Still, there was no way, no way in hell, Tom was taking this room out from under her, Mattie thought as she peered into the large living room with its original fireplace with beautiful tiled surround and, inevitably, fully stacked bookshelves on either side. There was also a quite hideous floral three-piece suite. ‘It’s much comfier than it looks,’ Posy promised. ‘And across the hall, this is the bathroom. We’ve just had a new shower installed.’
‘Perfect, love what you’ve done with it,’ Mattie murmured.
‘So much better than perfect,’ Tom insisted. ‘It’s very rare that I find a bath long enough that I can stretch out in it.’
‘Not getting involved,’ Posy said in a sing-song voice. She was in a much better mood this morning than she had been the evening before. Apparently she’d drunk a bottle of Gaviscon with her breakfast and her indigestion was temporarily abated. ‘Then this room is Nina’s. It is the bigger bedroom, but that’s neither here nor there, as Nina will be back imminently, I hope.’
‘She hasn’t said then?’ Mattie asked, as they all stared at the closed door of Nina’s room.
Posy shook her head. ‘No, she’s been very diligent with the remote marketing malarkey, but every time I ask her when she’s coming back, she ignores me. It’s very annoying, especially when I’m very pregnant.’
‘You’re only seven months pregnant. I think you’ve still got a few weeks to go before you’re very pregnant,’ Tom said, moving away from the door so he couldn’t see the daggers that Posy was shooting at him.
‘How would you know?’ she demanded. ‘When was the last time you were very pregnant?’
This was going much better than Mattie had imagined. Tom was going to talk himself out of the room without any help from her. Still, a little nudge couldn’t hurt.
‘Men don’t have periods either. Or the menopause. Or have to maintain ridiculous standards of grooming to conform to a patriarchal society’s ideal of what a woman should be,’ Mattie said with a sad sigh.
‘Good points, Mattie, but I’m still neutral,’ Posy said with a disapproving look. ‘Do you want to see the kitchen before we get to the room? And take your hand away from the door, Tom. I’m not having you go in there and try to bags it and claim that bagsying it is legally binding, like you did that time when The Midnight Bell only had one bowl of cheesy chips left.’
‘That was one time!’ But he stepped away from the door of Verity’s room and continued down the hall towards the kitchen, pausing in front of a strange bell-and-lever contraption fixed to the wall so he could give it a fond pat. ‘God bless you, Lady Agatha.’
The first owner of the bookshop had been one Lady Agatha Drysdale, who’d been gifted the business by her parents to distract her from her suffragette activities, with only limited success: Lady Ag was as passionate about women’s suffrage as she was about books.
‘It’s a butler’s bell that Lady Agatha installed so she could summon her employees up from the shop,’ Posy explained, giving it a fond pat herself. ‘Apparently, the wiring disintegrated some time in the seventies, which was a real shame. It would have been great to be able to do some summoning when Sam and I lived here.’
Posy and her younger brother Sam had lived above the shop almost all their lives. Lavinia, Lady Agatha’s daughter who’d by then inherited the shop and sounded as though she had been the most splendid woman, had employed Posy’s father to manage the bookshop and her mother to run the tearooms, but they’d died in a car accident some ten years before. Lavinia had continued to let Posy and Sam live above the shop, and when she died, she’d left both shop and flat to Posy. It also seemed as if she’d left Sebastian, her wildly dashing yet incredibly obnoxious grandson, to Posy too, for they were now married and expecting, and living in Lavinia’s house on the other side of Bloomsbury.
‘Though of course, you could have just summoned by text message,’ Mattie said, then she wished that she hadn’t because it sounded as if she was pouring cold water on Lady Agatha, when she wasn’t, she was just being practical. She also didn’t feel as if it were her place to give the butler’s bell a fond pat, so instead she dipped her head as she passed on her way to the kitchen.
‘It’s awfully small,’ Tom said, as they took in the old-fashioned kitchen cabinets painted a sunny primrose yellow with blue trim and grey Formica worktop. The kitchen wasn’t as small as the kitchen in the tearooms – there was even room for a small table, two chairs and a fridge-freezer – and Mattie wasn’t going to let Tom undermine her.
‘It’s a beautiful kitchen and anyway, size has absolutely nothing to do with it. I once made a triple-layer cake on a camping stove.’ So there, she wanted to add and stick her tongue out at Tom, but she resisted, though it took every ounce of strength that she had.
‘So, the room,’ Posy prompted, hands settling where her stomach used to be so she could rub soothing circles on her bump, which she did whenever she was agitated. ‘It used to be my room. It’s a nice size and the windows look out onto the mews.’
She squeezed past Mattie and Tom back the way she came, so she could open the door on a room. The room. The most perfect room. It was comfy and cosy but large enough for a double bed, a wardrobe, a chest of drawers and, of course, several bookcases. There were two picture windows and on this bright but chilly day, the weak winter sun streamed in.
‘It’s lovely,’ Mattie said in all sincerity.
‘I’ll take it,’ Tom said in a peremptory fashion, as if he dared Mattie to disagree, in which case he was doomed to disappointment. ‘I have worked in the shop longer than even Verity and Nina, yet they were still given first dibs on the rooms, which was very unfair, even though I never brought it up at the time.’ He tapped his chest. ‘That wounded me, Posy.’
‘Oh dear.’ Posy pulled a face. ‘It’s just that Verity is the manager and I just assumed that it would be less awkward to have Verity and Nina take the flat, on account of them being, like, ladies. Two ladies.’
‘When you assume, you make an ass out of you and me,’ Tom said gravely.
Mattie saw her chance and seized it with both hands. ‘Don’t call Posy an ass,’ she gasped in shocked tones. ‘And her pregnant, too! You know, it would be awkward, wouldn’t it, for Tom to share with Nina, Nina being a lady, but I’m a lady too, so that would be absolutely not awkward.’
‘Nina is my dear, dear friend,’ Tom said, his eyes flashing behind his glasses though his dear, dear friend Nina had once confided to Mattie that she suspected that Tom didn’t even need glasses and just wore them to make himself look even more like a tweedy nerd than he already did. ‘Also, it’s the twenty-first century, and if you won’t let me share a flat with a woman, then, I don’t want to, but I would have a very good case to take to a sexual discrimination trial.’
‘Yeah, nice try,’ Mattie blustered, because she could feel the flat slipping through her fingers.
Tom nodded. ‘Maybe even the European Court of Human Rights. It’s your decision, Posy.’
‘It’s not my decision,’ Posy said, backing out of the room. ‘I’m not making any decisions that are likely to cause my blood pressure to rise. I’m stressed out enough about all this Christmas stuff. You’ll have to decide between yourselves, like the sensible, grown-up, adult people that I know you both can be.’
Mattie hated to beg, but just because she hated something wasn’t a good enough reason not to.
‘No Posy, please, please, let me have the room. I have to be here by seven thirty, eight at the very latest. I get up at