The Bookshop (3 page)

Milo looked at her more closely.

‘Are you sure you’re well advised to undertake the running of a business?’ he asked.

‘I’ve never met you before, Mr North, but I’ve felt that because of your work you might welcome a bookshop in Hardborough. You must meet writers at the BBC, and thinkers, and so forth. I expect they come down here sometimes to see you, and to get some fresh air.’

‘If they did I shouldn’t quite know what to do with them. Writers will go anywhere, I’m not sure about thinkers. Kattie would look after them, I expect, though.’

Kattie must certainly be the dark girl in red stockings – or perhaps they were tights, which were now obtainable in Lowestoft and Flintmarket, though not in
Hardborough – who lived with Milo North. They were the only unmarried couple living together in the town. But Kattie, who was also known to work for the BBC, only came down three nights a week, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, which was thought to make it a little more respectable.

‘It’s a pity that Kattie couldn’t be here tonight.’

‘But it’s Wednesday!’ Mrs Green exclaimed, in spite of herself.

‘I didn’t say she wasn’t down here, only that it was a pity that she couldn’t come. She couldn’t come because I didn’t bring her. I thought it might cause more trouble than it was worth.’

Mrs Green thought that he ought to have had the courage of his convictions. Her notion was of a young couple defying the world. She herself was older, and had the right to anxiety.

‘At any rate, you must come to my shop,’ she said. ‘I shall rely on you.’

‘On no account,’ Milo replied.

He took her by both elbows, the lightest possible touch, and shook her by way of emphasis.

‘Why are you wearing red this evening?’ he asked.

‘It isn’t red! It’s garnet, or deep rust!’

Mrs Violet Gamart, the natural patroness of all public activities in Hardborough, came towards them. Although her back had been turned, she had noticed the shake but
felt that it was suggestive of the freedom of the arts and therefore not out of place in her drawing-room. The moment, however, had come for her to have a few words with Mrs Green. She explained that she had been attempting to do this all evening, but had been repeatedly spirited away. So many people seemed to have come, but most of them she could see at any time. What she really wanted to say was how grateful everyone must feel about this new venture, such foresight and enterprise.

Mrs Gamart spoke with a kind of generous urgency. She had dark bright eyes which appeared to be kept open, as though by some mechanism, to their widest extent.

‘Bruno! Have you been introduced to my husband? Come and tell Mrs – Mrs – how delighted we all are.’

Florence felt a muddled sense of vocation, as though she would willingly devote her life to the service of Mrs Gamart.

‘Bruno!’

The General had been trying to call attention to an abrasion on his hand, caused by the twisted wire on one of the champagne corks. He went up to every group of guests in turn, hoping to raise a smile by referring to himself as walking wounded.

‘We’ve all been praying for a good bookshop in Hardborough, haven’t we, Bruno?’

Glad to be summoned, he halted towards her.

‘Of course, my dear, no harm in praying. Probably be a good thing if we all did more of it.’

‘There’s only one point, Mrs Green, a small one in a way – you haven’t actually moved into the Old House yet, have you?’

‘Yes, I’ve been there for more than a week.’

‘Oh, but there’s no water.’

‘Sam Wilkins connected the pipes for me.’

‘Don’t forget, Violet,’ the General said anxiously, ‘that you’ve been up in London a good deal lately, and haven’t been able to keep an eye on everything.’

‘Why shouldn’t I have moved in?’ Florence asked, as lightly as she could manage.

‘You mustn’t laugh at me, but I’m fortunate enough to have a kind of gift, or perhaps it’s an instinct, of fitting people and places together. For instance, only just recently – only I’m afraid it wouldn’t mean very much to you if you don’t know the two houses I’m talking about –’

‘Perhaps you could tell me which ones you’re thinking of,’ said the General, ‘and then I could explain it all slowly to Mrs Green.’

‘Anyway, to return to the Old House – that’s exactly the sort of thing I mean. I believe I might be able to save you a great deal of disappointment, and even perhaps a certain amount of expense. In fact, I want to help you, and that’s my excuse for saying all this.’

