I was amused at his mannered, old-fashioned use of language. Even though I’d become used to the clipped English spoken here by the upper classes, my new friend took this to another level. A true English eccentric, I thought, and I liked him for it. He wasn’t afraid to be exactly who he was, and I knew only too well how much strength of character that took.
‘Now, I hope you like sole, and the fresh green beans are no doubt sautéed to perfection,’ he said as he reappeared with a bottle of wine, condensation dripping off it, plates, cutlery and two perfectly starched white linen napkins.
‘I do, very much. And yes,’ I said, ‘green beans are surprisingly tricky to cook well.’
‘You’re a chef?’ he asked me as he removed the covering from two foil trays. They reminded me of plane food. I could only hope their contents tasted better.
‘No, I just enjoy it. I took a course a few weeks ago and I had to serve green beans.’
‘You must understand I am not a food snob in the modern sense; I don’t mind what I throw down my gullet, but I do insist it’s well cooked. The problem is, I’m spoilt. Clarke’s is one of the best restaurants in London and their kitchen has prepared this for us today. Now then, will you have a glass of wine?’ he asked as he transferred the food onto a china plate, and placed it carefully in front of me.
‘I don’t usually drink at lunchtime.’
‘Well, I always think it’s good to break bad habits, don’t you? Here.’
He poured me a glass and handed it to me across the table.
‘Tchin-Tchin!’ he toasted me, gulping back a large swig, before proceeding to take enormous forkfuls of his fish. I prodded mine gently.
‘It really is excellent, Miss D’Aplièse,’ he encouraged me. ‘Don’t tell me you are on a diet?’
‘No. I’m just not used to eating at lunchtime either.’
‘Well now, as the saying goes, “Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.” Such a simple maxim to follow, and yet the human race ignores it and then complains when it’s unable to shift its fat. Not that weight seems to be a problem for either of us.’
‘No.’ I blushed as I continued to eat, noticing that he’d already vacuumed his plate clean. He was right – the food was excellent. He observed me closely as I ate, which I found extremely off-putting. I picked up my wine glass and took a sip, trying to garner my courage to ask the questions I needed to. I had come here to find answers, I reminded myself.
‘You said Flora MacNichol knew Beatrix Potter?’ I prompted him.
‘Indeed, indeed. And so she did. In fact, Miss Potter once owned this very shop. Have you finished?’ He eyed the one mouthful I had left on my fork. ‘I’ll take the dirty plates upstairs out of the way. I do so hate looking at them, don’t you?’
As soon as my fork was back on my plate, he swept it up, along with the bottle of wine. He took his own finished glass too, and seeing mine was no more than half drunk, left it on the table and disappeared through the back door.
I took another sip of my wine, which I didn’t really want, and remembered that I must ask him his name when he returned. Prising information out of this man was a delicate operation.
When he reappeared this time, he was carrying a tea tray with two china cups and a cafetière on it.
‘Do you take sugar?’ he asked as he placed it perilously on top of an old dictionary. I briefly wondered how much the book was worth. ‘Love the stuff myself.’
‘I love it too. Three please.’
‘Ah, I always have four.’
‘Thank you,’ I said as he passed me my cup, and I felt as if I had been swept up in the Mad Hatter’s tea party. ‘So how did Flora MacNichol know Beatrix Potter?’ I asked again.
‘She was once a neighbour of Miss Potter’s.’
‘Up in the Lake District?’
‘Indeed,’ he said approvingly. ‘Do you know about books and their authors, Miss D’Aplièse?’
‘Please, call me Star. And you are . . . ?’
‘Your name is “Star”?’
‘Yes.’ I couldn’t tell from the expression on his face whether he approved or not. ‘It’s short for “Asterope”.’
‘Ah! Aha!’ A smile tickled his lips and he began to chuckle. ‘Again, how deliciously ironic! Asterope, the wife – or mother, depending on the myth – of King Oenomaus of Pisa. You are one of the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades, the third of Atlas and Pleione’s daughters, after Maia and Alcyone, and before Celaeno, Taygete, Electra and Merope . . . “Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro’ the mellow shade, Glitter like a swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid . . .”’
