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

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Bookends was situated at the northern tip of Bloomsbury. People walking from Holborn down Theobalds Road, towards the Gray’s Inn Road, often missed the tiny cobbled Rochester Street on their right. If they did happen upon it and decide it was worth exploring, chances were they’d pause as soon as they came to the delicatessen to look at the cheeses and sausages and brightly coloured edibles in glass jars all lovingly displayed in the window.

They might browse the boutiques full of pretty dresses and soft and cheerful winter knits. Then the butcher’s, the barber’s, the stationery shop, until they came to the pub on the corner, the Midnight Bell, across the road from the fish and chip shop, There’s No Plaice Like Home, and an old-fashioned sweet shop, which still weighed out pear drops and lemon sherbets, aniseed balls, winter nips, humbugs and liquorice allsorts and poured them into little candy-striped paper bags.

Just before the end of this delightful street, like something from a Dickens novel, was a small courtyard on the right: Rochester Mews.

Rochester Mews wasn’t pretty or picturesque. There were weather-beaten wooden benches arranged in a circle at the centre of the courtyard, planter pots full of weeds … even the trees looked as though they’d seen better days. On one side of the yard was a small row of five empty shops. From the peeling, faded signs, it would seem that in another life the premises housed a florist, a haberdasher’s, a tea and coffee merchant, a stamp shop and an apothecary. On the other side of the yard was another, larger shop, though it looked like a collection of shops all joined together to make a jumbled whole. It had old-fashioned bow windows and a faded, black-and-white striped awning.

The sign above the door read Bookends, and on this particular day in February, with the afternoon sun already sinking and the shadows lengthening, a small, red sports car turned into the yard and came to a halt outside.

The door opened and a tall man in a dark suit and a shirt the same shade of red as his car unfolded himself from the driver’s seat, complaining bitterly all the while that the cobbles were playing havoc with the suspension of his vintage Triumph.

He strode around to the passenger side, pulled open the door and said, ‘Morland, I haven’t got all day. I drove you home, I’ve done my good deed for the day, now can you shift your bloody arse?’

A young woman in a pink dress stumbled from the car, then stood there swaying slightly on unsteady legs as if she was still getting used to dry land after months spent at sea. In one hand she clutched a cream-coloured en-velope.

‘Morland!’ The man snapped his fingers in the woman’s face and she came to with a start.

‘Rude!’ she exclaimed. ‘So rude.’

‘Well, you’re standing there like one o’clock half struck,’ he said, then slouched against the wall as she rooted around in her bag and produced a bunch of keys.

‘I won’t come in now,’ the man said. He gestured at the courtyard, neglected and unloved. ‘What a dump. I suppose we’ll have to chat this out quite soon. Can’t do much with the mews with you as a sitting tenant in the shop, can I?’

The woman was still struggling to get the door open but she turned to look at him. Her face pale, eyes wide. ‘But I’m not a sitting tenant, am I? I thought I was the owner. Well, for two years at least …’

‘Not now, Morland. I’m a very busy man.’ He was already walking back to his car. ‘Laters!’

She watched him drive away with a crash of gears, then opened the door of the shop and stepped inside.

Posy had no memory of leaving the club with Sebastian, getting in his car, doing up her seat belt – none of it. It was as if there’d been some breach in the space-time continuum as soon as she folded up Lavinia’s letter and placed it back in its envelope.

She was still clutching it now as she stood in the dark shop, the familiar shape of the shelves, the stacks of books, the comforting smell of paper and ink all around her. She was home and suddenly the world was back in focus, but still Posy stood there, not sure that she was capable of walking, much less able to think of where her feet should carry her.

Then Posy heard the bell above the door tinkle. It made her jump and she turned around to see Sam, school bag slung over one shoulder, anorak undone despite the cold and the fact that she told him every morning to do it up.

‘My God, you frightened the life out of me!’ she exclaimed. It was completely dark now; she didn’t know how long she’d been standing there. ‘You’re home late.’

‘It’s Tuesday. Football practice,’ Sam said, moving past her, his face in shadow but his steps slightly crabbed, which made Posy’s heart sink because it meant his shoes were getting too tight and he didn’t want to tell her because she’d only just bought him new ones in the January sales.

