Verity couldn’t bear it any longer. ‘He works very hard at his job,’ she said sternly. ‘Like you should all be doing instead of standing about gossiping. And much like I should be doing because I have lots of orders to fulfil before the last post.’
And as she had so often done in the past, usually when Posy was trying to persuade her to man the till for ten minutes, Verity fled for the safety of her office sanctuary.
Verity was still in flight mode at six when Posy flipped the shop sign to closed. Nina had finished cashing up, Tom was tutting as he reshelved a pile of books that had been left piled up on the sofas and Verity was sweeping the floor.
‘Pub,’ Nina said, as she so often did when bookselling was done for the day. ‘Who’s in?’
There were general sounds of agreement but Verity shook her head and there was only a token effort to talk her round because everyone knew that Verity rarely did the pub on a Friday evening. Not without half an hour to decompress in a dark room first.
But once the others left, Verity realised that sitting in her chair with the curtains closed wasn’t really going to cut it. Living over the shop was wonderful in so many ways. Rent, nil. Commute, ten seconds and down one flight of stairs. Central London location. Able to go to the big Sainsbury’s in Holborn twenty minutes before it closed and make out like a bandit on heavily reduced perishables. But living above the shop also meant that there was very little work/life balance when you spent most of your time in one building.
Luckily, Verity found that walking was almost as good as sitting in a dark room. She stuck to the side streets, the little cobbled mews of Bloomsbury, occasionally venturing into one of the big garden squares. It was still light enough that she felt perfectly safe, but she crossed over the road numerous times to avoid the huge crowds of people standing outside the area’s many pubs. All demob happy, jackets discarded and slung over railings and shoulders, clutching drinks and bags of crisps.
Verity saw a different side to the city when she walked. A city full of hanging baskets and window boxes full of bright flowers: geraniums, lobelias, petunias and trailing begonias. There were blue plaques to the great and good. The house where Charles Dickens had lived, now the Foundling Museum, just a few doors down from where E.M. Delafield had taken a flat when she was in town and written The Provincial Lady Goes Further.
As her stomach made its presence known and reminded Verity it had been a while since those chilli cheese straws, she pushed open the door of Il Fornello, to find Luigi waiting for her.
‘Miss Very! Usual table?’ he asked. ‘You’re not going to be joining any random strangers tonight?’
Verity shook her head. ‘I am not,’ she confirmed and she followed Luigi through the packed restaurant, nodding and smiling at each waiter she passed until they came to the little corner with room only for a small table set for one, where Verity could slide into the chair that Luigi pulled out for her.
It had taken quite a few weeks at the start of Verity’s patronage of Il Fornello for Luigi to understand that she would always be dining alone. That she wasn’t waiting for anyone. And she certainly didn’t want to be fussed over or have her wine or water glass constantly refilled and to be asked if everything was all right with her meal.
All Verity wanted was to sit and read a book with a glass, or two at most, of red wine, a side salad and a cast-iron dish full of lasagne, the cheese crunchy on top, and so hot she couldn’t eat it for five minutes. It wasn’t so much to ask. It wasn’t as if she were a hermit – that was what so many people didn’t understand; she quite enjoyed being in a crowded restaurant, listening to the hum of conversation around her, she just didn’t want to participate in it.
So, Verity opened her current book, an epic sweeping romance set in the heady months leading up to World War Two, took a sip of her wine and speared a green olive from the complimentary bowl Luigi always slipped her. If there was a finer way to spend a Friday evening after a long, hard week, then Verity couldn’t imagine it.
And it was perfect – until a tall man suddenly swung through the room, grabbed hold of an empty chair and plonked it down on the other side of Verity’s table. She looked up with an indignant gasp that died before it left her mouth, eyes widening in horror and disbelief.
Oh God, it was Johnny.
5
‘It was necessary to laugh, when she would rather have cried.’
‘Hello again,’ Johnny said easily, as he loomed over her table. Seven days had been long enough to dim his beauty so that when Verity had thought about their awkward encounter, though she’d tried really hard not to, his eyes had become a bog-standard blue. His cheekbones dulled. His hair had lost its lustre. His body wasn’t lean and lithe but gangly and gawky. But now he was back in full gorgeous HD definition, which was neither here nor there when his presence was as unwelcome as a meter reader at the door before eight a.m.
