‘This weekend, probably,’ Betty said. ‘We’re a bit nervous. Not having had a shop before.’
‘I’m sure you’ll do well,’ Mrs Oliver said.
‘Yes, we… hopefully.’ She looked round. The dominant colour in here was green, an arboreal haze over everything. ‘Are you fully recovered now?’
‘From what?’
‘I’m sorry, your husband said you’d been… not well.’
‘Did he?’
Betty said nothing. Discomfort hovered. Then Mrs Oliver seemed to relax, and her eyes lit up like coals in a stove when you pulled out the damper.
‘I’m Hilary.’
‘Betty.’
‘I’m glad we’ve met. Now, listen. You mustn’t be put off by James’s failure. Running a bookshop in a recession seems to require a level of enterprise that he lacks. We came here on a romantic whim – his romantic whim – for a weekend a few years ago, when he was convinced he’d seen Martin Amis having coffee with Andrew Motion, while he was still Poet Laureate. James’s… pavement-café-society moment. After that, he just had to live here.’
‘And open a shop? Bit drastic?’
‘My dear…’ Mrs Oliver did an unsmile ‘… James is one of those people who need to buy in. Move as quickly as possible to the centre of things. No use Martin Amis popping in for a browse and a coffee if he doesn’t become James’s close friend.’
‘And has he?’
‘Never been seen since. Nor Motion. Though I can’t deny that you do see authors here. They say every notable writer comes at least once, out of curiosity.’
‘I’ve heard that.’
‘Gets to the point, as I say, where you’re imagining you’ve seen someone and you actually haven’t. Ah, that’s so-and-so! It isn’t, but you think it is because this is Hay. I saw Beryl Bainbridge once. There she was walking amongst the open-air shelves at the honesty bookshop under the castle walls in her grey, fitted coat and a scarf and gloves. Not a face you’d think you could mistake, and I thought, I know, I’ll ask her if she’d mind signing some of her books. But it couldn’t have been. Her—’
Someone pushed past the table, dislodging it and causing Hilary Oliver’s coffee to spill. She frowned.
‘Terribly sad. Her obituary was in the Guardian the following day. I suppose what I’m saying is that this is one of those places where people become prone to delusions of one kind or another. Like this ridiculous business of the King, which began as a joke decades ago and doesn’t go away. He was pointed out to me once. I couldn’t take it on board. My God, his trousers…’
Hilary Oliver shuddered.
‘Will you still stay here, Hilary, now there’s no business?’
‘Well, we do have quite a nice house, with a big garden. And friends who like to come for weekends. We’ll probably have to stay until such time as James convinces himself it was a worthwhile exercise. He’s talking about standing for the town council. Ridiculous – town councils in this part of the world are nothing. No powers. Small-time talking shops. On reflection, I suppose he’ll quite enjoy that.’
Betty licked her ice cream, thoughtful. What had seemed quite funny at first was suddenly acutely depressing. It was how you didn’t want ever to wind up: purposeless. Looking for a reason.
‘But at least you’re out of the shop,’ she said.
‘No we’re not. We still own it. We had an opportunity to sell the premises and he refused. Two approaches. Both backed away when James demanded they sign a document committing them to preserving it as a bookshop. Perverse. He was held up to ridicule in some quarters because he would only sell good books. He said if we weren’t dependant on it for a living, we should feel obliged to stand up for what he saw as Literary Quality.’
‘That’s… kind of admirable, really. Isn’t it?’
‘My dear, it’s bloody silly, precious and guaranteed to fail. I have to say he wasn’t terribly pleased, at first, when he found out the kind of books you were proposing to sell, but at least they’re books. In the end, he simply refuses to be seen as betraying what he calls the defining quality of the town. But… he’s out of it. I know he likes to say it was my health that was suffering, but it was his. I’ll say no more.’
Betty said, ‘I wondered why you hadn’t developed it upstairs, opened up more book rooms. Something we can’t do, of course, or we wouldn’t have anywhere else to live.’
Hilary’s chin retracted, eyes widening.