The Bookstore (49 page)

“George gave him a hundred dollars for that book,” I say. Luke shrugs.

“George is a good man,” says DeeMo.

We are all quiet. Georgie is struggling against sleep in DeeMo’s arms. She is milk-drunk. A milk-drunk baby is a sight to see. We all watch her as she struggles to stay awake, and her eyelids fall, flutter open, fall again. I wonder if she can tell it is not me, that the arms around her are not my arms.

“I’ll have her back, if you’re not comfortable?”

DeeMo looks back at me. He must be remembering the hand sanitizer, my anxiety.

“I’m comfortable,” he says. “You okay?”

I am. I look out again at the street. The rain is falling. This is the way to go, through the good people, through George, and Luke, Stella, Barney, the mackerel man, DeeMo.

I watch Luke as he shifts a little in his chair to get more comfortable, until it fits his back. I’ve seen him do it a thousand times, now, settling down into a space and getting comfortable in it. He catches me looking as he does it, and gives me a funny little frown at my recognition. This moment feels like an abiding one; the past and the future are contained inside it, and it feels like a homecoming. As if all comes to this and the future unfurls from this.

Georgie is asleep, and we sit without speaking. We did this in the winter, Luke and I, drinking beers at night when it was raining. Before Georgie, before anything. We are listening to the music, as we did then, and looking out again from our glowing little jewel of a shop to the drenching summer rain, which washes all things new.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I
wish first to thank Phil Meyler, who gave to this book countless days of kind scrutiny, and next to thank Isobel, Katie and Hero Meyler, who have graciously put up with many an hour of benevolent neglect. I am very grateful to Linda Yeatman, for her discerning rigor and warm encouragement. Many thanks to Siobhan Garrigan, whose good offices helped me to an agent, and to those who have read this book and/or helped to make writing a less lonely occupation: Anna King, Allen Michie, Dan Pool, Sinead Garrigan-Mattar, Angela Tilby, Charlie Mattar, Chris Scanlan, Ian Patterson, Anne Malcolm, Martin Bond, Harry Percival, Ray Franks, Debbie Ford, Phillip Mallett, Christine McCrum, Meg Tait, Dorian Thornley, Simone Brenneis, Mary Steel, Tara O’Connor, Miranda Landgraf, David Theaker, Bruce Eder, Jo Wroe, Graham Pechey, Charlotte Tarrant, Leila Vignal, Alexis Tadié and Anthony Mellors. Thanks too to Dorian and Bryan of Westsider Books, whose bookshop on Broadway and 80th Street bears absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to The Owl, living or dead. . . .

I am grateful to Father Joel Daniels at St. Thomas Church, Fifth Avenue; to David Ford for facilitating the visit; to the librarians
at the Avery Library, Columbia; to the Arts Council for a grant to work with Jill Dawson at Gold Dust. Thanks to Dorian for giving up his bedroom when I come to New York, and to Henry Holman for his booklore and friendship.

Special thanks are due to Nick Barraclough and Tony Goryn for all the Wednesdays, and to those people whose generous encouragement, sometimes just given in passing, nevertheless made an enormous difference to me, including John Shuttleworth, the late Jeremy Maule, Veronica Horwell, Geraldine Higgins, Dino Valaoritis and Robert Warner.

I want to express my gratitude also to my warm and wise agent Eleanor Jackson, and to Julia Kenny, for all their hard work and impressive results, and thanks to Jonathan Sissons for letting me write in his attic and bringing tea and biscuits to me at regular intervals. Warm thanks to Emilia Pisani, my editor at Simon & Schuster, who is not only insightful and incisive but whose exclamation marks at the funny bits have cheered me up any number of times.

Finally my deep thanks to Andrew Zurcher, whose close reading of all texts continues to be of inestimable value; thanks and love always to my mother, Jean McLauchlan, my sister, Fiona McLauchlan-Hyde, and some more love to those daughters again.

ALLERY READERS GROUP GUIDE

The

Bookstore

According to your author biography, you worked in a bookstore in New York City for six years. How did that experience inform
The Bookstore?

The whole book is infused with that experience, especially with the sense of place, with New York. Unfortunately, I have a terrible memory, so I have to make things up—or, as some people phrase it, write fiction.

I think so many of us let events and funny moments slip through our memories into oblivion, like jewels into the dirt. I always mean to keep a journal and never do. My solace is that perhaps the memories really do merge over time to make something else, something new.

I worked in two independent bookstores in New York, one on Broadway and one on 57th Street, but it was really the shop on Broadway that captured my heart, as you can perhaps see from the book. I can remember only two phone numbers without difficulty: my own from childhood, and the number of that store.

As an Englishwoman living in New York, readers might assume that you experienced some of Esme’s sense of being the stranger in a strange land. Is this accurate? Does Esme share any other characteristics with you?

