Crazy in Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop

by Annie Darling

  ‘Well, it’s a road-trip kind of surprise,’ Noah revealed with a hopeful smile. ‘How does that sound?’

  Nina clasped her hands to her chest. ‘Oh my God, that sounds thrilling!’

  ‘We’ll be gone overnight,’ Noah explained. ‘I did ask Verity to pack a bag for you to add to the surprise element but she said that she didn’t feel comfortable doing that.’

  ‘The make-up alone,’ Verity called out from the kitchen. ‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’

  Nina was very grateful that Verity had recognised her limitations and hadn’t attempted to send her off without any liquid eyeliner or night cream. ‘I’ll go and pack, shall I?’ she asked, a little dazed that Noah was here and whisking her off to some place that wasn’t here.

  ‘You’ll need sensible walking shoes and a thick coat,’ Noah said, which, truthfully, sounded a lot less thrilling.

  It took Nina twenty minutes (a personal best) to pack two bags (one just for her make-up, skincare and hair products) and then Noah was escorting her to the hire car parked in the mews, with a food parcel from Mattie and coffee from Paloma.

  ‘Don’t worry about the time off!’ Posy called out kindly as she waved them off. ‘You can make it up when we start our extended summer opening hours.’

  Nina was quite beside herself. This was all so unexpected. She’d convinced herself that for his own emotional well-being she needed to end things with Noah as soon as he got back from Glasgow and yet he’d suddenly reappeared to rescue her from two days of retail drudgery and whisk her away on an adventure.

  A proper adventure.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked as Regent’s Park came into view. ‘Is it in London?’

  ‘It wouldn’t be a surprise if I told you,’ Noah said firmly, like he was one of those annoying people who wouldn’t crack under interrogation.

  Soon they joined the M1, past a sign that said ‘To The North’, which made Nina think of polar bears and ice caps and igloos. Then Noah started telling her about the packaging-plant emergency in Glasgow and how he’d had to spend most of his time in a factory in the middle of a huge industrial estate. ‘I had lots to say about staff morale,’ he said. ‘They didn’t even have a staff canteen. Just a whole wall of vending machines, half of which were broken, and the other half sold over-priced protein bars.’

  ‘It sounds like you’ve been to a very dark place,’ Nina noted, catching Noah’s eye. There was a lot of eye-catching going on.

  ‘The very darkest,’ he said mournfully.

  There was a quick stop at Watford Gap services for coffee and then back in the car and heading to the Midlands as Nina bragged about her success on social media.

  ‘Nearly two thousand followers on Instagram,’ she was proud to report. ‘Just over a thousand on Twitter and I got Sam to give me a tutorial on how to update the website, though I didn’t understand a word of it.’

  ‘I’ll help you with that,’ Noah offered immediately. Then he tried to explain how to game the Google rankings but Nina only understood every other word. Still, it was so good to see Noah again, to have his hand brush against her leg when he changed gears, to think greedily of all the time they were going to spend with each other.

  Past Derby and Nottingham, past signs to the Peak National Park and Nina couldn’t imagine where Noah might be taking her. ‘We’re not going to Glasgow, are we?’ she asked with a hint of genuine suspicion. ‘Do you have unfinished business at that packaging plant?’

  ‘You’ve found me out.’ Noah smiled and shook his head. ‘Guess again.’

  They came off the motorway to stop for an early lunch of toasted-cheese sandwiches in a pretty village pub on the outskirts of Chesterfield and talked about how Noah had missed pretty village pubs when he’d been in the States. Also Coronation Street (which he had a secret fondness for, even though his parents were very against commercial television) and ‘a decent cup of tea’.

  ‘Isn’t it a bit of a cliché to complain that you can’t get a decent cup of tea once you leave British shipping waters?’ Nina asked teasingly.

  ‘It’s a cliché only because it’s true,’ Noah replied. ‘You have to pay a fortune for a proper brand of tea bags from an import shop and their water tastes funny and they don’t even do proper milk. They have this stuff called half and half. It’s half milk and half I don’t even know what.’

  ‘This is why I only drink coffee,’ Nina said and Noah’s eyes widened even further.

  ‘That’s it. I’m dropping you at the nearest station to make your own way home,’ he said, putting his hand over the bill as Nina reached for the saucer. ‘No, it’s my treat.’

