The Bookshop of Second Chances

by Jackie Fraser

  I wonder if I should hire a van. I might want some of the furniture, perhaps, and there are bound to be bits and pieces that will need to be brought down and added to my storage unit. Or maybe I should wait until I get up there. I don’t want to drive a van to Scotland on the off-chance. And I suppose it doesn’t matter; I’ve got plenty of time and there is, rather excitingly, forty thousand pounds in my current account. I’ve divvied up a further forty-five grand into various savings accounts and fought the temptation to buy something completely ridiculous. I did get some new clothes though, even though I’m unlikely to need summer dresses in Scotland in April. Especially if I’m mostly going to be driving to the charity shop or the tip.

  I’ve never had to make so many decisions all at once. I can’t even remember if I’ve ever had to make any on my own before. I must have done, but this all seems almost overwhelming. But not quite. It’s good to have things to think about that have nothing to do with Chris.

  * * *

  The night before we leave for Scotland, my friend Angela phones to tell me she’s been invited to dinner by Chris and Susanna, and do I mind if she goes.

  ‘It seems so odd that it’ll be at your house,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to upset you. I think it’s awful, Thea, but I feel like I should go. Should I? I like Chris.’ She tuts. ‘I thought I liked Susanna, as well, but now I’m not sure.’

  I’m faintly amused by this. I feel she should have asked Xanthe’s opinion, rather than mine, but Angela isn’t tactful.

  ‘You must go if you’d like to – don’t think about me.’

  ‘But it’s so awful. I can’t believe she–’

  ‘It is awful. But it’s…’ I thought I was going to be able to say this without that light-headed feeling of misery and the pricking tears, but apparently not. I clear my throat. ‘But the thing is, she did, they have, it’s – that’s how it is. It’s not my house anymore. It’s their house.’ I wonder if I’ll ever truly believe this.

  ‘I’d be so angry though, Thea. If it were me.’

  I laugh. ‘I am quite angry. And I’ll probably be angrier yet before I feel better. But there’s nothing I can do, is there? And it makes no difference, whether I’m angry or miserable or whatever. If you want to be friends with them, you know, that’s fine. Go to their house and eat their food and… Just don’t tell me about what they’re up to.’ I pause for a moment, thinking about this. ‘Unless I ask.’

  ‘Well, okay.’

  ‘And even if I do, you probably shouldn’t, to be honest.’

  * * *

  I’m packed and ready. I just have to collect Xanthe, who is doubtless frantically rushing about, preparing Rob for a week alone with the kids, and then we’re off. It’s a Sunday, so I’m hoping the roads will be empty. We should be in Gretna by half past four.

  Six hours in the car. It rains the whole way. We eat sweets and sing along to an exhaustive playlist that Xanthe has compiled, tracks picked deliberately from before I met Chris, songs from our youth. It’s always fun to go on a road trip with a girlfriend. As long as no one gets shot and you don’t have to drive off a cliff, it’s all win, right?

  At Gretna, we’re staying in the nicest hotel I could find – sick, as I am, of efficiently bland budget hotel chains. I demand cocktails (although maybe not too many) and a super-king-size bed and fancy chenille sofas. It’s glamorous in a low-key modern way. We toast each other in the bar and make up stories about the other guests. We go to bed early because we’re old and exhausted. I lie awake for a while, listening to Xanthe’s gentle snores. I try to calculate how many different beds we’ve shared but I get muddled around the mid-1990s and fall asleep to dream the sort of oddly complex and anxiety-driven dream that’s not much more relaxing than being awake.

  * * *

  We’re due in Baldochrie for eleven o’clock, which seems quite a civilized time to meet a lawyer. I’m not sure why I’m nervous about it, but I am. It’s an odd thing to be anxious about. It’s not like he can decide I’m not a suitable person to inherit Uncle Andrew’s house. It takes me ages to realize that perhaps I’m not anxious at all, but excited.

