Noah was taller and with longer arms so he held up his phone and patiently (though there did seem to be some teeth grinding) listened to Nina’s instructions to ‘move your hand a fraction to the left, no, too far, back, back, back!’ and suffered her deleting most of the photos as they didn’t come up to the high standards she expected from her selfies.
‘Much as I hate to rush you, we’re due at Haworth Parsonage at four and it’s quarter to three now,’ he said at last. ‘We really should turn back.’
‘Oh, you’ll be wanting to go at a brisk pace,’ a lady rambler swathed in a purple cagoule told them. ‘Forecast is for rain.’
‘Isn’t it already raining?’ Nina ventured.
‘Pffttt! You call this rain? It’s barely even spitting,’ the woman said with a derisory snort, though actually the mizzle was far more like a very determined drizzle now. ‘Come on, you can walk back with us and I’ll make sure you don’t start to dawdle.’
‘So kind,’ Noah murmured, giving Nina a little warning nudge when she giggled a little hysterically at the thought of having to yomp back the way they came with Mrs Purple Cagoule yelling at them if they dared to lollygag.
Maureen, as Mrs Purple Cagoule had been christened, ‘though you can call me Mo,’ was a small, sprightly woman of very strong opinions. ‘I don’t think much of the soles on your boots,’ she said, eyeing Nina’s motorcycle boots with distaste. ‘And as for that coat. Well, you’ll catch your death,’ she added.
‘Here’s hoping,’ Nina muttered because the brisk pace that Maureen had promised felt like a very close cousin to jogging and Maureen’s hectoring tone was very similar to her mother’s. In fact, it was a pity that the FitBit that Alison had bought her for Christmas last year (her mother excelled in the buying of passive-aggressive gifts) was languishing in a drawer, because Nina was sure that she’d smashed ten thousand steps today and they weren’t even halfway back to Haworth.
Noah, who’d been walking on ahead with the other ramblers, stopped to wait for Nina. ‘How you doing?’ he asked.
‘I’ve decided that it’s best that you leave me here on the moors,’ Nina panted. ‘It’s too late for me and I’ll only slow you down but you can still make it back to civilisation. Christ, I’m unfit.’
‘You’re doing fine,’ Noah said encouragingly even though Nina was doing the very opposite of fine. Even though she was cold and yes, her sodding coat was sodden through, she was also hot and sweaty from the enforced exercise. ‘We haven’t got that far to go.’
‘Oh, it’s at least another mile,’ Mo said cheerfully as if she was actually enjoying this. Yes, she must definitely share DNA with Alison O’Kelly.
‘But just think, it won’t be long before you’re standing in Haworth Parsonage,’ Noah reminded her. ‘Where Emily and her sisters and that wastrel brother of theirs, what’s his name again, lived.’
‘Branwell,’ Nina said, although she wanted to use what breath she had left for walking not talking. ‘He was a wrong ’un if ever there was one. Ran up huge debts gambling and drinking – it was one of the reasons why the sisters turned to writing. Branwell ploughed through what little money they had.’
‘Are these relatives of yours?’ Mo asked with a little gleam in her eye as if she suspected that Nina came from a whole family of wrong ’uns.
‘No, we’re talking about the Brontës,’ Noah said politely. ‘It’s why we came to Haworth. Nina loves Wuthering Heights.’
If Noah could make an effort then so could Nina. ‘It’s my favourite book,’ she explained. ‘And I’ve always wanted to come here to see where Emily Brontë lived. Have you read it?’
‘I don’t have time to read,’ Mo said, a censorious expression on her weather-beaten face.
Usually those six smug words were a red rag to a bull but now Nina merely grunted as they were retracing their steps over the site of the old quarry, the slabs slick and wet, and she didn’t want to go arse over tit.
‘Careful.’ Noah took her arm without commenting on the non-grippiness of her boots. ‘Broken bones didn’t feature too highly in my plans for the day.’
‘I’m glad to hear that,’ Nina panted then decided she needed all of her energy for walking and not talking because the ramblers, despite the fact that they were all much, much older than her, were still cracking on at a punishing pace.