‘Tennyson,’ I said automatically, recognising the quote from one of Pa’s books.
‘Correct. My dear departed father, who owned this shop before me, studied Classics at Oxford, so my childhood was full of myths and legends . . . although I was not the son to be named after a mythical Greek king, but that’s another story . . .’ His voice trailed off and I worried that his attention had wandered again. ‘No, I was named by my sainted mother, God rest her soul, who studied literature at Oxford. Which was where my parents met and fell in love. Books are in my blood, you might say. Perhaps that is the case for you too. So, do you know anything of the family from which you were originally adopted?’
My hand reached for the plastic wallet. ‘Actually, that’s why I’m here. My father left me these . . . clues to find out where I came from.’
‘Ha! The game is afoot!’ The man clapped his hands together. ‘I do so love a good mystery. Are the clues in there?’
‘Yes, but all the information I have, apart from the bookshop card telling me to ask here about Flora MacNichol, is the place I was born. And this.’ I laid the jewellery box on the table in front of him, opened it and took out the panther. My heart was beating in fear at the trust I was placing in this stranger, sharing information with him that I had not yet even confided in CeCe.
His long fingers pushed his glasses higher up his nose, scrutinising the apparent address of my birth, and then the panther with great care. He returned them to me, and leant back in his chair. He opened his mouth to speak, and I shifted forward to hear his thoughts.
‘It’s time for cake,’ he said eventually. ‘Although, isn’t it always?’
He vanished upstairs, then reappeared with two slices of gooey chocolate gateau. ‘Want some? It’s awfully good. I buy it from the patisserie along the road in the morning. I find my sugar levels drop between three and five, so it’s this, or a nap.’
‘Yes, please,’ I said. ‘I love cake too. By the way, what is your name?’
‘Good grief! Have I not told you? I’m sure I must have done at some point.’
‘No, you haven’t.’
‘Well now, well now . . . that is a thing, and I do apologise. My mother named me for her favourite books. Therefore, I am either a grossly fat marmalade cat, or a fictional embodiment of a famous female author who ran off to France with her female lover and presented herself as a man. So,’ he challenged me, ‘what is my name?’
‘Orlando.’ And it’s perfect, I thought.
‘Miss D’Aplièse’ – he gave me a bow – ‘I am deeply impressed by your literary knowledge. So, am I more fat marmalade cat or, in fact, a woman masquerading as a man?’
I suppressed a laugh. ‘I think you are neither. You are simply you.’
‘And I think, Miss D’Aplièse’ – he leant forward and cupped a hand against his left cheek – ‘that you know far more about literature than you are letting on.’
‘I took a degree in it, but really, I’m no expert.’
‘You underestimate yourself. There are few human beings on the planet who would know of the marmalade cat and the famous biographical novel by . . .’
I watched him search for the author’s name. And knew full well he was still testing me. ‘Virginia Woolf,’ I answered. ‘The story was inspired by the life of Vita Sackville-West and her affair with Vi
olet Trefusis. And Orlando the Marmalade Cat was written by Kathleen Hale. One of her closest friends was Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf’s sister, who also had an affair with Vita Sackville-West. But you probably know all this . . .’
As my voice trailed off, I was suddenly embarrassed that I’d imparted all this information. I’d simply been carried away with the excitement of finding another obsessive book lover like me.
Orlando was silent for a while as he digested my words.
‘I knew some of it, yes, but not all. And I had never made the connection between the authors of those two entirely different books. How did you?’
‘I did my dissertation on the Bloomsbury Set.’
‘Aha! But then, as you may well have noticed, Miss D’Aplièse, my mind flits around like a flitty thing. It’s a bee searching for nectar and once it has found it, it moves on. Yours, to the contrary, does not. I believe that you are hiding your light under a bushel. A word I still mourn the death of in the English language, don’t you?’
