Advertisement: A Novel Holiday Idea
Borrow-A-Bookshop invites you to live out your dreams of running your very own bookshop in a historic Devonshire harbour village… for a fortnight.
Spend your days talking about books with customers in your own charming bookshop and serving up delicious food in your cosy cafe nook. Get to know our wonderful volunteers (all locals), always ready to offer a helping hand.
After shutting up shop, climb the spiral staircase to your bedroom with picture window seat and settle down to admire the Atlantic views. When your holiday’s over, simply hand the keys to the next holidaymaker-bookseller.
Request your booking early. Currently, there is a thirty-two-month waiting list.
Includes full use of café kitchen, courtyard seating, one double bedroom and bathroom upstairs, one single bedroom off the shop floor.
All bookshop and cafe takings retained by the Borrow-A-Bookshop Community Charity treasurer, Ms Jude Crawley, M.A.
Apply by email.
£400 charge per let for fourteen days.
Prologue
Evidence of the wildest party of the summer (if not in Wales’s entire student history) was strewn everywhere. Champagne corks, crushed beer cans and cigarette ends dotted the lawns, while abandoned shoes, Claire’s Accessories plastic tiaras and the ragged remains of feather boas decorated the bushes. The CONGRATULATIONS CLASS OF 2016 banner hung squint over the doors of the halls of residence. Apart from the summer dawn sounds of birdsong, everything was silent. Harri Griffiths and Annie Luna were the only two people awake in the whole world.
At least, that’s how it felt to Harri as they both sagged against the cabinet doors on the kitchen’s vinyl floor, the onset of the most epic hangover of their lives still hours away. The blinding headache and queasiness would probably make their presence felt around about the time Annie was boarding her flight home.
For now, they were enjoying the boozy, sleepy stillness of the morning, but reality was dawning. Very soon Harri, in his soft Valley’s accent, would be saying wela’i di wedyn to his closest friend since freshers’ week. He wouldn’t be able to say the word ‘goodbye’ in any language. That would feel far too final.
They’d tried not to think about this day all through their exams and their summer break spent bookselling together in Waterstones, but now that the sun was coming up on their last morning at Aberystwyth Uni (or ‘Aber’, as everyone called it) the sinking heaviness pressed hard on his chest.
Annie on the other hand, still in her graduation ball red dress, and swigging from a bottle of Co-op cava, knocked her booted feet together absently, looking like she could happily carry on the party.
At pre-drinks the day before, he’d watched her pinning those dirty-blonde plaits round her head in a coronet like any number of the Welsh medieval queens they’d encountered during their literature degree. Harri had held the pins for her as she worked. In the hours that followed, long strands had worked loose and were now hanging down around her face.
A prairie rose. That’s what she’d always jokingly labelled herself, and it suited her perfectly. She was tough and wild, beautiful and intimidating like the Texan landscape she came from.
She’d often described to him – with eyes half closed and in the drawling voice she reserved for reminiscing about home – how her parents grew a rose garden at their home where the desert met the Southern plains and where monster cacti reached for the sky alongside orchids and blousy English tea roses.
Harri realised he must have sighed out loud as Annie snapped her head towards him.
‘What?’ she asked, kicking her boot against his bare foot.
She’d opted for boots over heels for her walk across the graduation stage. Harri reckoned she’d probably never owned a pair of heels, but he’d never bet on it. Annie was the master of surprise, and he knew better than to make assumptions about her.
‘What?’ he echoed, giving her foot a softer nudge back.
‘You’ve got that ‘miles away’ look again.’
Harri sniffed a soft laugh. ‘I was picturing you back in your mum and dad’s garden, as it happens.’
Annie hugged the bottle. The cava must be horribly warm by now.
‘Hmm,’ she murmured, thinking, drawing her legs beneath her.
Mirroring her, Harri sat upright. ‘Aren’t you looking forward to seeing them?’
Annie’s parents had flown over to visit their daughter that one time back in second year – around about the time the inseparable friends were slogging away in a coffee shop to pay their rent while everyone else had gone home for the summer break. Harri had only stayed in Aber to keep Annie company.
He thought back to that awkward meeting, when he’d smiled and reached out a hand, saying, ‘Welcome to Aber, Mr Luna’.