But the journey was much easier with Noah to lean on and soon the church spire came into view and not long after that, they were passing through the kissing gate again and saying goodbye to their companions.
‘Mark my words, you’ll be coughing and sneezing before the day’s out,’ was mighty Mo’s parting shot.
Nina waved her off, though her instinct was to flip her off instead.
‘I’m fine,’ she insisted when she saw the concerned look on Noah’s face. ‘Honestly, I’m not about to do an Emily Brontë.’
‘How does one do an Emily Brontë?’ Noah asked as they headed back to where he’d parked the car.
‘She caught a bad cold at Branwell’s funeral, which turned into TB and she refused all medical treatment until it was too late, and then she died. In Haworth Parsonage,’ Nina added and a little chill did run through her at the thought of poor headstrong Emily finally asking Charlotte to send for the doctor, then dying a couple of hours after that. ‘But I’m not about to keel over during our tour. I’ll take off my coat though, because it smells like wet dog, and anyway since the mid-nineteenth century they’ve invented Lemsip and Day Nurse and all sorts of over-the-counter medicines for cold and flu.’
‘Are you sure?’ Noah took one of Nina’s hands, which made her shiver again, but not because she was thinking of untimely death. ‘You’re freezing.’
‘I’m going to swap my damp coat for a jumper,’ Nina said. They were at the car now. ‘Um, do you have a jumper I can borrow?’
There was no way that Nina and her breasts could fit into one of Noah’s navy-blue jumpers – unlike Emily Brontë and her infamous coffin that had measured only sixteen inches wide – so she had to make do with a zip-up fleece that didn’t go with her black fifties dress with its novelty print of sleek white pussycats.
‘You should never go out with a man skinnier, shorter or younger than you,’ had been one of Alison’s life lessons when Nina had hit her teens and her words came back to taunt Nina as she tried, and failed, to heave up the zip on the fleece.
‘That fleece looks much better on you than it does on me,’ Noah said appreciatively even if Nina was sure that he was lying.
Then he took her hand again and not because he was helping her over wet quarry slabs or checking that she hadn’t developed tuberculosis. Just taking her hand for the pleasure of taking her hand. Like he enjoyed touching her.
Nina squeezed Noah’s fingers gently and he instantly returned the pressure. The fleece smelt faintly of the clean, zesty scent of his aftershave so it felt a lot like she was wrapped up in him. She shivered for the third time, glanced up to see Noah looking at her with that thoughtful expression on his face as if he wished he had his iPad on him so he could make some detailed notes.
Finally, she looked away and then her breath caught in her throat and she gasped as she saw the neat garden in front of them and the neat house beyond them.
The Brontë Parsonage.
‘Any relic of the dead is precious, if they were valued living.’
Stepping through the white door into the parsonage, a journey that Emily Brontë and her sisters had made hundreds, even thousands of times, was quite something.
Nina paused to look around her at the dove-grey walls, to soak it all in, but was interrupted by a small group of middle-aged ladies who were coming down the stairs in front of them and chattering loudly.
‘So much cleaner than I thought it would be,’ one of them announced in a soft American accent. ‘And much smaller too.’
‘Well, people were smaller back then. What with the poor sanitation and the lack of fresh vegetables,’ another lady commente
d and they all hmm’ed in agreement.
‘I would have thought that one thing they weren’t lacking were fresh vegetables,’ Noah murmured in her ear, but Nina was still standing rooted to the spot and could hardly concentrate on anything but where she was. Emily Brontë wasn’t just a figure from history, an entry on Wikipedia, but had been made of flesh and blood and living within these four walls.
Nina looked through the open doorway to her left into a small room with a small table next to the fireplace, four chairs arranged around it, papers and pens and an inkwell on its polished surface. She stood there with a moony expression on her face, hardly noticing that she’d created a bottleneck for the American ladies who wanted to leave.
