Found in a Bookshop

by Stephanie Butland

Genres: General Fiction; Family Life; Women's Fiction; Romance; Later in Life Romance

Synopsis

Dear Lost for Words,

We are trying to stay at home . . . I am enclosing a cheque and I hope that you will use it to send us some books. Please choose books that we might think are wonderful.

Rosemary

Loveday Cardew's beloved Lost for Words bookshop, along with the rest of York, has fallen quiet. At the very time when people most need books to widen their horizons, or escape from their fears, or enhance their lives, the doors are closed. Then the first letter comes.

Rosemary and George have been married for fifty years. Now their time is running out. They have decided to set out on their last journey together, without ever leaving the bench at the bottom of their garden in Whitby. All they need is someone who shares their love of books.

Suddenly it's clear to Loveday that she and her team can do something useful in a crisis. They can recommend books to help with the situations their customers find themselves in: fear, boredom, loneliness, the desire for laughter and escape.

And so it begins.
______________

'A delightful and original concept about how a second hand bookshop can heal a community' Katie Fforde

'What a lovely book - so assured and gentle, full of compassion and replete with astute observations of human nature and behaviour' Carys Bray

'Beautifully written and atmospheric' Tracy Rees

(P) 2023 Headline Publishing Group Ltd

Release date: October 27, 2022

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 400

Sample

1

 

To a book lover, a bookshop is not a place in the world, but a world in itself.

You know.

You know what it is to open a door, and for the bell above it to chime, low and summoning.

You know how the smell of pages is in the air like smoke; you know how the sense of homecoming descends on you, whether you have ever truly had a home or not.

You know that somewhere in this place is a book that can give you what you are craving.

You know that books are safety and escape and wisdom and peace and the things that get you through. Whether they are showing you the best way to prepare mushroom soup, or breaking your heart with someone else’s loss so you can better bear your own, or making you laugh when there is nothing funny in your life, or making you afraid so that real life seems less fearful.

You understand.

And so you understand, too, or can imagine, the strangeness of an empty bookshop. It’s been a sudden world, this one, where people can no longer pass a book from hand to hand and say, I think this could be just the thing you’re looking for. Where booksellers – even the ones who like books more than people – cannot help but long for someone to come and interfere with their perfectly alphabetised shelves.

And where even the most beloved of bookshops might begin to struggle. Being filled with second-­hand treasures of all kinds, books loved and passed along, is useless when there is no one to open the door, and inhale, and ask a question of the bookshop.

My mother wants to re-­read something she remembers from school, but she doesn’t know the title any more.

I’ve just finished my exams and I want to read a book that has nothing at all to do with wars or history.

I can’t sleep. So I read. Where are the books that will make me feel surrounded, befriended, rather than as though I am the only person awake in the whole dark world?

It is easy to ask these questions, silently, when you’re in a bookshop; easy to walk around the shelves, to touch spines and turn pages and think, are you the book I need?

It’s sometimes straightforward to talk to a bookseller, to say, I want something light, or, I’m looking for a recommendation; and the bookseller will hear, beneath your words, I cannot bear how long the afternoons are, or, I don’t know what my life is about any more.

But not if the bookshop door is closed.

Not if you are trying to explain, over the phone, what it is you need when what you need is for the bookshop to invite you in and let you know it’s okay to wander, to touch, to mull.

Not if you don’t know what you need, especially when the ache for a new book feels both trivial and privileged: when, if what to read is your only worry, then you shouldn’t be worried at all.

Not if it seems that the whole world is lost for words.

2

Rosemary, 2020, Whitby

There is pain in the joints of Rosemary’s fingers, but she can’t seem to loosen her grip on the handle of her bag. Today has brought a sense of looming calamity that she fears might wash her away, a great invisible wave rending their cottage to rubble, ripping their plants from the ground, tipping them and every part of their long-­joined life into the cold North Sea.

She closes her eyes, tight.

She just needs a minute. Just one.

She tells herself that nothing has actually happened. The doctor asked George a lot of questions and a nurse took some blood. That’s all. Nothing to be concerned about.

