Crazy in Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop

‘That was yesterday. Have you any idea how much vodka I’ve drunk since then? Anyway, you know the business side of the business isn’t any of my business.’

Nina was genetically designed to tune out certain words like ‘business’ and ‘analyst’. And also ‘index-linked pension’, ‘slippers’ and ‘early night’.

‘Nina!’ Posy said with a sigh. ‘You knew we were looking at ways to grow the business. Working smarter. Digital whatnots. All that jazz.’

Noah, the business analyst, that Nina was still pretty sure she hadn’t been told about, had been silent during this exchange, but now he took a step forward.

‘I’m just here to observe your best business practices,’ he said, though Nina wasn’t sure she had any of them. She just turned up, clocked in, sold some books then trooped upstairs to get ready to go out and blow her wages on boys, booze and um, something else beginning with b.

‘It’s very creepy to just stand there and watch someone when they obviously don’t know you’re there,’ Nina persisted.

‘I did say hello, but you were shouting about coffee so perhaps you didn’t hear me,’ Noah said. ‘Anyway, it’s been established that I’m Noah and you’re Nina. Posy filled me in on the rest.’

‘I did,’ Posy said blandly, which could mean anything. It wasn’t as if Nina had led a blameless life. Far from it. ‘Nina, I’ve really got to go to the accountant’s now. He gets very stroppy if I’m even a minute late.’

Nina was feeling very stroppy herself and maybe Noah got the message because when Posy left in a panicked scramble, he decided to relocate to the office. Verity, though quiet herself, was sure to take a very dim view of being quietly observed, but as Nina perched on a stool and waited for the first customer of the day, she could hear unsettling noises from behind her.

Verity was chattering away. Laughing. Once, even snorting with mirth. It was very unlike Verity, who rarely chattered, or laughed, or snorted with mirth in the presence of strangers. ‘Can you believe that we still input stock into a ledger?’ she giggled.

‘You mean you write it down in a book?’ Noah, the so-called business expert, asked incredulously.

‘Yes, and then when we sell a book, we tick it off in the ledger.’

‘I didn’t notice a barcode scanner on the counter and your till … it belongs in a museum, doesn’t it?’

Nina patted the old-fashioned till affectionately. Bertha was at least forty years old and a little temperamental. Her drawer tended to stick but there was a particular spot you had to thump when she did, and then she was right as rain.

‘Lavinia – who owned Bookends, and left the shop to Posy, who turned it into Happy Ever After – was quite set in her ways,’ Verity was explaining earnestly. ‘Especially after her husband Perry died. She didn’t like things that beeped, and I like that the shop is quite quaint and charming but … but …’

‘But what?’ Noah prompted. ‘You can tell me. I’m just an observer. No judgement, no consequences.’

‘Don’t trust him!’ Nina wanted to yell but at that moment the door opened, the bell tinkled and two women came into the shop, so she was forced to stop earwigging and pin a smile on her face. ‘Welcome to Happy Ever After. Let me know if there’s anything in particular you were looking for.’

The women were middle-aged and in sensible shoes, slacks and pac-a-macs, but Nina knew not to try and second guess any customer’s reading preferences from their outward appearance.

‘Vampire erotica?’ One of the women queried, proving Nina’s theory right.

‘Erotica section is the end room on the right. Paranormal erotica on your left as you go in, then the vampire fiction will be on the top two shelves,’ Nina told her. ‘We’ve had a new book in last week by a woman called Julietta Jacobs about a vampire mafia boss. It’s pure filth.’

‘Oooh, sounds just my thing,’ the woman said, and she and her friend went through the arch on the right.

Meanwhile Verity was still happily complaining to Noah about how rubbish the shop was. ‘… it all has to be inputted manually so everything takes three times as long as it should. Stocktaking, inventory, cashing up; it’s a bit of a nightmare really.’

‘Yeah, it doesn’t sound very time-effective,’ Noah said in a sympathetic voice even though he wasn’t meant to be offering opinions.

Already Nina didn’t like him and she had famously low standards when it came to men. Her scowl was interrupted by another customer; Lucy, a pretty woman who worked at the council offices round the corner, came through the door. She read a romance novel a day, three on the weekend. Nina worried that there might come a day when Lucy had read every romance novel ever published.

Not today though. ‘Are those the new releases?’ Lucy asked, her eyes gleaming at the sight of the pile of books on the counter.

‘They are,’ Nina agreed. ‘Have at ’em!’

Verity was giggling again – she hadn’t been right since she fell in love a few months back – and Noah was murmuring again, but the bell was tinkling, more customers piling in, and Nina’s hangover had abated enough that she felt well enough to leave her stool and actually venture onto the shop floor to help them.

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‘She burned too brightly for this world.’

Noah and his infernal iPad left the shop before lunch, not to return. Nina hoped that he was done with his creepy, silent observing but when she got back from the accountants, Posy said that Noah would return the next day.

‘He seems nice though, doesn’t he?’ she insisted. ‘He’s a friend of Sebastian’s.’

