The Bookshop of New Beginnings: Heart-warming, uplifting – a perfect feel good read!. Jen Mouat

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СКАЧАТЬ the subject swiftly. ‘You know when we were kids I always wanted you to marry one of my brothers?’

      Kate accepted the conversational olive branch. ‘So you told me. Frequently.’

      She didn’t want to talk about her feelings for Dan, or their inevitable conclusion. Exactly how much Emily knew, Kate wasn’t sure; it was one of the few secrets she had kept, but she couldn’t be sure Dan had been as circumspect. She kept her tone light-hearted as she continued. ‘Ally was like a brother to me, Fergus was just too busy being a grumpy teenager to notice me like that. Noah’s a wee bit young, and Dan …’ Here, she trailed off. There was nothing to say about Dan now, or rather there was, but it was all too late. Married! A baby!

      She couldn’t help but voice the thought. ‘It’s so strange to think of him being married.’ It seemed such a grown-up thing to do – never mind that he was almost thirty and had been running his own business for the past ten years. But, also, hadn’t she always hung on to the vague, selfish idea that he was hers? Though she had let him go.

      Emily gave her a wry smile. ‘My money would have been on Dan, if you were going to hook up with any of them, but I suppose that ship has sailed now. You know, I’m sure he had a crush on you. I just wanted you to be part of the family, but of course you already are.’

      Kate’s heart raced as she tried to fathom if Emily knew more than she was letting on about her and Dan. Perhaps it was one of the many things they must lay bare, to clear the air between them. But not yet.

      Emily’s use of present tense felt good, reminding Kate that she had earned her place on the wall of family photographs, that her bedroom was waiting for her as if she had only stepped out momentarily. She watched as Emily picked up the framed picture again of the two of them on the beach at Rigg Bay, rummaged in a drawer for a slip of paper and a felt tip, wrote a label and added Kate to Lena’s memory board with a flourish.

      She turned to look at Kate, her expression innocently content, as if in that moment all her cares had melted. She smiled. ‘Wait here a moment. I’ve something for you. Oh, and open a bottle of wine. In the cupboard, there.’ She directed Kate towards the larder and then whisked out of the room in a whirl of knotty curls; she had shed the fisherman’s jumper in favour of more seasonal attire and her red T-shirt was vibrant against the dark of her hair.

      Kate wandered past the Aga, sniffing cautiously at the contents of the pan, which smelled surprisingly good – better than the sum of the ingredients haphazardly thrown in – and opened the larder door. She selected a bottle at random from the wine rack – Merlot, of course, but taking her back all the same to those student days sharing a bottle or three with Em, when the wine was rank and cost a few quid from the local newsagent.

      The cupboards in the Bluebell Bank kitchen were well ordered, despite the clutter covering the surfaces: the folded newspapers open at the crossword page, old yellowed recipes, receipts and lists and piles of glossy junk mail. The place had always had an air of lived-in untidiness, which had contrasted with the sharp cleanliness of Emily’s parents’ home and the fetid mess of Kate’s. It was comfortable and familiar to sink into a chair here, to look around at the lingering debris of Cotton family life and revel in the unchangeable-ness of this house.

      Kate had just twisted the cap off the bottle when Emily returned, bouncing into the kitchen with a heavy book in her hand. ‘Glasses are in there,’ she said. ‘Lena doesn’t like wine. She prefers a whisky, but it’s strictly rationed – medication, you know.’ Emily swept aside a sheaf of papers and sat down at the table. She accepted her glass of wine from Kate and, hesitating for just a moment, pushed the book across the table towards her. ‘Here. I made this for you. In case I ever saw you again. I was feeling sentimental one night.’

      Kate set down her own glass, and opened the leather cover. It looked like an old hardback book, but inside the pages were crisp and new: a photograph album disguised as an antiquarian book. ‘Is “sentimental” a euphemism for “drunk”?’

      Emily shrugged, with the beginnings of a grin. ‘Maybe.’

      Kate turned the pages slowly. Emily had documented their life together, gifted the book to her to smooth the turbulence of her return: there were school portraits in rumpled sweatshirts; summers at Bluebell Bank and hot days on the beach – in garish Bermuda shorts and Mickey Mouse sunglasses – and playing in the old orange dinghy with Ally and Fergus; then as young teenagers, posing provocatively, wearing the wrong shades of lipstick and heavy eye make-up. A bonfire party, their first purloined cigarettes held proudly between dark-painted fingernails.

      Next came the university days: nights out in cheap student bars around the city; sunbathing in Princes Street Gardens with various hangers-on they had once called friends; a weekend clubbing in London; a week in a backpackers in Rome.

      It was all there, every important moment in the timeline of their friendship and, because of the significance of that friendship, their lives: so entwined and tangled you could barely see the join. Where Emily ended and Kate began.

      And then, suddenly, it all came to an abrupt end, like a sentence without a full stop. Kate turned the page after the final photograph – a day trip in someone’s car to the sands of St Andrews – and was met with nothing but blank paper. All those empty pages were a glaring reminder of the sudden fracture.

      There was something missing too. Someone. Luke.

      Made more conspicuous by his absence, Luke’s name hovered on her lips as Kate flipped back to the place where he should have appeared – it couldn’t have been more obvious if Emily had left an empty space for him. Kate looked up, noted how Emily’s eyes slid away from hers as she realised her mistake. Perhaps she was only trying to protect Kate, shield her from the remembered pain of losing him, but erasing him wasn’t the answer; as if Kate could possibly forget.

      ‘Thanks,’ Kate said softly, pushing the book aside. ‘This is great.’

      Emily feigned interest in her ragged fingernails, hands curled around the stem of her wine glass. She took a gulp, realising too late that the gesture of the album had served as a nod to darker times just as surely as rekindling the gentle, happy reminiscences. No Luke, no Joe; but they were there all the same. ‘No problem. I had boxes of pictures lying about and I thought they should be in an album. All the photographs were taken on my camera. I didn’t think you would have any.’

      Boxes of pictures? So where was Luke? ‘I don’t. Thank you,’ Kate repeated. She lifted her glass to her lips and slowly took a sip.

      Emily stood up, almost knocking over her glass in her haste. ‘Better check on dinner,’ she said. ‘It’s probably ready. Oh, I gave Dan a call. He’s expecting us later. I didn’t tell him about you. I wanted it to be a surprise. He won’t be able to believe his eyes.’

      Kate, lost in thoughts stirred up by the album like a gust of autumn leaves, only murmured in assent. She was realising that two worlds could not collide and be expected to mesh. She could not be the New York Kate here at Bluebell Bank, with these people and these memories.

      And in New York she had eschewed the memories of this place, this version of herself, in order to be a completely new person: a better one, or so she had thought.

      But such a split couldn’t continue; she was either new Kate, aloof and unattached and capable, or old Kate, immersed in this world and these people. One must prevail.

      She would have to choose.

      Losing the new self she had crafted so carefully СКАЧАТЬ