How to Find Love in a Book Shop(6)

The next day, when they had put Julius’s mother back on the Paddington train – Debra didn’t like being away from London for too long – Andrea marched her over the road to the Peasebrook Arms. It was a traditional coaching inn, all flagstone floors and wood panelling and a dining room that served chicken Kiev and steak chasseur and had an old-fashioned dessert trolley. There was something comforting in the way it hadn’t been Farrow and Balled up to the rafters. It didn’t pretend to be something it wasn’t. It was warm and friendly, even if the coffee was awful.

Emilia and Andrea curled up on a sofa in the lounge bar and ordered hot chocolate.

‘So,’ said Andrea, ever practical. ‘What’s your plan?’

‘I’ve had to jack in my job,’ Emilia told her. ‘They can’t keep it open for me indefinitely and I don’t know when I’m going to get away.’ She’d been teaching English at an international language school in Hong Kong. ‘I can’t just drift from country to country for ever.’

‘I don’t see why not,’ said Andrea.

Emilia shook her head. ‘It’s about time I sorted myself out. Look at us – I’m still living out of a backpack; you’re a powerhouse.’

Andrea had gone from manning the phones for a financial adviser when she left school to studying for exams at night school to setting up her own business as an accountant. Now, she did the books for many of the small businesses that had sprung up in Peasebrook over the past few years. She knew how much most people hated organising their finances and so made it as painless as possible. She was hugely successful.

‘Never mind comparisons. What are you going to do with the shop?’ Andrea wasn’t one to beat about the bush.

Emilia shrugged. ‘I haven’t got any choice. I promised Dad I’d keep it open. He’d turn in his grave if he thought I was going to close it down.’

Andrea didn’t speak for a moment. Her voice when she spoke was gentle and kind. ‘Emilia, deathbed promises don’t always need to be kept. Not if they aren’t practical. Of course you meant it at the time, but the shop was your father’s life. It doesn’t mean it has to be yours. He would understand. I know he would.’

‘I can’t bear the thought of letting it go. I always saw myself as taking it over in the end. But I guess I thought it would be when I was Dad’s age. Not now. I thought he had another twenty years to go at least.’ She could feel her eyes fill with tears. ‘I don’t know if it’s even viable. I’ve started to look through the accounts but it’s just a blur to me.’

‘Well, whatever I can do to help. You know that.’

‘Dad always used to say I don’t do numbers. And I don’t either, really. It all seems to be a bit disorganised. I think he let things slip towards the end. There’re a couple of boxes full of receipts. And a horrible pile of unopened envelopes I haven’t been able to face yet.’

‘Trust me, it’s nothing I haven’t dealt with before.’ Andrea sighed. ‘I wish people wouldn’t go into denial when it comes to money. It makes it all so complicated and ends up costing them much more in the end.’

‘It would be great if you could have a look for me. But no mate’s rates.’ Emilia pointed a finger at her. ‘I’m paying you properly.’

‘I’m very happy to help you out. Your dad was always very kind to me when we were growing up.’

Emilia laughed. ‘Remember when we tried to set him up with your mum?’

Andrea snorted into her wine glass. ‘That would have been a disaster.’ Andrea’s mother was a bit of a hippy, all joss sticks and flowing skirts. Andrea had rebelled completely against her mother’s Woodstock attitude and was the most conventional, aspirational, law-abiding person Emilia knew. She’d even changed her name from Autumn when she started up in business, on the basis that no one would take an accountant called Autumn seriously. ‘They would never have got anything done.’

Julius was very easygoing and laissez-faire too. The thought of their respective parents together made the two girls helpless with laughter now, but at the age of twelve they had thought it was a brilliant idea.

As they finished laughing, Emilia sighed. ‘Dad never did find anyone.’

‘Oh come off it. Every woman in Peasebrook was in love with your father. He had them all running round after him.’

‘Yes, I know. He was never short of female company. But it would have been nice for him to have met someone special.’

‘He was a happy man, Emilia. You could tell that.’

‘I always felt guilty. That perhaps he stayed single because of me.’

‘I don’t think so. Your dad wasn’t the martyr type. I think he was really happy with his own company. Or maybe he did have someone special but we just don’t know about it.’

Emilia nodded. ‘I hope so … I really do.’

She’d never know now, she thought. For all of her life it had just been the two of them and now her father had gone, with all his stories and his secrets.





Two





1982


The book shop was in Little Clarendon Street. Away from the hurly-burly of Oxford town centre and just off St Giles, it was bedded in amongst a sprinkling of fashionable dress shops and cafés. As well as the latest fiction and coffee-table books, it sold art supplies and had an air of frivolity rather than the academic ambience of Blackwell’s or one of the more cerebral book shops in town. It was the sort of book shop that stole time: people had been known to miss meetings and trains, lost amongst the shelves.