‘Really? Sebastian has friends?’ Nina shook her head. Sebastian Thorndyke was many things: a digital entrepreneur, Posy’s childhood nemesis and now recently wed husband, but he was also the Rudest Man in London and completely lacking any filter. The last time Nina had run into him, when she’d been debuting her new pink hair, Sebastian had taken one look at her neatly set, sherbet waves and sniggered.

‘Torrid night of passion with a candyfloss machine, was it?’ he’d asked.

As a result of that and many other insults, Nina couldn’t imagine that Sebastian had many friends, but here was Posy, insisting that he did and that apparently this Noah was one of them. Maybe that was why Nina still had a nagging thought that she knew Noah from somewhere, even though she’d rather poke her eye out than hang out at boring techy things with Posy’s husband. He certainly hadn’t been at Posy and Sebastian’s wedding, which had been a very small affair thrown together at three weeks’ notice. ‘They met at Oxford,’ Posy said, her face going all melty as it did when she was thinking about Sebastian. ‘Been friends ever since. Noah doesn’t put up with any of Sebastian’s nonsense. Don’t you think he’s a little bit sexy, in a nerdy way?’

‘Ugh! No! He was wearing a tie!’ Nina exclaimed with a shudder. ‘And a suit. So not my type. I do bad boys. I don’t do nerds.’

‘Have you ever thought of going against type?’ Verity asked out of the corner of her mouth because she was cashing up and if she got too distracted, she lost count.

‘Why would I want to do that?’ Nina asked. ‘It would be like asking me to have brown eyes instead of blue. Or to stop being five foot six. I can’t change the way I am.’

‘Change is good,’ Posy insisted as she picked up the books that had been discarded on the three sofas that dominated the centre of the main room and began to reshelve them. ‘There’s been lots of changes round here in the last few months and they’ve all been pretty positive.’

There was truth in this. Last summer, the old and ailing Bookends had become Happy Ever After with a new romance remit and colour scheme, and a reopened tearoom. Nina was much happier selling romance novels to mostly ladies than she had been not really selling anything much to the occasional punter who had infrequently visited the shop.

But in order for Bookends to become Happy Ever After, lovely Lavinia, their boss and mentor, had died and Nina missed her as much now as she did that awful morning a few months ago when she’d first heard the news. It was why their central display table was a little shrine to their much-loved friend. Each time Nina caught sight of Lavinia’s favourite books stacked on it or caught the heady scent of Lavinia’s favourite pink roses in the glass vase she’d bought from Woolworths in the sixties, she felt the same sweet piercing ache.

Also, Posy had gone from never dating (unless Nina bullied her into it) to marrying Lavinia’s grandson, Sebastian, in the space of what felt like five minutes. Posy said that it had been building for years, but as far as Nina could tell, one minute Posy and Sebastian were shouting at each other as they usually did, the next they were plighting their troth at Camden Town Hall.

But in some ways that, too, had been a good change. Evidently Sebastian made Posy very happy. The frown that she’d always worn had been replaced by a slightly dazed smile and even better, she, and her younger brother Sam, had vacated the flat above the shop to live with Sebastian in Lavinia’s house in a pretty garden square on the other side of Bloomsbury. Though Nina missed Sam dreadfully – he could always be persuaded to go on a chocolate run or fix her iPhone when the screen froze – Posy had offered her old flat to Nina and Verity rent-free.

Nina hadn’t waited to be asked twice. Paying rent had taken up a huge chunk of her not-very-big bookseller’s wages. Not to mention that Nina had been stuck out in Southfields in a houseshare with five other people, no lounge, and an infestation of silverfish in the kitchen that would not quit. It had been a hell of a commute, especially when the District Line was malfunctioning, which it did frequently. There had also been an awful lot of sleeping on friends’ sofas after missing the last tube home.

So, the good changes and the bad changes just about balanced each other out. And some things never changed, like Nina waiting for Posy to finish reshelving and Verity to complete the cashing up, before she asked hopefully, ‘Pub?’

Going to the pub after work was a time-honoured tradition, except that was another thing that had changed – and not for the better.

‘I would …’ Posy began then shook her head. ‘But I really should get home. Sebastian’s been away on a business trip and I haven’t seen him for three whole days. We are still practically on our honeymoon.’

Nina didn’t think that it was still a honeymoon if you’d married last June and it was now fricking February, but she decided it was wiser not to mention it. Instead she turned pleading eyes to Verity. ‘Pub, Very?’

‘I can’t. I need a half-hour decompression lie-down then Johnny and I are going to a lecture about art deco at the Courtauld Institute,’ Verity said, because one of the other changes was that Verity, Verity, a self-professed introvert, was besotted with her newish boyfriend, a posh architect called Johnny, and Nina hardly saw her. She’d much preferred it when Verity had been seeing an oceanographer called Peter Hardy who’d mostly been away oceanographing so Verity could often be persuaded to go to the pub.

‘What’s that? What’s that I hear?’ Nina cupped a hand to her ear. ‘Oh yes. It’s the sound of wedding bells breaking up my old gang.’

‘I went to the pub with you yesterday,’ Posy pointed out.