Falling
Falling
THE MORE TIME SHE SPENT WITH HIM, THE MORE Ellen felt herself drawn to Ben. They never ran out of conversation. They talked about books, and swapped books, and argued about books. They compared notes on films that had come from books. Their tastes in modern music were similar, apart from Supertramp (she loved, he didn’t) and The Doors (he loved, she didn’t).
On the Mondays she brought cake to work, he complained. ‘You want to turn us into Billy Bunters.’
‘Nobody’s making you eat it’ – but he always did, and usually came back for more, telling her they couldn’t insult her aunt by ignoring it.
He teased her about her confessed crush on Dustin Hoffman. ‘You could hang a poster in the staffroom,’ he said, and she told him she’d think about it.
She produced fresh copies of crosswords that she and Frances had already completed and innocently beat him to every answer. He threatened to teach her chess, so he could get his own back. When she took him up on it he produced a chess set the next day and began, each lunchtime, to coach her.
And she would watch his hands as he moved the pieces, and she would try hard to concentrate on what he was saying, but his hands . . . his hands bewitched her.
And every so often, she would come up with a new idea for the shop.
‘Secondhand books.’
‘Secondhand? How would that work?’
‘Customers could return ones they’d bought – in perfect condition, and with their receipt – and get a small discount off their next purchase.’
‘I like it, but where would we put another section? We’re completely full.’
‘Not sure, but it’s worth thinking about. You’d be selling the same books twice.’
‘Definitely worth considering. I’ll put my lateral thinking cap on.’
And another day: ‘How about special offers tied to occasions?’
‘Go on.’
‘Discounts on all books by Irish writers for a few days around St Patrick’s Day, and on American novels for the fourth of July or Thanksgiving. Things like that.’
He thought. ‘Discounts on books that have been adapted for the screen in the run-up to the Oscars.’
‘Yes – and what about a free draw around the time of the Booker? The prize would be the winner, obviously.’
‘Genius.’
He sought her out one day as she was leafing through picture books, trying to choose a story for the following Saturday.
‘I’ve just had an idea,’ he said, ‘about where we could put the secondhand books. Come and see.’ He caught her arm and led her to the spiral staircase. ‘Here,’ he said, indicating the underside of the steps. ‘I’ve got a carpenter pal who might be able to make some kind of shelving to project from them. It wouldn’t be very big – we could only use the middle section, half a dozen shelves – but it’s better than nothing. What do you think?’
She looked at the boyish eagerness in his face. Her arm tingled where he had caught it. She wasn’t sure – could it be a hazard, would people risk bumping into projecting shelves? But she couldn’t bring herself to dampen his enthusiasm. ‘Great idea,’ she said, and he rushed off to phone the carpenter.
Next day he brought a magazine to the staffroom. ‘Help me out with this,’ he said, flipping pages till he found what he wanted. ‘ I’d love to win a year’s subscription to Time magazine because . . .’ He looked up. ‘Finish it in ten words or fewer. Something snappy.’
She’d seen competitions like that. There had been one on the back of the Weetabix box when she’d been home for Christmas. Six cars to be won, just by finishing a sentence with the right words. It hadn’t occurred to her to enter.
She thought for a minute. ‘What about because I could really use some free Time ?’
His face lit up. ‘Brilliant!’ He pulled a pen from his pocket and scribbled. ‘Capital T on time?’
‘Definitely.’
‘I knew you’d be good at these things. If it wins, I’ll up your wages.’
It won – and true to his word, her pay packet swelled by a fiver a week. From then on she entered every similar competition she came across, and she won a cuckoo clock that she and Frances hung in the kitchen, and a box of biscuits that she brought to work, and a red sweater that she passed on to Joan, and a woolly hat that she saved for Danny’s return to Galway.
‘I take full credit,’ Ben said. ‘You’d never have started this lark without me.’
‘I owe it all to you,’ she agreed. ‘I do give you lots of ideas for the shop in return, though.’
‘True.’
It was the start of April, just on closing time. They were in his office, she having brought up the day’s takings. He tipped back his chair as he often did, even though she’d told him it terrified her to see it, imagining him toppling over and breaking his neck.
‘I’m afraid to say you’re wasted here in case you leave, but you should be in marketing. You’ve got the perfect brain for it – and you’re a whizz at the snappy slogans, so you could work an idea up into an ad no problem.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘something to think about.’
The notion of getting paid to come up with ideas all day was intoxicating, and also daunting – what if they didn’t come? What if her brain refused to cooperate? – but she couldn’t imagine leaving the bookshop. Leaving him.
She would look at the back of his neck when he bent to retrieve a book from a lower shelf, and she would want so badly to reach out and touch the soft hairs that grew there. If their fingers brushed when they were engaged in a common task – pricing up new books, say, reaching together into the box that held them – she would burn. He was all she thought about when they were apart. He filled her dreams when she slept.
And now and again, maybe while they were sitting over the chess board, he would look up and hold her gaze, and she’d think he was about to say something, and then he wouldn’t – and she would wish with all her heart that he would. Because she felt, she was convinced, that her feelings were returned. All she needed was a word from him.
Did it matter that they worked together? Not in a bookshop, surely. And it wasn’t as if he was older and might be seen to be using his position as her superior to take advantage. She knew from Ruth that he was single: my bachelor brothers , she’d called her siblings once, chatting with Ellen after a storytime. There was nothing that could be seen as an obstacle.
The world with him in it was beautiful. She loved everyone, not just him. At work she went out of her way to help customers. She conversed and laughed with regulars, returned fallen toys to chubby hands, shushed babies while mothers browsed. Love made her a higher-voltage version of herself, spreading goodwill wherever she went.
She brought little treats home to Frances: a bag of favourite mints, a pocket book of crossword puzzles, a box of notecards. She even took to writing more regularly to her mother, although her letters remained formal and remote.
She was the clichéd heroine of every love song, every mushy, slushy film, every romance novel. She imagined them making a life together, opening a chain of bookshops in . . . Paris: why not? Three children they would have, two sons who would inherit their father’s sunny disposition, a daughter who would adore him as Ellen did. Readers, of course, every one of them. The most contented family there ever was.
One word from him. That was all it would take for her happy ever after to begin.