The Lost Bookshop

Chapter 54

Chapter Fifty-Four

HENRY

‘H ow are you so calm? Your grandmother’s name was Rose Clohessy. I mean, how many Rose Clohessys could have been born that year? It’s a pretty big coincidence, right?’ I realised how loud I was being, as I paced around her basement flat, in relation to her almost zen-like poise on the bed.

‘I’m not sure if I’d describe what I’m feeling as calm, Henry,’ she said, unflinching in the face of this monumental twist in her family ancestry.

‘You’re processing. Good. Right.’

Well, this was nuts. I had met the woman of my dreams only to find out that she carried the missing manuscript of Emily Bront? ON HER SKIN, and now, it seemed, was the great-granddaughter of Opaline Carlisle, one of the greatest book dealers of the twentieth century. A fact that, up to now, she had been completely unaware of.

Wait until I told the faculty about this – I finally had my thesis!

‘That’s what you’re thinking about?’

‘Huh? What? Wait, how did you—’ I hadn’t spoken that part aloud, had I?

She got up and pulled on her clothes with an urgency that suggested some activity other than my preferred one.

‘Of course you should write about it. Everyone needs to know Opaline’s story. And you’re the one to tell it.’

‘Okay, how did you know that’s what I was …’

‘It’s a gift, Henry. And I don’t plan on hiding it any more.’

I tried to pretend that this wasn’t unnerving at all and then immediately tried to not think of anything, lest she pluck it from my brain. The branches of the tree fluttered in an imperceptible breeze and the door slowly swung open with a theatrical creak.

‘As for Emily’s manuscript, no one’s going to believe it, are they?’

She was right. We had no proof that it was real. But we knew and that was enough. The realisation blew me sideways. The recognition didn’t matter to me any more.

‘You’ll have to settle for being the only one who sees it,’ she said, kissing me on the cheek.

‘I think I’m okay with that.’ I was very okay with that.

‘Right, should we give it a try?’ she asked, pulling on her shoes.

‘Climbing Everest? Dinner at the new Asian place?’ Apparently I did not share her gift.

She batted my arm and gave me that heart-melting smile. ‘Finding the bookshop. You read the last page, didn’t you?’

I tried to summon up the words in my minds’ eye.

The soul of the night turned upside down …

‘I’m not even sure what it means … the soul of the night?’

‘Don’t be so literal,’ she said, with a new-found confidence I’d never seen. It looked good on her. ‘If I am to be the custodian, and everything that has happened since I arrived here has been screaming to tell me that, I need to believe. I’ve been in denial for so long. I suppose I just never dared hope—’

She broke off, her voice thick with emotion. I put my arms around her waist and told her to slow down, take a breath.

‘You are so special. Only you can’t see it.’ I bent my head and let my lips touch the softness of her mouth, feeling the sweet scent of her breath pulling me in. ‘I’m just not sure where I fit in,’ I said, reluctantly breaking away. Stupid thoughts.

‘You’re the only one who has seen the bookshop. That has to mean something.’

It was true. The search for the manuscript had led me here and now I’d found the treasure I never knew I was searching for. She took my hand and led me upstairs. No light was on, but the rooms were lit by an incredibly large moon shining through the windows.

‘What about Madame Bowden?’ I asked, as we rounded the ground floor and headed up to the first landing.

‘I don’t think she’s coming back.’

Any hint of anxiety had left her voice. What was going on? She stopped for a moment and turned to face me.

‘Would you think it strange—’

‘Martha,’ I said, taking her by the shoulders. ‘I think the strange horse has bolted, don’t you?’

She smiled and physically shook off whatever last doubts were holding her back.

‘Apart from us, there isn’t one other person who has actually met Madame Bowden. I asked my friends from college – none of them saw her that night at my birthday party. Not even my mother.’

‘Right. Okay. That is strange.’

‘Apart from Shane,’ she added, her forehead creasing as she became lost in troubling memories of the past. ‘Why was that?’ she whispered almost inaudibly to herself.

I began to wish I hadn’t seen her either. Was she a ghost?

‘I don’t think she’s a ghost.’

‘So you’re just reading my thoughts at will now, is it? I don’t know if I like this!’

Martha smiled and assured me her ‘gift’ wasn’t that refined.

‘I read people’s stories, not every single thought. Although sometimes your thoughts are easily readable,’ she said, stepping closer to me in the darkness. We kissed again because, well, any opportunity.

