‘Why should we do that? I’ll get you a drink,’ Steven offered but it sounded very ungracious, like he was doing Nina a huge favour. ‘Then you can make it up to me.’
Make what up to him? For failing to have the words I’M NOT A SIZE EIGHT emblazoned on her profile? And how exactly did Steven think she was going to make amends for this dreadful oversight? Well, his eyes had barely left her boobs for the last five minutes so Nina had a pretty clear idea.
‘I’m very good at making up,’ she purred, fluttering her eyelashes at Steven, whose upper lip glistened even more. ‘You go and get me a vodka tonic, a large one, while I powder my nose.’
Steven had the nerve – the sheer nerve! – to pat Nina on the bottom and that was maybe his fifth strike, she’d lost count of just how many strikes, which was why she didn’t go through the door marked Ladies but carried on down the hall until she came to a door marked Private, which she knocked on.
It was opened by a burly, middle-aged man in a One Direction T-shirt who didn’t look surprised to see Nina. ‘Operation Frog?’ he asked.
‘Operation Frog,’ Nina confirmed. ‘I could kiss him from now until the end of eternity and he’d never be anything but a total arsehole.’
‘Say no more, my love,’ said Chris, landlord of the Thornton Arms and self-styled saviour of any customer on a bad date. ‘Follow me.’
He led Nina further down the hall to a door, which he unlocked so Nina could sneak out the back while Steven was still waiting to order her very large vodka and tonic.
‘You’re a real gent, Chris,’ she said gratefully, because this wasn’t the first time, and it probably wouldn’t be the last, that Chris had come to her rescue. ‘I owe you one.’
‘You owe me more than one,’ Chris said with a grin. ‘Time you settled down with a nice bloke.’
Nina pulled a face. ‘I don’t want to settle down with a nice bloke. I want nothing less than mad, passionate love with a man who’d give me the moon and stars if I asked for them.’
‘Good luck with that, sweetheart.’ Chris shook his head then pulled the door shut behind her.
Nina took her phone out of her coat pocket so she could block Steven. She was still logged into HookUpp, the app pinging to let her know there were matches close by, and for a moment, Nina was tempted. The night was still young, after all, and it wasn’t as if she was getting any younger. Or she could go back to the tapas bar and maybe have another crack at Javier. Perhaps she’d written him off too quickly.
Or she could just go home. She was only around the corner from Happy Ever After and, as if they had a mind of their own, her feet were swinging left and down Rochester Street then into Rochester Mews. Nina sighed as she tapped the security code into the panel of the electric gate that prevented undesirables from gaining access to the mews after hours.
Then it was an unsteady, vertiginous wobble across the cobblestones towards Happy Ever After. The shop was in darkness and Nina didn’t bother to turn on the lights as she locked the door behind her then gratefully eased off her shoes.
She padded across the main room, past the shop counter to the door that led to the stairs. There were no lights on upstairs but that didn’t necessarily mean that Verity was staying over at Johnny’s again. She could be home and doing yoga, which she preferred to do by candlelight. Or she could be reading, which was another quiet activity and one she could easily abandon to listen to Nina spin an amusing yarn about her adventures this evening.
‘Very? Are you in?’ Nina called out as she climbed the stairs. ‘Had a lucky escape from a total loser tonight. He had the worst hair plugs of anyone I’ve ever seen.’
‘Roooowwwwwrrrrrrrr!’ came the plaintive reply, not from Verity, but Strumpet, Verity’s obese, needy cat who waited for Nina to get to the top of the stairs then hurled himself at her shins.
‘Mr Strumpet! Did she leave you home alone?’ Nina hefted Strumpet into her arms, nearly giving herself a hernia in the process, and padded down the hall to the kitchen wearing Strumpet like he was a fur stole.
There was a note pinned to the fridge. ‘Hey Nina, probably going to stay at Johnny’s tonight. Strumpet has already been fed, despite what he might tell you. Be good. See you tomorrow. Very xxx’
It was only a short time ago that Verity and Posy, with a bit of nagging, could be persuaded to go out with Nina. And now it wasn’t even nine o’clock on a Wednesday evening and Posy was snuggled up with her husband, and Verity was sharing sofa space (she really wasn’t the snuggling sort) with her extremely eligible handsome architect boyfriend. And where did that leave Nina?