  Dumfries and Galloway is one of those large, amalgamated counties. It’s not astonishingly beautiful, or wild, not like the west coast further north. It’s quite rural: cattle country and sheep. The towns are small, and the A75 bypasses most of the ones I’ve heard of. We drive past Dumfries itself, Castle Douglas and Kirkcudbright. Sometimes we can see the sea. It’s still raining though, grey and wet, a sharp wind. There are lots of lorries, heading to, or from, Stranraer. Maybe it would be pretty if it wasn’t raining – it’s hard to say. We drive past little cottages and large Victorian villas and untidy farmhouses and caravan parks. There are castles, in various states of ruin. It looks cold out there, and some of it is definitely windswept. It’s strange to arrive somewhere knowing parts of it might become familiar, but you don’t know which bits. I always feel like this on holiday, wondering which road I’ll drive along most frequently, which shops I’ll go in, where I’ll buy petrol.

  And then here we are in Baldochrie, finding somewhere to park outside the rather grand Victorian town hall in a little square of neat stone houses. There’s a church, a war memorial with a kilted soldier and proper shops: a Co-op, an antiques shop, two cafés, a chemist. Daffodils, long over at home, are still dancing in the churchyard. It’s quite nice, old-fashioned. Nothing exciting, obviously, but I’ve seen some sad little towns where everything’s boarded up or for sale and it’s not like that. There’s a butcher’s and a baker’s and everything.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ says Xanthe. She gazes through the raindrops on the car window. ‘Imagine living here.’

  ‘It’s not so bad,’ I say. ‘Although I can’t think there’d be much to do if you were a teenager.’

  ‘Jesus. Nearest nightclub fifty miles away, probably.’ We both shudder. ‘And I’ll be bringing some much-needed diversity to the scene,’ she adds. ‘There’ll be people here who’ve only seen black women on the telly.’

  ‘Oh, come on.’

  ‘Betcha.’

  ‘Anyway,’ I say, ‘there’s the solicitors’. A large square Georgian building with three steps up from the pavement, statutory brass plaque and a boot scraper.

  ‘Exciting. Are you excited?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I suppose so. It’s odd.’

  ‘I’ll go and have a coffee. You don’t need me to come in with you, do you?’

  I hesitate. ‘I guess not.’

  ‘It’s nearly eleven,’ she says. ‘Come on.’

  It’s windy, a handful of raindrops blatting against the windscreen. I pull on my jacket and smooth my skirt, crumpled from two hours in the car.

  ‘You look very smart and responsible,’ she says. ‘Text me when you’re done. I’ll be in’ – she looks across the road – ‘that one. The Lemon Tree.’

  * * *

  A terribly pleasant-looking middle-aged lady looks up as I close the door behind me.

  ‘Good morning,’ she says. ‘Now, you’ll be Mrs Mottram?’

  I nod in agreement. A little sign on her desk says she’s Mrs McCain. I look round at the room I’m standing in, a large entrance hall, black and white marble tiles. Perhaps a little chilly for Mrs McCain. I can smell an electric heater of some kind, and suspect it’s under her desk, keeping her legs warm. An impressive staircase of polished dark wood curves upwards, the desk tucked in beside it. On the wall beside her there’s a large and rather gloomy portrait of a young woman in white satin, draped on a sofa.

  There are three doors, one to my left, and two on the right. White-painted, elegant. A large vase of daffodils sits on the desk, along with a telephone and computer. Between the two doors on the right, a cushioned but backless piece of furniture, a bench, long enough for two or three people to sit on. Above it, a huge mottled mirror, which has probably been there since the house was built.

  Mrs McCain smiles at me. ‘I’ll let him know you’re here. Have a seat.�
�

  I haven’t time to though, as the door on my left is opening and here’s Alastair Gordon, hand out in greeting. ‘Mrs Mottram. It’s good to finally meet you.’

  He’s much younger than I was expecting. In fact, I suspect he’s rather younger than me. And he’s reminded me that I might have to change my name. Should I? I’m not going to be Mrs Mottram for much longer. How does that work? How do you decide?

  As we shake hands, I’m confused and tongue-tied. I follow him into his office, and accidentally say, ‘I thought you’d be old. I mean – I’m sorry – you said you were friends with Uncle Andrew.’

  ‘We weren’t at school together or anything,’ he says, amused.

  ‘No… Even if you were old,’ I say, ‘you couldn’t be as old as him and still be working. I was just expecting you to be older. Not that it matters. Oh God, now I’m just… Do excuse me.’ I laugh. ‘Everything’s rather unexpected.’

