How to Find Love in a Book Shop (6 page)

‘It sounds a wonderful idea. Can I have a think and let you know?’

‘Of course.’ Emilia smiled, and Thomasina was struck by how like her father she was. She had his warmth, and his way of making you feel special.

She drifted back over to the cookery section, and spent a good half-hour browsing. She had narrowed it down to two books, and was holding them both, considering them, when a voice behind her made her jump.

‘The Anthony Bourdain, definitely. No contest.’

She turned, and felt her cheeks turn vermilion. She recognised the speaker, but struggled to place him. Had he been to A Deux? He was as tall and thin as she was short and round. She was mortified that she couldn’t recognise him, for she was certain she should.

‘It’s the best book about food I’ve ever read,’ her unknown observer went on. And then she remembered. He worked in the cheesemonger. She didn’t recognise him without his white hat and striped apron – he was in jeans and a jumper and she realised she had never seen his hair properly: it was curly and fair and he looked a bit like a cherub, with his cheeky baby face. She always bought her cheese from there – she always included a cheese course, with home-made oat biscuits and quince jelly and rhubarb chutney – and he had served her a couple of times, cutting little slivers of Comté or Taleggio or Gubbeen for her to try, depending on the theme of the meal she was cooking that night.

‘Sorry,’ he went on, and she saw his cheeks went as pink as her own. ‘I didn’t mean to interrupt you, but it’s one of my favourite books.’

‘I shall have it, then.’ She smiled, and put the other one back. ‘I didn’t recognise you at first.’

He pulled his curls back from his face and made the shape of a hat with his hands. She laughed. For some reason, she didn’t feel awkward. Yet she couldn’t think of a thing to say.

‘Do you like books, then?’ was all she could manage. How ridiculously lame.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But I couldn’t eat a whole one.’

She frowned, not sure what he meant.

‘It’s a joke,’ he said. ‘A bad one. It’s supposed to be
do you like children
?’

She looked at him blankly.

‘I love books,’ he clarified. ‘But I hardly ever have time to read. You have no idea how hectic the world of cheese can be.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t. But I think it must be fascinating. Have you always been in cheese?’

He looked at her. ‘Are you taking the mickey?’

‘No!’ she said, horrified that he might think so. ‘Not at all.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Only people do. They seem to find the idea of working in cheese hilarious. Whenever I go out, I just get cheese jokes.’

‘Cheese jokes? Are there any?’

‘What kind of cheese do you use to disguise a small horse?”

Thomasina shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Mascarpone. What type of cheese is made backwards?’

‘Um – I don’t know. Again.’

‘Edam.’

Thomasina couldn’t help laughing. ‘That’s terrible.’

‘I know. But I have to tell the jokes before anyone else does. Because I can’t bear it.’

She looked at him. ‘There must be a camembert joke in there somewhere.’

‘There is.’ He nodded gravely. ‘But let’s not go there. Anyway,’ he looked around the shelves, ‘I’ve come to get a present for my mum. She loves cookery books, but I think I’ve bought her just about every book in this shop. So I’m a bit stuck for ideas.’

‘Does she like novels?’

‘I think so …’ He wrinkled his nose in thought. ‘She’s always reading. I know that.’

Thomasina nodded.

‘You could get her a food-related novel. Like
Heartburn
. By Nora Ephron. It’s kind of funny but sad but with recipes. Or maybe
Chocolat
? You could get her a big box of chocolates from the chocolate shop to go with it.’ Thomasina was getting carried away. ‘If it was me, I’d love that.’

He looked at her, impressed. ‘
She’d
love that. You’re a genius.’ He looked around the shop. ‘Where do I find them?’

Thomasina led him over to the fiction shelves and found the books in question.

‘These two are keepers,’ she told him.

He looked puzzled.

‘You know, some books you lend or lose or give to a charity shop, but these are books for life. I’ve read
Heartburn
about seventeen times.’ She blushed, because she always blushed if she ever talked about herself. ‘Maybe I need to get out more.’

More? To misquote
Alice in Wonderland
, how could she go out
more
if she didn’t go out at all?

He patted her on the shoulder and she felt all fizzy inside. Fizzy and fuzzy.

‘Well, you’re a star and no mistake. I’ll see you in the shop?’

She smiled at him and wanted to say more, but she didn’t know what to say, so she just nodded, and he sauntered off to the counter and she realised she didn’t even know his name.

She watched him chatting to Emilia while he paid. He was so warm and friendly and open. And she realised something. He hadn’t made her feel shy and tongue-tied. She had almost felt like a normal person when she spoke to him. It had been easy. Yes, she’d gone pink, but she always went pink. It was just what she did.

