The Secret of Happy Ever After (17 page)

‘There.’ Michelle tweaked the ribbon and stepped back from the finished article. ‘Our book bouquet. Better for you than sweets, lasts longer than a bunch of flowers.’

‘Give the gift of nostalgia,’ said Anna, picking up her marketing drift at once. ‘Your childhood in an afternoon. Selected according to the preferences of the recipient and delivered by hand for . . . a fiver?’

‘Seven quid. Make it worth Gillian getting her moped out.’

‘I’ll make some fliers to leave by the till.’ Anna made a note in her book. ‘It’s a lovely present.’

‘It is,’ said Michelle, allowing herself a smile. She reached out and touched Anna’s arm. ‘Well done you, for coming up with it.’

‘Well,
you
really . . .’ Anna started, with typical modesty.

‘No,’ said Michelle emphatically. ‘Your idea. Take the gold star.’

Anna looked pleased, and touched. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I’m really glad my useless gift-giving had some kind of happy ending.’

‘Now, how about a coffee from that machine you said was so vital?’

Anna poured two cups of coffee from the jug, handed one to Michelle and smiled, her gentle face shining with enthusiasm. She looked younger suddenly, and Michelle realised she hadn’t seen her look so relaxed in months. Since before the girls arrived in her house, in fact.

Anna sold the book bouquet within ten minutes of Michelle’s departure, to a woman looking for something to give a friend who’d been ordered to bed for the last two weeks of her pregnancy.

‘Lauren’s not allowed to do anything other than read and go to the loo,’ she said, falling on the display by the door with a delighted coo. ‘And she’s so sick of magazines, but she can’t concentrate on anything too serious. This is absolutely perfect . . . Oh my God,
Anne of Green Gables
! Have you got any more?’

‘I have,’ said Anna, and sold her one, plus
What Katy Did
.

‘I so wanted to be Clover,’ the customer sighed, flipping through the book as Anna put the card payment through. ‘Didn’t you? I loved the bit where they were allowed long skirts and to put their hair up for the first time. I used to pin towels round me with kilt pins and swish around the house in my brother’s boots, calling everyone ma’am.’

Anna nodded. ‘Apart from the swing bit. It put me right off swings. My dad had only just put one up in the garden and I wouldn’t go near it for years.’

‘Me too!’ The customer widened her eyes. ‘That bit where the pin comes out with the terrible crack . . .’ She pulled a horrified face at exactly the same time as Anna did.

That was the nice thing about children’s books, Anna thought as the woman left, promising to come back when she had ‘more time for a proper browse’. They weren’t like adult novels, where people pretended to have read the Booker short-list, but never did; everyone really
had
gobbled up the same Dahls and Blytons, and talking about them gave you that instant sense of something shared, that ‘secret society’ feeling that wasn’t very secret at all because nearly everyone you knew had read the same things, had invited the same characters into their heads, and had woven secret scraps of themselves and their own feelings and fears into those imagined faces and voices.

She thought about what Michelle had said about
Ballet Shoes
and Lily, and decided she was right. There was no point waiting for other people; that was her motto for this year. And she would start the reading tonight.

Inspired by the sale and by the two customers who came in to inspect the new look and left with a vintage thriller and a
Complete Works of Shakespeare
respectively, Anna started to put together more bouquets – a Sunday afternoon Bunch of Detectives, with Miss Marple, Lord Peter Wimsey, Hercule Poirot and the Famous Five; a Romance Posy of pink and white novels by Georgette Heyer, Barbara Cartland and Jilly Cooper, topped off with
The Pursuit of Love
and a pack of Love Hearts, and tied with a silver ribbon.

She was threading a bag of toffee into the crime bouquet when a man in a suit entered the shop and marched straight to the front desk without bothering to browse.

Anna looked up, ready to smile, and stopped. He wasn’t, as most customers did, pausing to gaze around the shop with an expression of admiration for Michelle’s muted but welcoming colour scheme. Rather, he seemed annoyed.

‘Can I help you?’ she enquired, sizing him up. He seemed too young to be one of the ‘Where did you put the tank books?’ complainers, of which they’d had three so far, but his suit, now she looked more closely, was actually a tweed jacket. ‘Are you looking for something in particular?’