While she would rather die than become a smug married, it would be wonderful to have someone to come home to. And God, a passion-filled all-nighter with her Heathcliff-alike would absolutely hit the spot right now. Instead, Nina’s companion for the night was a chubby, demanding cat, like she was a spinstery crazy cat lady, with nothing to do but put on her pyjamas, ferret in the fridge for some leftovers and catch up on the latest episode of Tattoo Fixers.
It was less Wuthering Heights and more the absolute pits.
‘But I begin to fancy you don’t like me.’
Though Nina was very fond of saying ‘I can sleep when I’m dead’ every time any of her friends, especially Verity who was evangelical about eight hours of shut-eye, remonstrated with her about burning the candle at both ends, there was a lot to be said for an early night.
She’d been in bed by an unprecedented half past ten and woke up the next morning before her alarm. It was quite a revelation that getting showered, dressed and made-up could be done in a leisurely fashion, and when Verity finally came home from staying the night at Johnny’s, she did a double-take to see Nina sitting in the kitchen, lingering over toast and jam and her first cup of coffee of the day.
‘Morning, Very!’ Nina picked up the cafetière. ‘Do you want a cup?’
Verity goggled at her. ‘What is going on here?’ she asked in a bewildered fashion. ‘Did you stay out all night?’
‘I beg your pardon!’ Nina gasped, like she was affronted at the notion that the only reason she was up was because she hadn’t gone to bed. ‘The very idea! Not like you, you dirty stop-out!’
It was Verity’s turn to gasp in outrage. ‘I’m not a dirty stop-out. I’m in a loving, committed relationship, thank you very much.’
Half an hour later when Posy arrived for work, Nina took great delight in opening the shop door for her with much ceremony and a chirpy, ‘Posy! You’re five minutes late! No need to worry though, I’ve already signed for a couple of deliveries and done the till float.’
Posy put a hand to her forehead and pretended to swoon. ‘Oh God, I must be hallucinating. Are you really Nina?’
Nina nodded. ‘I’m a new, improved Nina who had an early night.’
‘I always knew this day would come,’ Posy said with a grin, nudging Nina. ‘If you continue to be new and improved, I might have to promote you to deputy manager, then you could open the shop every day and I could have a bit of a lie-in.’
‘I’m pretty sure that come tomorrow, I’ll revert back to Nina version one,’ Nina decided and then Posy pretended to cry and it set a jokey mood for the morning, which was just as well, because the day was grey and drizzly, yet again, and the shop was very quiet. Nina hoped that it was just because of the weather and not because they’d run out of customers. Verity still seemed to have a lot of orders coming in through the website and Posy insisted that it was just a lull and ‘things will pick up nearer to Valentine’s Day.’
But Valentine’s Day was only a week away and Nina couldn’t see that people would want to buy more romantic fiction if they had the real thing. And if they were single, why buy a romantic novel as a special Valentine’s Day treat, when it would only remind you of the fact that no one loved you?
Anyway, Valentine’s Day or not, the shop had become awfully quiet now that Christmas was long gone.
When they’d reopened as Happy Ever After last summer,
they’d planned all sorts of exciting things. Author events, blogger evenings, a book-of-the-month club, but as yet none of these exciting things had happened.
No one even bothered to update the shop’s Twitter or Instagram feeds any more. Sam, Posy’s sixteen-year-old brother, and Little Sophie, their Saturday girl, had promised to take responsibility for them, but their good intentions had lasted a maximum of two weeks. Nina wouldn’t have minded taking them over, or the Instagram at least, so she could take pictures of the new releases, but no one seemed to know the login details for each account. When Nina had asked Sam, he’d gone full teenage strop on her, so she suspected that he couldn’t actually remember what the passwords were.
Still, there was something to be said for a slow morning. Nina painted her nails then read a very sexy workplace romance called Billionaire In The Boardroom, Gigolo In The Bedroom in between texting back and forth with her friend Marianne about her new-found resolve to stop taking a chance on losers and really focus on finding her own true love, so despite the lack of customers, the morning sped by.
