As a result of that and many other insults, Nina couldn’t imagine that Sebastian had many friends, but here was Posy, insisting that he did and that apparently this Noah was one of them. Maybe that was why Nina still had a nagging thought that she knew Noah from somewhere, even though she’d rather poke her eye out than hang out at boring techy things with Posy’s husband. He certainly hadn’t been at Posy and Sebastian’s wedding, which had been a very small affair thrown together at three weeks’ notice. ‘They met at Oxford,’ Posy said, her face going all melty as it did when she was thinking about Sebastian. ‘Been friends ever since. Noah doesn’t put up with any of Sebastian’s nonsense. Don’t you think he’s a little bit sexy, in a nerdy way?’
‘Ugh! No! He was wearing a tie!’ Nina exclaimed with a shudder. ‘And a suit. So not my type. I do bad boys. I don’t do nerds.’
‘Have you ever thought of going against type?’ Verity asked out of the corner of her mouth because she was cashing up and if she got too distracted, she lost count.
‘Why would I want to do that?’ Nina asked. ‘It would be like asking me to have brown eyes instead of blue. Or to stop being five foot six. I can’t change the way I am.’
‘Change is good,’ Posy insisted as she picked up the books that had been discarded on the three sofas that dominated the centre of the main room and began to reshelve them. ‘There’s been lots of changes round here in the last few months and they’ve all been pretty positive.’
There was truth in this. Last summer, the old and ailing Bookends had become Happy Ever After with a new romance remit and colour scheme, and a reopened tearoom. Nina was much happier selling romance novels to mostly ladies than she had been not really selling anything much to the occasional punter who had infrequently visited the shop.
But in order for Bookends to become Happy Ever After, lovely Lavinia, their boss and mentor, had died and Nina missed her as much now as she did that awful morning a few months ago when she’d first heard the news. It was why their central display table was a little shrine to their much-loved friend. Each time Nina caught sight of Lavinia’s favourite books stacked on it or caught the heady scent of Lavinia’s favourite pink roses in the glass vase she’d bought from Woolworths in the sixties, she felt the same sweet piercing ache.
Also, Posy had gone from never dating (unless Nina bullied her into it) to marrying Lavinia’s grandson, Sebastian, in the space of what felt like five minutes. Posy said that it had been building for years, but as far as Nina could tell, one minute Posy and Sebastian were shouting at each other as they usually did, the next they were plighting their troth at Camden Town Hall.
But in some ways that, too, had been a good change. Evidently Sebastian made Posy very happy. The frown that she’d always worn had been replaced by a slightly dazed smile and even better, she, and her younger brother Sam, had vacated the flat above the shop to live with Sebastian in Lavinia’s house in a pretty garden square on the other side of Bloomsbury. Though Nina missed Sam dreadfully – he could always be persuaded to go on a chocolate run or fix her iPhone when the screen froze – Posy had offered her old flat to Nina and Verity rent-free.
Nina hadn’t waited to be asked twice. Paying rent had taken up a huge chunk of her not-very-big bookseller’s wages. Not to mention that Nina had been stuck out in Southfields in a houseshare with five other people, no lounge, and an infestation of silverfish in the kitchen that would not quit. It had been a hell of a commute, especially when the District Line was malfunctioning, which it did frequently. There had also been an awful lot of sleeping on friends’ sofas after missing the last tube home.
So, the good changes and the bad changes just about balanced each other out. And some things never changed, like Nina waiting for Posy to finish reshelving and Verity to complete the cashing up, before she asked hopefully, ‘Pub?’
Going to the pub after work was a time-honoured tradition, except that was another thing that had changed – and not for the better.
‘I would …’ Posy began then shook her head. ‘But I really should get home. Sebastian’s been away on a business trip and I haven’t seen him for three whole days. We are still practically on our honeymoon.’
Nina didn’t think that it was still a honeymoon if you’d married last June and it was now fricking February, but she decided it was wiser not to mention it. Instead she turned pleading eyes to Verity. ‘Pub, Very?’
‘I can’t. I need a half-hour decompression lie-down then Johnny and I are going to a lecture about art deco at the Courtauld Institute,’ Verity said, because one of the other changes was that Verity, Verity, a self-professed introvert, was besotted with her newish boyfriend, a posh architect called Johnny, and Nina hardly saw her. She’d much preferred it when Verity had been seeing an oceanographer called Peter Hardy who’d mostly been away oceanographing so Verity could often be persuaded to go to the pub.
‘What’s that? What’s that I hear?’ Nina cupped a hand to her ear. ‘Oh yes. It’s the sound of wedding bells breaking up my old gang.’
‘I went to the pub with you yesterday,’ Posy pointed out.
‘And, I’m not married and have no plans to,’ Verity added.
‘Alcohol?’ said a heavily-accented voice from the archway on the right and Nina turned gratefully towards Paloma, the tearoom’s barista who was standing there with a hopeful expression on her face. ‘Alcohol? Nina? Alcohol?’
‘Alcohol!’ Nina gratefully confirmed. ‘Si! Alcohol!’
Paloma was Spanish, from Barcelona, and hadn’t been in London for long. Her English was rather basic, though she said that coffee was pretty much a universal language, and she had more piercings than Nina (who had seven holes in one ear, eight in the other and a metal bolt through her tongue) or even Nina’s friend Claude, and he pierced people for a living. Paloma also had an on/off Cuban boyfriend called Jesus, who wasn’t as godly as his name suggested. It often sounded to Nina like they were having the most tempestuous rows, as it did ten minutes later, once they were settled round the table in a tapas bar just off the Grays Inn Road.
As usual, Paloma and Jesus were shouting at each other and gesticulating wildly as Nina sat there nursing a vodka and tonic to chase away the last dregs of her hangover. ‘Guys,’ she said eventually when there was a pause in the argument. ‘Really guys, I’m a big believer in passion, but can we just dial it down a notch?’
‘Que?’ Jesus shrugged.
‘We just talk about if we need the … the papel de baño …’
‘The papel de whato?’ Nina asked.
‘How do you say …’ Paloma swiped her hand in the region of her crotch where she apparently had quite a few piercings too. ‘For after when you pee.’
‘Oh, you mean loo roll.’
‘Si! Loo roll.’
Just as Nina was starting to despair of her Wednesday night, the door opened, letting in a gust of wind and a group of Paloma and Jesus’s friends. There was much hugging and kissing and shouting and gesticulating. It was a sea of unfamiliar, though smiling, faces.
The friends commandeered two extra tables, ordered what seemed like hundreds of tiny plates of delicious food and shouted at each other in Spanish. They tried to include Nina, to pull her into the conversation with halting English, but in the end she was left to her own devices and a bowl of patatas bravas. This was how Paloma must feel a lot of the time; everyone chattering away in another language, so Nina took it as her due. She also took the lingering looks from one of Jesus’s friends, Javier, and returned them with interest.
Javier had tousled black hair, the kind of hair that was designed solely to be rumpled by a lover’s hand. He had dark eyes that a girl could lose herself in. He also had a smile that was pure sex and seated as he was across the table from Nina, she was pretty sure