The Bookshop Page 5

  ‘I think there has been some mistake. I thought I made my choice quite clear. This appears to be a detective story, and not by any means a recent one.’ Mrs Keble added that she would be back in half-an-hour. She always thought that things would take about half-an-hour. ‘I am not interested in The History of Chinese Thought either,’ she said.

  The library was to open from two to three on Mondays. This was normally the slack time. Mrs Keble really had no business to come so early, but on the point of two o’clock several subscribers came in at once, and the atmosphere, in the cramped back of the shop, at once began to resemble the great historic runs on the Bank of England. During the ’45, Mrs Green remembered, the Bank had been forced to hold the customers at bay, to melt down the ink-wells to make bullets and to pay out in sixpences. If only Mrs Thornton would come to take her Queen Mary away – but satisfied, perhaps, by her incontestable acquisition of right, she failed, though expected every time the street door opened, to appear. Everyone could see her ticket, ‘which, I suppose, means that she is to be allowed to have Queen Mary first. I happen to have been told that she is a particularly slow reader, but that isn’t really my point.’

  ‘Mrs Thornton asked for the book first. That’s the only thing I take into account.’

  ‘Allow me to say, Mrs Green, that if you had a little more experience of committee work you would realize how rash it is to come to a decision as the result of one consideration only. A pity.’

  ‘In a small town we cannot help knowing something of each other. Some of us may be more attached than others to the concept of royalty. Some may feel that they have the right to read first about the late Queen Mother. It may have been a loyal devotion of long standing.’

  ‘Mrs Thornton was quite definite about it.’ The air of the summer afternoon grew uncomfortably warm. Two more subscribers crowded in, and one of them told Florence, in confidence, that Mrs Thornton was known to have voted Liberal in the last election. Both the backhouse and the street door were now cut off by ladies. At four o’clock – for office hours were short in Hardborough – their husbands joined them.

  ‘I shouldn’t have thought it was possible to misunderstand my list. Look, it’s written perfectly clearly. It looks like a failure in simple office routine. If everyone wanted this Life of Queen Mary, why were not more copies ordered?’

  The Old House Bookshop lending library temporarily closed, to reopen in a month, by which time the proprietor hoped to have more assistance. This was an admission of weakness. Wally took a formal note round to Mr Brundish to explain the situation. He hadn’t been able to see the old gentleman anywhere; so he gave the note to the milkman, who had left it with the milk under the sacking on the potato clamp, which was where Mr Brundish, whose letter-box had long been rusted up, received his correspondence.

  5

  I need help – Florence thought – it was folly to think that I could manage all this by myself. She put through a call to the offices of the Flintmarket, Kingsgrave and Hardborough Times.

  ‘Can you get it as quickly as possible, Janet?’ she asked. She had seen Janet’s one-stroke motor-bicycle outside the telephone exchange, and knew she would be in safe hands.

  ‘Are you trying the small ads, Mrs Green?’

  ‘Yes. It’s the same number.’

  ‘That won’t be worth the money, if you want to advertise for an assistant. One of the Gippings is going to come round to yours after school.’

  ‘A possibility, Janet, but not a certainty.’

  ‘Raven spoke to them about a week ago. He’d have liked to get you the eldest, but she’d have to stay home when Mrs Gipping went to the pea-picking. Or then there’s the second one, or the third one.’

  She reminded Janet that there might be other subscribers waiting for calls to be put through, but was told that there weren’t any.

  ‘The private lines have mostly gone over to Aldeburgh for that music, and the others are at the new fish-and-chip parlour. That opens for the first time tonight.’

  ‘Well, Janet, it might very well catch fire. I believe they use cooking oil. We ought to clear the line for emergencies. Is Mr Deben running it?’

  ‘Oh, no, Deben reckons it’ll be the death-blow to his trade. He’s attempting to get the Vicar on to his side, saying the odour of frying might waft into the church at Evensong. But the Vicar doesn’t like to be drawn into these arguments, he told Deben.’

  She wondered what the telephone operators said when they discussed her bookshop.

