Betty said, ‘I think it was bullshit.’
‘Because?’
‘You only had to look at his face when he smiled. He wanted to cause trouble. Not for us, for the guy in the shop. That’s my feeling.’
Betty’s feelings. You did not lightly ignore Betty’s feelings.
‘We could at least ask,’ Robin said. ‘Not like we got anything to lose.’
Betty stood with her back to the sign that said Back Fold and another bookstore on the corner. Three bookstores in this one short, twisting alley with a pole at its centre, phone or power cables spraying from it like ropes from a maypole. Robin looked back down towards the third bookstore, its window unlit. The shelves inside had seemed far from full. It had looked like a bookstore waiting to die.
Or get reborn…
‘OK.’ Betty threw up her arms. ‘We’ll get another parking tick— no, I’ll get it. You go back. There might even be nobody in there.’
‘Said Open on the door.’
Over the door it said Oliver’s Literary Fiction. Robin walked back down there, peered into the window, saw a short rack of hardback novels by Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, A. S. Byatt, Margaret Atwood and like that. He tried the door. It didn’t open.
Why was that woman always right? He shouted after her.
‘Bets!’
But she’d gone. He hated that his wife could now move so much faster. Hated how old ladies would cut him up in a supermarket aisle.
But then the door of Oliver’s Literary Fiction opened, and…
Oh my God.
The man in the doorway, in his collarless, striped shirt with the brass stud, his severe half-glasses, looked like nobody so much, Robin thought, as the guy with the pitchfork in Grant Wood’s American Gothic. It was the kind of face that only promised more humiliation.
Humiliation. How all this had begun, on a cold, rainy day when spring was an ailing baby squirming feebly out of winter’s womb. Just under a week ago.
They weren’t broke, but they weren’t far off.
Robin’s income had been smashed around the same time as his bones. They’d sold a house in the sticks, into a falling market, for less than they paid for it. They’d taken out a mortgage on a humbler dwelling. Now they were having difficulty paying the premiums and Betty had to work checkout at the Co-op.
One day Robin had been sitting, feeling hopeless, staring at the wall.
The wall was all books. Like all the other walls in the living room. And the hallway and the bedroom. And he was thinking, We’re never gonna read all these books again.
Collecting a rueful smile from Betty who, it turned out, had been thinking pretty much the same for several months, wary of approaching the issue because some of those books had great personal significance. They’d each brought a few hundred into the relationship and they’d bought one another more books, over the years, as inspirational presents.
But, hell, there it was. Circumstance.
So they’d driven over to Hay, the second-hand book capital of the entire universe and gone into the first shop they found with a sign that said BOOKS BOUGHT.
The name over the shop was G. Nunne. Robin had walked in with a holdall full of books, dumped it on the counter, told the guy there was another fifteen hundred back where they came from. All on the same subject. A collection.
The guy took a cursory look. He was built like an old-fashioned beer keg and had one of those red wine-stain birthmarks down one side of his face.
‘All more or less like this?’
Robin, who’d brought along what he judged to be the most valuable, beautifully produced, hard-to-find volumes on their shelves, had nodded.
The guy had rolled his head around on cushions of fat.
‘Market en’t good.’
He had, surprisingly, a local accent. Robin had figured that all the booksellers here were, like, London intellectuals.
‘See, you can get most of these as e-books for a few quid,’ G. Nunne said. ‘Nothing’s out of print these days. So… I’d need to take a look, but I’m guessing…’ blowing his lips out, considering ‘… three, four hundred, the lot?’
‘You mean these… these here…?’
‘No, the lot. Fifteen hundred, you said?’
‘What?’ Close to dropping the stick and dragging the guy across the counter by the lapels. ‘You’d make ten times that much. Hell, what am I saying? Twenty times… thirty times… maybe more…’
‘But even if that were true, I’d have to sell them all, wouldn’t I? How long you think it takes to even get your money back? What percentage of customers are looking for weird books? You think that’s so bloody easy in a double-dip recession, you try it.’