The Bookshop of New Beginnings: Heart-warming, uplifting – a perfect feel good read!

After they’d eaten they traded ideas, words pouring onto the page in Emily’s loopy cursive. The list was extensive – and probably expensive, but Emily didn’t want to think about that. Not yet, not when this dream she’d spun was still so fragile and imperative. The bookshop. She and Kate working side by side.

Kate scanned the list and tapped the page with a manicured fingernail. ‘That,’ she said with satisfaction, ‘is how we make this place work.’

‘All of it?’ It was exhausting merely to contemplate. Emily chewed the end of her pencil.

Kate reached across and took it. ‘Eventually. We’ll start small. One step at a time. A good clean up is our first priority, and building better shelving.’ She annotated the list with criss-cross stars to show the order of importance, and handed it back. ‘So, are you quite sure you don’t like my bookstore-boudoir idea? We could be draped over chaise longues in our lingerie, reading Jane Austen aloud and wearing sexy reading glasses? It would certainly make us stand out in this town full of bookshops.’ She grinned.

Emily thought of her grey brassieres and garish pants with cartoon characters and cheeky appliquéd messages. ‘I don’t do draped,’ she said firmly. ‘Or lingerie. And you don’t do Jane Austen.’

Kate sighed theatrically. ‘No, that’s perfectly true. But chaise longues are not a bad idea frankly. Along with the big, comfy armchairs around a wood-burning stove. We could pick them up cheaply and do the reupholstering ourselves. Write that down, Em,’ she ordered.

Kate leapt off the desk to pace. She picked up a book at random and fanned the pages, making a face at the dust clouds blooming from the spine. Picking up book after book, she created unsteady, leaning towers. ‘Some of this furniture is good,’ she said, when she had revealed the wood beneath. Funny, Emily thought, she saw the jewels in the piles of words and stories whereas Kate saw the books as decoration, focusing on the structures and substance beneath.

Kate turned and leaned against the rickety table she had cleared. The book towers wobbled. ‘This probably isn’t the time to mention it, but I’ll need to take a look at the business plan … see the financials, that sort of thing. It would help to know what kind of budget we’re working with.’

Emily paled visibly. ‘Business plan?’

‘Yes. You do have one, right?’

‘Not exactly.’ She dragged out the words reluctantly; she had hoped this moment would not come so soon.

She hadn’t been thinking business plans when she was halfway through the bottle of wine, typing her plea to Kate to come and rescue her. She hadn’t been thinking of anything except how, once upon a time, Kate had made everything better.

‘How did you convince the bank to lend you money without a business plan?’ Kate tamped down a swarm of panic, frowning at her friend. This was Emily; she hadn’t had any grand expectations of fully formed plans, but still … ‘I was expecting it to be rough around the edges, in need of some tweaking, but …’

Emily folded her arms on the counter and regarded Kate calmly. ‘It needs a lot of tweaking. As in, there isn’t one. I didn’t borrow money from the bank.’

Kate raised one eyebrow. ‘O-kay.’ Her doubtful expression asked more questions of Emily.

There was a long, uncomfortable pause. ‘The money came from Joe,’ Emily said, taken by surprise when her voice became a ragged gasp – just the mention of his name could still undo her.

Kate glanced at the glaringly empty space on Emily’s finger, devoid of engagement and wedding rings. Emily rubbed the spot unconsciously as if the absence caused her a physical ache. Even after so short a marriage there was a faint white mark where they had been.

‘I see.’ Kate was gentle now. ‘The divorce settlement? The sale of the house?’

‘Sort of.’ Emily shifted position and didn’t meet Kate’s eye. She didn’t want to be pitied, and yet she knew she had become pitiable: a shade of her former self. Never more so than when thinking or speaking of him. ‘He … he came into some money just after we broke up. He made me a one-off payment; it was enough to buy this place. I moved in with Lena. She … It was a mutually beneficial arrangement.’