Annie’s father had stared him down, telling him it was ‘Mr Luna, sir’ like they were in the military (or the 1950s). A stickler for good manners, he’d nevertheless chosen not to shake Harri’s outstretched hand. At the time, Harri had concluded Mr Luna was as chilly as the dark side of the moon and ultra-protective of his only child. Like Annie, Harri also had no siblings but his own dad hadn’t shown anything like the same paternal protectiveness. Far from it, unfortunately.
Annie had been uncharacteristically quiet during those introductions, and for the whole duration of her parents’ visit Harri had kept his distance at Annie’s apologetic insistence. Harri would at least have expected her to laugh and gently correct her father’s coldness, wrapping her old man around her finger like she could everyone she met; instead she’d wilted in their presence, the only time he’d ever seen anything like that happen to Annie. It had only made her more relatable and drawn him closer to her.
‘I’m hurtin’ to see Mom again,’ Annie was saying now. ‘And it’s gonna be hot and dry like you can’t imagine.’ Annie was smiling at the thought. It looked like genuine longing and excitement. Maybe things had thawed between her and Mr Luna too? He hoped so.
After throwing a quick glance at Harri, Annie added, ‘And I’ll Skype you, soon as I get there. And every other day after that.’
‘Oh, only every other day, is it? I see how it is,’ he tried to joke.
Silence fell again. Smiles faded. Annie looked around at the mess and the scattered sleeping bodies in their kitchen-lounge. The room appeared fuzzy to Harri since he’d taken his contacts out after they’d all stumbled home.
He guessed Annie was doing the same thing he was – running their ‘highlights’ reel in her memory – remembering all the pre-drinks and parties, all the stir-fries and burned toast, the movie nights and cramming sessions that had taken place here.
She wasn’t likely to cry. She could be as serene as the desert night in moments like this, preferring to smile and dazzle away any pesky tears. But Harri? He was seconds away from bawling.
Annie exaggerated a wistful sigh and a stretch and looked to the window where the sun had been streaming in for a while now.
A little flicker of panic ignited in Harri. Were they about to start with the farewells? Maybe if he drew her into storytelling they could spin out their last morning just a little longer?
‘How did you do it?’ he said after a hard swallow.
Annie tipped her head.
‘How’d you get the security guard to let us into the library last night?’
‘Hah!’ Her eyes lit up. ‘I’ve been bringing Jim my Mom’s rocky road every Thanksgiving since I got here. He owed me.’
‘You gave away your care package baking?’
‘Totally worth it. Or it will be.’ Annie waggled her light brows. Even in Welsh summers her cheeks grew freckled while her fair lashes and brows all but disappeared against her flushing skin. Harri always teased her about being secretly Welsh, and she always insisted Luna was hardly a Welsh surname.
Harri’s name was Welsh through and through; the Welsh spelling of ‘Harry’ and the same surname as half his street in Neath, the market town where he’d grown up.
‘Pity we won’t be here to see everyone’s reactions,’ Harri said, still smiling but looking down at his hands clasped in his lap.
A sleepy groan from one of the flatmates set off a grumpy sound in another. Someone rolled over then all fell still again.
Just after two this morning, the five of them, Annie, Harri, Gregor, Ioan and Catherine, had crossed the bridge in the student village and watched from the bushes as Annie tapped on the window, summoning the library security guard. They’d watched on, giggling and shushing one another drunkenly, as she spoke with him, working her magic.
Jim had thrown his head back in a laugh and unlocked the turnstile. He’d been surprised when Annie motioned for the hidden gang to join her and they’d all spilled out onto the path, but he’d let them inside anyway telling them in his own American drawl to ‘make it quick, five minutes max.’
Annie had saluted and told the group to ‘roll out!’
Within minutes they’d scattered through the stacks, pulling out titles from the shelves, searching for any book with a full-face portrait on the cover and applying the googly eyes.
Only half an hour before, Annie had proudly presented her willing recruits with the sticky sheets, outlining the mission she’d been planning in secret for who knew how long.
It had been a professional hit. By the time the security guard let them out again, filing innocently into the dawn light, every biography from Aneurin Bevan to Waldo Williams, every serious study of Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Shakespeare – anything with a face – was be-googled and carefully re-shelved for unsuspecting undergrads to stumble upon in the autumn, by which time the guilty occupants of flat 170 would be scattered across the face of the earth.
‘Aber’s not going to forget us any time soon,’ Annie said as their smiles turned wistful.