  At teatime next day a little girl of ten years old, very pale, very thin and remarkably fair, presented herself at the Old House. She wore a pair of jeans and a pink cardigan worked in a fancy stitch. Florence recognized her as the child she had seen on the Common.

  ‘You’re Christine Gipping, aren’t you? I had rather thought that your elder sister …’

  Christine replied that now the evenings were getting longer her elder sister would be up in the bracken with Charlie Cutts. In fact, she’d just seen their bikes stashed under the bracken by the crossroads.

  ‘You won’t have to worry about anything like that with me,’ she added. ‘I shan’t turn eleven till next April. Mine haven’t come on yet.’

  ‘What about your other sister?’

  ‘She likes to stay at home and mind Margaret and Peter – that’s the little ones. That was a waste giving them those names, it never came to anything between him and the Princess.’

  ‘Please don’t get the idea that I don’t want to consider you for the job. It’s just that you don’t really look old enough or strong enough.’

  ‘You can’t tell from looking. You look old, but you don’t look strong. It won’t make much difference, as long as you get someone from ours. We’re all of us handy.’

  Her skin was almost transparent. Her silky hair seemed to have no substance, ruffling away from her forehead in the slightest draught. When Florence, still anxious not to hurt her feelings, smiled encouragingly, she smiled back, showing two broken front teeth.

  They had been broken during the previous winter in rather a strange manner, when the washing on the line froze hard, and she was caught a blow in the face with an icy vest. Like all the Hardborough children, she had learned to endure. Running like tightrope walkers across the narrow handrails of the marsh bridges, they fell and were fractured or half drowned. They pelted each other with stones or with beets from the furrows. A half-witted boy was told that the maggots used as bait would be good for him and make him less dull, and he had eaten a whole jar full. Christine herself looked perilously thin, although Mrs Gipping was known as a good provider.

  ‘I’ll come and see your mother tomorrow, Christine, and talk things over.’

  ‘If you want. She’ll say I’m to come down every day after school, and Saturdays all day, and you’re not to give me less than twelve and six a week.’

  ‘And what about your homework?’

  ‘I’ll fare to do that after tea, when I’m at home.’

  Christine showed signs of impatience, evidently having decided to start work at once. She deposited her pink cardigan in the backhouse.

  ‘Did you knit that yourself? It looks very difficult.’

  ‘That was in Woman’s Own,’ Christine said, ‘but the instructions were for short sleeves.’ She frowned, unwilling to admit that she had put on her best to make an impression at the first interview. ‘You haven’t any children, Mrs Green?’

  ‘No. I should have liked to.’

  ‘Life passed you by in that respect, then.’

  Without waiting for explanations she bustled round the shop, opening drawers and finding fault with the arrangements, her faint hair flying. Not enough cards were on display, she declared – she’d see about sorting out some more. And indeed there were large packets of samples still in their wrappers, because Mrs Green hated them, at the back of the drawers.

  At first the child’s methods were eccentric. With a talent for organization which had long been suppressed by
her position as third daughter in the family, she tried the cards first one way, then another. Ignoring the messages, she sorted them largely by colour, so that roses and sunsets were put with a card representing a bright red lobster wearing a Scottish bonnet and raising a glass to its lips with the words ‘Just a wee doch an doris afore we gang awa!’ This, certainly, must have been a sample.

  ‘They really ought to be divided into Romantic and Humorous,’ said Florence. These, indeed, were the only two attitudes to the stages of life’s journey envisaged by the manufacturers of the cards. The lobster took a humorous view of parting. The sunset card was overprinted with a sad message.

  ‘What do “o’er” and “neath” mean?’ asked Christine sharply. This first admission that there was something she didn’t know encouraged her employer a little. Christine saw immediately that she had lost ground. There’s a whole lot more you’ve never even unpacked,’ she said reprovingly. They looked together at a brand-new set, naked men and women interlaced, with the caption Another thing we didn’t forget to do today. ‘We’ll throw these away,’ said Florence firmly. ‘Some of the reps have little or no idea of what’s suitable.’ Christine was doubled up with laughter and said that there were quite a few in Hardborough who wouldn’t mind having them through the letter-box. She was well prepared, Florence thought. She would be invaluable when the lending library reopened.