As the shop was quiet and she had actually started work early that morning, Nina reasoned that no one would mind if she was a little late back from lunch. She had planned to grab a quick bite with lovely Annika, girlfriend of lovely Stefan who ran the Swedish deli on Rochester Street, but Annika and Stefan had had a massive argument, which sounded far from lovely, so Nina had to listen to an entire repeat of said massive argument and then offer advice.
Usually when her women friends were fighting with their significant others, Nina would argue that passion made a relationship stronger as long as the reason for the fight didn’t involve cheating or skidmarks, but Annika wasn’t convinced.
‘He cares more about his smokehouse than he cares about me,’ she said sadly of the little wooden shed in the backyard of the deli where Stefan cured his own salmon.
So, Nina was late back from lunch. Only by fifteen minutes, which was nothing. She’d been back from lunch much later than that before. Much, much later.
Unfortunately the sun had come out since Nina had left the shop and when she returned, Happy Ever After was full of customers, as if the romance novel-reading public only ventured outside for blue skies.
‘Sorry!’ Nina said in a jaunty voice as she approached the counter where Posy was manning the till and a very reluctant Verity had been press-ganged into helping. ‘I got held up.’
‘There’s a reason why it’s called a lunch hour,’ Posy snapped in a very un-Posy-like manner. ‘That’s because it’s only meant to last sixty minutes.’
‘I said I was sorry. Keep your hair on,’ Nina said, nudging Posy out of the way with her hip, so she could serve the next customer. ‘Hello! Shall I take those from you?’
‘I’m going back to the office now,’ Verity announced in martyred tones, because she hated interacting with the general public in any way, shape or form. She’d only answer the phone under extreme duress, whereas Nina was happy to answer the phone every time it rang and chat to every customer, which even Posy got a bit bored with, so Verity and Posy could just get over themselves.
Her timekeeping might be a little free-form but Nina was excellent at customer service. She said as much to Posy, who was now taking the books that Nina rang up, and bagging them along with a complimentary Happy Ever After bookmark, but Posy just muttered darkly that she already missed the new and improved Nina.
The queue seemed never ending but it did end eventually, and Nina could take off her coat, stash her bag under the counter and come face to face with …
‘Not you again! How long have you been standing there?’ Nina demanded of Noah, who was indeed standing at the other end of the counter in his stupid suit with his stupid handheld device. No doubt he’d been writing copious notes about the amount of backchat Nina gave to Posy and was recommending that she be fired immediately.
‘Quite a while actually,’ Noah replied mildly. ‘You see, I wasn’t back late from lunch.’
Nina gave him a hard stare – she didn’t appreciate his sarcasm. Not one little bit. He had a clever, kind-looking face but when he smiled blandly at Nina, as he was doing now, it just stoked the flames of her dislike.
‘Noah’s here for the afternoon,’ Posy said. ‘Which you’d have known if you’d got back from lunch in time.’
‘God, Posy, will you let it go?’ Nina groaned and Noah made another mark on his iPad, which Nina was going to spill a hot drink on first chance she got, and Posy sniffed and said that she had work to do and that she wasn’t to be disturbed, and disappeared into the back office.
She even shut the door so Nina couldn’t eavesdrop on her and Verity, which meant they were sure to be talking about her. She glanced around the main room of the shop then craned her neck to see what was going on in the anterooms on her right and her left. The browsers had thinned out. The shop was almost empty again. Just like the old days when they’d been Bookends and the only thing stopping them from closing down was the fact that Lavinia had a private income to keep the shop afloat. Nina sighed.
Back then, she had half-expected to be made redundant. And now, if these last few weeks of not many customers in the shop was the new normal or the new old normal, was she going to live in fear of losing her job again? She’d been the last member of staff to be taken on, after all, and everyone knew that the last one through the door was the first to pick up their P45 when cuts were being made. Even though Verity refused to serve any customers, she was the only staff member who knew how the stock system worked. And Posy had been left the shop by Lavinia because she was practically family (her father had been the shop manager and her mother had run the tearooms until they’d been killed in a motorway crash), and anyway, she could hardly sack herself.
