The Secret of Happy Ever After

  ‘Quentin’s bookshop,’ she said. ‘Is it still available?’

  ‘It is. I have the advert here in front of me, but as yet, there is no one in the ad department at the Gazette to take it.’ He sounded amused. ‘I thought we were quite efficient here, but you’re putting us to shame.’

  ‘Good. I’d like to take on the lease, please.’

  ‘As a bookshop?’

  ‘As a bookshop.’ Michelle moved away from the posters and stared instead out of the window, at what had once been some kind of formal garden. A robin was hopping along the path towards a frozen bird bath. ‘I’ve got a manager lined up who I think Mr Quentin would thoroughly approve of. Someone who’s really passionate about books.’

  ‘Of whom. Of whom Mr Quentin would approve.’ Rory sounded amused, rather than suspicious, but she could tell he was dying to say, Come on, this is a joke.

  ‘Whatever. I’ve been thinking about what you said,’ Michelle went on, ‘about every town needing a bookshop. You’re right.’

  There was a snort, then a surprised pause, then Rory recovered his professionalism.

  ‘Well, that’s great news,’ he said. ‘Would you like to come in to talk about paperwork?’

  ‘I’ll be in this afternoon,’ said Michelle.

  5

  ‘I decided I wanted to be a baker after reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory aged eight. I could smell the waterfall-frothed chocolate river and the Sunday-roast-and-blueberry-pie gum and the boiled-sweet ship!’

  Juliet Falconer

  Anna stretched out her left leg under the duvet and wriggled her right toes under the dead weight of a snoring Pongo. She knew she should move him but she was as comfortable as he was. A pot of tea, some toast and the new Kate Atkinson hardback that Phil had bought her for Christmas – it was worth a dead leg for that sort of once-a-year indulgence. Anna had absolutely no intention of getting up before lunchtime, and she suspected Pongo wasn’t too fussed either.

  The phone rang and she leaned over to click it onto speaker so she didn’t have to put the book down.

  I bet that’s Phil, she thought, checking to see I’m enjoying my breakfast in bed while he’s back in the office. She’d tried to persuade him to go in a little late – so they could enjoy some rare morning privacy – but he’d insisted on being there by nine. He was a very dutiful boss.

  ‘Hello?’ she said, in her best Sybil Fawlty. ‘McQueen Dog Sitters?’

  ‘What?’ said a voice that definitely wasn’t Phil’s.

  ‘Oh, Michelle,’ she said, nearly dropping the book onto her crumby plate, and getting marmalade on her fingers.

  ‘Can you come over to the shop?’ Michelle sounded excited. She also sounded very up and dressed.

  Pongo’s ears pricked up at the sound of Michelle’s voice, though he didn’t move. He wasn’t usually allowed on beds, especially when Phil was around.

  ‘When?’ Anna asked, seeing her morning of reading vanishing. She grabbed the phone to stop Pongo reacting further to the invisible Michelle in the room. ‘I haven’t w-a-l-k-e-d the dog yet, and—’

  ‘Come now! Bring him over.’

  ‘Really? To your shop full of baskets and things to knock over?’

  ‘Well, run him twice round the park first to wear him out a bit.’

  Pongo’s ears had detected action, and now he was nudging at Anna’s knee with his nose, upgrading it to a paw when she didn’t respond.

  ‘What’s this about?’ Anna asked, giving up and putting her bookmark into the chapter she’d just started.

  ‘Surprise,’ said Michelle. ‘Now hurry. Pongo!’ she yelled. ‘Walkies! Waaaaalkies!’

  Pongo leaped off the bed in excitement and Anna resigned herself to getting up, fast.

  When they reached the high street, Michelle was waiting for them outside the shop with a jute bag over her shoulder and a couple of takeaway coffees from Natalie’s café in a paper tray.

  ‘No, don’t go in!’ she said, guarding the door of Home Sweet Home from Pongo’s curious nose. ‘No, next door, Pongo!’ Michelle waved a set of keys. ‘The bookshop.’

  Anna wrinkled her own nose, about to ask how on earth Michelle had a set of keys for the bookshop, but she was already letting herself in.