I think when people first come to New York they often experience a very strong sense of recognition, because we’ve all seen the movies and the TV shows and the photographs. We look for the landmarks and the clichés that we expect, and there they all are. There is the Chrysler Building, glinting, and there are all the yellow cabs surfing the green lights. We all feel as if it is
our
city. But that recognition proves—not untrustworthy, exactly, but to some extent a mistake. It is a different culture, and there are rules that you have to learn; you are, at first, a stranger. It takes time to adjust to the reality rather than the image.

For my own part, I was homesick and uneasy at the beginning. My Englishness didn’t seem to work in New York. I found it hard at first; perhaps I was obscurely annoyed with myself for choosing somewhere so obvious, so iconic, so much of a cliché if a person were thinking of reinventing herself. I resisted it. But it is hard to imagine, now, like looking at someone you love and trying to remember how you felt about them before the love came.

Perhaps one of my favorite quotations, from Robert MacNeil, sums up what happens very well. He says: “There is a moment when all that is manifestly ugly, noisy and expensive can suddenly appear beautiful, civilized and desirable. The moment New York plays that trick of vision on you, it’s impossible to go back through the looking-glass again. The city has made you a New Yorker.”

As for shared characteristics: I have to admit that I gave Esme some characteristics that I wanted myself. For example, I made
her tidy. If I can’t be tidy, I can at least invent someone who is. I enjoyed making her want to clean things in moments of stress. And I think fundamentally I share a sense of gratitude with Esme, or she shares it with me. I wanted to imbue her with that. You can’t be truly miserable if you’re grateful for something.

Now that you have returned to your native country, do you miss anything about New York? Do you ever return or plan to return?

I miss the beauty of it. It is unbelievably beautiful, exciting, full of great abstract fields of color. I miss the surging energy of it, which you can mistake for your own energy. I miss the cheese danishes. I miss how ridiculously intense the seasons are in New York, where it rains harder and snows more and the sun shines more brightly. The light really does feel different from English light—it
is
sharper, more lucid. Esme and I feel much the same on that point. I love walking in New York, and I hate walking anywhere else. I miss the intimacy of New York, the huddle of it, the expansiveness of it—how long have you got?

I do try to come back once a year, and I would love to be able to afford to live here part of the year. And retiring here seems like a good idea to me. Retiring to New York—you know, to get away from it all.

In today’s economy, many small, independent bookstores are closing their doors, yet some endure, as The Owl does in the story. How do you see the bookstore format evolving in the future?

I take heart from the fact that radios are still around, decades after the internet juggernauted into our lives. I think bookshops will last in some form or other, too. There might even be a resurgence of them. I know this is largely wishful thinking. However, my children, who like other children spend a lot of time on the computer, still like to switch off from all of that and find a corner, and read a real book. And so do I. I read some things electronically, but the feeling of being unassailable by the outside world when
we are reading real books is a powerful one. The sentimental or fashionable nostalgia for “vintage” things and experiences is one thing, but there is also a new push, an appetite, to carve out spaces free from digital, electronic, radio-fuelled connectivity. Sometimes people need to be quiet. I think that the best way for that might still be to read a real old-fashioned book, but that we are only just beginning to realize that, too late for some bookshops. But others will pop up.

You include candid sex scenes in the story. Were there any particular challenges to writing these?

I am not sure they are tremendously candid compared to some things that are out there. The bar is pretty high, in a low sort of way, these days. But I did read the first couple of chapters aloud to my mother when I was writing it. She sat quietly on the sofa when I had finished reading it, and she said, “Do you
have
an electric toothbrush?” I said that I didn’t. She said, “Well, I think if it gets published, you’d better get one.”

I suppose there is some residual timidity that I bring to writing sex scenes. I try to overcome it. It would be easy if it were anonymous, of course, but if you attach your name to your writing you also attach your being, in some sense or other—or at least, I have. That might be a rookie’s mistake, although I think it is something we can hardly help.

In your book the van Leuven family members treat Esme rudely and with remarkable disdain. Did you base any of these characters on real people? Are the van Leuvens symbolic of American privilege in particular or are they more universal?

They are most definitely more universal than that. If anything, I feel that they see themselves as having a slightly European aura—as if there is a little-known bloodline connecting them to old-world princes.

The van Leuvens are based on a jumble of observations I’ve made over the years, beginning with university, I suppose. I met one of the main sources for Olivia in Cambridge recently, where I
live, and I was so pleased; it’s like being an ornithologist and finding a golden eagle in your back garden.

You have a relatively new presence on online forums such as Facebook and Twitter. How do you hope these vehicles will influence contact and communication with fans of your book?

The thing about The Owl is that it is a place where people come to talk and get to know one another, and when Twitter and Facebook work well that’s what is really happening there as well. And the wonder of the internet, of course, is that it can happen between people who are thousands of miles apart, who don’t have the privilege of sauntering down to a local bookstore or coffee shop. These forums are an escape or a pleasure for so many people, including me. We were often more lonely before.