Kate pressed her lips together; she had never liked Joe. ‘Yes, I’ve heard him on the radio, quite the star now. So, tell me there’s enough cash left over to make this a viable business.’

‘I guess.’

Kate was wide-eyed. ‘You guess? Emily, don’t you know how much money there is left in the bank?’

Emily shrugged defensively. ‘All that stuff makes me anxious. I don’t care about money like you do.’ The words came out before she could stop them, tumbling off her tongue in an avalanche to swamp them.

‘Right,’ Kate muttered. ‘Thanks.’

‘I didn’t mean …’ Emily raised a hand, gestured wearily at Kate’s expensive cut and colour, the vintage dress more costly surely than the entirety of Emily’s wardrobe, the bracelet she suspected contained real diamonds glittering on one slim, tan wrist. ‘You know …’

‘Sure you meant it, but it’s OK. You’re wrong, though, Emily. I don’t care about money the way you think I do. I have enough. I don’t have to struggle and I’m not going to pretend I do. God knows I did enough struggling to last a lifetime. You remember when getting new clothes for me meant wearing your old cast-offs, don’t you? Taking charity from your parents like a beggar. Scraping together coppers I found down the back of the sofa to buy food?’ Kate’s voice rose and she clenched her hands, already regretting the brief outburst, the loss of cool.

Emily nodded, remorsefully. ‘I know. I’m sorry. Oh shit, what was that – two hours? You haven’t even been here a whole day and I’ve managed to put my foot in it. I’m not good company at the moment. The others will tell you. They think I’m losing it, since … you know.’

‘Joe,’ Kate said sighing softly. ‘It’s fine. We don’t have to talk about all that now. And we don’t have to talk about the financial stuff either. Like you said, I only just got here.’

Emily nodded. ‘I know it might not look much, Kate, but this place is a dream come true.’

Kate held Emily by the shoulders. ‘It doesn’t look like it yet,’ she said. ‘But it will.’

Emily smiled weakly. ‘OK. Why don’t we call it a day and go home?’

Chapter Three (#ulink_69c9abbd-9413-5a23-bf63-1f963e4bce3c)

Kate picked up the notebook: their recipe for success. She felt better with a plan; she needn’t worry about anything beyond the last bullet point on the final page, and that was comforting. Emily grabbed a bin liner from the kitchen and chucked the detritus of their lunch inside.

‘I have a hire car outside,’ Kate said, slipping the notebook into her bag. ‘I have to return it in three days. The nearest branch is just outside Glasgow.’

Emily called over her shoulder as she carried the rubbish into the kitchen. ‘That’s fine, I can follow you up in the Land Rover. We can make a day of it, scout around auctions or something.’

Suddenly it seemed too final. As if returning the car meant she was committed for the summer. Kate quickly pushed her uncertainty to one side and focused again on their plans for the shop, and sorting out Emily, who was clearly in just as much need of repair. ‘Not the same Land Rover, surely?’ She remembered a green, lumbering brute of a vehicle, mud spattered and temperamental; Lena ferrying them all down from Edinburgh in it all those times Kate gatecrashed the Cottons’ holidays, escaping the loneliness of the tenement. Every Easter and summer they would all pile in and chunter along the scenic route through Moffat and Dumfries, past the swooping valley of the Devil’s Beef Tub.

Emily returned from the kitchen, ducking beneath the strap of an old suede shoulder bag, her jacket over one arm. ‘Jasper? Yep, he still runs like a dream.’

Kate snorted. ‘He never did before.’

‘Don’t be mean about poor Jasper. Do you remember when Lena told us she’d named him after one of her old boyfriends? She said they were each as ornery as the other.’ She grinned at this memory; Lena was a woman who spoke openly of errant past lovers to her grandchildren, who smoked fulsomely and cursed and was generally considered (by Emily’s mother) to be a bad example. When in fact she was the best example of all; an example of how to be oneself in a world where all too often one was expected to twist and contort and conform to fit in.

