The Christmas Bookshop(22)

‘To steal my idea? Not likely,’ said Justin, grabbing his plastic bag and heading out again. ‘You’ll be sorry.’

Still, thought Carmen. It proved her ‘Christmas only’ push was working if people were desperate to get their books into the shop. And he was irritatingly right about the decorations issue.

Carmen watched him go, stalking off down towards the Grassmarket, clutching his plastic bag close, and felt sorry for him.

Or, she would have felt sorry for him if, over the course of the next four days, every time the old-fashioned black phone rang startlingly loudly, making her leap in the air, it would be somebody with a badly disguised Edinburgh accent asking if they had any books in about fish as that was the kind of thing they liked to read at Christmas. And as Mr McCredie had told her on strictest terms that next time he came in she had to buy one and give Justin ten pounds from the petty cash, because that was the correct thing to do at Christmas, she found herself feeling rather told off.



As was familiar to most people in Edinburgh, you weren’t just front-facing staff; you were tour guides and historians too, and Carmen was having trouble, not being a native, although she had figured out the answers to ‘Where’s the castle?’ (‘Up the steps on the left’), ‘OMG, WHAT’S THAT NOISE?’ (the daily one o’clock cannon designed, Carmen was reasonably sure, simply to startle people into having heart attacks and thus cut down on tourist numbers) and ‘Where’s the café J.K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter?’ (Carmen rotated her favourite coffee shops on this list, reasoning everybody deserved a shot).

So when the door tinged on a morning that had her staring longingly at the fireplace and wishing there weren’t rules against having an open fire in an old room filled to the brim with paper, and a rangy figure bounced in, looking exactly like a student, she steadied herself.

He had a battered rucksack slung over his back, a burgundy hoodie over a Breton shirt over a long-sleeved shirt – i.e. he appeared to be wearing everything he owned, a common response from people who had arrived quite recently.

He was tall, with light brown skin, dark hair in a top knot and green eyes; striking enough that Carmen felt a faint sadness that she was about to be directing him to the youth hostel down the other end of the Grassmarket, and that many of the shop’s customers were generally closer in age to Mr McCredie than to herself.

‘Hello?’ she said cheerfully.

‘Hello,’ he said. His voice was deep, with a very faint accent and Carmen picked up the well-used desk map in anticipation.

‘I was wondering if you had a copy of The Physiology of Tree Soil.’

Carmen looked at him and was about to call for Mr McCredie when she realised Mr McCredie would instantly corner him and talk his ears off.

‘I’m sure we could order it for you?’ she said. ‘Are you a student?’

He smiled.

‘Do I look like a student?’

‘You could not look more like a student if you had one of those raggedy scarfs and were trying to split a coffee four ways.’

He laughed.

‘You don’t like students?’

Carmen shrugged. Sofia’s elegant friends who had occasionally come to visit, or showed up to her hen night, her wedding, her christenings, all her simply fabulous parties in a variety of increasingly fancy apartments seemed callow and entitled, bristling with confidence and money. And always, at the back of her mind, her father saying, when she announced she was done with school and was off to work in Dounston’s, ‘But you’re such a clever girl.’ She had always been jealous of students. She covered it up by treating them with a bit of disdain. She could have been one too. It just hadn’t worked out like that.

‘I have a huge chip on my shoulder,’ she said eventually.

He smiled.

‘Well then, you will be pleased to know that although I have been a student for a very long time, I am now a lecturer.’

‘Who dresses like a student.’

‘You’re more confrontational than most people I’ve just met who work in a bookshop.’

‘Chip! Shoulder! What do you lecture in? Trees?’ Carmen giggled.

‘Um yes,’ he said. ‘I’m a dendrologist.’

‘A what?’

‘Tree person,’ he said hurriedly. ‘Trees. I’m a student of trees.’

‘Oh,’ she said. Then she thought about it. ‘You’d have liked our book about sublime landscapes.’

‘I would like that!’ he said.

‘Ah. We don’t have it.’

‘And the other one … ?’

‘Okay, well, let me order it for you,’ she said. There wasn’t a computer in the shop, and she had to call the wholesalers on her phone – really embarrassing – so she kept a book for orders. As she wrote down the details, he picked up a book near the till. It was an illustrated edition of A Christmas Carol Ramsay had sent over on – kindly – a sale or return basis, with paintings by Arthur Rackham.

‘Wow,’ he breathed.

‘I know,’ said Carmen. ‘Isn’t it awesome?’

‘I love his woods … his trees.’

‘I suppose you would.’

He grinned.

‘I suppose I would too.’