‘I—’
‘Tell me,’ he continued, ‘how do you know so much, yet present so little? You’re like the sliver of a new moon, and just as mysterious. Miss D’Aplièse . . . Star, Asterope, whichever nom de plume you wish to use, would you like a job?’
‘I would. I need one, because I’m broke.’ I tried not to look too desperate.
‘Ha! So am I, and the business too, after today’s little purchase. Of course, the wages would be dreadful, but I would feed you well.’
‘Exactly how bad are the wages?’ I asked him, in an effort to pin Orlando down before he zoomed off in another direction.
‘Oh, I don’t know. The last student I employed took home enough to keep a roof over his head. Tell me what you need.’
In truth, I knew that I would pay him to just be here every day. ‘Two hundred and fifty pounds a week?’
‘Done.’ Then Orlando smiled. And it was a big smile that showed his uneven teeth. ‘I must warn you, I’m not terribly good with people. I’m aware they think I’m a little strange. I seem to put them off somewhat when they walk in here. Better on the internet, don’t you know? Can’t sell a nut to a monkey, but my books are good.’
‘When do you want me to start?’
‘Tomorrow. If that’s possible?’
‘Ten o’clock?’
‘Perfect. I’ll run upstairs and bring you a set of keys.’ He stood up again and was about to dash upstairs, when I stopped him.
‘Orlando?’
‘Yes?’
‘Do you want to see my CV?’
‘Why on earth would I want to see that?’ he asked as he spun round. ‘I just gave you the most thorough interview possible. And you passed with flying colours.’
A few minutes later, I had collected my clues back into my plastic wallet and a heavy set of brass keys had been pressed into my palm. Orlando ushered me to the door.
‘Thank you, Miss . . . what do you wish me to call you?’
‘Star will do fine.’
‘Miss Star.’ He opened the door for me and I walked through it. ‘See you tomorrow.’
‘Yes.’
I’d started walking down the street before he called to me.
‘And, Miss Star?’
‘Yes?’
‘Remind me to tell you more about Flora MacNichol. And her connection to that animal figurine of yours. Goodbye for now.’
I felt as though I had just been turfed out of Narnia back through the wardrobe. Outside, Arthur Morston Books felt like a parallel universe. But as I took the bus home and inserted my key card to gain entry to the apartment, I felt a little bubble of happiness and expectation. I hummed as I cooked supper, and mulled over whether to tell CeCe about my extraordinary day. In the end, I only mentioned that I’d found a job in a bookshop and would be starting tomorrow.
‘That’s good for now, I suppose,’ she said. ‘But you’re certainly not going to make a fortune selling old books for someone else.’
‘I know, but I like it there.’
I excused myself from the table as soon as possible and went outside to tend to my plants. My new job may not have been much to anyone else, but it was an awful lot to me.
7
My first two weeks at Arthur Morston Books consisted of much the same pattern as the day I’d arrived. Orlando would mostly be upstairs during the morning – the space behind the back door and what lay on the upper floor remained unknown to me – and I was told to call up to him if a customer wanted to see one of the most rare and valuable books, which were kept in a huge rusting safe in the cellar, or if there was a query I couldn’t answer. But there rarely was – a query or a customer.
I began to recognise what Orlando called his ‘regulars’: mostly pensioners, who would pick a book off the shelf and politely ask me the price, which was always written on a card at the back of it. Then, formalities over, they would take the book to one of the leather chairs and sit by the fire to read it. Often, they were there for hours before looking up from the book, then leaving with a polite ‘thank you’. One particularly ancient gentleman in a threadbare tweed jacket came in every day for a week to pick up The House of Mirth and sit down with it. I noticed he’d even added a slip of paper to mark where he’d got to before he slid it back onto the shelf each day.
Orlando had provided me with the cafetière to make coffee in the alcove at the back of the shop, which I was to offer to any ‘customer’ that came in. One of my duties was to buy a pint of milk on my way to work, which I would often pour away unused, as there were so few takers.