‘I am sure no excuse is needed,’ said Florence.

‘There are so many more suitable premises in Hardborough, so much more convenient in every way for a bookshop. Did you know, for example, that Deben is closing down?’

Certainly she knew that Deben’s wet fish shop was about to close. Everybody in the town knew when there were likely to be vacant premises, who was in financial straits, who would need larger family accommodation in nine months, and who was about to die.

‘We’ve been so used, I’m afraid, to the Old House standing empty that we’ve delayed from year to year – you’ve quite put us to shame by being in such a hurry, Mrs Green – but the fact is that we’re rather upset by the sudden transformation of our Old House into a shop – so many of us have the idea of converting it into some kind of centre – I mean an arts centre – for Hardborough.’

The General was listening with strained attention.

‘Might pray for that too, you know, Violet.’

‘… chamber music in summer – we can’t leave it all to Aldeburgh – lecturers in winter …’

‘We have lectures already,’ said Florence. ‘The Vicar’s series on Picturesque Suffolk only comes round again every three years.’ They were delightful evenings, for there was no need to listen closely, and in front of the slumberous rows the coloured slides followed each other in no sort of order, disobedient to the Vicar’s voice.

‘We should have to be a good deal more ambitious, particularly with the summer visitors who may come from some distance away. And there is simply no other old house that would give the right ambience. Do, won’t you, think it over?’

‘I’ve been negotiating this sale for more than six months, and I can’t believe that everyone in Hardborough didn’t know about it. In fact, I’m sure they did.’ She looked for confirmation to the General, who stared fixedly away at the empty sandwich plates.

‘And of course,’ Mrs Gamart went on, with even more marked emphasis, ‘one great advantage, which it seems almost wrong to throw away, is that now we have exactly the right person to take charge. I mean to take charge of the centre, and put us all right about books and pictures and music, and encourage things, and get things off the ground, and keep things going, and see they’re on the right lines.’

She gave Mrs Green a smile of unmistakable meaning and radiance. The moment of confusing intimacy had returned, even though Mrs Gamart, in the course of her last sentence, had withdrawn, with encouraging nods and gestures, into her protective horde of guests.

Florence, left quite alone, went out to the small room off the hall to begin the search for her coat. While she looked methodically through the piles, she reflected that, after all, she was not too old to do two jobs, perhaps get
a manager for the bookshop, while she herself would have to take some sort of course in art history and music appreciation – music was always appreciated, whereas art had a history – that, she supposed, would mean journeys over to Cambridge.

Outside it was a clear night and she could see across the marshes to the Laze, marked by the riding lights of the fishing boats, waiting for the low tide. But it was cold, and the air stung her face.

‘It was very good of them to ask me,’ she thought. ‘I daresay they found me a bit awkward to talk to.’

As soon as she had gone, the groups of guests reformed themselves, as the cattle had done when Raven took the old horse aside. Now they were all of the same kind, facing one way, grazing together. Between themselves they could arrange many matters, though what they arranged was quite often a matter of chance. As the time drew on for thinking about going home, Mrs Gamart was still a little disturbed as what seemed a check in her scheme for the Old House. This Mrs Green, though unobtrusive enough, had not quite agreed to everything on the spot. It was not of much importance. But a little more champagne, given her by Milo, caused her mind to revolve in its giddy uppermost circle, and to her cousin’s second husband, who was something to do with the Arts Council, and to her own cousin once removed, who was soon going to be high up in the Directorate of Planning,
and to her brilliant nephew who sat for the Longwash Division of West Suffolk and had already made his name as the persevering secretary of the Society for Providing Public Access to Places of Interest and Beauty, and to Lord Gosfield who had ventured over from his stagnant castle in the Fens because if foot-and-mouth broke out again he wouldn’t be able to come for months, she spoke of the Hardborough Centre for Music and the Arts. And in the minds of her brilliant nephew, cousin, and so on, a faint resolution formed that something might have to be done, or Violet might become rather a nuisance. Even Lord Gosfield was touched, though he had said nothing all evening, and had in fact driven the hundred odd miles expressly to say nothing in the company of his old friend Bruno. They were all kind to their hostess, because it made life easier.