A small door at the end of the hall, which resembled something you might find at the front of a gnome’s house, required both of us to contort ourselves in equally undignified fashion in order to gain entry. Your average attic, where Christmas lay in hiding for eleven months of the year, was illuminated by the milky glow of the moon through half-size windows. Dustsheets covered unknowable shapes, and a cheval mirror at the end of the room reflected another young couple entering the room from a similarly tiny door. I recalled a book I had found at the bottom of a bargain bin in a charity shop near Camden. Something about the memories of buildings and how the walls are infused with them. They never forget, what we, as mere mortals, misplace. I hadn’t thought of it since, until now.

‘There’s a note,’ Martha said, picking up an envelope with her name on it.

Martha,

I have played many different characters in other people’s stories. Your story was my favourite and this chapter shall be your finest yet. In order for something to exist, you must first believe in it. Invite your heart to see what your eyes cannot. Follow your path and bring the scholar, I like having him around.

B.

‘Is that her handwriting?’ I asked.

‘Her?’

‘Yes. Madame Bowden.’

‘I don’t think Madame Bowden is the person we thought she was.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

She put the letter down and breathed in deeply, before smiling to herself. ‘You never left at all, did you?’

I waited for a moment and looked around the small attic space. Who was she speaking to?

Truth be told, I felt a mixture of things. Glad to be there with Martha/stupid for hoping that something otherworldly would happen/useless because I clearly had no idea what we were doing. I had done all of the research, but Martha seemed to be able to just feel her way, instinctively. It was like that song ‘The Whole of the Moon’.

‘ I spoke about wings. You just flew. ’

‘Is that a poem?’

‘No, it’s a song,’ I said, taking her hand. I could not be in the same room and not be close to her. ‘It’s about the moon and this guy who’s an idiot and a girl who just … knows everything.’

‘Sounds just like us!’

‘Exactly. I knew you’d like it.’

She put her arms around my neck and we stood there, shuffling a dance with no music.

‘This isn’t all too weird for you, is it?’ Her words came out muffled as she spoke into the shoulder of my woollen jumper.

‘If it was, I would have said so when the tree started growing out of your flat.’

She snorted, which made us both laugh.

‘I feel like I’m in a dream,’ she said and I concurred. But dreams had a habit of ending. I decided, quietly, that our dream would be different.

‘There’s another door!’ She broke free of my arms and rushed to the far end of the room.

On closer inspection, there was indeed another door. It was exactly where I thought the cheval mirror had stood, with our reflections inside. I blinked slowly. Nope, it was a door. No mistaking it.

‘How are we supposed to see where we’re going?’ I asked, after about thirty seconds of following her blindly in the dark. We were inside what felt like the eaves of the house.

‘You’re not. You just have to trust me.’

‘But you don’t know where you’re going either?’ I panted, now half crouched as I’d just whacked my head on a roof beam.

‘You once asked me to trust you and you don’t see me moaning about it,’ she needled.

I kept quiet for another minute or so, until it felt as though we were going upstairs.

‘Just checking that you’re aware of ascending, despite being in the attic.’

‘I’m aware.’

She reached back and patted the side of my head. It did not help matters.

‘You remember the book, how it talks about an upside-down stairway?’

I did remember it, but I thought it was some kind of sweet fairy tale for kids, not a map for … what exactly?

‘Yes, but, you don’t really believe we’re going to find the bookshop?’

Her voice seemed to be getting farther away. ‘You can’t find something that was never lost!’

Great. Even Martha was speaking in riddles now. That was Madame Bowden’s influence. And where the hell was she? There was no time to think logically, as the passage grew narrower and I could feel the skin on my hands being scratched.

‘Is now a good time to mention that I’m claustrophobic?’ I announced, as casually as I could, bravely omitting to comment on the fact that the stairs seemed to be taking us downward now, in a tight spiral.

‘I think these are the roots of the tree. Don’t you?’

Of course they are , I muttered to myself. I mean, it made perfect sense if you had just taken some sort of Class A drug. Or if your last name was Pevensie and you had just stumbled into a wardrobe full of fur coats. I suddenly became very aware of my own thoughts – this constant stream of ridicule. As Martha pointed out, wasn’t I the one who had walked straight into the bookshop on my first night here? Yet I had immediately dismissed it as some kind of drunken mirage.

My mind wouldn’t let me believe. Martha suffered no such resistance and I decided that if I could not necessarily believe, I could at least believe in her.

‘ The soul of the night turned upside down .’

‘Sorry?’

‘That line from the book. It said that you have to trust you will end up exactly where you’re meant to be.’

‘I feel like I already have,’ I said, but I wasn’t sure if she heard me. No sooner had I spoken the words than I saw a literal light at the end of the tunnel. My heart began to race.