Chapter 17 #2
it would be to have a man singing her praises in such a heartfelt way.
She tried to picture Roman doing it, but admittedly the raw material wasn’t encouraging.
There was only so much praise you can heap on someone who just sells stuff.
And that was her, wasn’t it? She had tried to be an editor and had even harbored deeply private dreams about writing her own book one day.
Facing facts, she had made no progress with the one and very little with the other.
No, she sold books, that was all. There was no marriage on the horizon, no beautiful babies like Ruth, no career progression, and she had even crawled back from her whole London adventure: nearly nine years of slog, with nothing to show for it.
Not much of a catch, she thought sadly, wondering what—if anything—Roman saw in her.
Her stomach flipped. Surely, he wasn’t just making out with her to gain some sort of commercial advantage? She went cold.
Feeling the need to focus on Gabriel’s mouth intensely, in an attempt to comprehend what he was saying, Jules sensed the rest
of the room fade away. The chatter dimmed to a dull roar, and dark spots started dancing in front of her eyes, crowding in
from the edges until she felt she was looking down a dark tunnel.
Cutting through the mists came Roman’s voice, sure and certain: “I need to get Jules to bed,” he announced, triggering a ribald
cheer. “Idiots,” he remarked, as he held out Jules’s jacket for her to put it on, then wrapped his arm around her shoulders
to lead her out onto the high street.
The door swung shut behind them, and she sucked in the cool evening air like a drowning woman. Then, oblivious to the curiosity
of passersby, she doubled forward, her head dropping to her knees. Immediately feeling better, she was grateful for Roman’s
silence, his lack of fuss.
Several long seconds later, she straightened gingerly.
“Okay?” he asked.
As the mist cleared, Jules focused on his concerned face. “Yeah, sorry. Felt a bit weird,” she admitted.
“You went white,” he told her. “It was hot in there. And it’s been a long week.”
“I’m good,” she told him briskly. “You go back in.”
“Absolutely not,” he answered, taking her arm and more or less frog-marching her down the street. “You’re going home, and
I’m going to make sure you get there safely.”
Huddling discreetly in Capelthorne’s doorway, Roman and Jules shared a tender kiss.
“This was nice,” she said, drawing away at last, resting her hand on his chest. “Your friends are nice.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “They liked you. So do I. Now, go and get some sleep.”
It felt less like taking her mother out for lunch and more like going to the dentist for a root canal.
Clutching a beautiful bunch of tulips from the florist on the hill, Jules boarded the bus to Middlemass. It was a beautiful
spring day, and she was glad she had made a point of booking one of the tables overlooking the garden at the Middlemass Arms.
She had left nothing to chance—nothing for her mother to complain about, although Jules was sure she would find something.
But that was not the right attitude, she told herself, sitting up straighter. She and Maggie may choose not to see too much
of each other, but Maggie was her mother, it was Mother’s Day, and it was—dare she say it?—nice to be away from the shop.
And if she had been gutted to turn down Roman’s alternative suggestion of a walk up to the ruined castle and a picnic at the
top, she was a bad daughter to admit it to herself. And she had no complaints; she and Roman had only just spent the evening
together after all. Even if it had been with all his mates in tow.
“Well, this is nice,” Jules told her mother valiantly, as Colin the innkeeper brought them plates piled high. They had both
chosen his Sunday roast, and Jules had been checking out the puddings; she had her eye on a neighboring table’s sweet pink
rhubarb crumble, drowning in creamy custard speckled with vanilla seeds. Faced with a dauntingly large main course, she was
worried pudding ambitions might have to be shelved.
This week the roast dinner was pork from Hollytree Farm just up the road, Colin was telling them as they ate.
With juicy meat, huge chunks of light-as-air crackling, along with the usual accom paniments, he was right to be proud.
Hollytree Farm was largely a dairy, he went on, but what meat it did produce was excellent, and butchers from far and wide were keen to stock it.
The brothers preferred, instead, to supply local pubs and restaurants, including Freya’s, although, as Colin pointed out to the two women, it was lucky that being schoolmates with the brothers was enough to make it onto their customer list, as he didn’t much fancy marrying either of them.
“Talking of love,” said Jules, taking up the conversational baton when Colin had gone, “Aunt Flo has found herself a lovely
bloke and he’s a fabulous cook, by her account. Isn’t that great?”