It was time to be gone. They were not sure where they or their wives had put the car keys. They lingered at the front door saying that they must not let in the cold air, while the General’s old dog, which lived in single-minded expectation of the door opening, thumped its tail feebly on the shining floor; then their cars would not start and the prospect of some of them returning to stay the night grew perilously close; then the last spark ignited and they roared away, calling and waving, and the marsh wind could be heard again in the silence that followed.

T
HE
next morning Florence prepared herself a herring – there was not much point in living in East Suffolk if one didn’t know how to do this – two slices of bread and butter, and a pot of tea. Her cooker was in the backhouse. This was the most companionable room in the Old House, white-washed, with not much noise beyond the sighing of the old bricked-up well in the floor. Previous residents had counted themselves lucky that they did not have to go outdoors to pump, luckier still when the great buff-glazed sink, deep as a sarcophagus, was installed. A brass tap, proudly flared, discharged ice-cold water from a great height.

At eight o’clock she unplugged her electric kettle and plugged in her radio set, which immediately began to speak of trouble in Cyprus and Nyasaland and then told her, with a slight change of intonation, that the expectation of life was now 68.1 years for males and 73.9 years for females, as opposed to 45.8 for males and 52.4 for females at the beginning of the century. She tried to feel that this was encouraging. But the Warning To Shipping
– North Sea, wind cyclonic variable strong becoming NE strong or gale sea rough or very rough – moved her to shame. She was ashamed of sitting in her backhouse and of her herring from the deep, and of the uselessness of feeling ashamed. Through her east-facing window she could see the storm warning hauled up over the Coastguards against a sky that was pale yellowish green.

By mid-day it was clear. The sky brightened from one horizon to the other, and the high white cloud was reflected in mile after mile of shining dyke water, so that the marshes seemed to stand between cloud and cloud. After her morning errands she took a short-cut back across the common. The Primary School were having their second play out. Boys separated from girls, except for the top class, coming up to their eleven plus, who circled round each other. Entirely alone, a small child stood howling. It had been well sent out, with a scarf crossed over the chest and secured behind with a safety-pin, and woollen gloves fastened to a length of elastic passed round under the coat collar. Patently it was a Mixed Infant, unqualified to mingle with either boys or girls. She attempted to calm it.

‘You’re from the Infants, you oughtn’t to be playing out now. Are you lost? What’s your name?’

‘Melody Gipping.’

Florence took out a clean handkerchief and blew
Melody’s nose. A waif-like figure, with hair as fine as dry grass, detached itself from the Girls.

‘That’s all right, miss. I’m Christine Gipping, I’ll take her. We’ve got Kleenex at ours – they’re more hygienic.’

The two of them strayed back together. The Boys were shooting each other dead, the Girls bounced old tennis balls, forming a wide ring, and sang.

One, two, Pepsi-Cola,

Three, four, Casanova,

Five, six, hair in rollers,

Seven, eight, roll her over,

Nine, ten, do it again.

Florence looked southwards, where the horizon was bounded by a dark stretch of pine woods. That was the Heronry, but in 1953, when the sea had drowned the woodlands in salt, the herons had flown away and no longer nested there.

At the kissing-gate which led off the common, she saw approaching her, stalking her almost, with the sideways look of the failed tradesman, Mr Deben from the wet fish shop. He must have followed her up there, indeed he as good as admitted it.

‘It’s about my place, Mrs Green. It’s going up for auction, but that won’t be till April, or it might be later still. I’d very much prefer to come to terms privately
before that. Now, as you’ve expressed an interest in the property –’ He did not pause long enough for her to say that she had done nothing of the kind, but hurried on: ‘If you’re not going to remain at the Old House, and if you’re not leaving the district altogether – you’ll appreciate I’m too busy to pay attention to all the rumours I hear – well then, it stands to reason you’ll have to make an offer for another place.’

