The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend (13 page)

Though with Henry and Susan, whose house she had just come to, there wouldn't be any problems. Henry and Susan always seemed to have more things than they knew what to do with. Occasionally, she suspected that they saw life as some kind of reverse garage sale, where the idea was to collect as much rubbish as possible.

She sighed and stepped carefully over a broken tennis racket. She knocked firmly and determinedly on the door, as though she was trying to convince herself just as much as Henry and Susan.

Susan answered. A nice, nervous woman in her mid-sixties, who always seemed excessively grateful and surprised at the smallest kindness, though she herself never had any intention of being unkind.

‘Susan,' said Caroline, ‘we're having a collection.'

Susan lit up. Her entire face creased into a smile. ‘How nice!' she said, meaning it.

‘Armchairs and tables, mainly.'

That had given others pause for thought. People had plenty of things they wanted to get rid of, but it was usually easier when they themselves were allowed to choose what to donate.

‘I'm sure we can manage that,' she said, shouting through to the living room: ‘Henry! A collection!' She turned back to Caroline. ‘Coffee?'

She had been given coffee in each house she had visited, but it went with the territory, so she nodded and followed Susan into the kitchen. She was handed a cup of coffee and a plate of cookies.

‘We're going to … um … open a bookstore,' Caroline said. She wasn't quite comfortable with that part of the story. It seemed so … overoptimistic. ‘With Amy Harris's books,' she added.

‘So sad, that,' Henry muttered. ‘About Amy.'

Susan wore a sad look on her round face for thirty seconds or so, until Caroline remembered to ask about the grandchildren – then the smile came back.

Susan and Henry had three children, all of whom had moved away from town, as well as four grandchildren who had never visited them and who had, as yet, failed to remember a single birthday. Despite that, their house was full of pictures of the children, and they loved to talk about them.

After that, Henry and Susan disappeared to go through their stash. Caroline stayed where she was, wondering why people even bothered getting married, never mind having children.

She herself had done neither.

Sometimes she thought that married women looked at her as if they felt they were more Christian than her, having started a nuclear family of their own. Or else they didn't look at her at all, as if you didn't really exist if you hadn't managed to find yourself an idiotic man. She had lost count of all of the weddings and christenings she had been to where people had seemed so determined
not
to look in any meaningful way at her that she felt she was invisible. As though an unmarried woman blended seamlessly into the wallpaper, something people's eyes drifted over before they landed, relieved, on all the married couples with children.

Though not nowadays, of course, she thought to herself, taking a sip of coffee and trying not to grimace. Very few got married in Broken Wheel now.

And you're older now anyway, she told herself. Once she had hit forty, no one had expected anything of her any more. Apparently forty was some kind of magical age limit.

Caroline normally steered clear of those who thought they were better because they had managed to get married. She didn't have much time for the nuclear family. It was better than many of the alternatives, that was true, but that was hardly grounds for being so smug and condescending. What was Jesus if not some kind of early, long-haired hippie who left his parents to drift around in a big, collective family?

Not that she had much time for hippies, either. They were extremely condescending too.

Henry interrupted her thoughts by peeping into the kitchen to say, with a certain hopefulness in his voice: ‘Lawn furniture not of any interest to you, is it?'

She shook her head apologetically. ‘Indoor furniture, I'm afraid,' she replied, adding in the name of diplomacy: ‘This time.'

Anything was possible. Sooner or later, she would be organising another collection for the church. Then, they would take anything people wanted to donate and they would be thankful for it. And, of course, she would be the one going around convincing people to donate their broken old lawn furniture; she would be the one organising the sale; she would be writing the thank-you cards. Again.

Sometimes it felt like she was the glue holding the church together, and with it the entire town and its history. When she was young, the work had been almost magical, a glimpse into an exciting, adult world where Things happened and Conversations took place. The work had been done by women of all ages, each with different experiences, lives and opinions, who had also helped one another out. And argued, of course.

She could still remember that good-for-nothing Samuel Goodwin who had once beaten his wife just a tiny bit more than people were prepared to look the other way over. Caroline had been twelve then, maybe thirteen, adult enough for the serious, whispered discussions not to automatically stop whenever she was nearby, and old enough to understand some of what they were saying. She remembered how they had all, in some way, been there – even those who had never cared for his silent and subdued wife. Mrs Goodwin had lost a child late on in a pregnancy, and that seemed to have been the opening salvo. Women had suddenly materialised out of nowhere, visiting her and cooking food and providing almost imperceptible help with the cleaning and the child-minding. Things had simply been done. No thanks necessary.

People had taken care of one another back then. There had been a kind of neatness and order to the chaos of life. People had also been expected to put up with their lot and suffer in silence, of course, but whenever things got too much, everyone had understood that they weren't expected to go through it alone.

Caroline sometimes wondered whether those women were the reason she had never married. Because she had seen her mother helping out with all those problems and developed a kind of distaste for relationships, or for men. That wasn't to say that all the world's problems were related to men, but there was almost always a man involved somewhere, in her view.

Susan and Henry were still busy in the cellar and, outside, the wind had picked up. Through the kitchen window, she could see the trees bending and she was in no rush to leave the warm kitchen and head out again. She took another sip of coffee and tried to stop herself from sighing.

She didn't regret that she had never married. Not really. It was just that she sometimes wondered when, exactly, she had become so old.

Perhaps it had happened when her mother died. Some kind of generational shift – the mantle being passed from Mrs Rohde to Miss. Her mother had died, and women were still being hit, or getting divorced, or breaking down over much too early, unexpected pregnancies. Or over pregnancies which never materialised, even when the nursery had been standing ready for years, the baby clothes long-since sewn. Amy had taken care of the day-to-day support of many of the women, but when catastrophe struck, Caroline was the one who had stepped up to get the others to pull their weight like good Christians. Time and time and time again. Then, before she knew it, she had turned forty. And then forty-four.

