Sam nodded. ‘Sounds like a good, varied diet with most of the book groups represented,’ he said.
Callie laughed.
‘Have you read any Roger Deakin?’ he asked.
‘No,’ Callie said. ‘What’s he written?’
‘He wrote three amazing books about the countryside and I think you’d really like Wildwood. My brother’s shop next door always stocks them.’
‘Shall I–’ she motioned to the door.
‘Go and take a look,’ he said with a nod.
Callie left the shop and entered the one next door. It had the same Georgian shopfront with a large window stuffed with books and the same sort of bell tinkled above the door when she opened it.
A dark-haired man was reaching up to a shelf, but turned around as she entered and Callie smiled as she looked at yet another handsome Nightingale bookseller.
‘Hello,’ he said. His hair was short and neat and he had a nice slim face with the same large brown eyes as Sam.
‘You’re Sam’s brother, right?’ Callie asked.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Did he send you round?’
‘He sent me in search of Roger Deakin,’ Callie explained.
‘Come this way,’ he said. ‘I’m Josh.’ He held out a hand for her to shake.
‘Callie,’ she said.
He blinked. ‘Callie Logan?’
She looked at him perplexed. ‘How did you know?’
Josh gave a smile that was like a ramped-up version of Sam’s, making Callie think that Sam’s smile was only on half-wattage.
‘Sam mentioned you’d visited the shop,’ he said.
‘He did?’
‘We love authors here, you see,’ Josh said. ‘You know we have a literary festival in the summer?’
‘I’ve heard about it,’ she said, wondering what on earth Sam had said about her.
‘Well, we always get excited when a new author comes to town.’
‘I’ve come here to live,’ Callie said.
‘I know,’ he said, again his full-beam smile washing over her. ‘Don’t worry – you’ll get used to everyone knowing your business. That’s small towns for you.’
‘So I’m learning,’ she said.
‘Right,’ he said, clapping his hands together, ‘which title were you after.’
‘Sam mentioned a book about a wood.’
Josh nodded. ‘Wildwood.’ He moved into the second room of the shop and, reaching up to a shelf, carefully extracted a white paperback which he handed to Callie. She looked at the blue and green trees on its cover. Simple but beautiful.
‘Wildwood – a journey through trees,’ she read on the cover. ‘Why haven’t I heard of this before?’
Josh grinned. ‘It’s a great day when you meet a new writer, isn’t it? It’s like an introduction to a best friend you didn’t know existed just hours before.’
Callie smiled. Josh talked exactly like his brother.
‘There’s Notes from Walnut Tree Farm which is about his life out at Mellis here in Suffolk. It’s in journal style. The writing is beautiful. And then there’s Waterlog – his great swimming adventure across the UK. He started off in his moat at home and then swam in everything from ponds and rivers and lakes and tarns.’
‘Really?’
‘Truly,’ Josh said.
The bell above the door rang as another customer entered the shop.
‘Excuse me,’ Josh said, leaving her in the company of three wonderful books which she berated herself at never having met before. She was still holding Wildwood and ran her fingers over the fine matte cover, enjoying the feel of the indented name and title and marvelling at the quality of the paper before flipping through the book. It was a good thick book of nearly four hundred pages and each chapter had a beautiful little illustration after its title. Callie knew she had to have it and a surge of excitement filled her as she thought about the hours of pleasure that this book would give her. She could come back for the other two books; it would be something to look forward to when she had finished the first – the delayed gratification that a compulsive reader never tires of.
She walked through to the till in the first room, pausing a moment as she saw Josh dealing with a customer.
‘But I’ve told you, I’m not stocking that book.’
‘It’s disgraceful!’ the woman told him. ‘Call yourself a bookshop when you don’t hold the latest bestseller?’
‘You are welcome to place an order and I can keep it here for you to collect,’ he said, doing his best to keep his patience.
‘I want to see it on display,’ the woman said.
