‘For one awful second I thought I’d have to do the VAT returns on my own and my whole life flashed before my eyes,’ Mattie said and Posy reached across the table, with some difficulty, to clink her glass in solidarity.
‘You and me both,’ she said, then turned her woeful face to Verity. ‘When are you moving out? The new year?’
‘Well, a bit sooner than that. If we start extended opening hours, which will mean opening on a Sunday, then I guess it will have to be … well, the day after tomorrow, if that’s OK,’ Verity said apologetically. ‘I could leave it until the new year, but Johnny has had one of those boiling-water taps installed so I can have instant tea, and he’s had a new window seat put in my favourite reading nook, it’s very comfy, and I spend all my time round his anyway … Oh! Yeah, I would be moving in with Johnny,’ she added, as though there had been any question.
Johnny was Verity’s beloved. A posh architect, who, much like Darcy in Verity’s favourite book Pride and Prejudice, with his ‘very fine grounds at Pemberley’, had a five-bedroom house in Canonbury and no one to share it with. Until now.
‘Oh! Very! Why didn’t you say something earlier?’ Posy exclaimed, grabbing Verity’s hand. ‘Let’s look at the ring! Oh … no ring.’
‘Because we’re not actually engaged. Just living together.’
‘Living in sin,’ Tom intoned, his hands in the prayer position, now that he’d eaten every single last cheesy chip without any thought for anyone else. ‘And you a vicar’s daughter, too.’
‘You know, Tom, that’s Nina’s line, you can’t really pull it off,’ Verity said. ‘And also, hello, welcome to the twenty-first century.’
Mattie was delighted for Verity, she really was. Even if living with a man was her idea of hell. She tried to smile happily and sincerely while she wondered what would be an acceptable period of time to pass before she could ask, plead, even beg Posy to be allowed to …
‘Well, if Very’s moving out, then I’ll take her room,’ Tom said calmly, as if his living rent-free in the flat above the shop was a done deal. ‘That’s fair, isn’t it?’
‘Wait, no, it’s not at all fair!’ Mattie exclaimed. ‘I was about to ask if I could take the room.’
‘Well, you should have been quicker,’ Tom said in that patronising way of his that made Mattie want to bash him over the head with the nearest heavy object to hand. In this case, a fire extinguisher. ‘Anyway, the flat is for bookshop staff.’
‘The tearooms are very much a part of the bookshop,’ Mattie said icily, never mind that she usually insisted that though they were very grateful for the footfall of the romantic-novel-buying public, she was running an autonomous business. ‘Though thank you very much for making me feel part of the Happy Ever After family.’
‘In case you’d forgotten, I’ve worked at Happy Ever After much longer than you’ve been at the tearooms,’ Tom pointed out superciliously.
‘You were part-time for ages,’ Mattie said calmly, although on the inside she was raging. ‘I bet if you add up all the hours I’ve spent in the tearooms, then it would be more hours than you’ve clocked up on the shop floor. I’m in at seven thirty every morning, I don’t leave much before eight most nights, and now you want to deprive me of the two hours of sleep I could snatch back.’
‘You’re completely overreacting,’ said Tom sourly, even though he’d worked among women for the last four years and knew only too well that to tell a woman that she was overreacting when she was reacting just enough was practically a hate crime. ‘Posy. It’s your decision.’
Posy burped. ‘My heartburn’s back. You two have given me heartburn and I’ve a good mind not to let either of you have the flat.’ She burped again. ‘I’m not meant to be getting stressed out, so you can sort out who gets the flat between you. Tomorrow,’ she added. ‘Now one of you go and get me another elderflower and soda, because I need to burp like no woman has ever needed to burp before.’
‘You’ve been burping on and off for the last hour,’ Verity ventured because she was a much braver woman than Mattie was.
Posy sighed. Then burped again. ‘Believe me, this is just the warm-up,’ she said sadly. ‘I’ve got an absolute ripper lodged somewhere in my midsection, which is yet to make its presence heard.’
The next morning, after the usual rush of customers desperate for one of Mattie’s breakfast specials and the bespoke blend of coffee that she had sent over from Paris, she, Posy and Tom inspected the upstairs flat.
Mattie didn’t want to get her hopes up, though she had an impassioned speech all ready as to why she should move into Verity’s soon-to-be-vacated room. Her heart was racing as she walked through the several anterooms of the bookshop, past the counter in the main room, through a door and up a flight of stairs. If she lived here, she’d be home by now instead of having an hour-long commute to and from Hackney – longer, if the traffic was terrible.
‘I’ve been meaning to say it for ages, Pose, but pregnancy really agrees with you,’ Tom said earnestly as Posy unlocked the door.
He really was the lowest of the low: his attempts to curry favour with Posy were laughably transparent and there was no way that Posy was going to fall for them.
‘That’s so sweet,’ Posy said with a watery smile and Mattie’s racing heart raced a little faster. ‘Nice try, Tom, but I’m a neutral observer in all this and also, I’m writing you up in the sexual harassment book.’
‘You know as well as I do that the sexual harassment book doesn’t even exist,’ Tom muttered, standing aside to let Mattie into the flat first because he did have a modicum of good manners, she’d give him that. ‘And if it did really exist, then I think you’d find that the only person who’s sexually harassed in this workplace is me. By post-menopausal women who are alarmingly handsy, and then instead of getting support from my colleagues, I’m further abused.’
Mattie couldn’t understand what the post-menopausal women saw in Tom. Objectively, he was all right looking, she’d have to admit if she was under oath. He was tall, made taller by his wheat-coloured hair, which was swept up in a quiff at the front and a short back and sides everywhere else. Mattie had never gazed into his eyes deeply enough to know what colour they were, but they were hidden behind old-fashioned horn-rimmed glasses that looked like they’d been given out free on the NHS in the 1950s, which somehow worked for him. He also had an OK build, though Mattie didn’t spend much time speculating at what Tom looked like under his clothes. God forbid!
Tom’s physical attributes might be passable but his clothes were another issue entirely. A major issue. He wore trousers that looked like they’d started life as part of a suit belonging to a country curate or some other dull sort of man that had lived eighty years ago and had a fondness for sombre tweed. His shirts, always white, weren’t too objectionable but the ties he wore, sometimes a jaunty polka-dot bow-tie and sometimes a knitted tie, and the cardigan with its leather patches on the elbows, all offended Mattie’s eyes.
Then there was his personality. Mattie knew that he was bookish: he had spent the last four years working part-time in the shop while he also studied for a PhD in philosophy or late medieval literature or some other dusty, dry subject. He refused to go into the details so Mattie had always assumed that it was something very dull and boring, or else, why all the secrecy? Still, Tom