‘How could it?’ Harri said, a new impulse of desperation blooming within him. He was going to have to say something, because if not now, moments before she put five thousand miles between them for Christ knows how long, then when? When would they next be together like this?
He’d tried to tell her how he felt umpteen times. The first time, when he simply fancied her like mad, way back in freshers’ week at the foam party when they’d been slipping around on the dancefloor and his eyes were stinging with whatever the hell they put in that stuff, and his dazzling, exciting new acquaintance had been laughing raucously and gripping his bare arms with her slippery fingers, when there’d been so little space between them it had felt like they might be about to kiss. But then the lights had come up and there were blokes with mops sweeping the drunk first years off the floor and out into the night.
He’d tried again that first Valentine’s Day when getting to know her better had only strengthened his interest in her, and he’d bought her those pathetic yellow roses in cellophane and she’d looked at them with unreadable tranquillity, saying, ‘Yellow roses for friendship, right?’ and he’d mentally kicked himself for being too slow to get to the supermarket before all the red ones sold out.
‘Sure,’ he’d said, shrugging the flowers off like they were little more than an afterthought while he’d picked up the ciders, and another big wedge lodged itself between them, even as their friendship took a giant leap forward.
They’d become devoted friends as their first year was drawing to an end, and so, by the time he finally plucked up the courage to confess that he liked her, ‘no, a bit more than like, truth be told,’ after an all-night study session that ended in them dozing against the headrest of his bed, most definitely too tired to even consider getting to their last nine o’clock lecture on Harold bloody Pinter, he had felt triumphant. But when he was done talking, his lips close against the top of her head, her arm resting across his stomach, all he’d got back was the soft sound of her breathing. She’d fallen asleep and missed the whole outpouring.
He’d been hit by frustration at first, and then relief that he hadn’t spoiled things between them. After all, she’d never explicitly shown him she shared any of his heated feelings. There’d been moments where he’d suspected she had, but after closer analysis, he’d put it down to her friendly, bold Texan ways, and she was like that with everyone, pretty much.
It had never been the right time after that. Either she was seeing someone or she was in one of her swearing off dating phases (usually accompanied by her asking Harri to help her cut new bangs over the sink – he was that deep into the friend zone) and he’d started to take his bad luck as a sign that if they hadn’t got it together by now, it was never going to happen.
By their second year, Annie’s friendship, like the petals of the yellow roses she’d allowed to dry and kept on the windowsill, had become a pure, perfect thing to him, far more precious than any risky student romance could ever have been.
But now they were graduates, both turned twenty-one. They would no longer be flatmates and study buddies or daring library raiders armed with googly-eye stickers. They were actual adults facing a whole new world and there was a possibility they could face it together – as well as a danger that things between them could dwindle away to nothing, what with them soon to be living an ocean apart.
‘Heartburn?’ came Annie’s voice, cutting though his thoughts.
Harri snapped his palm away from his chest where he’d been rubbing at the ache inside.
‘Nope, I’m good. Listen, Annwyl…’ He shifted a little closer so their stirring flatmates couldn’t possibly hear. ‘You’re leaving, and…’
Annie’s eyes narrowed in concentration.
He always called her Annwyl when other people were out of earshot, and she’d never protested, assuming it was a Welsh form of Annie. Should he tell her now that it really meant ‘my dear one’, or rather, it meant so much more than that since the word was wrapped up in his pride for his Welsh heritage and his language? When he called her Annwyl it was a name somehow recalling hundreds of years of affection whispered between Welsh lovers. He really should stop using it.
Someone’s alarm clock was going off in one of the flats around them. Harri cursed the paper-thin walls, and not for the first time.
Annie’s eyes stayed fixed upon him. Her trademark smile was wavering a little.
‘I don’t know how to say this,’ he began, with absolutely no idea what was going to come out of his mouth.
He watched her throat move softly as she swallowed.
He let words form, unsure where they were taking him, instinct taking over. ‘You and me, we’re special…’
Annie’s head turned first.
There was a key in the door, shoes scuffing over the bristly mat, pizza menus and junk mail being scooped up, and all too suddenly, a figure in the kitchen with them.
‘Paisley!’ Annie said, staggering to her feet.
The woman was the same age as the flatmates, young and pretty. She was dressed for work in office gear and black sandals.