He must be distracted by his business worries, she thought. He had come straight out of his shop with his fishmonger’s straw hat still on his head, and a dreadful old suit of overalls. Meanwhile his sly and muddled discourse had brought an idea to her mind, sudden but not strange, for she recognized it immediately as the truth. It was the truth in the form of a warning, for which she must be thankful.

‘There has been a misunderstanding, Mr Deben. But that doesn’t matter in the least, and I should like to help you. Mrs Gamart was kind enough to tell me about her scheme for an arts centre – which would, I’m sure, benefit every one of us here in Hardborough. She is, I believe, looking about for premises, and what could be better than a vacant wet fish shop?’

Without giving herself time for reflection, she left the common by the kissing-gate, which stuck awkwardly, as usual, while she and Deben exchanged politenesses, crossed the High Street, turned right by the Corn and
Seed Merchant’s, and right again for Nelson Cottage. Milo North could be seen through the downstairs window, sitting at a table with a patchwork cloth, and doing absolutely nothing.

‘Why aren’t you up in London?’ she asked, rapping on the pane. She felt mildly irritated by the unpredictability of his daily life.

‘I’ve sent Kattie to work this morning. Do come in.’

Milo opened the tiny front door. He was much too tall for the house, which was tarred and painted black, like the fishermen’s huts.

‘Perhaps you’d like some Nescafé?’

‘I have never had any,’ she said. ‘I have heard of it. I’m told it’s not prepared with boiling water.’ She sat down in a delicate bentwood rocking-chair. ‘These things are all much too small for you,’ she said.

‘I know, I know. I’m glad you came this morning. Nobody else ever makes me face the truth.’

‘That’s fortunate, because I came to ask you a question. When Mrs Gamart was talking at her party about the ideal person to run an arts centre, it was you, of course, wasn’t it, that she had in mind?’

‘Violet’s party?’

‘She expected me to move out – probably, in fact, to move somewhere else altogether – with the understanding that you would come to the Old House to manage everything?’

Milo gazed at her with limpid grey eyes. ‘If she meant me, I don’t think she could have used the word “manage”.’

Florence accused herself of vanity, self-deception, and wilful misconstruction. She was a tradeswoman: why should anyone expect her to have anything to do with the arts? Curiously enough, for the next few days she was on the verge of offering to leave the Old House. The suspicion that she was clinging on simply because her vanity had been wounded was unbearable. – Of course, Mrs Gamart, whom I shall never speak of or refer to as Violet, it was Milo North you had in mind. Instal him immediately. My little book business can be fitted in anywhere. I only ask you not to allow the conventions to be defied too rapidly – East Suffolk isn’t used to it. Kattie will have to live, for the first few years at least, in the oyster warehouse.

In calmer moments she reflected that if Mrs Gamart and her supporters could extract some kind of Government grant and could afford to pay her price for the freehold, plus moving expenses and a fair profit, she would be open to new opportunities, perhaps not in Suffolk, or even in England, and with that precious sense of beginning again which she could not expect too often at her age. No doubt it was absurd to imagine that she was being driven out, and that the hand of privilege was impelling her to Deben’s wet fish shop.

She blinded herself, in short, by pretending for a while that human beings are not divided into exterminators and exterminatees, with the former, at any given moment, predominating. Will-power is useless without a sense of direction. Hers was at such a low ebb that it no longer gave her the instructions for survival.

It revived, however, without any effort on her part, and within the space of ten minutes on a Tuesday morning at the end of March. The weather was curious, and reminded her of the day she saw the flying heron trying to swallow the eel. While the washing on the lines was blowing to the west with the inshore breeze, the pumping mill on the marshes had caught the land breeze and was turning east. The rooks circled in the warring currents of the air. She left her little car in the garage next to the Coastguards, which was as near as she could manage to the Old House, and took the short lane or passageway from the foreshore which led to her backhouse door.

The passage was very narrow, and in a hard blow the little brick-and-tile houses seemed to cling to each other, as the saying went, like a sailor’s child. Her back door had to be opened carefully, or the draught blew out the pilot light in the cooker. She turned the key in the mortice lock, but the door would not open.