  ‘There’s no point in treating me if you plan to drop me off like an unwanted parcel,’ Nina told him and Noah smiled.

  ‘I suppose if we’ve come this far we might as well continue.’

  They were deep in the darkest North now. Past Barnsley, past Wakefield, past little towns and villages whose names sounded clunky when Nina tried to say them out loud. Cleckheaton. Scholes. Hipperholme. Northowram. Dark-green fields were a blur out of the car window until they gave way to a grey stone sprawl as they drove through Bradford.

  Queensbury.

  Denholme.

  Nina’s heart was pounding because she knew they were now deep into Brontë country before she even saw the first sign to Haworth, the village where the Brontës had lived for most of their lives, but she didn’t want to ruin Noah’s surprise. The lovely, kind surprise he’d devised as he spent his days trapped in a packaging plant on an industrial estate on the outskirts of Glasgow and thought about her, about where she might like to go for their third date.

  ‘Are we … We are, aren’t we?’ Nina blurted out because they were now driving through Haworth and she had to twist around in her seat to take it all in. ‘Oh, Noah, I can’t believe we’re here! You … you …’

  ‘You what?’ Noah asked but Nina shook her head, words beyond her, which was a first. Instead she put her hand over Noah’s hand, which was resting lightly on the gearshift, and tried to convey her gratitude, that giddiness he made her feel, through her fingertips.

  Haworth was as charming a village as she’d ever seen. Maybe not as chocolate-box pretty as its Devonian or Cornish counterparts: its little shops were hewn from rugged, weatherbeaten stone, its church imposing. All the more so for it being a grey, damp March day, not quite raining, but not quite not raining.

  ‘Mizzle,’ Noah said, as he switched on the windscreen wipers. ‘A misty drizzle or a drizzly mist, one of the two.’

  Nina stared out of the window at an old-fashioned apothecary shop that reminded her of the one across the mews that had been boarded up and closed for decades.

  As they followed the signs to the Parsonage, the village seemed strangely familiar. ‘I feel like I’ve been here before,’ she remarked, peering out at a small row of shops. ‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Emily, Charlotte and Anne suddenly materialise in front of me.’

  ‘Anne? I didn’t know there was a third Brontë sister,’ Noah said, as he pulled into a car park.

  ‘She wrote The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall.’ Nina rolled her eyes. ‘I struggled to finish it though and I didn’t even attempt Agnes Grey, her other book. Beyond my GCSE English, I’m afraid,’ she added in what she hoped was a breezy manner. Noah could probably polish off The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall in a couple of hours and then give a presentation on it, complete with graphics and charts and gifs.

  ‘Oh, please. You’ve read more books than almost anyone I know,’ Noah said, switching off the engine. ‘Apart from Posy and I think her love of books is verging on pathology.’

  It was very disloyal to let Noah speak about her dear friend and employer in that way except … ‘Posy reads so fast that her eyes do this rapid flicker thing from side to side and Verity and I worry that she’s going to have a stroke,’ Nina shared with a grin and then because they were no longer in a moving vehicle and she’d regained the power of speech, she to
ok Noah’s hand again.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank you so much for bringing me here.’ Holding Noah’s hand, her fingers entwined with his, felt quite different to touching his hand when they were in motion. As if now, the hand-holding could be a prelude to … well, anything. ‘I’ve always dreamed of coming here. Not just because it’s where Wuthering Heights is set but because I wanted to get inside Emily Brontë’s head for a little while; see what she saw, that kind of thing. It sounds silly, doesn’t it?’

  Nina ducked her head and she would have tugged her hand free too but Noah wouldn’t let her. ‘It doesn’t sound silly,’ he said. He gestured out of the misty windscreen with his free hand. ‘Well, now that we’ve seen it, shall we head back to London in time to beat the rush hour?’

  Nina’s mouth hung open for just one very unflattering second before she did succeed in tugging her hand free so she could lightly smack Noah on the shoulder. ‘Say that you’re joking.’

  He pretended to cower away from her. ‘I’m joking. We’re actually due at the Parsonage at four. It’s not even half past one now. Is it too drizzly for you to want to walk on the moors?’