But when, exactly, had she decided that she wanted to be alone for the rest of her life?

From the cellar, she heard Susan's merry voice, slightly distorted by the stairs: ‘We've got
four
armchairs!'

She assumed they would need to gather everything at the church, and she would then have to find somewhere to store them.

She sighed.

Don't be ridiculous, Caroline, she scolded.

Then she had an idea.

‘Thanks so much,' she said. ‘I know just where we can store them.'

‘
SURE. YOU WANT
to open a bookstore. Why not? But have you really thought about what you want it to be like?'

Jen's tone of voice seemed friendly, but there she was, standing with her arms spread out right across the width of the hallway, forcing Sara to stay in the doorway. Behind her, she could see a wide staircase, with piles of sports clothes, gym shoes and toys on each step. That was the only sign that there were children in the house. Downstairs, everything was varying shades of coffee: cappuccino and latte walls; living-room furniture of dark, espresso-coloured leather.

Jen's place was twice the size of a typical Swedish house. Space clearly wasn't an issue in Broken Wheel; the next house was at least twenty metres away. The strip of land between the two wasn't exactly a no-man's-land, more … nothing at all. Just superfluous space which no one seemed to care about.

‘Have you found any furniture at all?' Sara asked. When Jen had phoned her, she had assumed it was because she had managed to find everything they needed, but now she wasn't so sure.

‘There's furniture and furniture …'

‘I want it to be cosy,' said Sara. ‘Armchairs and things like that.' Caroline had promised it wouldn't be a problem. A collection would solve it, she had told Sara with absolute certainty.

‘We can get you some armchairs, but wouldn't you rather have … I don't know, something more stylish?'

‘No.'

‘Not even a little glass table? A pair of matching leather armchairs maybe? It'd be fake leather, of course, but they'd still look so nice.'

‘I want them mismatched, and fabric. Proper reading chairs, the kind you can really sink into.'

Jen sighed and reluctantly welcomed Sara in. ‘Come on, then,' she muttered as she wandered to the living room. She shuddered noticeably as she entered the room, her expression one of untold suffering. Sara paused in the doorway, a smile creeping slowly over her face.

Spread out among the espresso-coloured armchairs (genuine leather, Sara presumed), a glass table and a display cabinet made from dark, polished wood, was an assortment of armchairs and tables. Winged armchairs; footstools; slender pieces; mammoth things which looked like they could swallow you whole; small wooden tables; round ones with metal tops; red tables; blue tables; all the varieties of wood Sara knew of, plus a few she didn't.

‘Caroline's been going round asking people to help out,' Jen said unhappily. ‘I guess they thought it was for the parish. And she told them to leave everything
here
. They've been dumping stuff all day.' She glanced around desperately. ‘What am I going to do with all this?'

Sara laughed. ‘Give it to the church,' she said. ‘I just need two armchairs and one table.'

She also needed bookcases, but she wasn't so worried about that. Of course, they were the very foundation of a bookshop, but they would also be covered by the books, so whatever they looked like, they would blend in. You would barely notice them. In the bookshop in Sweden, the shelves had been greyish metal which had once been painted white. Anything would be better than that.

Tom had been given that responsibility. He turned up at Amy's house the next day to take her to see them. She didn't really think she needed to see the bookcases – how bad could they be, after all? – but she was curious about Tom's house.

If she had been expecting it to reveal anything about him, she was about to be disappointed. They didn't even go inside.

A poorly maintained gravel driveway led up to the house, with a line of larches stretching almost right to the front door. The front of the house seemed to be in constant shade, with small, nondescript windows which couldn't have let much light in.

Tom took her straight into the backyard. The house had clearly been designed with the back as the most important part. The moment they rounded the corner, the garden opened up before her eyes. The house had been built on a hillock and the trees had been cut down so that you could look out over the cornfields, all the way to the gathering of rooftops which made up Broken Wheel.

The whole of that side of the house was made up of large, panoramic windows which seemed out of place here in the countryside.

A porch stretched the length of the house, morphing into a workspace so seamlessly that it was hard to say exactly where one stopped and the other began. There was an outbuilding at the far end. The door was open, and through it Sara could make out sturdy-looking workbenches and tools, shelves of neatly marked bottles and cans, and two old car seats covered in cream-coloured leather.

Outside the shed there was another long workbench by the side of the porch. There was also a paint-flecked tap and a sink.

And out in the garden itself – which was nothing but dry, trampled earth – there were three rickety bookcases, painted an awful reddish brown and so unsteady-looking that Sara doubted they would hold even a children's book.

‘Don't worry,' Tom said. ‘I'm going to repaint them.'

‘But there are only
three
of them.' She couldn't hide the dejection in her voice. In her old – and tiny – bookshop, there must have been over fifty bookcases. There would virtually be more armchairs than bookcases, for God's sake.

‘Too many?'

‘
Too many?
They'll barely cover half a wall.'

A gust of wind made the bookcases shudder. They seemed to be practically huddling up in fear of the elements. They looked so wretched that Sara was suddenly struck with sympathy for them. ‘I'm sure they'll be really nice,' she said. ‘But I need more. At least six more.'

Tom looked at her in surprise. ‘How many books do you have?'

Amy's book collection didn't contain anything unusual or valuable, but she had managed to create a room of pure, unadulterated reading joy. There was something for everyone, even those who ‘never read books' or ‘preferred films'. Sara was utterly determined to make her – their – bookshop just as much of a temple.