Beside her, George fumbles the front door key into the lock. Rosemary notices her husband’s shoulders sag in the second after the key slides home. She knows what that sag means. She has, after all, been next to George for all these years, since they first met in 1964. They have barely been apart since they retired from teaching in 2005, and never not together since the pandemic began. That shoulder sag means that her husband has just achieved something he thought was close to impossible. She remembers it from when they reached the summit of Scafell Pike, in the rain, shortly after they were engaged; when the school orchestra got through the whole of Tchaikovsky’s March of the Nutcracker at the Christmas concert without disaster, the players within a bar of each other; the year they realised they’d finally dug all the Japanese knotweed out of the garden of their beloved Whitby cottage that overlooks the sea.

And now, George is so worn out he can barely open their own front door.

‘Cup of tea in the garden, my girl?’ he asks, once they are inside.

‘I’ll make it. You go on. Maybe have a look at the snapdragons on the way.’

‘Wilco.’ George smiles at his wife the way he always has, and for a moment Rosemary wonders whether all could be well. Lots of people lose weight. All old men get up to go to the loo in the night, don’t they?

The water boils, and Rosemary takes their old brown teapot from the shelf above the kettle; but then she puts it back, and goes instead to the cupboard where they keep their special-­occasion crockery and glasses. She brings out the bone china teapot, painted with sweet peas, delicate and beautiful. They bought it as a fortieth anniversary present for themselves, at a craft fair in the grounds of Whitby Abbey in 2009. It usually comes out at Christmas and on birthdays. But they should use it more often. People are always saying that life is short; and Rosemary knows, in her heart, that they can no longer ignore the slow changes in George, or write them off as tiredness or the everyday sort of old age that makes Rosemary lose her reading glasses every five minutes. That’s why they went to see the doctor.

 

From the window, Rosemary watches George making his way down the garden. He’s stopping to inspect their plants and beds as he goes. He seems slow; but then again, so is she. They will both be seventy-­eight when autumn comes, she in May and he in August.

Rosemary pours the tea from the teapot into the flask, and tucks their tin mugs and the screw-­top jar of milk into the basket that’s easier than a tray. She knows that by the time she joins him, he will not only have checked the snapdragons for rust, but noticed other jobs: a prune here, some water there, a place where they need to lay down used tealeaves to keep the slugs away from tender growth.

She’s right. When she sits down next to him on the old, warm wood of their bench, he says, ‘I need to get that honeysuckle cut back, or the jasmine will never get through.’ It’s as though this is any sunny, late spring afternoon since they retired.

Rosemary pours their tea. She hands him the mug and notices how his fingers are cold to the touch.

‘I forgot the blanket,’ she says, ‘silly old brain.’

‘No matter,’ George answers. And then, as though he’s commenting on a story in the newspaper: ‘All this time we’ve kept ourselves safe from Covid, and we were looking the wrong way.’

Rosemary wants to say that nothing is certain yet: the doctor only said he needed to do some tests, maybe refer them to the hospital, depending. But she finds she can’t speak. George is right. They’ve worried about whether their shopping delivery would have everything they needed in it, because they haven’t been going to the shops, and there’s no one across the fence to ask for help. The rest of this little row of houses are holiday cottages now, their old neighbours all having sold up and moved on years ago, and this last year has been so very quiet, without new holidaymakers week in, week out. The only places George and Rosemary really venture to are the doctor’s surgery or the pharmacy, where Rosemary makes sure the young man sanitises his hands before passing their bag of prescription medicines across.

She looks out over the sea.

George proposed to her, more than five decades ago, as they walked along the promenade at Whitby. Being able to sit here and watch the wind move across the same water is part of what helps Rosemary to know that, for all of the ageing and the aching, they still belong in this, their precious world. They have always said it’s hard to imagine anything better than sitting here. She takes a breath, pulls it down deep. Come on, Rosemary. Don’t get soft now. You’ve no need to feel sorry for yourself. You’ve already had more than some people will ever get.

The clouds are slow, the sun steady, the wind slight. It’s almost impossible to think that the world is in crisis, and that they, George and Rosemary Athey, married since 1969 and all each other has, could be starting to fail.

Here, on this bench, which has been in this garden for as long as they have lived here, their life is what it has been for the thirty-­three years since they bought this little old cottage with its long strip of garden. Over the decades they’ve restored their home, mended it, made it beautiful, kept it going; and now, like them, it’s declining. The back window blows open in the night and the radiators bang and rattle like nobody’s business. They haven’t bothered with the greenhouse for the last couple of years, buying tomatoes and lettuce from the market instead, something that would have been unthinkable when they first moved in. Then, they had started turning over the soil ready to plant potatoes before they’d even made their bed.