‘That’s not going to happen,’ Josh said.
Callie blinked at his firm tone of voice. What on earth was this book they were talking about?
Luckily for Josh, the customer’s mobile rang and she hurriedly left the shop a moment later.
‘What did she want?’ Callie asked, coming out from her hiding place in Fiction L to M.
‘She wanted that damned awful book by F M Keynes,’ Josh said. ‘Pardon my Anglo-Saxon.’
‘You’re pardoned,’ Callie said with a grin.
‘You know the book?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Callie said. ‘I’ve seen it around. One of my London friends said she was in one of those massive supermarkets and a shop assistant was taking down all the other titles so she could put rows and rows of that book up.’
Josh shook his head in despair. ‘What is the world coming too? I’ve seen people reading it in public with no shame! At the bus stop, in the queue at the post office – I even saw one of our school teachers reading a copy down at Castle Park!’
Callie bit her lip to stop herself from laughing. She hadn’t met such a young man with such strong principles since her days as a student and it was wonderfully refreshing.
‘She just can’t accept that I’m not going to stock that book in this shop,’ Josh said.
‘Will she come back?’
‘Probably,’ he said. ‘She’s been in three times already this week and I’ve already backed down and said I’d order her a copy just to get her off my back, but she’s got this perverse notion about seeing it physically on display in the shop.’
‘How bizarre!’ Callie said. ‘Maybe she’s got a bet with a friend or something.’
‘Or maybe she’s just a pervert.’
They looked at each other and laughed.
‘Well, I don’t want a copy of that book,’ Callie told him. ‘I’ve found Wildwood.’
He grinned. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘A nice sane customer with exemplary taste!’
She watched as he rang the book through the till before placing it in one of the brown paper bags with the Nightingale stamp on which she was fast becoming addicted to.
‘And a bookmark for you,’ he said, popping one inside the bag.
‘For books which make your heart sing,’ she said from memory.
‘Exactly,’ Josh said, ‘and that bloody Keynes book does not make my heart sing!’ He rolled his eyes and sighed again, but then his smile returned. ‘It was very nice to meet you. I hope you’ll visit again.’
‘I think it’s probably on the cards,’ she said. ‘It’s hard for a writer to stay away from books for too long.’
He gave her a funny little salute that made her laugh and she left the shop, returning to the one just next door.
‘I loved your brother’s shop,’ she said as she entered to the sound of the tinkling bell.
‘I thought you would,’ Sam said, stepping down off one of the antique library steps. ‘You’ll have to meet my sister too – she runs the children’s bookshop opposite, and my cousin, Megan, runs the library.’
Callie looked surprised. ‘Your whole family works with books?’
‘Books, writing, editing, the literary festival–’
‘Wow,’ Callie said.
‘Did Josh tell you about Beechcombings?’ Sam asked. ‘The Richard Mabey book.’
‘No,’ Callie said.
Before she could ask him anything more, Sam disappeared, resurfacing a minute later with a pretty paperback. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘A little something for you from me.’
‘Oh, you must let me pay,’ she said.
He shook his head. ‘It’s been kicking around for a while and has a particularly nasty beer stain on page seventeen.’
Callie grinned. ‘Well, I’ll take it off your hands, then, and just hope that the pertinent passage that I’m looking for as a reader isn’t on page seventeen!’ She popped it into the brown bag which Josh had given her, a feeling of great satisfaction filling her at the thought of two new books to look forward to.
‘Listen, I’ll leave you to look around,’ Sam said and she watched as he walked across the room towards a stack of hardbacks teetering on an old wooden stool.
Callie realised that there were several important features to which she’d not paid due attention during her first visit to the shop like the wonderful beams. The shopfront might have been Georgian but the interior was obviously much older and the thick wooden beams looked ancient. Since she’d come to Suffolk, she realised that its architecture was very rich indeed and there were more medieval timber-framed buildings than she’d ever seen in her life.
