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

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СКАЧАТЬ didn’t feel like Ben’s Kate any more – not here, awash with the memories of love and loss, of Luke and Dan; and not when the person Ben had fallen in love with was a phoney. The Kate the Cottons remembered was the real one.

      *

      Emily watched Kate leaf through the photograph album and knew her mistake; she had omitted Luke from the annals, which was stupid – also difficult because he was in nearly every bloody photograph! She had been trying to save Kate the pain of seeing him, and also – if she was honest – to save herself too. Luke Ross was dangerous territory; they definitely didn’t need to venture there tonight.

      Kate’s expression was soft as she studied the images of her teenaged self, Emily and the brothers never far from her side. The album had achieved the desired effect of reminding her that once they had been her world.

      And they could be again. She and Kate could start fresh, put past differences behind them. They would make the bookshop work together. And maybe everything else would be easier with Kate here: bearing Lena’s illness; bridging the ever-widening gulf between Noah and Dan – permanently at each other’s throat; forgetting Joe. For the first time since she had fled home to Bluebell Bank, Emily felt wildly optimistic.

Chapter Five

      They ate in the dining room – not quite one of the epic dinners of family lore; not enough people seated around the table for that – but comfortingly evocative all the same. The walls were cherry red, the bay windows shrouded in net curtains that danced in the breeze, and the paisley patterned carpet was wearing thin in places. They ate Emily’s unconventional Bolognese, though for authenticity’s sake they should have been eating salad and cold cuts; with cherry tomatoes and avocado, little octagons of cucumber, folds of pink meat and shiny, quartered hard-boiled eggs. If they ever ate anything else those summer days at Bluebell Bank, Kate didn’t remember it.

      Kate reached for her wine glass, watching Emily and Lena laugh over recounting one of Fergus’s famous temper tantrums. ‘Red hair,’ Lena said sagely. ‘I should know, I was a redhead myself. I once threw James’s plate of dinner at the wall when I was in a temper over something or other.’

      ‘You didn’t?’ Emily’s eyes widened. ‘That should go in the memory book.’ She sprang up from the table and went over to an ancient sideboard. A moment later, she returned with a pad of Post-it notes and a pen. She hastily scribbled. ‘I don’t want to forget,’ she explained, glancing up from her writing to see Kate watching her curiously.

      ‘Memory book?’ Kate enquired.

      Emily nodded. ‘The story of Lena’s life. I’m preserving it all for her.’ And for all of us. The matter of fact way she said this, and the unspoken addendum, laid Lena’s illness before them.

      Kate looked at Lena, but she was unconcerned. Lena caught the look and grinned irreverently. ‘Like downloading me onto one of those memory stick thingies. On a computer. She’s making a backup.’

      Kate wasn’t sure how to deal with this candour. She hid her face in her wine glass to avoid having to reply. Emily and her grandmother had always been close and, watching them now, Kate felt the depths of their bond still. Emily seemed unfazed by the indisputable evidence of Lena’s illness; she faced the moments when Lena’s lucidity slipped with unfailing calm and gentleness, barely a crack in her composure. This was a good sign, for Emily had always been highly strung.

      After dinner, carrying the glasses to the kitchen to be washed, Kate overheard Lena in the kitchen saying petulantly; ‘But who is she? Has she come to clean? I told you I don’t need a cleaner.’

      ‘No, she’s not the cleaner. She’s an old friend of mine, Lena. She’s Kate.’

      ‘Kate? Don’t be silly. Kate’s just a child.’

      Kate had to return the glasses to the dining room to catch her breath, feeling dizzy and thrown off orbit. How on earth did Emily cope?

      By the time they set out to Dan’s farm, Lena was back to herself again. It was a perfectly lazy summer evening, the air sweet and heavy. A last slice of sunlight spilled over the rain-damp fields, the long grass was bowed with the weight of water and soft mud sucked at Kate’s borrowed wellingtons as they walked beneath the cool shade of the trees. The woods were alive: chirruping, rustling, crunching, squelching.

      ‘We walk this way most evenings after dinner,’ Emily said. ‘Even if we don’t go to the farm to see Dan and Abby. It’s a good walk for Bracken and Lena knows it like the back of her hand. She’s been doing it for seventy years so I don’t worry about her losing her way.’

      True, but Lena had also been handling cutlery for more than seventy years, yet earlier when she tried to set the table Kate had seen her freeze, bewildered, staring from the silverware in her hand to the empty space on the table, as if she had been asked to complete a puzzle, the key to which hovered beyond her ken, before finally dumping the whole pile in the middle in frustration. Everyone had extricated their own and it didn’t matter. Except, of course, that it did.

      The path from Bluebell Bank to the farm – shaped mostly by generations of Cottons – led down through the woods at the bottom of the garden, crossed stream and stile and skirted the fields, leading eventually down the slope of the lower pasture to the farmhouse nestled in the valley in the lea of two rolling hills.

      A lifetime of tramping the fields and hills of Galloway had made Lena thin and rangy and fit. She looked so strong striding out ahead of them in her manly boots, her wide-brimmed hat squashed on top of her wild, white hair, that Kate could imagine for a few moments that she was completely well. This physical wellness seemed unfair in the face of the insidious disease creeping at the corners of her mind, erasing parts of her. Kate wondered if Emily would have traded the mental disease for a physical, debilitating one, if it meant keeping Lena sharp and clever and herself? Would Lena? If she got to choose. She tried not to think about it as they walked. Lena led the way: hawk-eyed and stealthy as ever, naming the birds she spotted in the forest with mechanical ease; a woman who didn’t always remember what a fork was for could point out crossbills, goldcrests and great spotted woodpeckers without having to think about it.

      Now, trailing Lena and Bracken through the cool, dappled shade of the trees, Emily walked close enough to Kate to link arms affectionately. ‘So, tell me all about your job,’ she said.

      Kate pushed back her sleeves. The evening air had a strange, early summer feel to it: both warm and cool. She grinned. ‘There isn’t much to tell. I quit. I felt the commute from Wigtown would just be too much.’

      Emily rewarded her attempt at humour with a smile. ‘I hardly know what you did. Advertising or something, wasn’t it?’

      ‘Advertising, yes. It was a good company, some big campaigns. I was a junior assistant, but I was working my way up. I was working on a campaign for a big lingerie brand before I left.’

      ‘You were selling knickers?’ Emily sounded gleeful.

      Kate gave her a look. ‘Not knickers. Lingerie.’

      ‘Knickers are knickers,’ Emily said sagely. ‘However you dress them up.’

      Kate punched her arm lightly. ‘Perhaps that should have been my slogan. Knickers are knickers.’ She sighed. She had certainly felt like that sometimes, when she emerged from hours of interminable meetings, wilted and disillusioned: what was it all about? Haggling over wording СКАЧАТЬ