The Christmas Bookshop(20)

‘Oh!’ she said, ripping it off crossly.

‘I thought it was a feature,’ said young Mr McCredie. ‘You know. Seasonal.’

‘A bow stuck on my neck? You thought this was part of my shop modernisation?’

‘Um … ’

As a distraction, Ramsay opened the box carefully. There were a lot of big old dusty hardbacks, which Mr McCredie looked at reverently before he gently handled each one.

‘What’s this?’ said Carmen, picking up one on ‘the Sublime in Landscape Architecture, 1759–1805’.

‘Illustrated plates,’ said Ramsay.

‘Ooh,’ said Mr McCredie.

‘No!’ said Carmen. ‘We don’t have a market for that.’

‘But it’s beautiful,’ said Ramsay, and Mr McCredie nodded his head emphatically.

‘But who is going to buy it?’ said Carmen. ‘Sublime fans?’ Mr McCredie looked at her stubbornly, his hand on the old binding.

‘What else have you got?’ said Carmen, giving Ramsay a narrow look.

Beneath the pile of random books was a full set of identical heavy green hardbacks. Carmen pulled out the top one.

It was beautiful. Bound in a dark green, there was a coloured plate of a snow queen, recessed on the front. When you opened the cover, there was a fine layer of tissue paper which rustled gently and, once turned over, there was an image of the queen in front of her icy castle. The books, though clearly rather old, were perfect; they had never been open.

‘Well,’ said Mr McCredie reverently.

Carmen found herself desperate to put out a hand to touch another one. ‘These are lovely. Hans Christian Andersen?’

Ramsay nodded. The endpapers were marbled and there were full colour plates throughout the stories, as well as regular line drawings and a silk placeholding ribbon.

‘This is treasure, Ramsay,’ said Mr McCredie. ‘Where on earth did you find it?’

‘A lot of digging at an estate sale,’ said Ramsay in his deep rumble. ‘Looks like a younger son venture gone rather wrong, don’t you think, and covered up?’

‘Well, quite,’ said McCredie. ‘They must have cost more to produce than they could ever have brought in. Those posh boys and their book enterprises.’

Ramsay and Mr McCredie shared a conspiratorial glance at that, and both started to laugh.

‘Would have been in copyright then too,’ said Ramsay, shaking his head.

‘Well,’ said McCredie. ‘You clever thing.’ Then he pulled himself up, and turned to Carmen, who had her arms folded.

‘Um … what do you think, my dear?’

She looked at the books again.

‘Yes. Christmas, cold, winter, beautiful … yes. These will do. We’ll take these. None of the others.’

Mr McCredie winced and looked pained, but Ramsay wasn’t remotely fussed.

‘They’re lovely,’ said Carmen, handling them once more. The colour internal illustrations were each covered with the lightest, most delicate sheets of tissue paper. ‘I can’t imagine who wouldn’t want one.’

‘Traumatised children?’ mused Ramsay. ‘When we read the boys The Snow Queen, Patrick put all our glasses in the bin in case he broke one and got a bit in his eye. Hari helped.’

‘Oh, all your children,’ said Mr McCredie affectionately, at which point Carmen inserted herself and asked about prices, and bickered back and forth with him in a way Mr McCredie found frightfully vulgar and embarrassing and Ramsay rather enjoyed, until they finally shook hands. This set Ramsay grinning cheerfully until he saw a familiar peaked hat skulking up the steps of a shop close by and knew fine well what that skulking was in aid of and charged out of the shop brandishing his keys.

The old Land Rover took off in a cough of black smoke as the peaked cap stamped crossly past the window, the machine at the ready.

‘Yes!’ said Mr McCredie.

‘What?’ said Carmen. ‘He’s stealing parking!’

‘He’s doing business,’ said Mr McCredie. ‘Paying for parking would kill his profit margin.’

‘Is that what he does?’

‘Well, technically he’s a laird. But poor as a church mouse with a property to keep up, and land, and about a thousand children, only some of them his own.’

‘Don’t make me feel guilty for changing your buying methods,’ said Carmen. ‘Because I shan’t.’

And they worked together, setting out the beautiful new editions. They piled them irresistibly near the door whereupon, to Carmen’s delight, they started to sell straightaway – not to children, but to adults, drawn in by their own childhood memories, and the beauty of a thing.

Every time the bell dinged, Mr McCredie would glance up in wonder and surprise, and Carmen would smile secretly to herself and make sure the lovely books were somewhere adults could pick them up and admire them.

Marbled endpapers, Mr McCredie observed, meant nothing to children. But they meant a lot to those who loved colour and beauty and stories that would never end. And Carmen made sure to put lots of children’s books next to them, so the adults would buy a fancy gift for themselves and then often something not quite so precious for the children. Carmen also emailed Ramsay and told him she could sell as many Christmas books as he could unearth, and he sent her a jolly thumbs up and started on a mission for her.