was right to be proud. Hollytree Farm was largely a dairy, he went on, but what meat it did produce was excellent, and butchers from far and wide were keen to stock it. The brothers preferred, instead, to supply local pubs and restaurants, including Freya’s, although, as Colin pointed out to the two women, it was lucky that being schoolmates with the brothers was enough to make it onto their customer list, as he didn’t much fancy marrying either of them.
“Talking of love,” said Jules, taking up the conversational baton when Colin had gone, “Aunt Flo has found herself a lovely blokeandhe’s a fabulous cook, by her account. Isn’t that great?”
“No fool like an old fool,” sniffed Maggie. “Don’t tell me she’s launched herself onto a dating app in her dotage?”
“Better than that,” said Jules, describing how Flo and Graham’s friendship had developed. “It’s a mutual love of books and food,” she went on. “You should be happy for her, surely?”
“Didn’t say I wasn’t,” said Maggie, who might as well have done. “Please tell me it’s nothing serious, though.”
“Why can’t it be?” asked Jules. “I, for one, would love to see Aunt Flo settled with a nice partner,” she went on firmly. “She’s spent all these decades looking after everyone else. How about she’s the one getting looked after for a change?”
“You won’t say that when she marries him and then the last of what passes for the Capelthorne fortune goes out of the family,” said Maggie, taking a large swig of wine. She was looking away, or she would have seen a micro-expression of absolute disdain on Jules’s face.
“You can’t think I would care for a moment what Aunt Flo does with her money after she dies,” said Jules, working hard to keep her voice neutral and level. “It is entirely up to her what she does with it, and I have no expectations. Nor should you.”
“Youdosurprise me,” said Maggie. “Surely the thought of yourprecious bookshop being left to someone else bothers you just a little bit? The building alone has to be worth about six hundred thou. Course, I can’t imagine the business is worth much on its own...” Maggie went on, taking Jules’s silence as approval or, at least, interest. “But the Capelthornes have precious little to their name. I, for one, hope I’ll get something when she goes, because it’s not great approaching your fifties and still having monthly rent like a millstone around my neck. You’re young. You don’t have to worry about accumulating wealth, but it’ll start to bother you big-time when you get to my age, I can assure you.”
The time had come to knock her mother off her conversational course before one of them—okay, Jules—said something she regretted.
“I’m seeing Roman Montbeau,” she announced.
The effect was immediate. Maggie fell silent, and when Jules looked up, with trepidation, she saw her mother’s mouth was hanging open in shock.
“Seriously?” Maggie said at last. Her voice had risen by an octave.
“No, not ‘seriously,’” said Jules, deliberately misunderstanding. “It’s just a casual thing. We are enjoying each other’s company.” Which, to be honest, massively underplayed the emotional entanglement that Jules was now feeling. She had so nearly blurted those three little words to him the day before. Just as well she hadn’t; it would have been ridiculous to say such a thing after so little time seeing each other. He would probably have been horrified.
“I mean you areseriouslyseeing a Montbeau?” her mother clarified, the tone of her voice still so high-pitched with incredulity as to be deafening to any bats that happened to be passing. “Even though he’s trying to ruin you?”
“It’s true, I was annoyed when Portneath Books opened,” admitted Jules, “but to be fair, we don’t have a right to a monopoly. Roman’s just doing what he knows—he was working for a bigpublisher in the US—and he has business ideas he wants to explore, interesting ones actually. We’ve talked a lot—”
“Rubbish,” interrupted Maggie. “Two bookshops in a place the size of Portneath? It’s ridiculous. He wants to put you and Aunt Flo out of business, no ifs, no buts.”
But Jules refused to be daunted. “Hay-on-Wye’s probably no bigger than Portneath, and there are more than twenty bookshops there,” she said. “They’ve got the literary festival, of course, which helps, granted, but also, each bookshop has established itself in its own little niche. Capelthorne’s can do the same. Charlie’s doing really well with the antiquarian books—”
“That person in dungarees, with shaved hair and a ring through its nose?” scoffed Maggie.
“Charlie is simply expressing himself in a way that feels authentic to him. No one has a problem with that—except you,” said Jules icily, losing patience, “and the old books are something that’s totally unique to us. Portneath Books doesn’t sell used books at all, and Roman has no plans to start. He told me.”
“Oh, you poor, sweet, innocent fool,” sneered Maggie, putting down her knife and fork and wiping her mouth with her napkin. She oozed loftiness, seasoned with spite. “You don’t seriously think that Montbeau man actually cares for you?”
“I think his intentions are honorable,” blurted out Jules, confused, wondering why she had suddenly started speaking like someone from a Jane Austen novel. She should have remembered how her mother always managed to knock her off-balance. “We owe each other nothing, it’s just a casual thing. But it’s nice,” she went on defiantly. “And for heaven’s sake, isn’t the whole Montbeau and Capelthorne thing getting a bit ridiculous now? As far as I can gather from Aunt Flo, it all dates back to some dodgy bet or gambling debt,literallya hundred years ago. Why on earth should it be relevant to me and Roman, or any of us, come to that?”
“There’s been bad blood between the families a darned sight longer—and more recently—than a hundred years ago,” insisted Maggie. “That father of his ismygeneration, remember? He’s a monumental shit, and I wouldn’t trust his son as far as I could chuck him.”
Lovely though it was to walk down the street and constantly bump into people you knew, the fledgling relationship between Roman and Jules was the subject of intense interest, which could be a bit much some days. They had a new routine on Wednesdays, providing the weather was fine: at or around midday, they would each grab a sandwich lunch and individually take it, with a flask of tea, to the top of the high street, where the shops petered out and the graveyard leading to the church began. The Montbeau crypt, with its broad, flat stone lid, was the perfect picnicking perch. “Best views in Portneath,” Roman had declared, when he first encouraged Jules to clamber on next to him. “Wasted on the dead, don’t you think?” He nodded to the scene laid out before them: a jumble of red and gray rooftops forming a jagged line, leading the eye down the hill to the sea.
The sun was blindingly bright that day, three days after lunch with her mother, with a lively wind, unraveling skeins of wispy cloud across the sky.
It was good to get out of the town, thought Jules, handing Roman one of her sandwiches. “I still wonder what your ancestors would think of this, though,” she said, patting the sun-warmed marble. “Disrespecting the dead and all that.”
“How else are you going to get one over on a Montbeau,” he said cheekily, sneaking a kiss.
“Ha, I get one over onyouevery week,” Jules retorted, taking a huge bite of her sandwich and passing him her weekly sales figuresscribbled on a Post-it note for just this reason. “Read it and weep, Montbeau,” she said with her mouth full.
“Nice,” he said, nodding slowly. “But not as nice as this!” he went on, fishing a scrap of paper out of his top pocket and shoving it under her nose.