But when they’re sitting on the bench, gazing across the water, their overgrowing garden and the tired paint on the back door are behind them. Nothing has been able to worry them, here. Not even on their worst days. This old bench is where they have come to be content, to rest, to make peace.

‘You’ll be all right, my girl,’ George says.

‘What do you mean?’

He takes her hand, but he’s looking out to sea. ‘When I’m gone. You’ll be all right.’

A great sob breaks from her, surprising them both. Rosemary has never been a crier.

‘I won’t,’ she says, and she knows she sounds like one of any of the thousands of petulant children she encountered in her long teaching career. George says nothing, but his fingers squeeze hers. ‘And anyway, you’re going to be fine.’

He nods, and she feels relieved. But then he says, quietly, ‘Not for ever, though, eh?’

 

Bedtime. George is reading a history book that he borrowed from the library before lockdown; it smells of someone else’s pipe smoke. Rosemary cannot manage non-­fiction before sleep, so she’s on an Agatha Christie. She’s sure she’s read it before, but it doesn’t matter. She just needs three pages before she drops off. Most nights, anyway.

‘I was thinking,’ George says, a few minutes later, closing his book.

‘Be careful you don’t hurt yourself,’ Rosemary answers. It’s an old joke. He smiles.

‘All those books we gave away. When we thought we were old.’

Rosemary laughs. ‘Yes.’ It was when they turned seventy, eight years ago. They had decided to donate their small, beloved home library to the school where Rosemary had begun her teaching career and George had become Head of Maths. They had wanted to be sure that, when they died, their carefully kept books would be well looked after. And schools don’t have much money for books any more.

‘Do you remember how we used to read to each other?’

Rosemary, propped against her pillows, sits very still. Suddenly she’s warm, all the way through. Once, they had bought books one at a time, and read aloud so they would experience the pleasure of the pages, the first time, together. She’s not sure when they stopped. When they got too busy, she supposes. Or when owning a book became less of a luxury.

‘I remember,’ she says.

She thinks of the second-­hand bookshop they used to visit when they went on day trips to York, and wonders if it’s still there.

3

George, 1964

The first day at school as a teacher seems to be just as awful as the first day at school as a pupil. George is well prepared for his lessons: he’s spent the summer going over his training notes, making lesson plans, and trying not to fret himself to insanity when he thinks about whether he can really be a teacher, at the age of twenty-­two. He has no idea how he will find the authority to teach children not much younger than he is. He tells himself he’s qualified: he knows that, when it comes to it, it will work, the way it did when he did his teaching practice. But approaching the shining new secondary modern school in Harrogate in the autumn of 1964, he feels like a nervous boy. And entering the staffroom, which is smoke-­filled and bursting with the chatter of people who already know each other, doesn’t make him any more comfortable.

He puts his bag down next to a chair that seems unoccupied and hopes no one will notice him. He isn’t sure his voice will work if he tries to speak. Not a good start to his teaching career.

And then Rosemary walks in.

George is so nervous – only fifteen minutes to the first bell, now – that the fact he falls instantly and fully in love with her almost passes him by.

There is just something about her. He’s never seen anyone so precisely themselves. In that first instant, with her looking around the staffroom and him spooning coffee into a mug, it’s as though he sees all of her. Her kindness, her seriousness, and the fact that she will understand him. George is a mathematician. He doesn’t think like this. And yet. He smiles and gives a wave; everyone else is too busy catching up with their old colleagues to spot the new ones. Rosemary notices George’s wave, as though this is the signal she has been waiting for, and makes her way across the room to him.

‘George Athey,’ he says as he holds out a hand. ‘New starter.’

‘Rosemary Bell,’ she replies, shaking his hand. ‘Me too.’

Before they can get any further, they are swept up by their respective department heads and taken to their classrooms.

They don’t exactly decide to sit together every lunchtime, but it happens. George is quiet to begin with, because he cannot balance small talk with the overwhelming feeling of rightness that comes over him when Rosemary is there. So he asks her how her morning has been, and he listens to her excitement about being a real teacher, in a real classroom, with real pupils of her own, at last.