The only other person who hadn’t made her feel self-conscious was Julius. Maybe it was the shop? Maybe there was something in the air that made her the person she wished she were? Someone who could actually hold a conversation.

She went to pay for her books and plucked up the courage to ask Emilia.

‘You don’t know what that bloke’s name is? The one I was just talking to? I know he works in the cheese shop.’

‘Jem?’ said Emilia. ‘Jem Gosling. He’s a sweetheart. He always used to bring my father the last of the Brie when it was running out of the door.’

Thomasina looked down at the counter. She couldn’t, she just couldn’t, ask if he had a girlfriend. She knew there were women, more brazen than she, who would be bold enough. But that just wasn’t the sort of person Thomasina was.

Emilia was looking at her. She looked knowing. But not in an unkind way.

‘As far as I know,’ she said casually, ‘he’s unattached. He had a girlfriend but she went off to Australia. He used to come and talk to my father about it, when she first left. But I think he’s probably over it.’

Thomasina felt flustered. She didn’t know what to say. She didn’t want to protest that she didn’t need to know any of that, because it would seem rude. But she was mortified that Emilia thought she was after Jem. She hoped Emilia wouldn’t say anything to him if she saw him, even in jest. The very thought made her feel ill. She changed the subject as quickly as she could, hoping Emilia would forget she’d ever mentioned him.

‘By the way, I’d love to do a reading,’ she found herself saying. ‘At the service.’

‘That’s wonderful,’ Emilia smiled. ‘If you can let me know what you’re going to read, I can put it into the order of service.’

Thomasina nodded, hot blood pounding in her ears. What on earth had she said that for? She couldn’t stand up and speak in public, in front of a full church. It was too late now, though. Emilia was writing her name down on a list. She couldn’t back out, not without looking disrespectful to Julius.

Feeling slightly sick, she paid for her book as quickly as she could and left.

Four

‘The Desprez à Fleur Jaune is going to have to come out. It’s just not thriving. It’ll break my heart. It’s been there ever since I can remember. But I don’t think there’s any hope.’

Sarah Basildon spoke about her rose as if it were a beloved animal she was having put down. Her fingers moved gently over the space on the planting plan taken up by the sick flower, as if she were stroking it better.

‘I’ll take it out for you,’ said Dillon. ‘You won’t have to know about it. And once it’s actually gone, perhaps you won’t notice.’

Sarah smiled a grateful smile. ‘Oh, I’ll know. But that’s good of you. I’m just too much of a wimp.’

Of course, Sarah was far from a wimp in reality. She was redoubtable, from her gumboots to her chambray denim eyes. Dillon Greene thought the world of her.

And she him. They were as close as could be, the aristocrat and the horny-handed son of toil, thirty years apart in age. They loved nothing better than sitting in the dankness of the garden room, drinking smoky builders’ tea and dunking custard creams. They could easily get through a packet in a morning as they put the world and the gardens to rights.

Sarah’s planting plans for the next year were spread on a trestle table in the middle of the room, the Latin names spidered all over the paper in her tiny black italics. Dillon knew the proper names as well as she did now – he’d been working with her at Peasebrook Manor since he left school.

As stately homes went, Peasebrook was small and intimate: a pleasingly symmetrical house of Palladian perfection, built of golden stone topped with a cupola, and set in two hundred acres of rolling farmland. When Dillon joined as a junior gardener in charge of mowing the lawns, he quickly became Sarah’s protégé. He wasn’t sure what it was she had recognised in him: the shy seventeen-year-old who hadn’t wanted to go off to university as his school had suggested, because no one else in his family ever had done. They’d all worked outdoors: their lives were rugged and ruled by the weather. Dillon felt comfortable in that environment. When he woke up, he looked at the sky, not the Internet. He never lay in bed of a morning. He was at work by half seven, come rain or shine, sleet or snow.

One teacher had tried to persuade him to go to horticultural college, at the very least, but he didn’t see the point of sitting in a classroom when he could learn hands-on. And Sarah was better than any college tutor. She grilled him, tested him, taught him, demonstrated things to him, and then made him show her how it was done. She gave praise where it was due and her criticism was always constructive. She was brisk and always knew exactly what she wanted, so Dillon always knew exactly where
he
was. It suited him down to the rich, red clay on the ground.

‘You really have got green fingers,’ she told him with admiration and increasing frequency. He had a gut feeling for what went with what, for which plants would flourish and bloom together. To supplement his innate ability, he plundered her library and she never minded him taking the books home – Gertrude Jekyll, Vita Sackville-West, Capability Brown, Bunny Williams, Christopher Lloyd – and he didn’t just look at the pictures. He pored over the words describing their inspiration, their visions, the problems they faced, the solutions they came up with.

