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

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СКАЧАТЬ sipped her tea and looked at her levelly. ‘You had every right to ask it, and expect it too. You’re my best friend.’

      ‘Still? After all this time?’

      ‘Time makes no difference, Em.’

      Emily’s grey eyes were trembling with a mix of hope and doubt, the intensity of her gaze unnerving beneath heavy brows. ‘Doesn’t it?’

      The look – the hope – was too much for Kate. Time was not the problem, but rather the nature of their parting; immediately after university, Emily running off with gorgeous, unreliable Joe, quite determined to make a life with him in spite of her family’s objections; and Kate, tired of fighting Emily on the subject, still heart-sore over her own lost love and desperate to put as many miles between her and her mother as possible. She stuck a pin in a map and came up with New York. It seemed glossy and glamorous, ambiguous, anonymous: the ideal stage for her reinvention.

      Time mattered only in as much as all the moments lost, and all the things they hadn’t said.

      Kate knew what she needed to say to mend the moment, what Emily needed to hear. ‘Not to us.’ Her words were emphatic and brooked no argument. They’d work the rest out later.

      She set down her lipstick-printed mug on a nearby table and her boots rang on the flagstones as she made yet another loop of the shop.

      Completing her circuit, she paused, lips compressed in contemplation as her plans began to form, spider-webbing in her mind. She had flown through the night, navigated airport queues and driven for hours in a rented car for this. She had had next to no sleep, but she barely felt tired at all now. When she turned back to Emily, her eyes were bright. ‘It’s going to be great,’ she enthused. ‘We’ll start with a good clean up. We should redesign the layout of the shop floor, get new tables, chairs, rugs. We must start thinking about our advertising strategy, our unique selling point …’She paused. She could already see it all – buttery light spilling from low lamps, plump cushions and overstuffed armchairs, and row upon row of books awaiting the ready smiles of the regulars and the meandering casual browsers, and, pervading it all, the smell of good coffee.

      So real was the image that she could almost feel the crisp, thick covers of new books beneath her fingertips, hear the murmur of rustling pages and the hum of happy voices. Kate didn’t even like books all that much but she was desperate to begin, to create the very best bookshop imaginable. Together.

      Emily buried her head in her hands as bubbles of panic rose and burst and she began to deflate like a popped balloon. ‘Please—’ she began.

      Kate looked confused. ‘I’m sorry, should I slow down? But … this is why you brought me here – no?’

      Emily dragged her hands from her face with a sigh. ‘Yes. But it’s all so fast. I need some time to get accustomed to the idea of you being here, never mind thinking about rugs and chairs and … and selling points.’

      Kate gave her a cool, meditative stare, deciding that Emily’s dithering ennui had best be ignored. ‘Nonsense,’ she said briskly. ‘Find me a notebook and point me in the direction of the nearest deli. We’ll make some notes over lunch.’

      Equipped with legal currency and directions – it had been a long time since Kate’s last visit to Wigtown and shops had come and gone in the intervening years – Kate headed for the door, only to turn back abruptly. Emily remained anxiously in the middle of the shop. ‘Emily, I came all this way with no warning. I should have called … and I didn’t even ask where I would be staying.’ Suddenly it seemed impulsive and imprudent to have leapt on the plane and come on the strength of so very little.

      Emily set aside the book she had picked up and pushed her hair back behind her ears. ‘You’ll stay with me of course.’ As if it was a stupid question.

      Kate spoke with exaggerated patience. ‘Yes, but where is that exactly? Sleeping bags in one of the outbuildings?’ With Emily, she wouldn’t rule it out.

      Emily shuddered at the prospect of the scuttling spiders. ‘I live at Bluebell Bank, with Lena. You’ll stay with us there.’

      A thrill ran through Kate. Full circle. Back to Bluebell Bank. It was more than she could have hoped for. Missing those years with Emily had meant losing the rest of the Cottons too. Bluebell Bank was the source of the only happy, carefree memories of Kate’s childhood. When she had been welcomed into the clan she had been transported from her life of poverty and loneliness and brought here to the Solway, to share the Cotton’s idyllic summers with Lena, their unconventional grandmother, and all Emily’s brothers.

      ‘Will that be all right with Lena?’ she asked, flinching from the prospect of coming all this distance only to be turned away, or worse, treated like an old acquaintance from an era long gone. She was family. She belonged. And they belonged to her.

      ‘Yes,’ Emily said stoutly, ‘it’ll be grand.’ She was keeping something back, Kate could tell. She lingered in the doorway, watching, noting how Emily’s eyes remained fixed on the floor as she reached for another book and began nervously rifling pages. A spasm of fear caught Kate in its iron grip, squeezing the breath from her lungs. For the first time since the email – the precipitous decision, the termination of her New York life and the plane ride over the ocean – she began to contemplate the dreadful possibility that the sanctuary she had returned to was not, as she had always imagined it must be, simply waiting for her, unchanged.

      ‘Bluebell Bank,’ Kate whispered, as Emily’s anxious eyes rose to meet hers again. ‘We were so happy there as kids, weren’t we.’

      Emily’s smile was every bit as pale and determined as the thin beams of sun that strained through the shop windows - nearly opaque with grime. ‘Yes. And we will be again.’

Chapter Two

      Kate walked briskly along the street, reacquainting herself with the town: its wide cobbled roads and flowering planters pungent in the persistent rain; the county buildings at one end and the bowling green splitting the road into two forks; the arty-crafty havens all along the street; the coffee shops and newsagents.

      And bookshop upon bookshop upon bookshop.

      What was Emily thinking: opening a bookshop in this town?

      Kate thought of the draughty old barn – rustic and romantic, Emily would say – with its mouldy books and pall of damp and cold, and lights that flickered, but only occasionally. How typical of Emily to see none of the pitfalls, but only the potential of the place shining through, like a lighthouse beacon in the fog, ready to save them all, but only if they did some serious work, fast.

      Wigtown was accustomed to tourists; the book festival had gone from strength to strength since its first incarnation had drawn the town into cultural focus, and the Solway coast had long been a haven for holidaymakers, with its beaches and forests and gentle, rolling beauty. It was the beginning of June, the festival was some months away and the thick of the tourist season was not yet upon them, and today was a drab, grey Monday, so Kate found the town quiet. For a horrible moment, it seemed too small for her and she felt a wave of homesickness for her city.

      And for Ben. She pictured him, luxuriating in his vast bed, giving her a lazy look from sloe-dark eyes. But, no, Ben would not be idling between his Egyptian cotton sheets waiting for her to come home and slip in beside him. He would be getting on with things, working or schmoozing clients in a bid to impress the СКАЧАТЬ