But Valentine’s Day was only a week away and Nina couldn’t see that people would want to buy more romantic fiction if they had the real thing. And if they were single, why buy a romantic novel as a special Valentine’s Day treat, when it would only remind you of the fact that no one loved you?
Anyway, Valentine’s Day or not, the shop had become awfully quiet now that Christmas was long gone.
When they’d reopened as Happy Ever After last summer, they’d planned all sorts of exciting things. Author events, blogger evenings, a book-of-the-month club, but as yet none of these exciting things had happened.
No one even bothered to update the shop’s Twitter or Instagram feeds any more. Sam, Posy’s sixteen-year-old brother, and Little Sophie, their Saturday girl, had promised to take responsibility for them, but their good intentions had lasted a maximum of two weeks. Nina wouldn’t have minded taking them over, or the Instagram at least, so she could take pictures of the new releases, but no one seemed to know the login details for each account. When Nina had asked Sam, he’d gone full teenage strop on her, so she suspected that he couldn’t actually remember what the passwords were.
Still, there was something to be said for a slow morning. Nina painted her nails then read a very sexy workplace romance called Billionaire In The Boardroom, Gigolo In The Bedroom in between texting back and forth with her friend Marianne about her new-found resolve to stop taking a chance on losers and really focus on finding her own true love, so despite the lack of customers, the morning sped by.
As the shop was quiet and she had actually started work early that morning, Nina reasoned that no one would mind if she was a little late back from lunch. She had planned to grab a quick bite with lovely Annika, girlfriend of lovely Stefan who ran the Swedish deli on Rochester Street, but Annika and Stefan had had a massive argument, which sounded far from lovely, so Nina had to listen to an entire repeat of said massive argument and then offer advice.
Usually when her women friends were fighting with their significant others, Nina would argue that passion made a relationship stronger as long as the reason for the fight didn’t involve cheating or skidmarks, but Annika wasn’t convinced.
‘He cares more about his smokehouse than he cares about me,’ she said sadly of the little wooden shed in the backyard of the deli where Stefan cured his own salmon.
So, Nina was late back from lunch. Only by fifteen minutes, which was nothing. She’d been back from lunch much later than that before. Much, much later.
Unfortunately the sun had come out since Nina had left the shop and when she returned, Happy Ever After was full of customers, as if the romance novel-reading public only ventured outside for blue skies.
‘Sorry!’ Nina said in a jaunty voice as she approached the counter where Posy was manning the till and a very reluctant Verity had been press-ganged into helping. ‘I got held up.’
‘There’s a reason why it’s called a lunch hour,’ Posy snapped in a very un-Posy-like manner. ‘That’s because it’s only meant to last sixty minutes.’
‘I said I was sorry. Keep your hair on,’ Nina said, nudging Posy out of the way with her hip, so she could serve the next customer. ‘Hello! Shall I take those from you?’
‘I’m going back to the office now,’ Verity announced in martyred tones, because she hated interacting with the general public in any way, shape or form. She’d only answer the phone under extreme duress, whereas Nina was happy to answer the phone every time it rang and chat to every customer, which even Posy got a bit bored with, so Verity and Posy could just get over themselves.
Her timekeeping might be a little free-form but Nina was excellent at customer service. She said as much to Posy, who was now taking the books that Nina rang up, and bagging them along with a complimentary Happy Ever After bookmark, but Posy just muttered darkly that she already missed the new and improved Nina.
The queue seemed never ending but it did end eventually, and Nina could take off her coat, stash her bag under the counter and come face to face with …
‘Not you again! How long have you been standing there?’ Nina demanded of Noah, who was indeed standing at the other end of the counter in his stupid suit with his stupid handheld device. No doubt he’d been writing copious notes about the amount of backchat Nina gave to Posy and was recommending that she be fired immediately.
‘Quite a while actually,’ Noah replied mildly. ‘You see, I wasn’t back late from lunch.’
Nina gave him a hard stare – she didn’t appreciate his sarcasm. Not one little bit. He had a clever, kind-looking face but when he smiled blandly at Nina, as he was doing now, it just stoked the flames of her dislike.
‘Noah’s here for the afternoon,’ Posy said. ‘Which you’d have known if you’d got back from lunch in time.’
‘God, Posy, will you let it go?’ Nina groaned and Noah made another mark on his iPad, which Nina was going to spill a hot drink on first chance she got, and Posy sniffed and said that she had work to do and that she wasn’t to be disturbed, and disappeared into the back office.
She even shut the door so Nina couldn’t eavesdrop on her and Verity, which meant they were sure to be talking about her. She glanced around the main room of the shop then craned her neck to see what was going on in the anterooms on her right and her left. The browsers had thinned out. The shop was almost empty again. Just like the old days when they’d been Bookends and the only thing stopping them from closing down was the fact that Lavinia had a private income to keep the shop afloat. Nina sighed.
Back then, she had half-expected to be made redundant. And now, if these last few weeks of not many customers in the shop was the new normal or the new old normal, was she going to live in fear of losing her job again? She’d been the last member of staff to be taken on, after all, and everyone knew that the last one through the door was the first to pick up their P45 when cuts were being made. Even though Verity refused to serve any customers, she was the only staff member who knew how the stock system worked. And Posy had been left the shop by Lavinia because she was practically family (her father had been the shop manager and her mother had run the tearooms until they’d been killed in a motorway crash), and anyway, she could hardly sack herself.
Tom was only part-time and refused to wear the official Happy Ever After staff T-shirt, but he had a way with their older customer base that defied belief. Also, Nina could imagine that if Posy did fire him, Tom would just tell Posy very crossly that he wasn’t fired and that would be the end of it.
Before she’d come to work at Bookends, Nina had as much success in keeping her jobs as she did in keeping her boyfriends. Both employment and relationships usually lasted between three days and three months. She’d been let go from pretty much every position she’d ever had for a variety of reasons ranging from poor timekeeping and a bad attitude to daydreaming. But it wasn’t really Nina’s fault – she’d become so bored with her old profession. She’d been on her feet all day, the chemicals had played havoc with her manicure and she got into trouble if she didn’t convince her customers to buy overpriced products that they didn’t really need.
Then that miraculous moment, three years ago, when Nina had bumped into Lavinia at a David Bowie exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. It had been a hot July day, Nina had been wearing a sleeveless fifties dress and had been staring at a display case featuring outfits from the Ziggy Stardust years, when someone had tapped her on the shoulder.
‘Excuse me, my dear,’ a very posh female voice had said. ‘Is that an Alice in Wonderland tattoo on your arm?’
Nina had turned round to see an elderly woman standing there, though there was nothing decrepit about the curious, warm look on her face.
‘It is,’ Nina had replied, holding her arm out so that the woman could get a better look at the intricate, inked artwork depicting the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, and