Dillon, Sarah realised one day, knew much more than she did. More often than not these days he questioned her planting plans, suggesting some other combination when redesigning a bed or coming up with a concept for a new one. He would suggest a curve rather than a straight line; a bank of solid colour instead of a rainbow drift; a bed that was conceived for its smell rather than its look. And he used things he found around the estate as features: an old sundial, an ancient gardening implement, a bench he would spend hours restoring. It was reclamation at its best.

Her greatest fear was losing him. There was every chance he would be headhunted by some other country house because the gardens at Peasebrook Manor had become increasingly popular over the past few years. There were three formal rose gardens, a cutting garden and a walled kitchen garden, a maze and a miniature lake with an island and a ruined temple for visitors to wander around. There had been a flurry of articles in magazines, many of them featuring pictures of Dillon at work, for there was no doubt he was easy on the eye. More than once her own heart had stopped for a moment when she’d rounded a corner and seen him in his combat shorts and big boots, his muscles coiling as he dug over a bed. He’d be television gold.

She would do anything in her power to keep him. She couldn’t imagine life at Peasebrook without him now. But there was a limit to how much she could afford to pay him. Times were hard. It was always a struggle to balance the books, despite all their best efforts.

But today, at least the stress took her mind off her grief. Her secret grief. She’d had to put her heart in a straitjacket and she’d hidden her heartbreak well. She didn’t think anyone was any the wiser about how she was feeling or what she had been through.

Six months, if you counted it from the beginning. It had ripped through him, devoured him with an indecent speed and she could do nothing. They had snatched as much time together as they could but—

She shut off her mind. She wasn’t going to remember or go back over it. Thank God for the gardens, she thought, day after day. She had no choice but to think about them. They needed constant attention. You simply couldn’t take a day off. Without that momentum she would have gone under weeks ago.

‘What about the folly?’ asked Dillon, and Sarah looked at him sharply.

‘The folly?’

‘It needs something doing to it. Doing up or pulling down. It could make a great feature but—’

‘We’ll leave it for now.’ Sarah used her ‘
don’t bring up the subject again’
voice. ‘That’s a long-term project and we don’t have the budget.’

He looked at her and she held his gaze, praying he wouldn’t push it. Did he know? Is that why he’d brought it up? She had to be careful, because he was perspicacious. More than perspicacious. He almost had a sixth sense. It was one of the things she liked about him. Sensitive wasn’t quite the right word, she thought. Intuitive, maybe? He’d once told her his grandmother had ‘the gift’. That kind of thing could be hereditary. If you believed in it. Sarah didn’t know if she did, but either way she wasn’t going to give anything away at this point.

He was right, though. The folly did need attention. It was on the outer edge of the estate, high on a hill behind a patch of woodland. An octagon made of crumbling ginger stone, it was straight out of a fairy tale, smothered in ivy and cobwebs. It had been neglected for years. Inside, the plaster was falling off the walls, the floorboards were rotten and the glass doors were coming off their hinges. There was just an old sofa, steeped in damp and mildew. Sarah could smell it now, its comforting mustiness mixed with the scent of his skin. She’d never minded the insalubrious surroundings. To her, it could have easily been the George V or the Savoy.

She didn’t want anyone else going in there.

‘Let’s just shut off the path to the folly for the time being,’ she told Dillon.

She thought of all the times she had been along it, the tiny woodland path that led up the hill to their meeting place. He would park his car in the gateway on the back road, behind a tumbledown shed. The road was barely used except by the odd farmer, so with luck no one had ever noticed. Although sometimes drunk drivers used it as a rat run from the pub, and it only took one person to put two and two together …

She couldn’t worry about it. It was almost irrelevant now, and certainly no one could prove anything. She tried to put it out of her mind and concentrate on the wedding instead. As the mother of the bride, it should be her priority. But it seemed to be organising itself. There didn’t seem to be the usual hysteria that accompanied most weddings. They had plenty of experience, after all: Peasebrook Manor had had a wedding licence for some years, and it was one of the things that had filled the gaping coffers, so when it came to organising a wedding for one of their own, they were well prepared. And Alice wasn’t a highly strung, demanding bride-to-be. Far from it. As far as Alice was concerned, as long as everyone she loved was there, and there was enough champagne and cake, it would be a perfect day.

‘I don’t want fuss and wedding favours, Mum. You know I hate all that. It’s perfect to be getting married at home, with everyone here. What can go wrong? We can do this with our eyes shut.’

Alice. The apple of her eye. Alice, who treated life like one long Pony Club camp, but with cocktails. Alice, whose sparkle drew everyone to her and whose smile never seemed to fade. Sarah could not have been more proud of her daughter, and her need to protect her was primal. Though Alice was quite able to look after herself. She was charmed. She strode through life, plumply luscious, in her uniform of too-tight polo shirt, jeans and Dubarrys, her flaxen hair loose and wild, face free from make-up, always slightly pink in her rush to get from one thing to the next.

