The Little Bookshop of Lonely Hearts: A feel-good funny romance

On the other arm, for a change of pace, Nina had a full sleeve depicting the Mad Hatter’s tea party from Alice in Wonderland.

Then the three girls turned to look at Tom because it was his turn to confess his unsuitability for employment outside Bookends. ‘I’m a PhD student,’ he reminded them. ‘I could easily pick up some more teaching or research work, but I don’t want to. I want to work at Bookends. On Mondays, we have cake!’

‘We have cake every day,’ Posy pointed out. ‘Look, none of us know what’s going to happen so I suppose we’ll simply carry on as normal until … um, we don’t. Let’s just take today to remember how much we loved Lavinia and—’

‘Ah! There you all are! Lavinia’s waifs and strays! Her merry band of misfits!’ declared a voice. A deep, pleasant voice, which could have been described as attractive, if the things that were said in that voice weren’t always sarcastic and cutting.

Posy looked up at Sebastian Thorndyke’s face, which would have been a very attractive face if it wasn’t always sneering and she forgot that she was meant to be remembering how much she’d loved Lavinia. ‘Ah, Sebastian,’ she snapped. ‘The self-styled, so-called rudest man in London.’

‘Not self-styled or so-called,’ Sebastian said in the smug, self-satisfied high-handed way that he’d perfected by the age of ten and which always made Posy curl her fingers into fists. ‘The Daily Mail said I was and the Guardian too, so it must be true.’ He glanced down at Posy, eyes lingering over her breasts, which to be fair were testing the buttons of her dress to breaking point. Any sudden movements and she’d flash her M&S ditsy print bra to the room, which would be highly inappropriate at any time, but especially at a wake. Especially in front of Sebastian, but he’d now stopped gazing at her breasts and was looking around the room – probably to see if there was anyone present that he hadn’t insulted yet.

You could never tell with Sebastian, Lavinia’s only grandchild. Posy had fallen instantly in love with him when she’d arrived at Bookends at the age of three and first encountered the haughty eight-year-old with a sweet smile and eyes as dark as the bitterest of chocolate. She’d stayed in love with Sebastian, following him around Bookends like a devoted and faithful puppy, until she was ten and he’d locked her in the dank coal-hole under the shop where spiders and beetles and rats and all manner of horrible, diseased, crawling creatures lived.

Then he’d denied all knowledge of her whereabouts and it was only when her frantic mother was about to call the police that he’d confessed.

Posy had got over the Coal-hole Affair in time – though to this day, she refused to so much as stick her head through the hatch – but Sebastian had remained her arch nemesis ever since. All through his sullen, sulky teen years, then his cocky twenties when he’d made a fortune developing horrible websites (Zinger or Minger? had been a particular low point, even for him) and now his dissolute thirties when he was never out of the papers, usually with a beautiful blonde model/actress/whatever clinging to his side.

He’d reached peak notoriety after his first and last appearance on BBC’s Question Time when he’d told a red-faced MP, who was utterly furious about everything from immigrants to green taxes, that he needed a good shag and a cheeseburger. Then when a woman from the audience had embarked on a long, meandering speech about teachers’ pay, Sebastian had drawled, ‘God, I’m bored. I can’t do this sober. Can I go home now?’

It was then that the papers had started to call him The Rudest Man in London and Sebastian had been playing up to it ever since – not that he needed any encouragement to behave in an obnoxious and completely offensive manner. Posy suspected that the offensive gene made up at least seventy-five per cent of his DNA.

So, it was actually quite easy to hate Sebastian, but it was also very, very easy to appreciate his beauty.

When his lips weren’t curled in derision, he still had a sweet smile, still had those dark, dark eyes inherited from his Spanish father (his mother, Mariana, had always had a weakness for Mediterranean men). His hair was just as dark, and coaxed into cherubic curls made for women to wind around their fingers.

Sebastian was long-limbed and lithe (six foot three, according to Tatler, who insisted, despite all evidence to the contrary, that he was one of the most eligible bachelors in the country) and he favoured bespoke suits that clung so lovingly to his body that they were approximately one centimetre away from being obscenely tight.

Today, in deference to Lavinia’s last wishes, Sebastian’s suit was French navy, his shirt red with white polka dots that matched his pocket square …

‘Morland, stop staring at me. You’re starting to drool,’ he said and Posy’s face flared as red as his shirt, and her mouth, which had been hanging open, snapped shut.

Then she opened it again. ‘I’m not. I wouldn’t. In your dreams!’

Her protest simply glanced off Sebastian’s Teflon-coated hide. She was working up to saying something really crushing to him, as soon as she could think of something really crushing to say, when Nina nudged her. ‘Posy, have a heart,’ she said through gritted teeth. ‘We’ve just come from his grandmother’s funeral.’

They had. And Lavinia had always been the weak spot in Sebastian’s bespoke caddish armour. ‘Come on, Granny, I’m taking you to cocktails,’ he’d announce as he swept into the shop. He never entered a room when he could sweep into one instead. ‘How do you fancy a Martini bigger than your head?’

Lavinia had loved Sebastian, despite his many failings. ‘One has to make allowances,’ she was fond of saying when she caught Posy reading about his latest beastly act, whether it was an adulterous affair or his soulless dating app, HookUpp, which had made him millions. ‘Mariana always over-indulged the poor boy.’