‘God, is that the time?’ Harri rubbed at his eyes and stood too, a little too quickly. Dizziness hit him and he steadied himself against the countertop.
‘You stayed up all night?’ Paisley asked, before turning to Annie. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be on your way to the airport?’
Annie took this as the dismissal it was. ‘Yep. Taxi’s coming in ten. I just need to grab my case.’
‘You’re going dressed like that?’ Paisley said.
She’d never really warmed to Annie. And who could blame her? She was always there, stealing the limelight. But now the Texan was on her way out, there’d be nothing standing between her and Harri. They were, after all, boyfriend and girlfriend; had been all final year. Harri had dived in with both feet too. It had all been part of his making peace with the ‘friend zone’ thing.
‘I’ll change at the airport, or maybe I won’t.’ Annie shrugged and squeezed past the pair, heading for her bedroom, right next to Harri’s.
‘Aren’t we getting coffee?’ Paisley asked Harri. ‘We’re supposed to be job hunting, remember? If we’re going to find positions close to each other.’
‘Right.’ Harri held a hand to the back of his neck. ‘Of course. Sorry. I’ll shower and we can go to the computer suite, see what’s out there.’
His eyes travelled to Annie’s door and the sound of trundling suitcase wheels. He wanted to howl like a wolf at the awful feelings inside him, but as Paisley stepped closer and drew his face down to hers with a finger at his chin, there was nothing he could do.
‘Eww, morning breath!’ she told him, but still lifted herself to kiss his lips.
‘Sorry,’ he said again. ‘Last night got a bit out of hand.’
‘And not for the first time,’ Paisley said, softly scolding. ‘It was a shame I had to work, but…’ she took both his hands in hers, ‘now we’ve graduated, there’s nothing getting in our way.’
Harri knew perfectly well what his girlfriend was getting at, and the guilt stabbed at him. Annie emerged from her room in a faded denim jacket over her party dress, shouldering tote bags full of books.
Paisley went on, a little louder now. ‘We have our whole lives ahead of us to be together, go on adventures, get our own place…’
‘I’m heading out, then,’ Annie interrupted.
Paisley was still gripping his hands. Was this how they were supposed to part after the most extraordinary three years of friendship? It was too awful.
Annie stepped nearer, struggling under the weight of her bags. Paisley had no choice but to drop Harri’s hands because Annie was beaming her biggest smile at him, inches away.
‘I’ll be seeing you, my friend,’ she said, holding out her arms.
Harri felt Paisley observing their hug, knowing it was going on too long for her liking. The book totes jutted into his sides but he didn’t mind. He could have sworn he felt Annie’s chest heave in a sob as they clung together, but when she stepped back, she was grinning the same as always.
He watched as Annie pulled the surprised Paisley in for a hug too, the first the women had ever shared. ‘Take good care of him, okay?’ Annie said, her voice like soft music to Harri’s ears.
‘I’ll come see you when I’ve enough money saved,’ he told her weakly.
‘Me too,’ Annie countered. ‘I’ll be on the first flight I can afford.’
‘And remember, Annwy…’ He stopped himself. ‘Annie. We’ve got our bookshop holiday to look forward to, if we ever get to the top of the waiting list.’
‘Like I’d miss that,’ Annie beamed, but seeing Paisley’s face fall, she quickly hid her excitement. ‘I should…’ she hiked a thumb towards the doorway behind her.
Then weirdly, horribly, that’s how it ended, with Annie shouldering her belongings and wheeling her cases away, her boots clomping across the floor.
Impossibly, the door clicked shut on the latch behind her and she was gone, leaving Harri with a sliver of himself missing.
Meanwhile Paisley breezily outlined their plans for the day and he really did try to force himself to listen as she reeled it off; packing, letting agents, the job centre, dinner at her family’s home in Port Talbot when she’d finished her shift at the call centre, and then an early night…
He was nodding and wondering if he was managing to smile convincingly. He liked Paisley very much; he wouldn’t have agreed to go out with her in the first place if he didn’t. She was smart and caring, she knew what she wanted and was going to achieve it all, and he’d been drawn to her certainty and confidence. Even his dad loved her. Plus, she really was the prettiest girl in Wales, and she’d liked him right from the day they met. The perfect girlfriend.
He felt himself softening again, letting her talk him round, hoping she couldn’t feel the awful tug within him that made him want to run after Annie’s taxi.