‘Sorry,’ Nina said and moved closer to the red rope that barred her from entering the dining room to rub her hands over every available surface. ‘Noah.’ She reached behind her to tug him closer. ‘This … this is the room where the Brontës wrote their novels. Can you even imagine it? Emily writing Wuthering Heights while Charlotte worked on Jane Eyre and Anne wrote The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall. It would be like Posy, Verity and I all writing novels at the shop that went on to become bestsellers.’ Nina shook her head. ‘What would the odds of that be?’
‘Worth putting a tenner on each way,’ Noah decided and he stood there patiently while Nina strained against the rope, desperate not to miss any small detail of the room where so much bookish greatness had occurred.
They wandered the house, peering in at Mr Brontë’s study and the kitchen with its old-fashioned range, then up the stairs to look in at the children’s study and Charlotte’s room. Emily and Anne didn’t seem to have had their own rooms but as the information cards explained, a Reverend Wade, who’d moved in after the Brontës were dead and gone, had added a new wing to the house and some of the old rooms had been converted into a corridor.
‘Not only did their mother, Maria, die in this room, so did Charlotte herself,’ Nina said in shocked but quiet tones as they peered into Charlotte’s room. It wasn’t the kind of information you said at a normal volume. In the middle of the room was a glass display case with one of Charlotte’s dresses in it. Despite its voluminous skirts and huge sleeves, it was obvious that its original wearer had been tiny. ‘God, I couldn’t even get one of my legs in it,’ Nina exclaimed. ‘Also when I die, I hope no one displays my stockings for public viewing.’
She turned her head to see what Noah thought but he wasn’t looking at Charlotte Brontë’s white stockings pinned up behind her dress but at his watch. He’d been quite restless all the way through their tour, though Nina could hardly blame him. It had to be a quite dull way to spend an hour if you weren’t a mad Brontë fangirl.
‘I’m sorry,’ Nina said. ‘I don’t think there’s much more to see. I thought, and this isn’t a criticism, that it would be much bigger. It seemed bigger when I looked at it on the internet. Is this very boring for you?’
‘Oh no, it’s great. Very interesting,’ Noah said without much conviction.
‘’Cause I don’t think there can be that much more to see, then we can visit the gift shop.’ Nina cracked her knuckles in anticipation. ‘I love a gift shop.’
‘Who doesn’t?’ Noah agreed rather vaguely and then, as if he couldn’t help himself, he checked his watch again. ‘Sorry. Are you mad at me?’
‘Not at all,’ Nina decided, because it would be weird if Noah were as obsessed with Wuthering Heights and Emily Brontë as she was. He didn’t expect Nina to embrace kayaking through white-water rapids or ziplining, thank God. ‘And I can’t be mad at you when you’ve arranged this amazing surprise for me. You’ve set the bar pretty high for all other dates.’
It felt presumptuous to assume that there might be other dates but this third date was so spectacular that Nina wanted a fourth date, a fifth date, maybe so many subsequent dates that it stopped being dating and became a relationship, and it had been so long since she’d had one of them, that the idea of it made her insides flutter like a lorry load of butterflies had taken up residence in her stomach. Perhaps if she explained about Paul, about the accident and how it had changed him, Noah would be all right with it. Maybe …
‘Talking of surprises,’ he was saying, so Nina was forced to stop imagining what might be and focus on what was. ‘It’s why I keep looking at my watch. I have you booked in at quarter past four.’
‘Booked in for what?’ Nina wondered. She cast a doubtful eye at Charlotte’s dress. ‘Am I going to get kitted out in old-timey gear and have my picture taken?’
‘Are you what? No! It’s, well, I hope it’s more amazing than that,’ Noah said hesitantly as if he wasn’t sure how Nina would react to this latest surprise.
She was definitely intrigued and yes, a little nervous, as they headed back down the stairs.
Then Noah led her through to the back of the parsonage and into an exhibition room. Like everywhere else in the Parsonage, at this time on a damp, grey Friday afternoon off-season, it was empty apart from one member of staff who smiled as they entered the room.
‘Noah Harewood?’ she asked with a friendly smile. ‘And Noah’s friend?’
‘This is Nina,’ Noah said, pulling Nina forward. ‘We’re not too late, are we?’