‘Hello,’ Verity said, politely but perfunctorily. Experience had taught her that sometimes, though not as frequently as she’d like, men slunk off in the face of zero encouragement. She turned back to her book and made a big performance of finding her place. Really, it was Oscarworthy. She even traced a sentence with her fingertip, though the black type on white paper might just as well have been written in Martian for all the sense it made.
Was Il Fornello Johnny’s new Friday night haunt? Had he just moved to the area and didn’t know anyone so had decided that Verity would do until he found some new friends? Was he going to talk and talk at her when she just wanted to be left alone?
‘Please, I beg of you, just go along with this,’ Johnny said as he sat down opposite Verity and she could hear his smile as he echoed her own words back at her. Now he had her full, stony-faced attention. ‘I didn’t know how else to find you. I did try googling Verity Love but all I came up with were several very poorly designed goddess websites … anyway, I digress. I hoped you might be here so we could talk in person. It’s the kind of thing that would probably be better if we just chatted it out.’
Verity closed her book and willed her face to become even more stone-like. ‘Chatted what out? Is this about me thinking you were gay? Because, I get it, you’re absolutely not gay.’ Though he was protesting far too much for someone who was allegedly straight.
‘Oh, no, it’s nothing to do with that! When you maintain a certain standard of grooming, people always think you’re gay.’ Johnny waved away the idea with an airy gesture. ‘It’s about Peter Hardy, oceanographer.’
Verity inched her chair back. ‘What about him?’ she asked tightly.
‘Genius idea, an imaginary fake boyfriend, but why does he have to be imaginary? Why not have a real fake boyfriend? It kills so many birds with one almighty stone.’
Verity looked at Johnny briefly from under her lashes, just in time to see him smile at her. He was lovely to look at, even lovelier when he smiled, and Verity still had all kinds of feelings that kicked in when a lovely-looking man smiled at her. That didn’t mean that she had to act on them.
Luckily Luigi arrived with her food: lasagne still bubbling in its dish, side salad and a beaker full of garlic breadsticks. ‘Just yell if you need anything,’ Luigi told her pointedly with a sideways look at Johnny. Then he made a big fuss of shaking out Verity’s napkin and placing it reverently on her lap, before he brandished the big pepper grinder, not at her lasagne, but in the direction of Johnny, in what could be taken as a threatening manner. ‘Anything at all.’
Verity took her time selecting a breadstick then held it aloft. ‘I’m fine,’ she said, because much as she was alarmed that Johnny had hunted her down and was talking about fake boyfriends, both imaginary and real, she would expire from sheer embarrassment if Luigi and a couple of his burlier kitchen staff escorted Johnny off the premises. ‘We’re fine. Are you going to order something?’ she asked Johnny who turned his lovely smile on Luigi and soon they were chatting happily about Luigi’s wood-fired oven (his pride and joy) and the provenance of his mozzarell
a.
As soon as Luigi left to prepare Johnny’s pancetta and mushroom pizza with his own hands, Johnny’s gaze was back on Verity. She wanted to squirm and fidget, but despite the panic rising up in her, there was something calm and measured about him. Something still. Like he was a fixed point in a chaotic world. ‘I’m not gay,’ he said yet again. ‘That’s not why I’m single. If you really must know it’s because I’m in love with a woman that I can’t be with. Not right now, no matter how much we both desperately want to be together.’
‘How very romantic and Wuthering Heights-y,’ Verity said dryly. She had spent a lot of her impressionable teen years dressed in black and pretending that Weelsby Woods in Grimsby was rough moorland and not a splendid municipal park. She was far less impressionable now. ‘Surely if you want to be together, you should well, just be together. Oh, I didn’t mean to upset you,’ she added as Johnny’s face fell. ‘Here, have a garlic breadstick. They’re really good.’