He opened his mouth to speak, than glanced sideways as if he’d just noticed something. ‘What happened to the military section?’ he demanded. ‘Used to be here, by the desk.’

‘We moved it.’ Anna smiled. ‘It’s in the side room.’

‘Hmph. And the naval history?’

‘Also in the side room. With the comfy chair. We thought it would be nicer for the history browsers to be able to sit down.’

He carried on looking round, in the proprietorial way many old customers had been doing. ‘I like what you’ve done with the shelves,’ he conceded. ‘Nice clear labelling. You can see where you are. And you’ve restocked?’

‘We’ve reorganised the old stock,’ said Anna, pleased he’d noticed. ‘There was quite a lot of it.’

‘Good.’ He started to step towards the local section for a browse, then pulled himself back. ‘I’m looking for Ms Nightingale,’ he said instead. ‘Is she in today?’

‘She’s next door, in Home Sweet Home, but she’s in and out with meetings.’

Anna racked her brains to think who this slightly pompous man might be – and what her best response should be. She assumed he was a rep, or maybe someone from the council: he was about her age, tall and good-looking, with an angular face and sandy-blond hair that fell into his eyes. He pushed it back now with an automatic sweeping gesture.

‘Is it something I can help with?’ she went on. ‘I’m the shop manager.’

‘Yes, in that case it is,’ he said. ‘It’s about the pile of boxes in the communal hallway between the shop and the flat upstairs. They’re blocking access.’

‘I’m so sorry about that,’ said Anna, half relieved but half guilty. ‘They’ll be moved by tonight. It’s just that we’re very short on storage space – the sealant on the floor in the back room hasn’t dried as quickly as the builder hoped, so we couldn’t put the last set of shelves back in, and so Michelle said if I stacked them there for a few days we’d be—’

‘It’s breaching fire regulations,’ said the man. ‘You can barely get a pushchair up those stairs anyway, plus it’s a pain in the arse. I’ve got a massive scrape on my leg from trying to fold the bloody buggy small enough to get past.’

Anna reeled slightly. A pushchair? She hadn’t noticed any children upstairs. She hadn’t even noticed any adult occupants.

‘I’m terribly sorry, Mr, um . . .’ she said. ‘I didn’t get your name.’

‘Rory Stirling.’ He held out a hand. ‘And yours is?’

‘Anna McQueen. I’m sure we can sort this out very quickly for you,’ she said, amazed that the baby hadn’t been woken by the building work. Not that she wanted to bring that up if he hadn’t noticed. ‘It might be easier to pop in next door and grab Michelle now.’

He looked aghast at the thought. ‘I’ve seen through the window. It’s like a jumble sale in there. I don’t want to get between those women and the last half-price scented candle.’

‘I’ll ring her,’ said Anna, reaching for the phone. ‘And I’m so sorry, it must be hard enough getting a buggy up those stairs to begin with.’

‘It’s a form of punishment.’ Rory wiped a hand over his face, and when he revealed his eyes again, Anna noticed they were apologetic and bloodshot. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to shout,’ he said. ‘It’s been a very long day or two. I’m not really an expert on buggies.’

‘They’re worse than deckchairs when you’re not used to them,’ said Anna.

‘To be honest, I’d normally be fine about the books, so long as I got first dibs. Let me know if you’re throwing any out. Especially any on Toddlers for Beginners.’

He added a tired smile at the end. It was a direct one, like a child’s u-shaped grin. It sat endearingly at odds with his slightly fusty clothes.

‘Why don’t you take a seat?’ said Anna, sensing a kindred book-ish spirit. ‘Michelle won’t be long. Coffee?’

‘Milk, two sugars,’ said Rory, looking round at where the machine was bubbling away. ‘Now there’s an improvement already.’

Michelle had long since perfected the art of serving three customers at once without making any of them feel neglected, which was vital at peak moments of sale chaos like this, with the lines jammed on the credit-card machine, a stress headache pounding at her temples, and now the phone ringing. A busy till was a happy one, as she told the staff, but today she didn’t have the energy for it.