Earlier, in church, Sebastian had read a eulogy to Lavinia that had had everyone roaring with laughter in the pews. As most of the women, and some of the men, had craned their necks to get a better look at him, he sketched a vivid, vibrant picture of Lavinia as if she were standing there next to him. But then he’d finished with a quote from Winnie the Pooh, a book he’d said that Lavinia had read to him countless times when he was a child.

‘“How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard”,’ Sebastian had said, and only someone who knew Sebastian as well as Posy could hear the break in his voice, a tiny, terrible fracture. He’d stared down at his notes, which he hadn’t looked at once, then raised his head and smiled his brilliant and careless smile and the moment had passed.

Now Posy realised that, as much as she was hurting, Sebastian must be hurting more.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘We’re all so sorry for your loss, Sebastian. I know how much you’ll miss her.’

‘Thank you, that’s very kind of you.’ His voice caught again, his smile slipped, but then it was back in the time it took Posy to blink. ‘Sorry for your loss. God, it’s such a clichéd sentiment. It doesn’t really mean anything, does it? I hate clichés.’

‘People only say that because it can be very hard to know what to say when someone’s di—’

‘You’re being very earnest now, Posy. It’s so boring. I much prefer it when you’re being bitchy,’ Sebastian said, and Verity, who hated anything that even faintly resembled a confrontation, covered her face with a napkin and Nina made another hissing noise and Tom looked expectantly at Posy, like he was waiting for her to cut Sebastian down with her rapier-like wit, in which case he’d have a very long wait.

‘Rude. Very rude,’ was what she did say. ‘I would have thought that today of all days, you might have taken some time off from being as thoroughly obnoxious as you usually are. Shame on you!’

‘Yeah, shame on me. And I would have thought that today of all days, you might have brushed your hair.’ Sebastian actually dared to lift up a piece of Posy’s hair, before she swatted him away.

Posy longed for hair that could be described as tresses or locks or even a silken fall. The reality was brown with reddish tones, which she liked to think was auburn in a certain light, but which attracted knots like bees to honey. If she brushed her hair, it transformed into a gigantic frizzy puffball and if she combed it, it was an exercise in pain and futility as she encountered tangle after tangle, so she tended to scoop it up and secure it with whatever was to hand. Usually pencils, but today Posy had made a special effort and used hairclips, even if they were all different colours. She’d hoped the overall effect was eclectic and Bohemian, but apparently it was neither of those things. ‘I don’t have the kind of hair you can brush,’ she said defensively.

‘That’s true,’ Sebastian agreed. ‘It’s more the kind of hair that birds love to nest in. Now, come on, get up!’

His tone, as ever, was so peremptory that Posy prepared to launch herself off the chair then stopped as she realised that she didn’t need to do anything of the sort. She was quite comfy where she was and besides, she’d already had two glasses of champagne on an empty stomach and her legs were doing a good impersonation of jelly.

‘I’ll stay where I am, if it’s all the same to you … What are you doing?’

Sebastian was manhandling her, that’s what he was doing. His hands were under her armpits and he was trying to heave Posy out of her chair, though as she was made of stronger, much denser stuff than the women he was usually seen with, she stayed exactly where she was, until his heaving and her struggling resulted in the inevitable: two of the buttons on the bodice of her dress gave up the good fight and suddenly, Posy was flashing her bra to anyone who cared to look in her direction.

As it was, most of the guests were staring at them because it wasn’t often you saw two people almost come to blows at a funeral.

‘Get off me!’ Posy growled as Verity shoved a napkin at her so Posy could protect her modesty. The two offending buttons had been flung to the far corners of the room with the force of their trajectory. ‘Look what you’ve done!’

She glanced up at Sebastian, who was looking at what he’d done, and not bothering to disguise his leer. ‘If you’d got up when I asked you to—’

‘You didn’t ask. You ordered. You didn’t even say please!’

‘Anyway that dress was too tight, I’m not surprised your buttons made a bid for freedom after the ordeal you’ve put them through.’

Posy shut her eyes. ‘Go away. I can not deal with you. Not today.’

Her words failed to register with Sebastian, who was tugging at her arm now. ‘Don’t be such a baby. The lawyer wants to see you. Come on. Chop, chop.’

The urge to put her hands on Sebastian so she could inflict grievous bodily harm upped and left, to be replaced with an unpleasant churning in her guts so that Posy was suddenly pleased that she hadn’t been able to eat anything.

‘Now? He wants to see me now?’

Sebastian threw back his head and groaned. ‘Yes! Jesus! Wars have been fought and won in less time than it takes to hoist you out of a chair.’

‘But you didn’t say. You just demanded and grappled.’

‘I’m saying now. Honestly, Morland, I’m losing the will to live here.’

Posy shut her eyes again so she wouldn’t have to see the anxious faces of the Bookends staff. ‘Why does he want to see me? We’re at Lavinia’s wake. Can’t it wait?’

‘Apparently not.’ It was Sebastian’s turn to close his eyes and pinch the bridge of his elegant, aquiline nose. ‘If you don’t start moving, I will put you over my shoulder and God knows, I really could do without the hernia.’

That had Posy jumping to her feet. ‘I don’t weigh that much. Thank you!’ she added to Nina, who’d produced a safety pin from the depths of her bag and was waving it in Posy’s face.

Then, with Sebastian gripping her elbow, because he was incapable of keeping his hands to himself as Posy tried to reunite the two sides of her dress, she found herself hustled out of the room.