Her first trip to the bookshop had been about finding her way around the shelves and discovering which books were kept where, but now she looked at the shop itself – at the little pieces of old furniture that were dotted around the rooms and the ornaments too. There was an old chipped Staffordshire pottery figure of Shakespeare wearing a gleaming white outfit decorated in delicate gold stripes and buttons. He was leaning on a plinth of books and had the dreamy look of a true poet. He had been placed up against a row of fine hardback editions of his own plays.
‘I keep him safely tucked away on the top shelf,’ Sam said as he saw her looking at it. ‘There’s always the urge for people to touch him and he’s a bit delicate these days.’
‘He’s keeping an eye on everyone from up there,’ Callie said.
‘Especially me,’ Sam said. ‘I have a tendency to lose myself in a good book when I should be thinking about the literary needs of my customers.’
‘I have to say I wasn’t a big fan of Shakespeare in school,’ Callie said. ‘Our teacher made us read The Merchant of Venice around the class. I was Shylock’s daughter, Jessica. It was an awful part and I didn’t know what on earth was going on.’
Sam smiled. ‘I got to play Petruchio in our school’s production of The Taming of the Shrew. I’ve never worked so hard in my life as I did learning all those lines.’
‘Tough role,’ Callie said. ‘I’m impressed. Do you still remember it all?’
‘Bits and pieces,’ he said. ‘“Now, by the world, it is a lusty wench; I love her ten times more than e’er I did. O, how I long to have some chat with her!”’
Callie laughed and Sam cleared his throat.
‘It’s quite ridiculous what the brain stores away, isn’t it?’
‘Quite,’ she said, noticing that his cheeks had coloured up rather attractively.
‘That’s what I love about bookshops,’ he said. ‘There are so many worlds in this very modest space. You can time travel back to virtually any era from Shakespeare’s England to the 1960s. You can become a soldier and fight a world war, you can climb Everest or explore a South American tepui with Arthur Conan Doyle, or milk a cow in nineteenth-century Dorset with Thomas Hardy or drink a Rolls Royce cocktail on a farm in Kent with H E Bates. Where else could you do all of this but in a bookshop?’
Callie nodded, smiling at his enthusiastic words.
‘So many lifetimes can be lead within the covers of books,’ she said, watching as he picked up a yellow-spined paperback that had been wrongly shelved and returned it to its rightful home.
‘This is the popular paperback section – always a hit with the holidaymaker.’
‘Wow!’ Callie said, gazing up at the books which reached from floor to ceiling, their bright spines enticing her to lean forward and touch them – to pull them out and gobble them up.
‘Some people are surprised that we have so many. They shake their heads and tut, but there’s room for everything at Nightingale’s.’
Callie nodded. ‘There is still this big divide between literary and popular fiction, isn’t there?’
‘I’m afraid so,’ Sam said. ‘I’ve seen customers come in here and buy the latest Booker Prize winning title and I know they’re not going to read it in a million years. They might struggle through the first chapter on a dark winter’s night when they can’t get out into the garden, but that’s as far as it’ll go and it’ll soon appear on one of the tables at the church fete where people will nod towards it and say, “Didn’t that book win a prize?” and then they pick up the John Grisham or Nora Roberts next to it instead.’
Callie laughed. ‘I don’t know why there’s such snobbery. It seems very silly to me. Books are meant to give pleasure, aren’t they?’
‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘I like to split books into two groups. Just two. Books I want to read and books I don’t.’
‘And are there many in the books you don’t want to read category?’ Callie asked him.
‘Not many,’ he said with a little smile. ‘I think most books have some sort of appeal to me as a bookseller if not a reader – even if it’s just the font used for the title or the quality of the paper the publisher has printed it on. If a book crosses my path, I have to pick it up and examine it even if I have no intentions of reading it.’
‘Me too,’ she said, ‘and I have an awful habit of picking up fellow authors’ books and reading the first chapter before either shuddering in horror because the writing is so bad or shuddering in horror because it’s so much better than my own. But don’t tell anyone I said that!’