“No fool like an old fool,” sniffed Maggie. “Don’t tell me she’s launched herself onto a dating app in her dotage?”
“Better than that,” said Jules, describing how Flo and Graham’s friendship had developed. “It’s a mutual love of books and
food,” she went on. “You should be happy for her, surely?”
“Didn’t say I wasn’t,” said Maggie, who might as well have done. “Please tell me it’s nothing serious, though.”
“Why can’t it be?” asked Jules. “I, for one, would love to see Aunt Flo settled with a nice partner,” she went on firmly.
“She’s spent all these decades looking after everyone else. How about she’s the one getting looked after for a change?”
“You won’t say that when she marries him and then the last of what passes for the Capelthorne fortune goes out of the family,”
said Maggie, taking a large swig of wine. She was looking away, or she would have seen a micro-expression of absolute disdain
on Jules’s face.
“You can’t think I would care for a moment what Aunt Flo does with her money after she dies,” said Jules, working hard to
keep her voice neutral and level. “It is entirely up to her what she does with it, and I have no expectations. Nor should
you.”
“You do surprise me,” said Maggie. “Surely the thought of your precious bookshop being left to someone else bothers you just a little bit? The building alone has to be worth about six hundred thou. Course, I can’t imagine the business is worth much on its own.
..” Maggie went on, taking Jules’s silence as approval or, at least, interest. “But the Capelthornes have precious little to their name. I, for one, hope I’ll get something when she goes, because it’s not great approaching your fifties and still having monthly rent like a millstone around my neck.
You’re young. You don’t have to worry about accumulating wealth, but it’ll start to bother you big-time when you get to my age, I can assure you. ”
The time had come to knock her mother off her conversational course before one of them—okay, Jules—said something she regretted.
“I’m seeing Roman Montbeau,” she announced.
The effect was immediate. Maggie fell silent, and when Jules looked up, with trepidation, she saw her mother’s mouth was hanging
open in shock.
“Seriously?” Maggie said at last. Her voice had risen by an octave.
“No, not ‘seriously,’” said Jules, deliberately misunderstanding. “It’s just a casual thing. We are enjoying each other’s
company.” Which, to be honest, massively underplayed the emotional entanglement that Jules was now feeling. She had so nearly
blurted those three little words to him the day before. Just as well she hadn’t; it would have been ridiculous to say such
a thing after so little time seeing each other. He would probably have been horrified.
“I mean you are seriously seeing a Montbeau?” her mother clarified, the tone of her voice still so high-pitched with incredulity as to be deafening
to any bats that happened to be passing. “Even though he’s trying to ruin you?”
“It’s true, I was annoyed when Portneath Books opened,” admitted Jules, “but to be fair, we don’t have a right to a monopoly. Roman’s just doing what he knows—he was working for a big publisher in the US—and he has business ideas he wants to explore, interesting ones actually. We’ve talked a lot—”
“Rubbish,” interrupted Maggie. “Two bookshops in a place the size of Portneath? It’s ridiculous. He wants to put you and Aunt
Flo out of business, no ifs, no buts.”
But Jules refused to be daunted. “Hay-on-Wye’s probably no bigger than Portneath, and there are more than twenty bookshops
there,” she said. “They’ve got the literary festival, of course, which helps, granted, but also, each bookshop has established
itself in its own little niche. Capelthorne’s can do the same. Charlie’s doing really well with the antiquarian books—”
“That person in dungarees, with shaved hair and a ring through its nose?” scoffed Maggie.
“Charlie is simply expressing himself in a way that feels authentic to him. No one has a problem with that—except you,” said
Jules icily, losing patience, “and the old books are something that’s totally unique to us. Portneath Books doesn’t sell used
books at all, and Roman has no plans to start. He told me.”
“Oh, you poor, sweet, innocent fool,” sneered Maggie, putting down her knife and fork and wiping her mouth with her napkin.
She oozed loftiness, seasoned with spite. “You don’t seriously think that Montbeau man actually cares for you?”
“I think his intentions are honorable,” blurted out Jules, confused, wondering why she had suddenly started speaking like
someone from a Jane Austen novel. She should have remembered how her mother always managed to knock her off-balance. “We owe
each other nothing, it’s just a casual thing. But it’s nice,” she went on defiantly. “And for heaven’s sake, isn’t the whole
Montbeau and Capelthorne thing getting a bit ridiculous now? As far as I can gather from Aunt Flo, it all dates back to some