The Curious Heart of Ailsa Rae

by Stephanie Butland

  There was only one new one, and it was for a book we had a copy of in the storeroom upstairs, so I dug it out and put it in a brown paper bag, wrote the customer’s name on it, phoned the customer to say it was waiting, and put it on the shelf behind the desk. It was a Jean M. Auel, something Archie would definitely have considered below his notice. It might have only been a fiver but I’d bet good money that all of my fiver book sales add up to more than Archie’s precious first editions. In fact, I don’t need to bet. I see the figures. Archie takes me to the meetings with the accountant, so I can listen to the bits he misses. He starts by nodding and then nods off, double-chin to chest. It’s funny, he looks small when he’s sleeping. When he’s awake, and he’s talking, he seems too big for the shop, too big for York, although he says the city is perfect for him. I asked him once how he ended up with the shop and he said, ‘It was time to be contained,’ which is a ridiculous answer. Another time he told me that he came to York to see a friend, ‘got overly merry’, and bought the business on a whim. Also ridiculous, but more likely to be true.

  Ben, who does house clearances and brings the books to us, had brought in a couple of boxes and, judging from the spines of the books I could see, they were going to be a welcome addition to the Music Biography (Classical) section: there was my work for the day. I like it when boxes like that come in, with a theme rather than a hotchpotch of collected living. It makes me feel as though I’m spending time with someone who had a bit of substance. Plus, there’s always the possibility of what Archie calls buried treasure. A person with a passion is more likely to have bought and kept first editions and tracked down rare things for the sake of their content, but they won’t have thought about financial value, because the value, for them, is all in the pages. Personally, I’m with them, but as Archie loves to point out, I’m not the one paying the rent.

  Before I started on the box, I made a little notice – ‘Found’ – like the ‘Lost’ ones people make when their cats go missing. Like the cat hasn’t just had a better offer and pissed off out of there. The notice said: ‘Found: Grinning Jack by Brian Patten. If you are the (neglectful) owner, come in and ask for Loveday.’ I stuck it in the window and tucked the book away, in the back, behind the door marked ‘Private’. If no one else was going to appreciate it, then I would.

  It takes Archie half an hour to smoke his pipe, gossip with everyone and anyone who’s going past, and come back in again. He makes no concession to weather, and I kind of admire his commitment, though I’m well aware that if he was smoking cigarettes I might not be as sympathetic. The smell of cigarette smoke reminds me of my dad. My mother made him stop when money was tight. Even now, cigarette smoke makes me uneasy, and at the same time it smells something like home.

  There was a biography of J. S. Bach in the box, and when I opened it up I found a piece of greaseproof paper, carefully folded to enclose a rose. The paper crackled as I unbent it, but didn’t break; the rose seemed more brittle than the wrapping, and I held my breath over it, not wanting to touch it with anything at all, in case I broke it apart. The petals might have been pink, once, but they had become a dusty grey, tucked away from air and light. I refolded it in the paper and pinned it on the ‘Found in a Book’ noticeboard at the front of the shop, wondering who had saved it, and why; whether it had been pressed on an impulse and forgotten, or whether it was a symbol of something more significant. I find the fact that I’ll never know quite comforting. It’s good to be reminded that the world is full of stories that are, potentially, at least as painful as yours.

  *

  A week passed, and there were no takers for the Brian Patten. I was planning to take the sign down that afternoon. My plan was to tuck the book behind the counter and then give it to someone who was buying something that suggested they might appreciate it. I wasn’t going to sell it; that didn’t feel honest. Yeah, I sometimes over-think. There are worse faults.

  I was having my lunch in the back of the shop, which is basically: a tiny loo and hand basin behind an ill-fitting wooden door that needs a yank to close it and a shove to open it; an armchair in front of the fire exit; a shelf; a bin and the hoover underneath the shelf. The armchair is big and comfy, jammed into the space: I can sit cross-legged in it. I have cereal and a banana for lunch – which is also what I have for breakfast, but I like breakfast best, so why the hell shouldn’t I have it twice a day? – and I was halfway through it when I heard Archie calling my name.