  ‘Have a seat,’ he says. He offers me a drink, asks about the journey. We talk about the traffic and the roadworks and he opens his office door and asks Mrs McCain to make some tea. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to have a PA. I doubt I’ll ever find out. I almost ask him but, really, I need to control this urge to just say whatever comes into my mind.

  I feel a bit awkward, partly because Xanthe spent quite a lot of the journey wondering about Mr Gordon, and we laughed a lot at her imaginings, mostly because he was bound – guaranteed in fact – to be very different to her daydreaming. And he is, I suppose, because we thought he’d be dark but he’s blond. He is quite good-looking though, if you like people who look posh, which I always pretend I don’t. They have good bones, don’t they, and tend to be attractive; it’s centuries of breeding. He’s probably only thirty-five or something though.

  He comes back to his desk and sits down. ‘My father was Andrew’s solicitor before I was,’ he says. ‘I’d known him since I was a child. I gather you didn’t know him that well, yourself?’

  I shake my head. ‘Hardly at all. The whole thing has come as rather a shock.’

  I look around, surreptitiously searching for the obligatory photograph of wife and children. I can’t see any but, then again, these days people have their kids as wallpaper on their PC, don’t they, rather than a framed photograph on their desk. There’s a small painting of a dog though, on the wall by the door. A Golden Retriever. The room has a fireplace and beautiful plaster cornices, and shelves in the alcoves on the fireplace wall, filled with boxes neatly labelled with surnames. One of these, with HAMILTON, A F & M G written on it in beautiful handwriting, sits on the desk between us. There’s another painting over the mantel, mountains and moorland, and a watercolour between the windows, which I think is of the town square. It’s amusing to have a painting more or less of the view outside.

  ‘So, have you been to Baldochrie before?’ he asks, leaning back in his chair.

  ‘No, I never have.’ I tell him I feel terrible about never visiting, about not coming to the funeral. I ask him to tell me what Uncle Andrew was like, and begin to form a picture of him: self-reliant, a gardener and a lover of books, always smartly dressed, and funny; very sharp, says Alastair Gordon. ‘He made me laugh a lot. I miss him.’

  Three

  I pull off the road behind Alastair’s BMW, onto the wide gravelled drive that curves round beside the West Lodge. I’m excited to see it in the flesh, although I’ve looked at it on Google Street View many times. It’s a neat one-storey grey stone building with a slate roof. The lawn in front is beginning to be shaggy, but there are tulips and primroses, and some sort of climbing plant, still very naked, so possibly wisteria, curling round the bright red front door. Xanthe and I get out of the car and crunch across to where Alastair waits. It’s stopped raining, and there’s a hint of sunshine away to the south. Water drips from the eaves. He hands me two sets of keys and gestures towards the gate and the road that passes through it, onward towards the house for which the Lodge was built. I’ve looked at that on Street View, too, a large and imposing Georgian building that might be a hotel, or a school. There’s no sign, though; no car park full of cars – so perhaps not. Although surely no one lives in such a big house these days.

  ‘So that’s the Drive,’ he says. ‘It’s private – as much as one has private land in Scotland – that’s from the main road as well, and through the gates. But part of the covenant is that you and your visitors and tradesmen and so forth are allowed free access. As I say, that’s just a polite technicality.’

  The gates are elaborate wrought-iron things easily twice my height. I don’t think they’ve been closed for a long time.

  ‘Your uncle bought West Lodge in the late fifties, from the present Laird’s grandfather. So Lord Hollinshaw would be your closest neighbour. The house – Hollinshaw House – is about a mile further on up the Drive.’

  ‘An actual lord?’ asks Xanthe, disbelieving.

  Alastair nods. ‘I’m afraid so. Quite a lot of the estate buildings were sold – not just West Lodge. The post-war period was tough for the gentry,’ he says, slightly sarcastically. ‘They had to sell various things to pay for the upkeep on the house, which is an unnecessarily grand building. The tenth Lord H sold almost all the estate buildings. The East Lodge; this one; there are some cottages, built for gardeners and gamekeepers; and the Home Farm. And then his son sold off all the land that wasn’t directly associated with the house, so they just had the park.’