‘And I’m Moira. You’re just in time. We’re closing in fifteen minutes.’ The woman gestured at the table in front of her, then at Nina. ‘Would you like to take a seat?’
Nina was desperate to sit down, mostly because she’d been on her feet for hours. Her curiosity was like a restless beast that couldn’t be caged. ‘What is going on?’ she asked, her voice quite squeaky with suspense.
‘Next year is the bicentennial of Emily Brontë’s birth and to commemorate it, we’re asking visitors to the museum to each write a line from Wuthering Heights in a specially commissioned hand-written book,’ the woman explained.
‘And you get a special pencil to keep,’ Noah added as if Nina might need an incentive, which she didn’t. Her bottom was already in the chair.
‘I’ll do it!’ she yelped, hands in the air, fingers outstretched. ‘Look! I’m limbering up!’
‘Let’s create a little ambience, shall we?’ Moira suggested. She switched off the main lights so that the room was almost in darkness, apart from the desk lamp in front of Nina which cast a warm glow.
Now that she’d calmed down a fraction, Nina could see a huge but neat pile of paper to her left, an old copy of Wuthering Heights open about two thirds of the way through with an old-fashioned slide rule marking the page, and an open wooden box with curved corners filled with black pencils.
Nina dipped her head so she could see that each one was inscribed, Wuthering Heights – A Manuscript.
‘You’ll be needing one of them,’ Moira said, and with great care Nina chose a pencil, even though they were all identical. ‘Now, here’s the manuscript and this is your line: I put on my bonnet and sullied out, thinking nothing more of the matter.’
Never in her life had Nina concentrated so hard on her penmanship as she copied the words in her best, her nicest, joined-up writing. All her muscles were tensed until she was done and found that, oddly, she felt close to tears.
‘It’s quite emotional,’ she said in a husky voice. ‘To sit here, in this house, and write the very same words that Emily Brontë wrote in this same house nearly two hundred years ago. Never knowing that the story she was telling would be read and loved two centuries later. God, it’s doing my head in!’
‘Lots of people have had a similar reaction,’ Moira noted. She looked at Noah. ‘Now, your turn.’
‘Oh yes! Noah! You should!’ Nina exclaimed, but he was backing away, hands held up.
‘No, I don’t want to rain on your parade,’ he said firmly. ‘This is your thing.’
‘But I want to share it with you,’ Nina said just as firmly, pushing the chair back and standing up. ‘This is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of deal. He can write a line too, can’t he?’
‘Of course you can.’ Moira
smiled a little at the determined expression on Nina’s face as she tugged at Noah’s arm.
‘Sit!’ she demanded. ‘Go on, sit!’
‘I’m not a dog,’ Noah grumbled, but he was sitting. ‘You know, I have terrible handwriting. I’ll have to write in block capitals, otherwise it will be completely illegible.’
‘No judgement,’ Moira assured him. ‘Take a pencil and this is the line you need to copy out: She bounded before me, and returned to my side, and was off again like a young greyhound.’
Nina wanted to keep a respectful distance while he worked but she was distracted by the way Noah laboured with pencil and paper. He held the pencil as if he were expecting it to suddenly make a break for freedom and he came at the paper like it was a mortal enemy.
‘Oh my God! I’d forgotten about the time you sent me that note and I could barely read it. You really weren’t joking about your handwriting,’ Nina blurted out, then cursed her lack of tact. Even Noah’s block capitals looked like they were having a nervous breakdown across the page.
‘Now, now, Nina. I can’t be good at everything,’ Noah said and Nina waited until he’d finished his last letter, though it looked more like an insect had just died on the page, and dug him in the shoulder.
‘I was going to tell you that you’re amazing at arranging surprise road trips but it would only go to your head,’ she said, as Noah got up from the chair. She turned to Moira. ‘Thank you so much for letting us do this.’
‘Well, you really have your young man to thank but I think that would go to his head too,’ Moira said. She ushered them towards the door, a regretful smile on her face as if she’d have liked nothing more than to stay there and watch them banter back and forth. ‘I’m sorry but we close at five and you’ll be wanting to visit the shop before you go.’
Crazy in Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop Page 24