Kate remembered being fourteen, squashed in the back of Jasper with Emily, Fergus and Ally; she and Em reading Just Seventeen and giggling over the problem pages, fascinated by sex. Dan and Fergus had come to blows over the front seat and were nursing their wounds and lingering tempers. Kate was eyeing Dan surreptitiously when she didn’t think anyone was watching, a strange, new fluttering of longing in her belly that summer – for what she didn’t know. Willing him to notice her that way. Lena was singing badly to The Kinks and the dog was stinking out the car with his breath.

That was the summer Kate met Luke Ross and everything changed.

‘Come on, let’s go home to Lena,’ Emily said, cutting through Kate’s reverie. Kate flushed with the heat of her remembered crush on Dan – fading in the face of her greater obsession with Luke. It had been one of the best times of her life and they had repeated it year on year, those hot, languid summers on the Solway becoming synonymous with love, and Luke.

Bluebell Bank had never grown old or lost its appeal. They kept coming back long after most kids gave up on family holidays, especially with a curmudgeonly old grandmother. Lena understood young folk, never patronised them or interfered, and they loved her for it.

Every year they’d gathered, right up until Emily went off with Joe and Kate left for New York. They’d convened at Bluebell Bank, place of peace and beauty, and relive those blissful younger days.

She was nervous and excited now in equal measure. Bluebell Bank conjured up nostalgic images of corniced rooms and patterned carpets, of salads on hot summer days and net curtains blowing into the garden on the breeze; of paddling pools and rope swings and gnarled apple trees and children’s shrieks carried on warm currents of air; a place where time slowed and stopped and real world problems could not touch her. Bluebell Bank was a parallel universe; it had always seemed impossible to her that the same old life was continuing unabated whilst she was there; far easier to believe she had slipped through a crack in time, into a new world altogether. A world where she didn’t have to worry about her mother, or where the next meal was coming from.

Kate pictured the indomitable Lena, with her penchant for wearing men’s work trousers and battered sandals on her leathery feet, overseeing the Cotton family chaos, her wild, white hair sticking up around her face and shrewd blue eyes seeing to the heart of them all. She was always ready to listen to childish woes and her puckish sense of adventure kept the children coming back for more. Kate could not wait to be reunited with the Cotton matriarch, a woman who had been more of a mother to her than anyone. Emily’s mother, Melanie, was always supremely kind, but she was so polished and perfect that Kate had never quite got over her awe of her.

They locked up the shop, inserting a heavy, rusted key into a door warped by damp. The small yard and corkscrew path were overrun with lush, rain-drenched foliage. A wet, summery smell wrapped itself around them as they squeezed between the dripping bushes, heading up the lane towards the high street.

‘Tomorrow the hard work starts,’ Kate said, shooting a warning look at Emily. She didn’t want Emily to lose sight of the road ahead, the hurdles they must vanquish along the way.

They drove in convoy out of town, past the Bladnoch Inn and distillery and along narrow, tree-lined roads. Bluebell Bank was a mile from town, sitting atop a small rise with its gardens spilling down towards the river. A twisting drive led through a thicket of steadfast old trees.

Turning off the road, negotiating the bumps and turns of the track in her too-pristine car, Kate had a sudden vision of these woods filled with children. She could see herself and Emily darting through the long grass, barefoot, hair flying, grabbing the old gnarled trunks to peer out and glimpse their pursuers. She could hear their gasping laughter, feel the twigs and rough grass catch at her feet; Fergus, cursing as he stumbled gracelessly through the woods in pursuit, while Dan laughed complacently, calling out that he was wasting his time, they’d be better off lying in wait for the girls to risk a final flight towards the house – Lena’s protection being the only safety net in this ferocious game of chase and catch. Kate had wanted Dan to catch her; she had longed to feel the crush of his arms as if in embrace, to be swung off her feet. Dan had seemed so tall and handsome and brave, everything her girlish soul could desire.