  I step backwards, looking up at the roof of the Lodge. It looks fine from here. My dad says I ought to have a survey done, like I would if I was buying it. I suppose he’s right.

  ‘Dreadful for them,’ I say.

  ‘Yes. Anyway, since Lord Hollinshaw – Charles – took over in the mid-nineties, he’s been buying things back. West Lodge is the only estate building still belonging to someone else. I can assure you that, should you decide to sell, he’ll bite your hand off.’

  ‘Oh really?’

  Alastair has stepped up to the front door. He turns to look over his shoulder at me. ‘Very keen to get it all back. He rents them as holiday lets, mostly. His first wife was an interior designer; they’re very stylishly done. They were in all the magazines, when he finished the East Lodge and the cottages. And the newest one was in the Telegraph magazine just last year. Andrew was holding out, but I don’t think you should let that affect your decision.’

  ‘How many wives has he had?’ asks Xanthe, always eager to know the details.

  ‘Oh, only two. I mean, he’s been married twice. And divorced twice,’ adds Alastair.

  ‘Really?’ Xanthe raises her eyebrow at me and I try not to laugh. She’s decided that being with the same person for twenty years is ‘horribly boring’ and I’ve had a ‘lucky escape’ from the tedium of long-term monogamy. This is all an elaborate joke to make me feel better, of course. It’s not exactly working, but I appreciate the attempt.

  I clear my throat. ‘He didn’t want to sell? Or he didn’t want to sell to Lord Whatsit?’

  ‘Hollinshaw. They didn’t get on, it’s true. Ironic, really, because… Well, it’s a long story,’ he says, ‘and it’s not my story to tell.’

  ‘Oh, go on,’ says Xanthe, ‘you can’t just leave us hanging.’

  He unlocks the front door with a third set of keys, which he then hands to me, and ushers us inside. There’s a long passage or hallway with a flagstone floor and various white-painted doors opening off it, on both sides. It smells slightly stale, but not damp. There’s a twirly Edwardian hall stand with a mirror and hooks for coats, with walking sticks and a multi-coloured golf umbrella leaning against the central drawer. A pair of Wellington boots, a waterproof jacket. These objects, evidence of the life lived here, make me feel slightly melancholy. I shiver, wishing again that I’d visited Uncle Andrew before he died.

  I open the first door on the left and glimpse a green-carpeted sitting room with lots of furniture. We stand in the hall though, while Alastair continues, ‘Your uncle didn
’t get on with Charles’s father at all. James. I’m not exactly sure what caused that, to be honest. But anyway, when Charles… It’s rather complicated. Charles is the younger brother, you see; Edward renounced the title.’

  ‘Gosh,’ I say, ‘like Tony Benn?’

  ‘I should think Tony Benn was a pretty big inspiration, yes. So he – Edward – didn’t get on with his father, either. He and your uncle were good friends, actually. Because of the books.’

  ‘Oh yes, the books. We should look at the books?’

  ‘Through here.’ He leads the way up the corridor and opens the third door on the right. The room’s in darkness, blackout blinds at the window. Alastair pauses on the threshold and continues. ‘Yes – Edward’s a dealer. A book dealer, I mean,’ he adds, hurriedly, which makes Xanthe snort with laughter. ‘He has a shop in town – you might have noticed it? It’s across the square from my office. His father hated it. Anyway, when James died, Edward renounced the title, which passed to Charles. Charles is more business-minded, I suppose. Made a lot of money from property development in Edinburgh and Glasgow. He was determined to buy back the estate houses at least, although all the farmland is another matter. He got the Home Farm back about five years ago, but there’s a lot more land that was bought up piecemeal by various people in the fifties and sixties. And, like I say, he bought East Lodge and the Lower Farm cottages and so on.’ He taps his fingers on the door, and changes the subject. ‘But these are the books. Edward valued this lot for Andrew the back end of the year before last. The valuation probably still stands, but you might want to ask him to take a look for you.’

  He flicks the lights on.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ says Xanthe.

  The room is lined with bookshelves, and the shelves are full of books. Most of them are leather-bound and gold-blocked. Like a mini-stately-home library. Busts of Milton, Shakespeare and Newton, a very faintly musty smell overlaid with leather.