  When Archie calls it’s usually because one of ‘my’ customers (i.e. one of the ones he doesn’t like) comes in. It won’t be a question about stock, because I swear he knows every single book in the shop, and where it is.

  Archie and I are alike in that we have a low tolerance for people who annoy us – not an advantage in the customer service game, as he says – but the good thing is that different categories of people wind us up. I don’t like people who giggle. He says there’s nothing wrong with a little bit of joie de vivre. He doesn’t like people who smell. I say you shouldn’t penalise people for their circumstances and books don’t care when you last washed. I don’t like people who try to knock down the price or bang on about how they could get it cheaper on the internet. Those people don’t realise that, for a lot of rare books, if they search the internet they’ll end up at us anyway, but we’ll charge them postage, too. I quite like it when that happens. A bit of schadenfreude really brightens up twenty minutes in a post office queue. I feel like Becky Sharp from Vanity Fair.

  Archie doesn’t like the people he calls superfans, but I like a bit of focus in my customers. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to own every edition of every book by a particular writer, and most of the authors who are being pursued through our shelves are dead, so if they’re not bothered by obsessive fans, I don’t see why we should be.

  I thought the visitor was probably a collector, who Archie would automatically pass to me, regardless of how far through my lunch I was. I overlook his minor infringements of employment law on the basis that his good points outweigh his flaws by a ratio of about three to one. The old lady gothic novel fan has a sixth sense for when she can ruin my lunch by interrupting me, so I was expecting it to be her, but as I rounded the end of the cookery section, I saw that Archie was talking to someone I had never met. I’d have remembered.

  Leather coat and a crew cut, metallic-blue DMs laced up differently, a laugh – Archie looked as though he was on a charm offensive – like sea over gravel. Archie saw me coming and he caught my eye.

  ‘Brace yourself,’ he was saying, ‘she doesn’t approve of people who aren’t good to books.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said the stranger. ‘I don’t approve of them either.’

  ‘Here she is,’ Archie said. ‘My straywaif.’ I thought for a horrible moment that he was going to launch into his how-I-met-Loveday story, but he managed to resist.

  ‘Can I help?’

  ‘You certainly can,’ said the stranger. ‘You already have, I believe.’ He smiled and his teeth were straight and even, middle-class teeth, braced into conformity at great expense, no doubt.

  ‘Really?’ He could work for it.

  ‘Loveday,’ Archie said, ‘this gentleman is in search of a missing poet.’

  ‘The sign in the window. The book.’ The stranger’s voice was clear and I couldn’t find an accent in it, not that it was exactly posh, either.

  ‘I found it on the pavement,’ I said. I sounded accusatory. I didn’t mind. Poetry has a difficult enough time without people throwing it away.

  ‘I think it fell out of my pocket,’ he said. ‘It’s quite deep but I was reading it on the bus, then I realised I’d nearly missed my stop, and I don’t think I put it away properly.’ He put his hand into the pocket of his coat and it disappeared up to the wrist. I noticed that his hands were long, even in proportion to the rest of him, his fingers tapering, the tip of his thumb arching away from his hand, as though it was going to do a runner.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ I said. I fi
gured he could work a bit harder, though it amused me that he thought he had to make a case, as if he’d arrived late for a job interview.

  ‘And I love the Liverpool Poets,’ he said. ‘I studied them. People don’t realise they pretty much invented performance poetry. They invented The Beatles, come to that.’

  I didn’t need to hear his dissertation. ‘I’ll just go and get it,’ I said. I had a spoonful of cereal when I went through to the back, but it had gone to mush.

  ‘Our neglectful new friend is a poet himself,’ Archie said when I returned.

  ‘Then he should know better than to fold down the corners of poetry books,’ I said, and gave him his Brian Patten back. I wasn’t going to be impressed. I’ve got a couple of notebooks of my own poems at my place; I wouldn’t tell people I’m a poet. I’d tell them I work in a bookshop. If I thought it was any of their business.