  Pongo whined and strained after her. ‘Can he come in?’ Anna called.

  ‘Sure.’ Michelle’s voice suggested she was already a long way into the shop.

  With a warning look at Pongo to behave himself, Anna followed her inside.

  The bookshop felt damp and chilly, but it was still an unsupervised bookshop, and Anna felt a frisson of excitement as she scanned the shelves with greedy eyes. Libraries weren’t quite the same, she’d found; something about the prosaic smell of other people’s houses and fingers seeping off the pages diluted that sense of magical worlds, but untouched, unread, unexplored books were something else.

  She walked slowly, angling her head to read the titles that were left on the partially emptied shelves: Mr Quentin might have gone but his collection of military history titles still took the prime position by the door. It was strange seeing the shop without his mercurial presence behind the desk and without other customers browsing the shelves. It felt smaller than she remembered, and sadder.

  Pongo was sniffing at the wastepaper bin by the desk. Anna checked there was nothing inside he could eat, then tied his extending lead to one of the desk’s heavy legs and went off to find Michelle.

  She was standing in the back room, where the shelves were obscured by piles of second-hand stock. Mr Quentin could never say no to a house clearer or a car boot sale. Books were scattered unceremoniously around Michelle’s feet from where she’d dragged a shelf away from a wall, and she was looking critically at two slashes of buttercream paint applied over the faded magnolia.

  ‘What do you think?’ she asked, turning to see Anna’s reaction. ‘String or Matchstick?’

  ‘They look the same to me. Are you allowed to do that to someone else’s shop? Are you decorating this for someone?’

  ‘No. And no.’ Michelle took another paint pot out of the jute bag and started slapping on another patch below the squares of cream. This one was a rich red. ‘Or what do you think about a real reading room feel? Too much like the inside of someone’s liver?’

  ‘Are you going to tell me what’s going on?’

  ‘In a minute.’

  Anna couldn’t bear to see scattered books. She bent down to pick them up and felt a tug of nostalgia as she recognised an old favourite: the same 70s edition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory she’d had on her own shelves, complete with the magical chocolate machine gushing rainbow-coloured foam from a tangle of pipes. She opened the pages and the scratchy, busy illustrations immediately took her back to her small bedroom, her dad sitting like a giant on the half-size chair next to her bed in his shirt sleeves, reading ‘just one more’ chapter before she went to sleep. Roald Dahl was his favourite too; he did all the accents. Petulant Veruca and greedy Augustus, and with a surprising South American glee, the singing Oompa-Loompas.

  The well-worn pages felt velvety as she turned them, and Anna’s head filled up with memories of warm blankets, and Dad’s after-work office smell, and his supper in the oven downstairs, and in her head, hot chocolate rivers and everlasting toffees and a feeling of being absolutely safe. Free to wander round fantastical worlds, into danger and battles and haunted houses, but with her dad right by her side, his familiar voice in her ear.

  Anna had daydreamed about reading to her own children since she was a child herself and her heart expanded with impatient longing as she thought of the baby out there, waiting for her, waiting to start its journey into her life. When she and Phil had their own baby, she’d have a different life. A life where she’d feel needed, wanted, not just tolerated, like a competent temp.

  Michelle’s voice cut through her thoughts. ‘. . . coffee?’

  She looked up. Michelle was offering her a takeaway cappuccino, and judging by t
he excitement radiating from her – and the new to-do list in her hand – it wasn’t her first coffee of the day.

  Michelle never had to worry about who she was, thought Anna with a stab of envy. She had a job. A thriving business. A life based on who she was, not who she wasn’t.

  ‘Anna? What’s the matter?’ Michelle turned to look at the wall, then back again. ‘Is the colour really bad? Go on, you can tell me.’

  ‘No, it’s not that.’ Anna took the coffee and told herself to get a grip. ‘They’re both . . . nice. But why are you painting?’

  ‘I’ve rented the shop,’ said Michelle, swinging her arm wide. ‘Stage two of the Nightingale takeover of the high street.’

  ‘Congratulations! Are you knocking through?’ Anna made her face cheery, even though inside she felt sorry for the now-homeless books and Cyril’s life’s work, heading for the recycling to make way for witty cardboard stags’ heads.