Tom was only part-time and refused to wear the official Happy Ever After staff T-shirt, but he had a way with their older customer base that defied belief. Also, Nina could imagine that if Posy did fire him, Tom would just tell Posy very crossly that he wasn’t fired and that would be the end of it.
Before she’d come to work at Bookends, Nina had as much success in keeping her jobs as she did in keeping her boyfriends. Both employment and relationships usually lasted between three days and three months. She’d been let go from pretty much every position she’d ever had for a variety of reasons ranging from poor timekeeping and a bad attitude to daydreaming. But it wasn’t really Nina’s fault – she’d become so bored with her old profession. She’d been on her feet all day, the chemicals had played havoc with her manicure and she got into trouble if she didn’t convince her customers to buy overpriced products that they didn’t really need.
Then that miraculous moment, three years ago, when Nina had bumped into Lavinia at a David Bowie exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. It had been a hot July day, Nina had been wearing a sleeveless fifties dress and had been staring at a display case featuring outfits from the Ziggy Stardust years, when someone had tapped her on the shoulder.
‘Excuse me, my dear,’ a very posh female voice had said. ‘Is that an Alice in Wonderland tattoo on your arm?’
Nina had turned round to see an elderly woman standing there, though there was nothing decrepit about the curious, warm look on her face.
‘It is,’ Nina had replied, holding her arm out so that the woman could get a better look at the intricate, inked artwork depicting the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, and the words weaving through it: ‘You’re mad, bonkers, completely off your head. But I’ll tell you a secret; all the best people are.’
They’d read out the quotation in unison, both of them laughing, and then Lavinia had introduced herself and asked Nina if she could tempt her to a pot of tea and a cake. She’d offered Nina a job at Bookends about ten minutes after that.
But Lavinia was gone and so was Bookends. It was a new era of Posy and Happy Ever After, and Posy had been so convinced that becoming a ‘one-stop shop for all your romantic fiction needs’ would bring in new customers in huge numbers,
but what if Posy had been wrong?
‘Don’t mind me, I am just meant to be observing, but are you all right?’
‘You what?’
Nina’s doom-laden reverie was interrupted by Noah who’d felt moved enough to put down his iPad as he gazed at her with some concern. If only she could remember where she knew him from. ‘It’s just you’ve been standing there for the last six minutes and forty-three seconds without moving. Do you suffer from low blood sugar?’
‘Hardly! Not with the amount of cakes I eat,’ Nina said honestly. She shook her head and blinked. ‘I’m fine. Don’t stare at me like that. It’s weird.’
She was a fine one to talk. She was being very weird herself. Noah obviously thought so because he muttered to himself as he picked his iPad up again and made a note. Of course he did. Nina could just imagine what he was writing about her.
Nina is a terrible employee. She has no work ethic. She doesn’t even attempt to look busy when the shop’s quiet but stands there like she’s about to go into hypoglycaemic shock. Also, I think she was dribbling.
‘Enough of this!’ Nina said, though she wasn’t sure if she was talking to Noah or putting herself on a warning. Either way, she needed to do some work. Or else, look like she was doing some work. The bell above the door tinkled as a couple of people came into the shop.
‘Hello! Welcome to Happy Ever After. Just ask if you need any help,’ Nina called out as she so often did and not just because she was being steadily and creepily observed.
Thankfully, there was a constant flow of customers for the rest of the afternoon and Nina didn’t have to pretend to look busy. She was run ragged dealing with one woman who stayed for over an hour because she was in the mood for ‘a multi-book series set in a country house a bit like The Cazalet Chronicles’ but had read everything that Nina pulled from the shelves. Or if she hadn’t read them, then she didn’t like the look of them.
In the end, Nina persuaded her to reread The Cazalet Chronicles and sent her off with all five books, as the woman had lent her copies to her sister-in-law who she hadn’t spoken to for eighteen months, since they’d had words at a family christening about some Tupperware that hadn’t been washed and returned after a barbecue.
Crazy in Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop Page 3