  If they were in London, Nina would have insisted on arming herself with her huge, flamingo-printed golf umbrella in case a drop of rain went anywhere near her. But she’d wanted to come to Haworth for ten years and she wasn’t going to let a little rain get in her way.

  ‘I’m pretty sure I won’t melt,’ she said stoutly. ‘I have sensible walking shoes, a thick coat and a burning desire to see the Brontë Waterfalls.’

  ‘I have fled my country and gone to the heather.’

  ‘You know,’ said Noah reflectively two minutes into their walk. ‘I’m not sure that motorcycle boots and a leopard-print fun fur constitute sensible walking shoes and a thick coat.’

  ‘They do in my world,’ Nina said, panting slightly. Her boots were fine for the job in hand. Her coat, not so much.

  Noah, of course, was wearing a navy windcheater cum anorak-type affair (Nina didn’t know what the technical name for it was), which was no doubt made of some space-age, weather-proof, anti-sweat wicking. He had also not been idle during his downtime in Glasgow.

  Armed with his trusty iPad, which was also clad in a weather-proof case, Noah was the font of all things Brontë. As they walked back along Main Street, it was to a running commentary.

  ‘And that gift shop used to be the post office, which was where the Brontës mailed off their manuscripts,’ he said. Then, as they walked a narrow path through the old churchyard, Noah made Nina stop at ‘the iron kissing gate’. Her heart began to beat faster than was strictly necessary. How romantic, she thought, and she raised her face, pursed her lips ever so slightly in anticipation of a …

  ‘And the oldest part of the church dates back to the fifteenth century.’

  … a lecture on how many times the church had been knocked down and rebuilt and could Nina spot the Ordnance Survey mark on the south-west corner of the church tower to mark the fact that they were seven hundred and ninety-six feet above sea level?

  When they came to a rustic wooden sign informing them that they had two and a half miles to go until they reached the waterfall, Nina thought that she might cry. Not just because she didn’t think she’d ever walked two and a half miles in her life, but the anticipation of Noah commenting on every fence-post and large rock they passed was too awful to contemplate.

  ‘So, Penistone Hill, don’t worry, it’s quite a gentle incline, means we’re now in an official country park and this area used to be a quarry.’

  It looked quarryish. There were big lumps of rock scattered about as Noah walked and Nina trudged along. They crossed over a main road, not a car in sight unfortunately because Nina wouldn’t have thought twice about flagging one down and demanding that the driver take her back to civilisation. Noah was banging on about the reservoir they could see in the distance and that there should be a cattle grid coming up.

  ‘And now we’re on open moorland,’ Noah said, squinting down at his iPad and trying to wipe the screen as the drizzle was starting to upgrade to proper rain. ‘This is an area of special scientific interest, especially if you’re a birdwatcher …’

  ‘Stop! Just stop!’ Nina demanded, holding out her hands like she was trying to beat back a flock of scientifically interesting birds. ‘Please …’

  ‘I was trying to make the walk interesting,’ Noah protested. ‘I know you’re a city girl and I thought if I pointed out significant features, it would make the walk less … walky.’

  ‘And I appreciate that, I really do,’ Nina said, because she did, even if Noah pointing out significant features was making her want to scream. ‘I appreciate all the trouble you’ve gone to and how much time you must have spent in your hotel room in Glasgow putting this all together, but I don’t need to know about reservoirs or starlings and sparrows or whatever these scientifically interesting birds are.’

  ‘Curlews and peregrines actually,’ Noah said with a little sniff.

  ‘I went on a date with a guy called Peregrine once,’ Nina recalled. ‘He was so posh that what came out of his mouth didn’t even sound like English.’

  Noah sniffed again as Nina slowly turned a full circle. ‘Do you want to go back then?’ he asked in the same huffy voice.

  Nina turned again. ‘No,’ she said. ‘But look. Just look.’

  No wonder they described Yorkshire as God’s own country. The moors weren’t like the neatly clipped lawns and manicured paths of the parks that Nina was used to. Here, up this high, the sky, dark and grey, hung heavy and looked bigger, mightier than sky normally did. It was the perfect dramatic backdrop for the lush green below; every shade of green that Nina had names for, from sludgy khaki to rich emerald, moss and fern, to palest seafoam.

