‘My price is a cinnamon bun from Maggie’s,’ Charles said, lifting the pipe out of his mouth. ‘That’s the bakery three doors down from my shop. Bring me one of those and I’ll tell you all the tales you have time for.’
Zoe thought of Mick’s hesitant warning in the car, about the locals and their legends, embellished to frighten incomers. She took another drag, the second easier than the first, and felt the nicotine buzz through her blood.
‘How do you know so much about the place?’ she asked.
‘I lived here for a while, many years ago.’ Charles paused to relight his pipe. After considerable effort and fierce puffing, he looked up at her through a cloud of smoke. ‘After I retired, I drifted back. I think I always knew I would, deep down.’ He made it sound fatalistic, the way Mick had.
‘You missed it?’
‘It called me back. Simple as that. I took a look around and it occurred to me that people here could do with a bookshop.’ He drew on his pipe again with a rueful smile. ‘Not many of them agreed, if my accounts are anything to go by.’
‘Rubbish,’ Edward said. ‘People love the bookshop. Your profit margins would be a lot better if you weren’t always giving books away for nothing.’
‘Well, that’s the trouble, you see.’ Charles leaned forward, pointing the stem of his pipe at Zoe as if he were imparting a confidence. ‘Whenever someone comes in, I think, a-ha, I know just the thing he or she should read. But people have very fixed ideas about what they think they like – have you noticed? Sometimes I have to fairly insist they take it, and then I can hardly charge them. But I’m almost never wrong – Edward will tell you. Besides,’ he sucked on the pipe and sighed out a fragrant haze, ‘I hate to see books sitting alone and unloved on a shelf. I’d much rather they found a home.’
‘Not the smartest way to run a business,’ Edward said, with affection. Charles inclined his head.
‘True. But only an idiot would open a second-hand bookshop to get rich.’
‘Did you live here as a child?’ Zoe asked.
Charles looked at her, his white eyebrows gently puckered, as if the question required careful deliberation.
‘There you are!’ The door banged against the wall and Kaye stood on the step, a pint glass of water in one hand, jabbing a finger towards Zoe in mock-admonishment. ‘Thought we’d lost you.’
Zoe saw her take in the cigarette and felt immediately guilty, as if she were still her adolescent self and had exposed herself to the censure of the neighbours. Kaye’s look changed when her gaze fell on Charles, stretched comfortably over his bench, Horace’s chin resting on his boots.
‘Has he been filling your head with nonsense?’ She nodded towards him. She was trying to keep her voice light, but Zoe did not miss the underlying sharpness, the anxiety in Kaye’s eyes.
‘None that wasn’t there before,’ Zoe said with a smile.
‘He’s a great one for the stories, is our Professor,’ Kaye said, fixing him with a stern eye. ‘Keeps us all entertained round the fire when the nights draw in. Ed – Bernie wants to go in five. Give us a drag of that.’ She took Edward’s half-smoked cigarette from his hand without waiting for an invitation, throwing a guilty glance towards the upper windows of the building behind them. ‘If my girls are looking out, I’m in trouble.’
She hauled in another lungful and leaned down to stub out the butt in a pot of sand by the door. Edward dug his hands into his jeans pockets and dipped his head towards Zoe. ‘Nice to meet you. Hopefully we’ll see you up here again, if you’re around for a while.’ The diffident angle of his glance, the not-quite-meeting of her eye, the studied nonchalance of his tone, all caught Zoe off guard; was he flirting with her?
‘Sure,’ she said, aiming to sound neutral. The idea seemed so unlikely that almost as soon as it had occurred she felt embarrassed by it, in case he had guessed at her presumption. He nodded, gave Charles a brief wave and disappeared back inside the pub. Kaye beamed widely and looked at the door, as if she could will her guest back inside with the force of her smile. Zoe was too foggy with tiredness to offer any resistance. She looked at the cigarette burning slowly down between her fingers as if she couldn’t remember how it had come to be there. She ground it out in the sand and turned back at the door to Charles.
‘I’ll look out for your shop, Mr Joseph.’ She did not quite have the nerve to call him ‘Professor’.
‘Please do,’ he said, reaching down to tousle the dog between its ears. ‘Horace and I are there every day, putting the world to rights with whoever drops by. We’d be delighted to see you. I promise I’ll find you an interesting read.’
A brief twitch of alarm passed across Kaye’s face. ‘Mind you behave yourself,’ she said, pointing at him. ‘Mrs Adams is our guest.’ Once more, the jokey tone, with the undercurrent of warning. It was curious, Zoe thought; Kaye obviously liked the Professor, but she seemed keen to keep him away from her, without ever quite making it explicit. Did she fear he might tell her some local legend that would spook her so much she’d run away tomorrow and shout it all over TripAdvisor? She almost laughed, that they could think her so skittish. They had no idea; no story could be worse than the one she carried with her. Besides, she had already paid half the rent up front.
‘I like history,’ she said to Charles. ‘And poetry.’ Her tongue felt thick and woolly in her mouth as she spoke. She looked down at the glass in her hand and realised it was empty; she did not remember drinking it. She felt Kaye’s solid presence at her back, ushering her firmly but gently indoors.
After the night air of the courtyard, the heat of the log fire and the press of bodies crowded in on her. The whisky churned in her empty stomach and the nicotine pulsed in her temples, dizzying her and blurring her vision. She leaned against the wall, briefly closing her eyes. Her skull seemed to squeeze tighter and she took a deep breath to quell the nausea. Though she had no interest in making friends here, she did not want to be known forever as the woman who threw up in the bar within an hour of arriving.
‘You all right?’ Kaye laid her metalled fingers lightly on Zoe’s shoulder.
Zoe nodded. ‘The bathroom?’
‘Past the bar, on the right.’ Kaye patted her, as you might a small child.
The bathroom was even more stifling, airless with the heat of hand-driers in a confined space. Zoe took off her flying jacket and tucked it between her knees, splashed cold water over her face and dried it with the sleeve of her shirt. She rested her forehead against the cool of the mirror and watched as her breath fogged a circle on the glass. Her reflection stared back at her with frayed outlines. Her skin looked blanched, the shadows beneath her eyes so deep they appeared bruised. She had taken her make-up off before the flight and been too tired to bother applying any more. Straight off the red-eye, Bradley to Dublin, connecting flight to Glasgow and on to a five-hour train journey to the ferry, to bring her here. When she had planned it, back home, it had seemed a good idea: get all the travelling done at once, no layovers, no breaks for sightseeing. She was not here for tourist attractions. All she wanted was to get to the sprawling old house by that deserted shore that had called to her over the Internet, and wrap its solitude around her. She had no sense of time any more; she struggled to remember when she had last eaten, or showered.
Rubbing away the condensation of her breath with a sleeve, she met her reflection’s eye with as steady a gaze as she could manage. They both seemed disappointed with each other. Turning forty-three, and looking every last day of it. Did she seriously imagine that earnest, handsome boy would have been flirting with her? But it was more than jet lag, she thought, peering closely at her own face in the mirror; all the turbulence of the past year was written into her skin, a bone-deep exhaustion she could not shake off. Perhaps here she would finally be able to sleep.
She fished in her pocket and found a Chanel lipstick, one she had thrown in at the last minute, just in case. In case of