It didn’t help that Owen kept sloping down from the office upstairs to photograph new items, causing an instant hiatus in service from Kelsey, and now – thanks to his kind fixing of her new phone – Gillian too. Michelle was less impressed. He’d returned from his New Year trip to London with a hangover, a love bite and a tiny new tattoo on his wrist in the shape of a single angel wing. Her new website was still only half done.

And she’d just noticed that Harvey had re-registered his details on the mailing list, after she’d blocked him from the old one. His shadow had appeared in her shop again.

‘Kelsey, the phone!’ she snapped, unable to bear the ringing, then checked herself. It wasn’t fair to take it out on Kelsey. She grabbed it herself. ‘Hello?’

‘Michelle, I wonder if you could pop next door?’ All she could hear behind Anna’s voice was the gentle waft of a string quartet playing Bach. ‘There’s a man here who wants to see you.’

‘Did he make an appointment?’ Michelle smiled apologetically at her customer and put her credit card into the machine again. ‘If it’s a rep, tell him to come back next week.’

‘He’s called Rory Stirling. It’s about the books in the hall upstairs. They’re blocking access.’

Michelle’s fingers slipped on the keypad and she accidentally charged the customer £9376.99 for her two Liberty silk scarves and silver-dipped egg box. The invisible metal band round her head tightened.

Rory Stirling. Great. That was all she needed: it was probably just an excuse to come round and tell her how she should be running the shop. She’d already had a few ‘suggestions’ from him via email about what she should be stocking. She’d deleted them all.

She jabbed at the cancel button. ‘I’m so sorry . . . Let me do that again. Anna, just move the books and apologise. Tell him it was temporary. I’m rushed off my feet here.’

‘Michelle, I think it’d be a good idea if you spoke to him yourself.’

‘Fine, two minutes.’ She redeployed her customers to Gillian and Kelsey, wove her way through the throng of people and out onto the high street.

The chilly air didn’t help Michelle’s head but the soothing atmosphere of the bookshop did. It was like walking into a hidden garden off the main street, with gentle music and the smell of coffee. However, when she saw Rory Stirling, irritation retightened its grip.

He was leaning by the big desk that doubled as the counter, chatting away to Anna with one lanky leg crossed over the other. Michelle noted he was wearing yellow socks. That made seven things about him that really annoyed her. She couldn’t stand ‘amusing’ socks. Harvey had been a keen wearer of socks with motifs, which one solicitor told her was grounds enough for divorce in some parts of Surrey. Rory was also telling Anna something tedious about an author Michelle had never heard of, and Anna was smiling in an indulgent fashion.

‘
Salve
, Ms Nightingale,
tandem
,’ Rory said, turning round. When he stood up, she noticed that his shirt was un-ironed under his jacket.

‘Tandem?’

‘Latin. It means “at last”. Anna and I were just talking about Latin A-level. How useful it is in everyday life.’

‘If you’re a gardener,’ added Anna. ‘Or a birdwatcher.’

Great, thought Michelle. Anna’s finally found someone as daft as her about her bloody Latin A-level.

‘Sorry to have kept you waiting, but I’m right in the middle of my busiest time,’ she said. ‘What’s the Latin for “run off my feet”?’

‘You’ve got me there,’ said Rory. ‘I can see you’re busy. Looks as if the knick-knacks are flying off the shelves next door. Some of them have even flown in here.’ He gestured towards a pile of soft woollen blankets Michelle had arranged by the romance section, right next to where she was standing.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s part of the reading experience. Cup of tea, warm blanket, romantic novel. Nothing wrong with that.’

Rory raised his eyebrow as if there
was
something wrong with that, and Michelle bridled. ‘Cross-selling,’ she said. ‘It’s how you make low-margin products like books work these days.’

‘We’ve sold lots,’ agreed Anna. ‘I’ve got one. They’re
so
cosy. Real one-more-chapter cosy.’

‘Well, I hope you didn’t move the military section to make room for blankets,’ said Rory.

‘What about spurs?’ demanded Michelle. ‘Would that have been OK? Or imitation pistols?’