And they make the chairs near the door in the staffroom theirs, as though they have chosen them; as though the other teachers have not deliberately sat further into the room, where they are not vulnerable to answering the knocks of pupils sent with messages, tales, or reports of wrongdoing. But George and Rosemary are happy there. Most days, George brings a sandwich, and sometimes an apple. Rosemary soon starts to bring a second piece of cake with her lunch. After they eat it, she carefully flattens, folds, and saves the greaseproof paper it comes in, to reuse. Something in him knows that she will do this always. And their life together will prove him right.

4

Kelly

Kelly’s walk to work is beautiful, the perfect commute: her route takes her along the River Ouse and over the Lendal Bridge into the old city of York.

It’s become the best part of her day.

She has noticed that she’s no longer full of excitement at the thought of being in the bookshop, which is no longer a busy, lively place, where time rushes along. Kelly worked in a pub to finance her first degree and as a care assistant to get her through her Masters. Working at Lost For Words was supposed to be the thing that kept her going through her PhD, but rapidly became the place she goes to escape it. She took the job almost four years ago, and until the pandemic hit she had never been happier working anywhere.

Now things don’t feel so good. The money through the till – from internet orders, customers phoning in, and the occasional passer-­by stopping at their improvised book-­buying hatch, a table across the recessed doorway to the shop – has amounted to less than Kelly’s part-­time salary. Loveday, her boss, can’t be taking a wage, and heaven only knows how she is covering the other shop costs. Kelly is aware that Loveday inherited the bookshop, and her home, from the previous owner of Lost For Words, but it doesn’t automatically follow that she can underwrite the shop costs for ever. Or would want to, come to that.

Every day now Kelly takes her beautiful walk to work while wondering if this is going to be the day Loveday lets her go. And then she would be all alone, in her little flat that her dad helps her pay the mortgage on even though she’s thirty. All day, every day, it will be just her and her stalled PhD on writer-­wives, writer-­mothers, writer-­sisters and writer-­mistresses, lost in the shadow of the lauded men they sacrificed their own talents for. And she supposes she’ll have to find a way to count herself lucky so long as she and Dad stay well. At least she has her funny, sweet, loving Craig, even if she hasn’t seen him in the two long months since lockdown began.

When Kelly gets to the bridge, she leans over the cold metal railing and watches the water flow. York is so quiet that she can hear its rushing wetness that makes the soles of her feet prickle with longing to walk in the Whitby sea.

Her phone buzzes in her pocket. It will be Craig, checking in as he does every morning. Her relationship with him is something else the pandemic has sucked the joy from, although to complain seems wrong, given the state of the world. They met the previous October, via a dating app, and had seen each other a couple of times a week since. From the beginning, Craig was funny and caring, and didn’t mind a bit that she wanted to take things slowly – not even when she told him she was going to Whitby to be with her father for two weeks over Christmas and New Year. But despite Kelly’s caution, Craig had edged his way into her heart. She cannot remember when she began to love him, though she often thinks of the evening she first said so. When he texted her at midnight on New Year’s Eve with the words, Happy New Year. I want you to spend every moment of this year knowing that I love you, she had felt a deep sense of rightness. Something in her had relaxed. She knew he was the one.

When lockdown loomed, they had talked about moving in together. Kelly had spent a long time getting used to living alone, but could never quite love it, despite the pleasure of being able to read, uninterrupted, for a whole weekend, or sleep on the sofa when the day working on her PhD in bed meant that her duvet was swamped by carefully sorted piles of research that she didn’t want to have to move. She had told him she thought they should try living together, even if it meant they were moving a little faster than they might in a non-­pandemic world. Craig said he felt the same way, but then, just when Kelly had made space in the wardrobe, he changed his mind. It wasn’t that he didn’t love her, he’d said, his voice down the phone sounding muffled with emotion. It was that he was afraid of ruining a good thing. She was too precious to him to risk. Of course, she couldn’t be angry, especially as she knew that rushing into commitment after an accidental pregnancy had done for a previous relationship of his.

Morning, says the message in her WhatsApp, followed by a heart.

She sends a heart back, then adds, Talk?

 

CRAIG:

Gimme 5, I’ll call you. Early meeting just ending.

Kelly leans against the bridge; she tips her head back and looks at the May-­blue sky. The river seems even more present when she can only hear it. Now that the Lost For Words bookshop isn’t open to the public, Loveday is even less concerned than before about Kelly’s timekeeping. She’d told her at her interview that she had no intention of interfering with Kelly’s running of the shop and, though it had sounded almost like a threat or a warning, it was bliss to Kelly. If she stood here and talked to Craig for half an hour, she’s pretty sure Loveday wouldn’t mind.