  ‘Nope, it’s going to be books.’

  ‘Books?’

  Michelle nodded. ‘I’m going to run it as a bookshop.’

  ‘But this is the worst possible time for bookshops,’ said Anna, horrified. ‘And I say that as Longhampton’s sole remaining purchaser of books. I mean, it’s great that you want to keep it open, but I don’t want to see you ruined.’

  ‘Well, we’ll see. Tell me what you think about my ideas.’ Michelle flipped over another page in her notebook, which was covered in her bold handwriting, arrows and bubbles springing in every direction. ‘Redecoration and marketing are the key things. I was thinking about those presents you gave the girls. We could call them Book Bouquets, and offer it as a service – a stack of romances sent to a relative stuck in hospital, say? You can’t have flowers in some hospital wards, apparently – I’m always sending silk flower bouquets up there.’

  ‘Well, I’d buy that, obviously,’ conceded Anna. ‘Who’s going to put them together, though? Kelsey?’

  She didn’t want to add, ‘You?’ because she knew she couldn’t make the word come out politely. Michelle was the only person she knew who arranged her books in rainbow order.

  But Michelle was still listing her ideas, clearly not in the mood for negatives.

  ‘And I was thinking about organic book boxes, like veg boxes? For ten quid, we could send someone a mentally nutritious selection of titles, some new, some second-hand. Some easy “potato” books, some more challenging “turnip” ones. You know how you always make an effort to do something new when they send you a Savoy cabbage? Well, the book box would be like that. People would feel virtuous for trying a Swedish translation along with their new Marian Keyes, and it wouldn’t cost us anything because – here’s the clever bit – it’s here already.’

  Anna marvelled at how Michelle made everything sound so possible. ‘That’s actually a really good idea. You’d need to put in a guide, though, get them interested in the turnip books. But who’s going to . . . ?’

  ‘Brilliant!’ Michelle pointed her pen at her, and jotted the idea down in the notebook. ‘And reading groups – during the day, not at night? I see the same faces in my shop during office hours – you know, the yummy mummies with babies and nothing else to do. They can’t really get their buggies in next door, but they could in here, if we made the space between the tables good and big. I thought with some chairs in here . . . get the fire going . . . paint it the right colour . . .’ She tapped her pen against her perfect white teeth. ‘What else?’

  ‘Pot of coffee brewing?’ suggested Anna, half joking.

  ‘Coffee, yes, good. And pastries. It’s all about the extras in a place like this. I’ll see if I can do a deal with the deli . . .’

  Anna looked around and tried to see what Michelle was seeing, but she couldn’t: the windowless room was stacked with boxes of second-hand stock Cyril Quentin had never got round to sorting, let alone shelving. The shelves themselves were tatty and the lino was torn, showing bare boards in some places. No one ever ventured into the back room. Even she’d only put her nose round the door once or twice before giving up, overwhelmed by the disordered stock.

  ‘Children’s books are good sellers,’ she said, reaching down to pick up James and the Giant Peach, another old favourite. The downy, luscious peach dangling above the seething sea, strung up by thousands of seagulls. Anna had always been slightly scared of the gulls and had made her dad read it with the book flat, so she wouldn’t let their sharp beaks into her dreams as she dozed off. ‘Kids get through them so quickly, if they’re fast readers,’ she went on. ‘You could maybe get the mums in to read to the smaller ones, like the Reading Aloud project? They had to cut back on that at the library, but it was always well attended.’

  ‘Of course!’ Michelle scribbled away, turning the page quickly.

  ‘I don’t want to sound interfering,’ said Anna cautiously, ‘but if you need some help with the books, I’d be happy to give you a hand.’

  ‘I was hoping you’d do a bit more than that,’ said Michelle. She looked up with a smile, and Anna could almost see the sparks of her enthusiasm prickling the dusty air. ‘I was hoping I could hire you. To run the whole thing.’

  ‘Me?’

  Michelle nodded, as if it were too obvious to explain. ‘I want to see the customers looking like those people at Butterfields.’

  ‘What? Old?’