  ‘I know, it’s a terrible habit,’ said the leather-coat-poet, and he smiled and I smiled back, even though I didn’t really want to. Smiles give too much away. More than your teeth.

  He tucked the book into his pocket and pulled the flap over the top, as if to show me that he’d learned his lesson. It was the beginning of March, cold still. I wondered what he wore in summer.

  ‘Well, I’ll be more careful in future.’ He made a gesture – I thought he was saluting, but then I realised it was a sort of hat-tip, though he wasn’t wearing a hat, so it came off slightly stupid, or it should have done. Then he held out his hand to me to shake, and I shook it. He said, ‘Thank you, Loveday. Nathan Avebury.’ His wrists were slim, straight.

  ‘No problem,’ I said. This is why I don’t like talking to people. I never think of anything interesting to say. I need time to find words, and that’s hard when people are looking at me. Also, I don’t like people much. Well, some are okay. But not enough to make it a given.

  He turned away and I realised there was something in my hand. A chocolate coin, wrapped in gold foil and thoughts of long-ago happy Christmas mornings. If he’d been looking at me when I realised, waiting for a reaction, I would have written him off as a stupid show-off. But the bell above the door had already jangled out the message that he’d gone, and when I looked up there was no sign of him outside.

  ‘Well,’ Archie said. ‘Nathan Avebury.’

  ‘Do you know him?’ I asked.

  There aren’t a lot of people in this corner of York that Archie doesn’t know. He’s friends with the publicans, though they’ve started to change over the last few years now the pubs have become more like restaurants, run by foodies rather than drinkers. He makes a point of shopping in all the nearby places, buying cushions and paintings of the coast, artisan chocolates and lots and lots of cheese. His doctor is always talking to him about cholesterol and losing weight, but Archie says good relationships are more important than being able to see your feet.

  ‘I only know him by reputation,’ Archie said. ‘Time was, he was the next big thing.’

  I knew he was waiting for me to ask for details, so I didn’t. I went back to the armchair and ate the rest of my banana, and when I came back into the shop I took the ‘Found’ notice down. Then I got stuck in to the box of music biographies again.

  There were no more treasures among the pages, no pressed flowers or postcard bookmarks or names on the flyleaf that made me wonder. My favourite, ever: a 1912 edition of Mansfield Park, which had ‘Edith Delaney, 1943’ written in the careful, joined-up writing of a child on the inside front cover. The ‘Delaney’ was crossed through and ‘Bishop’ written underneath. Then ‘Bishop’ crossed out and another name, a longer, double-barrelled one, scored through so thoroughly that it’s impossible to make out. ‘Brompton-Smith’ is my best guess. Then ‘Humphrey’ underneath that. All the same handwriting, but you can see she’s getting older. I’ve got the book at home. Along with my wages I get a book allowance and this was one of the first ones I took. I look at it and I think, well, Edith Delaney-Bishop-Brompton-Smith-Humphrey, I hope you married them all because you liked them, even if Brompton-Smith turned out to be a bastard, by the looks of it. Good for you for taking no shit off anyone.

  *

  Wednesday is Archie’s bridge night so he left early, putting on his Crombie coat with the moss-green velvet collar and shouting, ‘Toodle-oo, Loveday’ as he went. I stayed a bit late, getting through the box, putting aside the books that I thought were worthy of Archie’s attention. I always lock myself in at five, because late afternoon is Rob’s favourite time for coming in and talking about how I should go out with him again as we got off on the wrong foot. He wouldn’t try anything nasty – he wouldn’t dare – but I can’t be bothered with him. Well, I can’t be bothered with men in general, so if I’m not getting any of the alleged thrills, I’m sure as hell going to do without the aggro.

  At five fifteen, there was a tap on the door, and there was Rob’s grinning face, making a ‘let-me-in’ gesture. I shook my head, pointed at the ‘closed’ sign, and went back to what I was doing. He knocked a couple more times but I ignored him. Then there was a sort of crunching, rattling sound and I realised he was pushing a rose through the letterbox. It’s one of his regular tricks. He also brings in chocolates for me and leaves them with Archie because he knows I won’t take them from him. I don’t eat them; I put them on the big table with a ‘help yourself’ sign and they’re gone within an hour. I’d like to think that Rob would read the sign as a bit of advice for him – as in, ‘please get yourself some help’ – but if he comes in when the chocolates are out he just looks pissed off.