She wasted only a moment’s thought on stiff hinges, warped wood, and so on. The hostile force, pushing against her push, came and went, always a little ahead
of her, with the shrewdness of the insane. The quivering door waited for her to try again. From inside the backhouse came a burst of tapping. It did not sound like one thing hitting another, more like a series of tiny explosions. Then, as she leaned against her door, trying to recover her breath, it suddenly collapsed violently, swinging to and fro, like a hand clapping a comic spectacle, as she fell inwards on to the brick floor on her knees.

Everyone in Score Lane must have seen her pitch head foremost into her own kitchen. But stronger than the embarrassment, fear and pain was the sense of injustice. The rapper was a familiar of the bathroom and the upstairs passage. In the backhouse she had never heard or seen any signs of malignancy. There are unspoken agreements even with the metaphysical, and the rapper had overstepped them. Her will-power, which she felt as indignation, rose to meet the injury. The Unseen, as the girls had always called it at Müller’s, could mind its own business no better than the Seen. Neither of them would prevent her from opening a bookshop.

In consequence, Mr Thornton was instructed to finalize the business as soon as possible, which meant that he proceeded at the same pace as before. Thornton & Co had been established for many years. The court work might be largely left to Drury, the solicitor who. wasn’t Thornton, but Thornton was reliable through and through. He had heard, of course, that his client had
been seen falling about the street, holding a horse’s head for that old scoundrel Raven, and calling on Milo North, of whom Thornton disapproved. On the other hand, she had been asked to a party at The Stead, where he himself had never been invited, although he still hoped that the Gamarts would see sense one day and transfer their affairs from Drury, who was simply not up to handling important family business. Well, so Mrs Green knew the Gamarts. But even about that, he believed, there were reservations.

Taking out his file on the Old House, he explained that there was some little difficulty about the oyster warehouse. It could be upheld that the fishing community, by right immemorial, were entitled to walk straight through it on their way to the shore, and possibly to dry their sails in the loft.

‘You don’t get to the shore if you walk through the warehouse,’ she pointed out. ‘You get to the gasmanager’s office. Nothing can be dried there anyway – the walls are running with condensation. The loft has fallen to pieces, and none of the longshore fishermen go out under sail. Surely that question won’t take long to settle.’

The solicitor explained that rights were in no way affected by the impossibility of putting them into practice. Conveyancing, he added, was not as simple as the general public imagined. ‘I’m pleased that you called in today,
as a matter of fact, Mrs Green. Something that I heard, quite by chance, made me wonder whether you were thinking better of the whole transaction.’ He appeared to be trembling with curiosity.

‘By thinking better you mean thinking worse, of course,’ she said.

‘Having second thoughts, dear lady. It’s always sad to think of losing a member of a small community like Hardborough, but if there are greater opportunities elsewhere, one can only applaud and understand.’

‘You mean you thought I might want to change my mind and go somewhere else?’ She wished that she could grow much taller, if only for half an hour, so that she could look down, rather than up, during interviews like these. ‘You mean you thought I wanted to get out of the Old House – which, by the way, is my only home – while you’re still dithering about the fishermen’s right of way?’

‘There are many other empty properties in Hardborough, and, as it happens, I have a list of some other ones farther afield – Flintmarket, and even Ipswich. I don’t know whether you’ve considered …’

It was May, and flocks of terns had arrived, rising and falling with every wingbeat, and settling by the hundred on the sandy patches towards the shore. The stock from Müller’s came down in two Carter Paterson vans,
followed a week later by orders from the book wholesalers. For the rest, for the new titles, she would have to wait for the salesmen, if they would venture so far across the marshes to a completely unknown point of sale. Since the warehouse had proved unusable, everything had to be piled into the spacious cupboard under the stairs while Florence pondered the arrangement.

She drove back one morning from Flintmarket to find the premises full of twelve- and thirteen-year-old boys in blue jerseys. They were Sea Scouts, they told her.

‘How did you get in?’

‘Mr Raven got the key from the plumber,’ said one of the children, square and reliable as a straw-bale.

‘He’s not your skipper, is he?’