  There hardly seemed anything to discuss that evening with Mrs Gipping, who stood tolerantly at her half-open gate when Florence accompanied Christine home.

  Little Peter was planting rows of clothes pegs between the rows of early French beans. ‘Why’s Christine late?’ he asked.

  ‘She’s been working for this lady.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘She’s got a shop full of books for people to read.’

  ‘What for?’

  Now vans and estate cars began to appear in increased numbers over the brilliant horizon of the marshes, sometimes getting bogged down at the crossings and always if they tried to turn round on the foreshore, bringing the publishers’ salesmen. Even in summer, it was a hard journey. Those who made it were somewhat unwilling to part with their Fragrant Moments and engagement books, which were what Florence really wanted, unless she would also take a pile of novels which had the air, in their slightly worn jackets, of women on whom no one had ever made any demand. Her fellow-feeling, both for the salesmen and for the ageing books, made her an injudicious buyer. They had come so far, too, that they ought to have tea made for them in the backhouse. There, in the hope that it would be long before they returned to this godforsaken hole, they stirred their sugar and relaxed a little. ‘One thing, the competition’s not keen. There isn’t another point of sale between here and Flintmarket.’

  Their hearts sank when they realized that there was no rail-service at all and that all future orders would have to come down by road. By the time they felt that they had to be moving on, the wind had got up, and their vans, without the load which had kept them stable, went weaving to and fro, unable to hold the road. The young bullocks, most inquisitive of all animals, came stepping across the tussocks of grass to stare mildly at them.

  ‘I don’t know why I bought these,’ Florence reflected after one of these visits. ‘Why did I take them? No one used force. No one advised me.’ She was looking at 200 Chinese book-markers, handpainted on silk. The stork for longevity, the plum-blossom for happiness. Her weakness for beauty had betrayed her. It was inconceivable that anyone else in Hardborough should want them. But Christine was consoling: the visitors would buy them – come the summer, they didn’t know what to spend their money on.

  In July, the postman brought a letter postmarked from Bury St Edmunds, but too long, as could easily be seen from the thickness of the envelope, to be an order.

  Dear Madam,

  It may be of interest, and perhaps of entertainment to you, to know how it was that I came to hear of your establishment. A cousin of my late wife’s (I should, perhaps, call him a cousin once removed) is connected, through a second marriage, with that coming young man, the Member of Parliament for the Longwash Division, who mentioned to me that at a gathering of his aunt’s (Mrs Violet Gamart, who is personally unknown to me) it had been remarked in passing that Hardborough was at last to have a bookshop.

  She wondered in what possible way this could be considered entertaining. But she must not be uncharitable.

  It may increase your amusement to learn that I am not writing to you on the subject of books at all!

  There were several pages of thin writing paper, from which it emerged that the writer was called Theodore Gill, that he lived somewhere near Yarmouth, and that he was a painter in watercolours who saw no reason to abandon the pleasant style of the turn of the century, and that he would like to organize, or better, have organized for him, a little exhibition of his work at the Old House. The name of Mrs Gamart and of her brilliant nephew would, he was sure, be sufficient recommendation.

  Florence looked round at her shelving, behind which scarcely a square foot of wall space could be seen. There was always the oyster warehouse, but even now, in the height of summer, it was damp. She put the letter away in a drawer which already contained several others of the same kind. Later middle age, for the upper middle-class in East Suffolk, marked a crisis, after which the majority became water-colourists, and painted landscapes. It would not have mattered so much if they had painted badly, but they all did it quite well. All their pictures looked much the same. Framed, they hung in sitting-rooms, while outside the windows the empty, washed-out, unarranged landscape stretched away to the transparent sky.