There had been a couple of years of worry (as if she’d needed more worry!), when Alice had gone off to agricultural college to do estate management – she was, after all, the heir to Peasebrook Manor, so it seemed logical, but she failed, spectacularly, two years running. She had never been academic, and the course seemed beyond her. Of course there was too much partying going on, but the other students seemed to manage.

So Alice came home, and was put to work, and it suddenly became abundantly clear that running Peasebrook Manor was what she had been put on earth to do. She had vision and energy and a gut feeling for what would work and what the public wanted. Somehow the locals felt included in Peasebrook Manor, as if it were theirs. She had been the mastermind behind converting the coach house in the middle of the stable yard into a gift shop selling beautiful things you didn’t need but somehow desperately wanted, and a tea room which sold legendary fruit scones the size of your fist. And she was brilliant at orchestrating events. In the last year there’d been open-air opera, Easter Egg hunts, and a posh car boot sale. She was thinking of running children’s camps the following year: Glastonbury meets Enid Blyton.

And the most exciting upcoming event, of course, was Alice’s own wedding, to be held at the end of November. She couldn’t have a summer wedding, because they were too busy holding them for other people.

‘Anyway,’ said Alice, with typical optimism. ‘I’d much prefer a winter wedding. Everything all frosty and glittery. Lots of ivy and lots of candles.’

She was to marry Hugh Pettifer, a handsome hedge fund manager who set hearts a-flutter when he raced through the lanes in his white supercharged sports car, bounding from polo match to point-to-point.

If Sarah had her doubts about Hugh, she never voiced them. He was perfect on paper. And utterly charming. She supposed it was her maternal need to protect Alice that made her wary. She had no evidence that Hugh was anything other than devoted. His manners were faultless, he mucked in at family events, he was thoughtful, and if he partied hard, then all Alice’s crowd did. They were young and beautiful and wealthy – why shouldn’t they have fun? And Hugh worked hard. He earned good money. He wasn’t a freeloader. And anyway, if he was looking for a meal ticket, he wouldn’t get one from the Basildons. They were classic asset rich/cash poor. If anything, they needed him more than he needed them.

So Sarah kept any doubts about Hugh to herself. She had to learn to let go. It was time to hand Alice over. She would still be very much part of life at Peasebrook Manor – it would fall apart without her – but she was a woman in her own right. And Sarah wasn’t gold-digging on Alice’s behalf. It would be nice for her to have a husband who could support her when the time came for her to have children. Sarah was in no doubt of her daughter’s capabilities, but she knew how deep the pressures dug. And nobody could deny that money didn’t make things easier, especially when it came to motherhood.

‘I’ll put a gate up, shall I?’

Dillon’s voice startled Sarah and dragged her back to the matter in hand.

‘Yes. And put a lock on it for the time being. I don’t think the folly’s safe. We don’t want anyone getting injured.’

Dillon nodded. But he was eyeing her with interest. Sarah started to doodle on the edge of one of the planting plans. She couldn’t quite look at him. He knows, she thought. How she wished she could talk to someone about it, but she knew the importance of keeping secrets. And if you couldn’t keep your own secret, how on earth could you trust someone else to keep it?

‘Right.’ Dillon stood up. ‘I better get on. It’s starting to get dark early. The days are getting shorter.’

‘Yes.’ Sarah couldn’t decide which was worse. The days or the nights. She could fill her days with things to do but she had to pretend to everybody, from Ralph and Alice down to the postman, that nothing was wrong, and that was wearing. At night she could stop; she didn’t need to pretend any more and she could sleep. But her sleep was troubled and she couldn’t control her dreams. He would appear, and she would wake, her face wet with tears, trying not to sob. Trying not to wake Ralph because what could she say? How could she explain her distress?

She sighed, and took another custard cream. Her brain had no respite these days. Everything whirled around in her head, day and night; a washing machine filled with thoughts, fears, worries that seemed to have no answer.

And she missed him. God, she missed him.

She picked up their used mugs and took them back to the kitchen. On the kitchen table was a copy of the
Peasebrook Advertiser
. Ralph must have been reading it, or one of the staff. Sarah kept her kitchen open to the people who worked for her, because she felt it was important for them to feel part of the family. The kitchen was enormous and there was a back door out into the courtyard so they didn’t have to traipse through the rest of the house, and there were just less than a dozen full-timers working in the estate office and the tea room and the shop, and in the grounds. They were usually all gone by five o’clock so it wasn’t too much of an imposition, and she was convinced it was an advantage.