And it was above the shelf in the alcove that a picture caught my eye, the style of the illustrations being as familiar as the palm of my own hand. I stood on tiptoe to take a closer look and saw from the writing – now faded to within a ghostly whisper of its original – that it was a letter. The tiny watercolours that peppered the page had fared better and I marvelled at the perfection of them. My nose almost pressed to the glass to decipher the words, I saw a date and the faint outline of a name.
‘My dear Fl—’ The rest of the name was too faded to be conclusive. But the signature at the bottom of the page of small, neat writing was not. It was without a doubt proclaiming the author of this letter as ‘Beatrix’.
‘Fl . . .’ I murmured to myself. Could this letter be to my Flora MacNichol? Orlando had said that Beatrix Potter and Flora had known each other. I was determined to ask him.
At one o’clock precisely, Orlando would hare down the stairs and disappear through the front door. This seemed to be an invisible signal to whoever was reading in the chairs by the fire to leave. When he was back, Orlando would lock the door behind him and swing the sign to Closed.
The china plates, cutlery and starched white linen napkins would appear from upstairs and we would proceed to eat.
This was my favourite part of the day. I loved listening to him as his mind skittered between one topic and another, normally punctuated by a literary quotation. It became a game for me to try and work out what particular subject would lead on to the next. Yet I usually failed to guess, as he veered off on wild and obscure tangents. I managed in between to learn that his ‘sainted’ mother, Vivienne, had perished in a tragic car accident when Orlando was merely twenty and in his second year at Oxford. His father had been so heartbroken, he had promptly taken himself off to Greece to ‘drown himself in the misery of his mythological gods, and ouzo’. He had died of cancer only a few years back.
‘So you see,’ Orlando had added dramatically, ‘I am an orphan too.’
His conversation was also sporadically peppered with questions about my own upbringing at Atlantis. Pa Salt especially seemed to fascinate him.
‘So who was he? To know what he knew . . .’ Orlando muttered once after I’d confessed that I didn’t even know Pa’s country of birth.
Nevertheless, despite his obsession with Pa, he never volunteered any further information on the subject of Flora MacNichol. When I’d brought up the frame
d letter from Beatrix Potter, there was not the reaction I’d hoped there would be.
‘Oh, that old thing’ – he waved a hand towards it – ‘Beatrix wrote rather a lot of letters to children.’ And off he went on another subject before I could pin him down.
One day soon, I promised myself I would find the courage to ask more. But even if I never learned more about Flora MacNichol, my days were filled with glorious books; just the scent and feel of them as I catalogued new stock in a vast leather-bound ledger with a heavy ink pen filled me with pleasure. I’d had to take a handwriting test before he’d actually let me put ink to paper. I’d always been complimented on my clear, elegant script, but I’d never thought that one day a skill that was fast becoming archaic and defunct would turn into an asset.
As I sat on the bus on the way to the bookshop at the beginning of my third week, I pondered whether I should have been born in a different era. One where the pace of life had been slower and missives to loved ones would take days – if not months – to reach them, rather than arrive in seconds by email.
‘Good God! I loathe modern technology with a passion!’ Orlando mirrored my thoughts as he strode through the front door at his habitual half past ten, patisserie box in hand. ‘Last night, due to a freak rainstorm, all the telephone lines went down in Kensington, taking the internet with them. And I was unable to put in my bid for a particularly spectacular copy of War and Peace. I love that book,’ he sighed, turning to me with a crestfallen face. ‘Ah well, Mouse will be relieved that I’m not spending more money we don’t have. Talking of whom, I mentioned you the other day.’
I’d heard about ‘Mouse’ several times before, but had never managed to ascertain exactly who this person actually was to Orlando. Or even whether they were male or female.
‘Did you?’
‘Yes. Are you busy this weekend, Miss Star? I have to travel to High Weald for Rory’s birthday. Mouse will be there too. Thought you could see the house, meet Marguerite and chat about Flora MacNichol.’
‘Yes . . . I’m free,’ I said, realising I had to grasp the opportunity while it was on offer.
The Shadow Sister Page 7