The torn-in-two feeling would probably go away soon, and he’d be left in the glow of Paisley’s warmth and goodness. He’d eat at her parents’ table tonight and they’d make plans for the rest of the summer and it would all be okay. He had to let Annie go and this was the next logical step.
Paisley kept talking as she gathered abandoned bottles and cans, pouring the dregs down the sink. The stretching, eye-rubbing, grunting figures under blankets and coats on the sofas and floor protested about keeping it down please, there were people dying in here.
Harri made his way into his bedroom, unbuttoning last night’s tuxedo shirt that’d need to go back to the rental place by five.
Against the wall leaned the flattened cardboard boxes that would soon contain the last remnants of his student life in Aber.
Something caught his eye and he made his way to the stack of books on his bedside table where he found, upon closer inspection, every cover adorned with google-eye stickers. He smiled at first, until the weird pain welled up again.
‘What was she on about, anyway?’ Paisley said suddenly from the doorway, making him jolt round, schooling his features into a look of placidity.
‘Huh?’
‘Something about a bookshop holiday? A waiting list?’
Harri knew she was trying to look unbothered. ‘Oh, right, that,’ he said with a coolness he didn’t feel. ‘It was just this thing we put our names down for ages ago.’ By which he meant before he met Paisley. ‘A working holiday kind of thing, down in Devon. It’ll probably never happen.’
Paisley stared back, looking like a woman weighing up whether this was a potential threat of some kind. She cast her eyes into the now empty bedroom next to his and made her decision.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s get some day-after-graduation pancakes before we start the job hunt. My treat.’ She was already on the move, shooing groaning flatmates off the sofa so she could straighten the cushions.
‘Okey-dokey,’ he called back. ‘I’m all yours,’ and he made a silent promise to Paisley that this was true, and an even more solemn promise to himself that he’d take comfort in the fact that he had it all: a best friend in Annie Luna – even if she would be on the other side of the world pretty soon – and a loving, committed, super-smart girlfriend who he loved very much and had a future with right here in his beloved Wales. Given time to adjust to graduate life, he knew he’d come to believe it fully.
Chapter One
Clove Lore – eight years and seven months later
Devon, even in wintertime, is a mellow, bountiful county, a place where the dark water is alive with silver fishes, a place of sodden sands picked over by keen-eyed waders, a place of fern-dripping coves, mossy woodland and blustery promontories, no less beautiful in their austere winter livery. Come February, if you’re lucky, the worst of the sea storms are over, the temperatures are sneaking towards double figures and the bulbs have pushed green shoots through spring-softening earth.
Folks up country say everything bursts back into life in the South West a good two weeks sooner than in their parts of the world, but the palm trees in the gardens are still wrapped in protective fleece, the greenhouses still require heating to spur on early seedlings, and every sleeping snail, spider and ladybird dare not rouse itself from their sequestered spots too soon because, even with the hedgerows awakening with birdsong, winter lingers on.
The chimneys all down the sloping village of Clove Lore still cough smoke right through February, and the tourists are only just beginning to think of spring minibreaks and rock-pooling in waterproofs. The dark still falls across the county as the school buses whisk kids home for dinner, and no one, but no one would dream of remarking how the light nights will soon be here for fear of tempting back the frosts or, worse, another terrifying flood, all too common at this time of year.
Harri had taken in the county with dull eyes as he made his way down towards the coast, passing shuttered arcades only open in the high season, giant plastic ice cream cones appended to roadside kiosks, signs pointlessly boasting, ‘pick your own strawberries, June-August’, and surf academy lock-ups which, come beach season, would be bustling from dawn to dusk with happy customers, salted and sun-bleached from the shore.
Thinking how this probably wasn’t the ideal time for a seaside bookselling holiday, Harri stopped now in the middle of the fairy-lit, cobbled courtyard of the Borrow-A-Bookshop, flicking at his phone screen to find the bookings manager, Jude Crawley’s, text with the keycode so he could get inside the darkened shop. It wasn’t easy with his gloves on.
No messages from Paisley, he noted. It was simultaneously a sadness and a relief.
They’d never gone this long without talking. He hoped she was okay. He hoped she was beginning to forgive him.
Half-six in the evening on the first day of February, and the Devonshire sky was black. There was no point waiting out here. In the old days, Annie was always late. If she turned up at all.
End of exclusive subscribers’ only extract – hope you loved it