Johnny took a breadstick, but it wasn’t the cure-all that Verity had hoped it would be. His light glowed a little less now. ‘We can’t be together,’ he said again. ‘It’s very complicated.’
It sounded like the simplest thing in the world to Verity. If two people loved each other, really and truly loved each other, then they moved oceans and landmasses, spurned the ties of blood, laughed in the face of every obstacle that stood in their way. She might not want love herself but Verity was emphatically pro-love for other people. But it probably wasn’t the best time to go down that particular road.
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ was what she did murmur, then she was just about to ask what Johnny’s complicated romantic status had to do with her when his pizza arrived and there was a flurry of cutlery and more pepper grinding and did they want extra Parmesan until they were left alone to eat.
Eating together, or rather eating in front of a stranger, wasn’t quite the ordeal that Verity expected it to be. In fact, it almost felt companionable until Johnny was halfway through his pizza and started talking again.
‘So, what I was thinking was that we’re both alone, for our own reasons, but that doesn’t mean we can’t join forces,’ he said as he cut the crust off a slice of pizza. ‘Just as a stopgap. A short-term solution to fend off our friends.’
‘What do you mean when you say “join forces” and “stopgap” and “short-term solution”?’ Verity asked, even though she was quite familiar with all of these phrases and their meanings. It was just that she couldn’t quite get her brain to process what they meant in connection to Johnny and herself.
‘Well, you see, they’re not just setting me up with unsuitable women any more, my friends, now they’ve started sending passive-aggressive emails with links to dating sites and then there are the invites to weddings and …’ He stopped as his phone beeped. ‘Ah, talk of the devil.’ He looked at the screen then smiled. And suddenly the smiles Verity had seen up to this point were whispers, grainy photocopies, nothing like this smile for the unknown, unseen person who’d just texted him. It was a smile of pure joy, instant happiness. What would it be like to have Johnny, anyone, smile at her like that? She couldn’t even begin to imagine.
Johnny texted a reply, thumbs moving as fast as hummingbird wings over his touchscreen, then he looked up. ‘I’m sorry. How rude. Where was I?’
Verity picked up his thread. ‘You were proposing we joined forces in a short-term kind of way. Something about wedding invites and passive-aggressive emails.’
‘Right, right.’ Johnny nodded. ‘Well, you see, I’ve been inspired by your tales of Peter Hardy, oceanographer,’ he said as if Verity had spent hours regaling him with all sorts of imaginary exploits that her imaginary boyfriend had got up to. ‘It got me thinking. If I, we, turned up to a couple of things together, in the company of a real live human being of the opposite sex, then it would get our friends to stop with the endless matchmaking.’
‘But my friends have stopped with the endless matchmaking since Peter Hardy,’ Verity pointed out quickly because it was best to shut this down immediately.
Johnny narrowed his eyes. ‘Hmmm, but I bet then they started pestering you with so many questions and queries about Peter Hardy—’
‘It’s natural that they’d be curious!’ Verity blustered.
‘—because they never once met him and how could they? He wasn’t real. He was just a figment of your imagination.’ Johnny was relentless. And ruthless. So ruthless.
‘Not just my imagination. It was my sister who said he should be an oceanographer,’ Verity muttered. She put down her fork, which she’d been using to stab at her lasagne instead of eating it. ‘All right, I’ll admit that my plan was flawed but it did get my friends off my back for a little bit. God, it was great while it lasted.’ She ended on a wistful sigh. ‘My friends just want me to be happy but they think being single must make me unhappy so I get their work colleagues and second cousins and dodgy flatmates all shoved in my direction. “This is Verity. I’m sure you two have got so much in common.”’ She clapped her hand over her mouth. She’d said far too much and Johnny was smiling smugly.
Verity was pleased to note that his smug smile didn’t do anything for him. Not a thing. It edged him into Wickham territory.
‘Well, there you are then,’ Johnny said as if it really could be that easy. ‘What I’m proposing is simple. You come and meet my friends and I’ll meet yours and it will buy you some time from introductions to second cousins and dodgy flatmates and you can save me from any more advances from divorcees with fake breasts …’
‘My breasts could be fake for all you know,’ Verity said and regretted it immediately. She hadn’t meant to sound flirty and she certainly hadn’t meant to draw attention to her breasts. Johnny probably wasn’t gay because as soon as she’d mentioned them, his eyes were immediately drawn to her chest.