  The desire to exhibit somewhere more ambitious than the parish hall accompanied this crisis, and Florence related it to the letters which she also received from ‘local authors’. The paintings were called ‘Sunset Across the Laze’, the books were called ‘On Foot Across the Marshes’ or ‘Awheel Across East Anglia’, for what else can be done with flatlands but to cross them? She had no idea, none at all, where she would put the local authors if they came, as they suggested, to sign copies of their books for eager purchasers. Perhaps a table underneath the staircase, if some of the stock could be moved. She vividly imagined their disillusionment, wedged behind the table with books and a pen in front of them, while the hours emptied away and no one came. ‘Tuesday is always a very quiet day in Hardborough, Mr—, particularly if it is fine. I didn’t suggest Monday, because that would have been quieter still. Wednesdays are quiet too, except for the market, and Thursday is early closing. The customers will come in and ask for your book soon – of course they will, they have heard of you, you are a local author. Of course they will want your signature, they will come across the marshes, afoot and awheel.’ The thought of so much suffering and embarrassment was hard to bear, but at least she was in a position to see that it never took place. She consigned Mr Gill’s letter to the drawer.

  She had been almost too busy to realize that the holiday season had arrived. Now she noticed that bathing towels hung and flapped at every window of the seafront houses. The ferry crossed the Laze several times every day, the fish-and-chip parlour extended its premises with pieces of corrugated iron transferred from the disused airfield. Wally appeared to ask if Christine would like to come camping, and she wondered if he was not hanging round rather often, and in a marked manner. Christine, however, rejected his invitation with a dignity imitated from her elder sisters. ‘That Wally’s after your washboard for his skiffle group. I’ve seen him eyeing it in your backhouse.’ ‘Then he’d better have it,’ Florence said. ‘I’ve never known what to do with it. He can have the mangle too, if he likes.’

  She ought to go down to the beach. It was Thursday, early closing, and it seemed ungrateful to live so close to the sea and never to look at it for weeks on end. In fact she preferred the winter beach; but, reproving herself, she had a bathe and then stood in the sun at the end of the long swale of multi-coloured pebbles. Children crouched down to decide which
of these pebbles they would put into their buckets; grown men selected others to throw into the sea. The newspapers they brought with them to read had been torn away from them by the wind. The mothers had retreated from the cutting air into the beach huts, which were drawn up in a friendly encampment as far as possible from the coldly encroaching North Sea. Farther to the north unacceptable things had been washed up. Bones were mixed with the fringe of jetsam at high tide. The rotting remains of a seal had been stranded there.

  The Hardborough locals mingled fearlessly with the visitors. Florence saw the bank manager, unfamiliar in striped bathing-trunks, with his wife and the chief cashier. He called out, and was understood, in snatches, to say that all work and no play made Jack a dull boy, and that it was the first time he had been able to set foot on the beach this year. No reply was needed. Another voice, from inland, shouted that it had held up bright. Raven was running in his new van. Next week he was going to run some of the sea scouts up to London for their annual day out. They were going to check the progress of Baden-Powell House, and after that they had voted unanimously to go to Liverpool Street Station, and watch the trains go out.

  Walking further up the beach was more like plunging at every step. The wet sand and shingle sank as though unwilling to bear her slight weight, and then oozed up again, filling her footprints with glittering water. To leave a mark of any kind was exhilarating. Past the dead seal, past the stretch of pebbles where, eighty years ago, a man had found a piece of amber as big as his head – but no one had ever found amber since then – she reached a desolate tract where the holiday-makers did not venture. A rough path led up and back to the common. Human figures, singly and in pairs, were exercising their dogs. She was surprised to find how many of them were known to her by now as occasional customers. They waved from a distance and then, because the land was so flat and approach was slow, had to wave again as they drew nearer, reserving their smiles until the last moment. With the smiles, most of the exercisers, glad to pause for a moment, said much the same thing: When would the lending library be open again? They had been looking forward to it so much. The dogs, stiff with indignation, dragged sideways at their leads. Florence heard herself making many promises. She felt at a disadvantage without her shoes and wished she had put them on again before leaving the beach for the common.