bookcase that she swore she’d never seen before.
Her fingers trailed over the shelves, the spines of the books, as she did a silent inventory. The very last room on the right, accessed through a pair of glass doors, had once been a little tearoom. Now it was a curtained-off store room; its tables and chairs stacked to one side, the cake stands and china lovingly sourced from charity shops, antique fairs and car boot sales, packed away in boxes. If Posy closed her eyes, she could imagine it as it had once been. The smell of coffee and freshly baked cakes wafting through the shop, her mother weaving through the tables, her long blonde hair escaping from its ponytail, her cheeks pink, green eyes sparkling as she dispensed coffee and tea refills and took away empty plates.
In the shop, her father would have rolled up his shirtsleeves – he always wore a shirt and waistcoat with his jeans – and could usually be found halfway up the rolling ladder as he selected a series of books for a customer waiting down below. ‘If you liked that one, then you’ll love these,’ he would say. Lavinia had called him the King of Hand-Selling. As Posy reached the poetry section, her eyes immediately searched for the three volumes of poetry that her father had written, which they always kept in stock. ‘I think, if Ian Morland hadn’t been taken from us so cruelly, so suddenly,’ Lavinia had written in his obituary, ‘then he would have become one of our greatest English poets.’
There’d been no obituary written for her mother, but that hadn’t meant she was missed any less. Far from it. As Posy retraced her steps to the main room again, she wasn’t wandering through a shop, but through her home, memories of her mother and father alive with every step she took.
In the back office, one of the walls was covered with the signatures of visiting authors, everyone from Nancy Mitford and Truman Capote to Salman Rushdie and Enid Blyton. The notches on the doorjamb faithfully recorded the heights of the Bookends children, starting with Lavinia and her brothers and ending with Posy and Sam.
Outside in the courtyard, they’d have summer fetes and Christmas fairs. Posy remembered how the trees would be strung with fairy lights for launch parties and poetry readings al fresco. They’d once held a wedding reception out there after two customers had fallen instantly and madly in love over a copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Under the shelves in a corner by the counter was the cubbyhole where her father had built her a little reading nook. Posy’s mother had made her four plump cushions to lounge on while she read.
It was in Bookends that Posy had met some of her best friends. Pauline, Petrova and Posy (whom she was named for) Fossil from Ballet Shoes, her mother’s favourite book. Not to mention Milly-Molly-Mandy and little-friend-Susan, the girls of St Clare’s and Malory Towers and the Chalet School. Scout and Jem Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird. The Bennet sisters. Jane Eyre and poor, mad Cathy ‘mopped and mowed’ about the moors as she searched for her Heathcliffe.
And it had been a night very much like this one, but far, far worse when she’d wandered around the darkened shop, still dressed in her funeral black, still seeing the two coffins slowly being lowered into the ground. That night, unable to sleep, determined not to cry because she knew that she’d howl and she didn’t want to wake up Sam, she’d plucked a book, a random book, from the shelves and crawled into her cubbyhole.
It had been a Georgette Heyer novel, Regency Buck. A beautiful flighty girl, Judith Taverner, locks horns with the sardonic, dandified Julian St John Audley, her legal guardian. Judith launches herself on London society, has madcap adventures in Brighton, meets and charms Beau Brummel and the Prince Regent, and has many spirited disagreements with the arrogant Julian, until they’re both compelled to admit their love.
It had pushed buttons that Posy didn’t even know she had. The Heyer Regency romances weren’t quite up there with Pride and Prejudice, which was the gold-star, triple-A standard of romance novels, but they came quite close.
Over the next few numb weeks when just getting through each day intact was a major triumph, Posy had read every single Regency romance Georgette Heyer had written. She’d begged Lavinia to order more and when she’d finished them all, Posy took to the internet to find other writers who were considered Heyer’s successors: Clare Darcy, Elizabeth Mansfield, Patricia Veryan, Vanessa Gray – they couldn’t match Heyer’s exquisite attention to detail or her wit, but there were still flighty young heiresses and sardonic men trying to lord it over them until love prevailed.
Posy had taken over one room of the shop and filled it with novels by Julia Quinn, Stephanie Laurens, Eloisa James, Mary Balogh, Elizabeth Hoyt and others. And when Posy had read every Regency romance that she could find, there were other books, lots and lots of them, where the girl didn’t just get the boy, she got the happy ever after that everyone deserved. Well, almost everyone. Serial killers and people who were cruel to animals and drunk drivers – especially drunk drivers, like the one who had careered over the central reservation of the M4 and ploughed into her parents’ car – none of them deserved happy ever afters, but everybody else did.
It turned out that a lot of the women who worked in nearby shops and offices and browsed Bookends in their lunch-hour were also suckers for a well-written romance. Since no one was buying enough misery memoirs or stodgy books on military history to warrant the shelf space, Posy persuaded Lavinia to allow her to take over two more rooms of the shop.
But these days, people weren’t buying enough books of any kind. Not from Bookends anyway. In her letter, Lavinia had seemed sure that Posy would immediately devise a bulletproof scheme to entice people back into the shop to buy books in great quantities, when nothing could be further from the truth.
Suddenly, Posy couldn’t bear to be in the shop a moment longer. It had always been her happy place, her lodestar, a comfort blanket made of wood and paper, but now the shelves upon shelves of books taunted her. It was so much responsibility and Posy wasn’t very good at responsibility.
She turned off the lights in the shop, shut the door that separated the shop from the stairs that led up to their flat, which was usually left open, then slowly climbed the stairs. She was about to open Sam’s door without knocking, but remembered just in time the ‘knock first’ rule she’d instigated after Sam had barged into the bathroom and caught her in the shower, screeching ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ into her shampoo-bottle microphone.
‘Sam? Are you decent?’ Dear God, don’t let him be doing indecent things, because she wasn’t ready for that. ‘Can I come in?’
She heard an affirmative grunt, and tentatively pushed open the door. Sam was lying on his stomach on top of his duvet, staring at his laptop. ‘What’s up?’
Posy sat down on the edge of his bed and looked at his bony shoulders hunched over the computer screen. Even now, though he’d been in her life for fifteen years (their miracle baby, her parents had called Sam, though at the time thirteen-year-old Posy had been mortified at the prospect of what her parents had been doing to produce a miracle baby) she still sometimes had an overwhelming urge to squeeze Sam until he squeaked, such was the depth of her love for him. She settled for reaching out to ruffle his hair but he twisted away from her. ‘Get off me! Have you been drinking?’
‘No!’ Posy settled for nudging him with her elbow. ‘I need to talk to you.’
‘But we’ve already talked about Lavinia and I already told you that I’m sad and everything about it sucks, but really, Pose, I can’t take any more speeches about feelings and emotions.’ He pulled a face. ‘Can we just not?’
Posy was sick of making speeches about feelings and emotions, so that worked out fine, but still, she was the big sister. The parental figure. The designated adult. The responsible one.