  ‘No!’ Michelle swatted her knee. ‘Entranced. Captivated by your storytelling. You’ve got library experience, you’re not working at the moment . . . You can start at once, can’t you?’ She paused for the first time and gave Anna a searching look. ‘I know you’ve been applying for jobs, but have you had any interviews?’

  ‘No,’ admitted Anna. ‘To be honest, I’d stand more chance of getting into space travel than finding work in a library right now.’

  She didn’t know what to say: she was touched by Michelle’s confidence in her, but also suddenly shy. Michelle was a mate, but she was serious about her business, and Anna didn’t want to let her down. She hated letting anyone down.

  But a bookshop. Her own bookshop.

  A slow smile spread across her face. ‘Honestly?’

  ‘Honestly.’ Michelle grinned. ‘I can’t think of anyone who’d do it better. You’ve got to believe in yourself a bit more. Didn’t I tell you that when you wrote things down on a list they happened?’

  She raised her cappuccino, and they chinked their paper cups of coffee, two friends setting off on an adventure together.

  But even as she sipped, Anna’s enthusiasm hit a cartoon brick wall. How was the girls’ daily routine going to function if she was out during shop hours? The transporting, shopping, cooking, washing – it was like running a hotel.

  And Pongo. There was another responsibility. He’d got used to having her around, and going out twice a day to meet his mates down the park. They’d have to get Juliet the dog-walker back – if she had any spaces.

  She put down her coffee and shoved her hands into her hair. ‘Michelle, I really want to do this, but I’m going to have to run it by Phil first.’

  ‘Why?’ Michelle tried to hide it, but Anna could tell she was irritated. ‘Phil should be thrilled. You’ve spent the last year acting as a housekeeper for him, it’s about time he let you get back to using your brain again. It’d do him good to realise how hard you work at home.’

  ‘Well, it’s not as simple as that,’ she said. ‘We’ve got routines, responsibilities. I can’t just do my own thing any more. It’s what you do when you’re married.’

  Too late, Anna realised that wasn’t the most tactful thing to say.

  Michelle flipped her notebook back so the cover snapped shut on itself, and looked at her with the cool, clear gaze that she sometimes found quite unsettling. Michelle’s focus could sometimes verge on the superhuman; it was hard to imagine her worrying much about anything, once she’d set her mind to it. Anna wondered – very quietly, in case Michelle could read her mind – if that was a result of her divorce, or something that had contribut
ed to it.

  After three years, she still only knew the very vaguest of details about Michelle’s failed marriage. Michelle knew Anna inside out, but there were areas of her own life that remained thoroughly fenced off.

  ‘Is it what you do when you’re married?’ Michelle said. ‘That’s one of the reasons I decided I didn’t want to be married any more. Having to run everything past someone else for approval, only to be told I couldn’t do it.’

  Pongo, having freed himself from his collar yet again, clicked over to her and pushed his head onto her knee.

  ‘Get off, you hairy mutt,’ she said, but stroked his velvety ears as she said it.

  Anna felt torn, as she so often did. Phil wasn’t like Harvey – as far as she could tell. He wasn’t controlling or dismissive of her career, but without any real discussion, it had somehow become understood that the girls would come first. It was the lack of discussion that bothered her more.

  ‘I’ll talk to him,’ she said.

  Anna thought about the bookshop all afternoon as she powered round the house, shoving laundry into drawers, books onto shelves, magazines into piles, and hoovering the spaces in between.

  She’d spent years daydreaming about her ideal bookshop – how she’d stock it, the quirky reps who’d nod at her interesting selections and gossip about new authors, the recommendation cards with unusual choices, the coffee always psch-psching in the background, the regular customers who’d come back and say, ‘Oh, Anna, this changed my life!’ And now it might be a reality she wasn’t really in a position to take it without causing disruption at home, just when things were calming down again.

  She shoved the hoover under Chloe’s dressing table, and her heart sank as she spotted something. All twelve of her present books were stacked in a corner, perilously close to the bin. Anna steeled herself and bent down to pick them up. So much for ‘Oh, Anna, this changed my life!’ She piled the scattered make-up back into the storage boxes she’d provided, put the books on the resulting space, and carried on tidying.