This time last year he’d been the same height as her, but now he’d shot up by a good six inches; he was going to be as tall as their father. As Sam reached the counter and snapped on the lights, Posy caught sight of his grubby white socks, which meant he needed new school trousers too. She hadn’t budgeted for either new school shoes or trousers this month. And then she looked down and saw Lavinia’s letter still in her hand.

‘Are you all right, Posy? Was it awful?’ Sam leaned on the counter and frowned. ‘Are you going to cry? Do you need some chocolate?’

‘What? No. Yes. I mean, the funeral, it was hard. It was sad. Very, very sad.’

Sam peered at her from beneath his fringe, which he refused to cut, despite Posy’s threat to creep into his room with the kitchen scissors while he slept. ‘I still think I should have come. Lavinia was my friend too.’

Posy moved then. Stretched out her arms and legs, which were stiff from being still for so long, and walked over to the counter so she could brush the hair back from Sam’s eyes. They were the same blue as her own eyes, the same blue as their father’s. Forget-me-not blue, her mother had always called it.

‘Honestly, Sam, as you get older, you’ll have plenty of funerals to go to,’ she said softly. ‘You’ll be sick of funerals. And there’ll be a memorial service later in the year. You can go to that, as long as it’s not on a school day.’

‘We might not even be in London by then,’ Sam said, pulling his head back so his hair flopped over his face again. ‘Has anyone said what’s happening to the shop? Do you think they’ll let us stay here until Easter? What’s going to happen about school? I’ll need to know quite soon. This is a very important academic year for me!’

His voice squeaked then broke on the last sentence. It sounded painful and Posy gulped in sympathy. ‘Nobody’s going to come in and take the shop out from under us,’ she said. Saying it out loud didn’t make it sound any less unbelievable. Or true, because Sebastian seemed to have plans for the mews that didn’t involve Bookends or Posy. ‘Lavinia’s left the shop to me. I own the shop, so I suppose I own the flat above the shop too.’

‘Why on earth would she leave you the shop?’ Sam opened his mouth, probably to unleash a whole new volley of questions, then shut it. ‘I mean, it’s lovely of Lavinia to leave the shop to you, but you’re not even allowed to cash up unsupervised at the end of the day.’

This was also true, after an incident involving a missing one hundred pounds, which hadn’t been missing at all, it was just that the 0 key on the shop calculator was sticky because Posy had been eating a Twix while she cashed up. ‘Lavinia was being kind, wanting to make sure that we’d be all right, but I wonder if this was the best way to go about it,’ Posy admitted. ‘Oh, Sam, I can’t even think in whole sentences right now. Have you got any homework?’

‘You want to talk about homework? Now?’ Posy was sure that Sam was rolling his eyes. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

Where to start with that one? ‘Mostly, I’m hungry. I haven’t had anything to eat all day. Shall we have fish-finger sandwiches for dinner?’ They always had fish-finger sandwiches for dinner when either one of them was feeling down. They’d had fish-finger sandwiches for dinner quite a lot recently.

‘Crinkle chips and baked beans too,’ Sam decided as he followed Posy through the back office and up the stairs to their flat. ‘Also, for English I have to pick a rap song and rewrite it in the style of a Shakespeare sonnet, so can you help me with that?’

Later, after fish-finger sandwiches had been eaten and Sam’s English homework had been accomplished with a glass of wine and only a small amount of flouncing and door slamming (mostly from Posy), she crept back downstairs to the shop.

Sam was meant to be getting ready for bed, but she could hear the faint but tinny sound of a computer game from his room. Posy didn’t have the energy for another argument though; not after trying to rewrite Jay Z’s ‘99 Problems’ in iambic pentameter.

Posy only put on the sidelights so the shop was mostly in shadow then slowly walked around the main room. Shelves lined the walls from floor to ceiling; there was a big display table in the centre of the floor, flanked by three sofas in varying stages of decay. Open arches to the left and right led to a series of anterooms sectioned off by bookcases. Posy suspected that the bookcases bred overnight. Sometimes she’d be poking around in one of the furthest reaches of the shop and would come across a bookcase that she swore she’d never seen before.

