Crazy in Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop. Annie Darling

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СКАЧАТЬ answer the phone under extreme duress, whereas Nina was happy to answer the phone every time it rang and chat to every customer, which even Posy got a bit bored with, so Verity and Posy could just get over themselves.

      Her timekeeping might be a little free-form but Nina was excellent at customer service. She said as much to Posy, who was now taking the books that Nina rang up, and bagging them along with a complimentary Happy Ever After bookmark, but Posy just muttered darkly that she already missed the new and improved Nina.

      The queue seemed never ending but it did end eventually, and Nina could take off her coat, stash her bag under the counter and come face to face with …

      ‘Not you again! How long have you been standing there?’ Nina demanded of Noah, who was indeed standing at the other end of the counter in his stupid suit with his stupid handheld device. No doubt he’d been writing copious notes about the amount of backchat Nina gave to Posy and was recommending that she be fired immediately.

      ‘Quite a while actually,’ Noah replied mildly. ‘You see, I wasn’t back late from lunch.’

      Nina gave him a hard stare – she didn’t appreciate his sarcasm. Not one little bit. He had a clever, kind-looking face but when he smiled blandly at Nina, as he was doing now, it just stoked the flames of her dislike.

      ‘Noah’s here for the afternoon,’ Posy said. ‘Which you’d have known if you’d got back from lunch in time.’

      ‘God, Posy, will you let it go?’ Nina groaned and Noah made another mark on his iPad, which Nina was going to spill a hot drink on first chance she got, and Posy sniffed and said that she had work to do and that she wasn’t to be disturbed, and disappeared into the back office.

      She even shut the door so Nina couldn’t eavesdrop on her and Verity, which meant they were sure to be talking about her. She glanced around the main room of the shop then craned her neck to see what was going on in the anterooms on her right and her left. The browsers had thinned out. The shop was almost empty again. Just like the old days when they’d been Bookends and the only thing stopping them from closing down was the fact that Lavinia had a private income to keep the shop afloat. Nina sighed.

      Back then, she had half-expected to be made redundant. And now, if these last few weeks of not many customers in the shop was the new normal or the new old normal, was she going to live in fear of losing her job again? She’d been the last member of staff to be taken on, after all, and everyone knew that the last one through the door was the first to pick up their P45 when cuts were being made. Even though Verity refused to serve any customers, she was the only staff member who knew how the stock system worked. And Posy had been left the shop by Lavinia because she was practically family (her father had been the shop manager and her mother had run the tearooms until they’d been killed in a motorway crash), and anyway, she could hardly sack herself.

      Tom was only part-time and refused to wear the official Happy Ever After staff T-shirt, but he had a way with their older customer base that defied belief. Also, Nina could imagine that if Posy did fire him, Tom would just tell Posy very crossly that he wasn’t fired and that would be the end of it.

      Before she’d come to work at Bookends, Nina had as much success in keeping her jobs as she did in keeping her boyfriends. Both employment and relationships usually lasted between three days and three months. She’d been let go from pretty much every position she’d ever had for a variety of reasons ranging from poor timekeeping and a bad attitude to daydreaming. But it wasn’t really Nina’s fault – she’d become so bored with her old profession. She’d been on her feet all day, the chemicals had played havoc with her manicure and she got into trouble if she didn’t convince her customers to buy overpriced products that they didn’t really need.

      Then that miraculous moment, three years ago, when Nina had bumped into Lavinia at a David Bowie exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. It had been a hot July day, Nina had been wearing a sleeveless fifties dress and had been staring at a display case featuring outfits from the Ziggy Stardust years, when someone had tapped her on the shoulder.

      ‘Excuse me, my dear,’ a very posh female voice had said. ‘Is that an Alice in Wonderland tattoo on your arm?’

      Nina had turned round to see an elderly woman standing there, though there was nothing decrepit about the curious, warm look on her face.

      ‘It is,’ Nina had replied, holding her arm out so that the woman could get a better look at the intricate, inked artwork depicting the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, and the words weaving through it: ‘You’re mad, bonkers, completely off your head. But I’ll tell you a secret; all the best people are.’

      They’d read out the quotation in unison, both of them laughing, and then Lavinia had introduced herself and asked Nina if she could tempt her to a pot of tea and a cake. She’d offered Nina a job at Bookends about ten minutes after that.

      But Lavinia was gone and so was Bookends. It was a new era of Posy and Happy Ever After, and Posy had been so convinced that becoming a ‘one-stop shop for all your romantic fiction needs’ would bring in new customers in huge numbers, but what if Posy had been wrong?

      ‘Don’t mind me, I am just meant to be observing, but are you all right?’

      ‘You what?’

      Nina’s doom-laden reverie was interrupted by Noah who’d felt moved enough to put down his iPad as he gazed at her with some concern. If only she could remember where she knew him from. ‘It’s just you’ve been standing there for the last six minutes and forty-three seconds without moving. Do you suffer from low blood sugar?’

      ‘Hardly! Not with the amount of cakes I eat,’ Nina said honestly. She shook her head and blinked. ‘I’m fine. Don’t stare at me like that. It’s weird.’

      She was a fine one to talk. She was being very weird herself. Noah obviously thought so because he muttered to himself as he picked his iPad up again and made a note. Of course he did. Nina could just imagine what he was writing about her.

       Nina is a terrible employee. She has no work ethic. She doesn’t even attempt to look busy when the shop’s quiet but stands there like she’s about to go into hypoglycaemic shock. Also, I think she was dribbling.

      ‘Enough of this!’ Nina said, though she wasn’t sure if she was talking to Noah or putting herself on a warning. Either way, she needed to do some work. Or else, look like she was doing some work. The bell above the door tinkled as a couple of people came into the shop.

      ‘Hello! Welcome to Happy Ever After. Just ask if you need any help,’ Nina called out as she so often did and not just because she was being steadily and creepily observed.

      Thankfully, there was a constant flow of customers for the rest of the afternoon and Nina didn’t have to pretend to look busy. She was run ragged dealing with one woman who stayed for over an hour because she was in the mood for ‘a multi-book series set in a country house a bit like The Cazalet Chronicles’ but had read everything that Nina pulled from the shelves. Or if she hadn’t read them, then she didn’t like the look of them.

      In the end, Nina persuaded her to reread The Cazalet Chronicles and sent her off with all five books, as the woman had lent her copies to her sister-in-law who she hadn’t spoken to for eighteen months, since they’d had words at a family christening about some Tupperware that hadn’t been washed and returned after a barbecue.

      In between it was the usual routine of ringing up and bagging books, sharing recommendations СКАЧАТЬ