‘Hey,’ she says when he calls back, five minutes later. He’s always true to his word.

‘Hey. Is everything okay?’

She can hear his footsteps, slapping along a pavement. It’s so long since he last ran up the stairs to her flat, kissed her nose, felt her bum. ‘Where are you?’

‘Just nipping out to get some shopping. I’ve got calls all day and I’m nearly out of coffee. Danger zone.’

Her phone pings with an image: a piece of paper that reads ‘coffee, pears, newspaper’, and Craig’s blunt thumb and clean, flat-­clipped fingernail in the bottom corner. Kelly wants to kiss it.

‘You wrote a shopping list for three things?’

‘I know, right?’ She loves how he laughs at the end of sentences. Loves pretty much everything about him, really. ‘So, what’s up?’

‘I don’t know,’ she says, and suddenly she couldn’t care less about the river or the sky or the silence, ‘I’m just – I’m on my way to work and I just wish I knew what was going to happen.’

There’s the sound of a pedestrian crossing beeping permission, and then Craig says, ‘Why don’t you ask? Your boss with the funny name, why not ask her what’s going on?’

‘She’d tell me if she knew, wouldn’t she? And nobody knows what’s going to happen.’

‘You’re not asking her to predict the course of a global pandemic, love. You want to know if you’re still going to have a job.’

Oh, that ‘love’. She would put it in her pocket if she could. It’s hard to remember how life was, before Craig.

‘I know. But I don’t want to be extra pressure. You know? She’s got a lot on her plate. I don’t want to be a problem.’

‘But you’re worried. That matters.’

‘I know.’

‘You don’t sound convinced.’

Kelly laughs. ‘I’m not.’

‘If you know what you want, you can ask for it.’

‘I want to know if my job’s safe. I want to go and see my dad. And I want you to come round with a takeaway, and stay the night,’ she says.

5

Jenny

The women, when they first arrive at the shelter, all have expressions that are 50 percent cannot-­believe they-­have-­got-­away gladness and 50 percent cannot-­believe-­they-­have-­got-­away terrified. This woman, Jenny, is no different. She cradles her child, a three-­year-­old called Milo. He’s still subdued, as the children often are. It’s only been a few hours since they entered a place where they are not yet certain they are safe.

Carmen is the volunteer showing Jenny round. The shelter staff have done the paperwork and settled her into her room. It was the room that Carmen was given when she got away from her marriage, almost five years ago, and she remembers the feeling of lying in bed that first night and daring to think that she might be safe. It’s a white-­painted room on the third floor, with heavy grey velvet curtains, donated by a hotel and altered to fit by volunteers. They are perfect for deadening the night sounds that can make some women start awake. There’s a painting of flowers on the wall, yellow cushions on the bed, and the child’s bed has bright yellow bedding. Carmen was the one who put the welcome pack together while Jenny talked to the staff, and another volunteer entertained Milo within Jenny’s line of sight.

In the walk-­in donations cupboard, Carmen had gathered the usual things: a three-­pack of knickers still in the packet, a bar of chocolate, toothbrush and toothpaste, a full-­sized bottle of shower gel and another of shampoo. Hotels often donate miniature toiletries, but Carmen thinks it’s better to give the big bottles. She doesn’t want any woman who comes here to think she is safe only for as long as a two-­shower bottle of body wash lasts. Then she took clean towels and pyjamas from the drawers. They’re not new, but they’re something, and once Jenny has got settled then one of the other volunteers will help her with clothes from their wardrobe room. It’s something Carmen would like to be able to do one day, but she needs to go on the training first. Many of the women who have come to them from an abusive relationship have lost their sense of what they are, or haven’t been allowed to choose their own clothes. They simply do not know how they want to look, and it takes both gentleness and expertise to help them. For Milo, Carmen took a colouring book and pack of crayons. Jenny will be able to choose what he needs from their children’s storeroom; but most mothers arrive with the things that their children need to be comfortable, even if they themselves have nothing.

Carmen has made sure to deliver the things she has collected to Jenny’s room while Jenny is still in the office. The fewer unexpected knocks a. . .