Her fingers trailed over the shelves, the spines of the books, as she did a silent inventory. The very last room on the right, accessed through a pair of glass doors, had once been a little tearoom. Now it was a curtained-off store room; its tables and chairs stacked to one side, the cake stands and china lovingly sourced from charity shops, antique fairs and car boot sales, packed away in boxes. If Posy closed her eyes, she could imagine it as it had once been. The smell of coffee and freshly baked cakes wafting through the shop, her mother weaving through the tables, her long blonde hair escaping from its ponytail, her cheeks pink, green eyes sparkling as she dispensed coffee and tea refills and took away empty plates.

In the shop, her father would have rolled up his shirtsleeves – he always wore a shirt and waistcoat with his jeans – and could usually be found halfway up the rolling ladder as he selected a series of books for a customer waiting down below. ‘If you liked that one, then you’ll love these,’ he would say. Lavinia had called him the King of Hand-Selling. As Posy reached the poetry section, her eyes immediately searched for the three volumes of poetry that her father had written, which they always kept in stock. ‘I think, if Ian Morland hadn’t been taken from us so cruelly, so suddenly,’ Lavinia had written in his obituary, ‘then he would have become one of our greatest English poets.’

There’d been no obituary written for her mother, but that hadn’t meant she was missed any less. Far from it. As Posy retraced her steps to the main room again, she wasn’t wandering through a shop, but through her home, memories of her mother and father alive with every step she took.

In the back office, one of the walls was covered with the signatures of visiting authors, everyone from Nancy Mitford and Truman Capote to Salman Rushdie and Enid Blyton. The notches on the doorjamb faithfully recorded the heights of the Bookends children, starting with Lavinia and her brothers and ending with Posy and Sam.

Outside in the courtyard, they’d have summer fetes and Christmas fairs. Posy remembered how the trees would be strung with fairy lights for launch parties and poetry readings al fresco. They’d once held a wedding reception out there after two customers had fallen instantly and madly in love over a copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Under the shelves in a corner by the counter was the cubbyhole where her father had built her a little reading nook. Posy’s mother had made her four plump cushions to lounge on while she read.

It was in Bookends that Posy had met some of her best friends. Pauline, Petrova and Posy (whom she was named for) Fossil from Ballet Shoes, her mother’s favourite book. Not to mention Milly-Molly-Mandy and little-friend-Susan, the girls of St Clare’s and Malory Towers and the Chalet School. Scout and Jem Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird. The Bennet sisters. Jane Eyre and poor, mad Cathy ‘mopped and mowed’ about the moors as she searched for her Heathcliffe.

And it had been a night very much like this one, but far, far worse when she’d wandered around the darkened shop, still dressed in her funeral black, still seeing the two coffins slowly being lowered into the ground. That night, unable to sleep, determined not to cry because she knew that she’d howl and she didn’t want to wake up Sam, she’d plucked a book, a random book, from the shelves and crawled into her cubbyhole.

It had been a Georgette Heyer novel, Regency Buck. A beautiful flighty girl, Judith Taverner, locks horns with the sardonic, dandified Julian St John Audley, her legal guardian. Judith launches herself on London society, has madcap adventures in Brighton, meets and charms Beau Brummel and the Prince Regent, and has many spirited disagreements with the arrogant Julian, until they’re both compelled to admit their love.

It had pushed buttons that Posy didn’t even know she had. The Heyer Regency romances weren’t quite up there with Pride and Prejudice, which was the gold-star, triple-A standard of romance novels, but they came quite close.

Over the next few numb weeks when just getting through each day intact was a major triumph, Posy had read every single Regency romance Georgette Heyer had written. She’d begged Lavinia to order more and when she’d finished them all, Posy took to the internet to find other writers who were considered Heyer’s successors: Clare Darcy, Elizabeth Mansfield, Patricia Veryan, Vanessa Gray – they couldn’t match Heyer’s exquisite attention to detail or her wit, but there were still flighty young heiresses and sardonic men trying to lord it over them until love prevailed.

Posy had taken over one room of the shop and filled it with novels by Julia Quinn, Stephanie Laurens, Eloisa James, Mary Balogh, Elizabeth Hoyt and others. And when Posy had read every Regency romance that she could find, there were other books, lots and lots of them, where the girl didn’t just get the boy, she got the happy ever after that everyone deserved. Well, almost everyone. Serial killers and people who were cruel to animals and drunk drivers – especially drunk drivers, like the one who had careered over the central reservation of the M4 and ploughed into her parents’ car – none of them deserved happy ever afters, but everybody else did.