They laughed and their eyes met and there was one of those wonderful moments of connection between two people that so rarely happens in life. It was as if both their lives had been leading up to this quiet little moment in a bookshop in Suffolk, somewhere between G and L in the fiction department.
It was Sam who broke the spell first, clearing his throat.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I hope this isn’t too forward of me, but – well – I was wondering if you’d like to go for a meal sometime.’
‘No,’ Callie said, the word shooting out of her mouth before she had a chance to check it.
‘Oh, okay,’ Sam said, holding his hands in the air as if in surrender. ‘I didn’t mean to–’
‘I’ve got to go,’ she said, leaving the shop in a dash of carrier bags and embarrassment.
When she got back to the sanctuary of Owl Cottage, she could feel her heart was racing wildly and tears filled her eyes. Why had she done that? She could still see the wounded look upon Sam’s face. It was as if her ‘no’ had been fired directly into his heart. She closed her eyes as hot tears spilled down her face. Stupid, stupid girl, she chided herself. What had Sam Nightingale done to deserve that from her? Nothing! Absolutely nothing. He was sweet and kind and interesting and they’d been getting on so well together. She liked him – really liked him.
Perhaps that was it, she thought. Perhaps it was the fear of liking somebody too much again. She couldn’t risk it. Not after what had happened with Piers. She was still feeling so wounded and raw from that that she could never see herself becoming involved with anyone ever again.
‘What is wrong with me?’ she asked.
You’ve been hurt, a little voice inside her said and she knew it was true. Piers might not have hurt her physically, he hadn’t ever even raised his voice at her let alone a hand, but he had certainly hurt her emotionally. All those lonely nights she’d spent when he’d been at work had left her feeling isolated and unloved and she’d come to believe it was her fault until her best friend, Heidi, had told her that it wasn’t her fault at all.
‘Piers is a
pig!’ she’d told Callie.
‘Isn’t that being a bit mean?’ Callie had said.
‘He’s the one who’s mean!’ Heidi had said, but Callie couldn’t help harbouring the thought that something must be innately wrong with her for her husband not to have wanted to spend time with her.
She caught her reflection in the glass of a framed picture, her eyes large and frightened.
‘What is wrong with me?’ she asked herself again.
She closed her eyes. She really didn’t know the answer to that question, but one thing was certain: she was never ever going to get close to another man.
Chapter 6
What on earth had he been thinking about, asking her out for dinner? Of course she didn’t want to go out with him. She was a beautiful, famous author and he was a fusty old antiquarian. She was never going to say yes.
Sam Nightingale shook his head ruefully. And they’d been getting on together so well too, he thought, remembering the easy way they’d talked and laughed. It had been so relaxed with Callie and he’d really thought there had been a connection there.
‘But you had to go and blow it!’ he said to himself, cursing as he dusted a hardback copy of The English Vicarage Garden before giving it its moment in the spotlight on the music stand. The cover was a little dated, but it was a pretty book that would find its owner, he felt sure of that.
‘What did you go and blow?’ Grandpa Joe said from behind him.
‘Grandpa!’ Sam said. ‘I wish you wouldn’t creep up on me like that.’
‘I don’t creep,’ he said with a little grunt.
‘You do,’ Sam said. ‘You should wear proper shoes instead of those slippers so I can hear you coming.’
‘I like these slippers,’ Grandpa Joe said. ‘They keep my feet warm.’
Sam shook his head at his grandfather’s eccentric ways. He sometimes had a feeling that customers came into the shop to see Grandpa Joe as much as they came to see the books.
‘Anyway,’ his grandpa continued, ‘what did you go and blow?’
Sam sighed. Grandpa Joe’s ears were far too keen for his liking. Why couldn’t he be nice and deaf like most eighty-three-year-olds?
The Book Lovers Page 6