‘I think not,’ he said playfully, teasingly, as if they were really flirting. ‘I’m an architect. I know about false structures.’
He was still looking thoughtfully at Verity’s breasts and when she folded her arms, his gaze skittered from them back to her face, which she hoped looked stern and disapproving.
Verity was wearing a black and white striped top, dark jeans and a pair of purple Saltwater sandals that she’d got for half price in last year’s sale because not many people wanted purple sandals. Her hair, lightened by the sun so it wasn’t quite as mousy as usual, was pulled back in a ponytail – not one of those perky ponytails that bounced from side to side as she walked either. She dressed exactly as you’d expect from a twenty-seven-year-old woman who’d studied English Literature at university and was now manager of a bookshop that sold only romantic fiction, had embraced spinsterdom and owned a cat who regarded legs as nothing more than the things you climbed up so you could jump into your owner’s arms and cling. And Johnny was sitting across from her with his perfect smile and his perfect face and his perfect hair and his perfectly cut suit and perfect white shirt on his perfect body.
They were chalk and cheese. Oil and water. Spots and stripes. No one who had eyes in their head would ever believe that they were boyfriend and girlfriend.
While this had all been fun – the commiserating about being single – it was time to get real. Verity pushed away the second helping of breadsticks that Luigi had discreetly placed in front of her, because the waistband of her jeans was starting to dig in.
‘The thing is you think that pretending you’re in a relationship is simply one harmless little lie to get your friends to back off. But that one harmless little lie quickly turns into so many lies that pretty soon you need a spreadsheet to keep track of them all.’ Verity scooped up a breadstick, but only so she could admonish Johnny with it. He sat there very calmly, waiting until she was done, which she wasn’t. ‘Also, it’s very wrong to lie to people but at least Peter Hardy, oceanographer, was a fake lie. What you’re proposing is a real lie with acting and a back story.’
‘OK, all right.’ Johnny held up
his hands. They did look like the hands of an architect. Verity could imagine those hands unfurling blueprints and making notes with monogrammed Staedtler pencils. Or even gently cupping the face of the woman he loved desperately but couldn’t be with right now. ‘But we don’t have to act like we’re madly in love. If we met each other’s friends as a one-off, then all we’d have to say is that we were seeing each other. And technically we are seeing each other right now, aren’t we?’
Johnny was starting to sound a little desperate and the whole thing was crazy. What was even crazier was that Verity was considering it. Not seriously and only for a second but she did wonder what it would be like to walk into a party with Johnny with his perfect everything so all her friends would say, ‘Who is that with Verity? Is it that Peter Hardy bloke?’
That was as far as Verity got though, because then everything in her baulked, like a rookie filly getting to Becher’s Brook during the Grand National and deciding that they wouldn’t jump, because actually they preferred all their fetlocks intact, thank you very much. Walking in anywhere with Johnny looking the way he did and Verity’s friends not having seen her with a man in years would mean that Verity would be the centre of attention. Quite frankly, she’d rather die.
‘I can’t,’ she said firmly and with what she hoped was an air of finality that would shut this thing down once and for all. ‘I just couldn’t do it. No way. Sorry.’ She proffered the discarded breadsticks as a consolation prize. ‘You can have these if you want. Luigi always gives me an extra portion.’
‘That’s very kind but I’d hate to have to get my tailor to let out the fat straps on my suit,’ Johnny said gravely, even though his charcoal suit was so slim-cut that Verity doubted it had room for fat straps. ‘I suppose it was a pretty left-field idea. I hope I didn’t offend you.’
‘No! Not at all,’ Verity assured him, because Johnny was sitting there, with his chin resting on one hand and looking rather disconsolate like he had an urgent social gathering first thing tomorrow morning and had been expecting Verity to jump at the chance to be his plus one. ‘Anyway, I’m sure there must be women queuing up to be your fake real girlfriend.’
True Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop Page 4