  Rob stood there for a bit longer waiting for me to go and get the rose, but I didn’t, so he went away, giving the door handle a last, vicious rattle as he went. I picked up the stem and crushed petals from the desk and was taking them through to the bin when the letterbox rattled again and I jumped. I turned around and saw the back of a leather coat swirling away, and there was a leaflet sticking through the letterbox.

  Poetry Night at the George and Dragon

  Wednesdays from 8 p.m. £3 entry. Open mic.

  There were Facebook details at the bottom. I put it on the community noticeboard, which is next to my noticeboard of things we’ve found in books, and I locked up and left. I pass the George on the way home; it’s on the corner before the cycle lane starts.

  I didn’t go in.

  I wondered if that twirling-away of leather was the last I’d see of Nathan Avebury. But no. He came back the next week.

  Praise for

  ‘A beautiful book’

  PRIMA

  ‘Lost for Words pushes all my bookish buttons’

  RED MAGAZINE

  ‘Intriguing and touching story’

  SUNDAY EXPRESS, S MAGAZINE

  ‘Loveday is an appealing character with a fascinating hinterland’

  DAILY MAIL

  ‘This book is sure to make you laugh and cry in equal measure’

  BUZZFEED

  ‘Loveday is a compelling character, you love her in the way you love a cat who always scratches but you love it anyway . . . this book is quirky, clever and unputdownable. I really enjoyed it’

  KATIE FFORDE

  ‘Burns fiercely with love and hurt. A quirky, rare and beautiful novel, one you’d be delighted to unearth in any bookshop. And Loveday Cardew is a character who leaps from the pages into our hearts’

  LINDA GREEN

  ‘Loveday is so spiky and likeable. I so loved Archie, Nathan and the bookshop and the unfolding mystery’

  CARYS BRAY

  ‘OH poor, brilliant Loveday. Gorgeous, gorgeous bookshop book . . . So, so lovely!’

  SARAH FRANKLIN

  ‘Loveday is a marvellous character and she captured my heart from the very first page . . . her bookshop is the bookshop of readers’ dreams’

  JULIE COHEN

  ‘It is such a beautiful read and Loveday’s voice is so compelling . . . an exquisite story that I couldn’t put down’

  LIZ FEN
WICK

  ‘Beautifully written and atmospheric. Loveday is an endearing heroine, full of attitude and fragility. The haunting story of her past is brilliantly revealed’

  TRACY REES

  ‘This book will warm and break your heart in equal measure! Loveday Cardew is funny and sassy, angry and loving, and she is running scared; she wears her scars deep within her and on the outside too. In Butland’s consummate hands, the story of Loveday’s past and her present is bravely told and is transformative. This is a must-read novel’

  CLAIRE DYER

  ‘What an absolute stunner of a book. I LOVED it and cried like a mother***er. If you care about books (or humans) read it!’

  SHELLEY HARRIS

  ‘A beautiful, touching, moving, sweet treat of a book. Sad, intriguing, cleverly plotted, sometimes shocking, compelling read. I was with Loveday all the way. I absolutely loved it’

  JANE WENHAM-JONES

  ‘What a unique, beautiful novel that cleverly builds to a heart-stopping climax. Any book lovers out there would be mad not to adore the quirkily drawn character of Loveday who pulls you in right from the get go with her distinctive voice!’

  TRACY BUCHANAN

  ‘Wonderful. So many beautiful one-liners too!’

  AYISHA MALIK

  About the Author

  Stephanie lives with her family near the sea in the North East of England. She writes in a studio at the bottom of her garden, and when she’s not writing, she trains people to think more creatively. For fun, she reads, knits, sews, bakes and spins. Researching her novels has turned her into an occasional performance poet and a keen tango dancer.