His voice squeaked then broke on the last sentence. It sounded painful and Posy gulped in sympathy. ‘Nobody’s going to come in and take the shop out from under us,’ she said. Saying it out loud didn’t make it sound any less unbelievable. Or true, because Sebastian seemed to have plans for the mews that didn’t involve Bookends or Posy. ‘Lavinia’s left the shop to me. I own the shop, so I suppose I own the flat above the shop too.’
‘Why on earth would she leave you the shop?’ Sam opened his mouth, probably to unleash a whole new volley of questions, then shut it. ‘I mean, it’s lovely of Lavinia to leave the shop to you, but you’re not even allowed to cash up unsupervised at the end of the day.’
This was also true, after an incident involving a missing one hundred pounds, which hadn’t been missing at all, it was just that the 0 key on the shop calculator was sticky because Posy had been eating a Twix while she cashed up. ‘Lavinia was being kind, wanting to make sure that we’d be all right, but I wonder if this was the best way to go about it,’ Posy admitted. ‘Oh, Sam, I can’t even think in whole sentences right now. Have you got any homework?’
‘You want to talk about homework? Now?’ Posy was sure that Sam was rolling his eyes. ‘What’s wrong with you?’
Where to start with that one? ‘Mostly, I’m hungry. I haven’t had anything to eat all day. Shall we have fish-finger sandwiches for dinner?’ They always had fish-finger sandwiches for dinner when either one of them was feeling down. They’d had fish-finger sandwiches for dinner quite a lot recently.
‘Crinkle chips and baked beans too,’ Sam decided as he followed Posy through the back office and up the stairs to their flat. ‘Also, for English I have to pick a rap song and rewrite it in the style of a Shakespeare sonnet, so can you help me with that?’
Later, after fish-finger sandwiches had been eaten and Sam’s English homework had been accomplished with a glass of wine and only a small amount of flouncing and door slamming (mostly from Posy), she crept back downstairs to the shop.
Sam was meant to be getting ready for bed, but she could hear the faint but tinny sound of a computer game from his room. Posy didn’t have the energy for another argument though; not after trying to rewrite Jay Z’s ‘99 Problems’ in iambic pentameter.
Posy only put on the sidelights so the shop was mostly in shadow then slowly walked around the main room. Shelves lined the walls from floor to ceiling; there was a big display table in the centre of the floor, flanked by three sofas in varying stages of decay. Open arches to the left and right led to a series of anterooms sectioned off by bookcases. Posy suspected that the bookcases bred overnight. Sometimes she’d be poking around in one of the furthest reaches of the shop and would come across a bookcase that she swore she’d never seen before.
Her fingers trailed over the shelves, the spines of the books, as she did a silent inventory. The very last room on the right, accessed through a pair of glass doors, had once been a little tearoom. Now it was a curtained-off store room; its tables and chairs stacked to one side, the cake stands and china lovingly sourced from charity shops, antique fairs and car boot sales, packed away in boxes. If Posy closed her eyes, she could imagine it as it had once been. The smell of coffee and freshly baked cakes wafting through the shop, her mother weaving through the tables, her long blonde hair escaping from its ponytail, her cheeks pink, green eyes sparkling as she dispensed coffee and tea refills and took away empty plates.
In the shop, her father would have rolled up his shirtsleeves – he always wore a shirt and waistcoat with his jeans – and could usually be found halfway up the rolling ladder as he selected a series of books for a customer waiting down below. ‘If you liked that one, then you’ll love these,’ he would say. Lavinia had called him the King of Hand-Selling. As Posy reached the poetry section, her eyes immediately searched for the three volumes of poetry that her father had written, which they always kept in stock. ‘I think, if Ian Morland hadn’t been taken from us so cruelly, so suddenly,’ Lavinia had written in his obituary, ‘then he would have become one of our greatest English poets.’
There’d been no obituary written for her mother, but that hadn’t meant she was missed any less. Far from it. As Posy retraced her steps to the main room again, she wasn’t wandering through a shop, but through her home, memories of her mother and father alive with every step she took.
In the back office, one of the walls was covered with the signatures of visiting authors, everyone from Nancy Mitford and Truman Capote to Salman Rushdie and Enid Blyton. The notches on the doorjamb faithfully recorded the heights of the Bookends children, starting with Lavinia and her brothers and ending with Posy and Sam.
Outside in the courtyard, they’d have summer fetes and Christmas fairs. Posy remembered how the trees would be strung with fairy lights for launch parties and poetry readings al fresco. They’d once held a wedding reception out there after two customers had fallen instantly and madly in love over a copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Under the shelves in a corner by the counter was the cubbyhole where her father had built her a little reading nook. Posy’s mother had made her four plump cushions to lounge on while she read.
It was in Bookends that Posy had met some of her best friends. Pauline, Petrova and Posy (whom she was named for) Fossil from Ballet Shoes, her mother’s favourite book. Not to mention Milly-Molly-Mandy and little-friend-Susan, the girls of St Clare’s and Malory Towers and the Chalet School. Scout and Jem Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird. The Bennet sisters. Jane Eyre and poor, mad Cathy ‘mopped and mowed’ about the moors as she searched for her Heathcliffe.
And it had been a night very much like this one, but far, far worse when she’d wandered around the darkened shop, still dressed in her funeral black, still seeing the two coffins slowly being lowered into the ground. That night, unable to sleep, determined not to cry because she knew that she’d howl and she didn’t want to wake up Sam, she’d plucked a book, a random book, from the shelves and crawled into her cubbyhole.
It had been a Georgette Heyer novel, Regency Buck. A beautiful flighty girl, Judith Taverner, locks horns with the sardonic, dandified Julian St John Audley, her legal guardian. Judith launches herself on London society, has madcap adventures in Brighton, meets and charms Beau Brummel and the Prince Regent, and has many spirited disagreements with the arrogant Julian, until they’re both compelled to admit their love.
It had pushed buttons that Posy didn’t even know she had. The Heyer Regency romances weren’t quite up there with Pride and Prejudice, which was the gold-star, triple-A standard of romance novels, but they came quite close.
Over the next few numb weeks when just getting through each day intact was a major triumph, Posy had read every single Regency romance Georgette Heyer had written. She’d begged Lavinia to order more and when she’d finished them all, Posy took to the internet to find other writers who were considered Heyer’s successors: Clare Darcy, Elizabeth Mansfield, Patricia Veryan, Vanessa Gray – they couldn’t match Heyer’s exquisite attention to detail or her wit, but there were still flighty young heiresses and sardonic men trying to lord it over them until love prevailed.
Posy had taken over one room of the shop and filled it with novels by Julia Quinn, Stephanie Laurens, Eloisa James, Mary Balogh, Elizabeth Hoyt and others. And when Posy had read every Regency romance that she could find, there were other books, lots and lots of them, where the girl didn’t just get the boy, she got the happy ever after that everyone deserved. Well, almost everyone. Serial killers and people who were cruel to animals and drunk drivers – especially drunk drivers, like the one who had careered over the central reservation of the M4 and ploughed into her parents’ car – none of them deserved happy ever afters, but everybody else did.
It turned out that a lot of the women who worked in nearby shops and offices and browsed Bookends in their