  But the scenery stretching out before her from every side wasn’t pretty. There was a savage beauty to the land, deep seams riven through it, teetering, haphazard rock formations looming at every turn.

  It was wild, untethered, elemental. And over the light patter of the rain on the unflinching stones from the old quarry, Nina could hear the wind wrapping around them.

  ‘Noah! Listen!’

  ‘I thought I was meant to be looking,’ he grumbled.

  ‘The wind … I think it’s wuthering.’

  ‘What even is wuthering?’

  Nina put a hand to her ear. ‘It sounds like the wind’s calling us.’ She shivered and not just because she was bloody freezing. ‘This is the same wuthering that Emily Brontë wrote about and if you forget about the reservoirs and the quarry and Ordnance Survey marks, and just look around us, this, this, is what the Brontës saw. We might even be standing where they stood. Charlotte wrote about the waterfall so all three of them must have walked these paths two hundred years ago. That just blows my mind.’

  ‘It’s blowing mine too. Or that might just be the wind. Wuthering,’ Noah said and he wasn’t looking quite so cross now. ‘Shall we take a moment?’

  ‘Let’s.’

  They stood side by side to appreciate again the rugged moors, the untamed landscape, how insignificant they both were compared to the vastness of nature.

  ‘OK, I’m done taking a moment,’ Nina decided. ‘How about you?’

  Noah nodded. His face was quite raw from being so rigorously scrubbed by the wind. ‘Moment taken.’

  They set off again and though Noah couldn’t resist a few informed remarks about the terrain or the occasional derelict cottage they came across, he kept them brief. Nina’s head was full of images of Cathy and Heathcliff. Now that she’d been here, she couldn’t wait to reread Wuthering Heights.

  The last part of their journey to the waterfall involved clambering over stone steps slick with rain and unevenly dispersed like they’d been thrown down by an angry god.

  Noah raised an eyebrow when Nina told him this. ‘OK, if you say so.’

  ‘I’m really big on the symbolism of Wuthering Heights right now,’ she explain
ed. ‘How the moors represent Heathcliff; all savage and unpredictable. Luckily, no one is going to make me write an essay on the use of nature as metaphor.’

  ‘Oh, that’s what I had planned for this evening – among other things,’ Noah said and then he smiled in a way that made Nina feel quite hot even though she was still bloody freezing.

  They were joined for the last few metres of their journey by a small group of ramblers and then, at last! They were at Brontë Falls.

  It had rained heavily the day before according to the man who was leading the ramble, which was why the waterfall was such an impressive sight as it gushed down a series of stone shelves that had been carved into the hill over thousands of years. There was a stone bridge at the bottom of the falls, though apparently the original bridge had been swept away in a flash flood in 1989, according to a small plaque.

  ‘Do you think it’s safe?’ Nina asked Noah before she stepped on to it. ‘I really want a selfie but I don’t want to be swept away by the current.’

  Noah cast what looked like a professional eye over the water descending down from above. ‘Well, it is a pretty small waterfall as waterfalls go. I reckon you’ll be safe.’

  It wasn’t the ideal conditions for a selfie. The lighting was terrible. And even with it pinned up and mostly hidden under a polka-dot scarf, Nina’s hair looked awful and the wind and the mizzle seemed to have removed quite a lot of her make-up so that her …

  ‘Come on, you know you always look good,’ Noah said though Nina knew no such thing.

  ‘My eyeliner is but a distant memory,’ she groused as she held her phone up, sucked in her cheeks, pouted then shot off ten quick frames, angling her head in a different position in each one.

  If there was one thing that Nina knew how to do, it was taking a selfie, though the ramblers were looking at her like she’d suddenly started spewing ectoplasm out of her ears.

  Noah was watching her too, with amusement that quickly turned to horror when Nina beckoned him closer. ‘You don’t want me cluttering up your selfies.’

  ‘’Course I do!’ Nina insisted. She’d dreamed of coming here, well maybe not to a waterfall, across open moorland in damp, cold weather, but of coming to Haworth and Noah was the person who’d made it happen. And they’d been on two dates or non-dates, hung out an awful lot and they hadn’t even taken a selfie together. ‘Get your arse over here!’