Chapter 33
Inevitably, the housemates from London texted, at the worst possible time, to say their tenancy was coming to an end, and
please could Jules collect her stuff, which was still stored in the attic.
“I’ll drive you,” Roman had declared, when Jules wondered aloud what to do. “We can go tomorrow.”
“You’re too busy,” Jules insisted. “The building work, the insurance company...”
“I’m not actually doing it myself,” Roman pointed out. “They can cope for one day. It’ll be fun. Can’t remember the last time
I was in London...”
Jules and Roman set off at dawn in Henry’s station wagon, because it had the most space, not that Jules’s possessions amounted
to much, as Jules had insisted to Roman. She was loathe to put Henry out, for fear of annoying him.
“It’s not Dad’s only car,” insisted Roman. “Believe me, he’s got garages full to choose from.”
Jules couldn’t bring herself to answer, but Roman quickly noticed.
“I’m not my father,” he said quietly, turning briefly from the road to look at her.
“I know, I know... But I just can’t understand why—with all that money—it is so important for your dad to take Capelthorne’s just because he can. For the money. I mean, now it looks as if there will be
no bookshops in Portneath. Who could have imagined that a few weeks ago?”
“We can’t change our families,” Roman reasoned.
“But we can be better,” insisted Jules, clenching her fists and turning her whole body to face Roman in the driving seat.
“We will be. We are,” he replied. “It’ll be different now. We’ll show them.”
Even hitting the city at rush hour didn’t delay them for too long, due to Roman’s skill maneuvering the car in and out of
the lanes of traffic. Soon, with the autumn sun now high in the sky, they were pulling into the narrow Oppingham Road, filled
with mean, Victorian, terraced houses. Jules’s house, with its peeling blue door and rotten window frames, was weirdly unfamiliar-looking
to Jules. She supposed she had rarely seen it in daylight, working such long days.
The stale cooking smells in the narrow hallway were familiar enough, but it didn’t feel like home. Jules realized with a gasp
of dismay they had not thought to bring a stepladder to get into the loft. She wondered what on earth they would do, but Roman
stood on a chair to push the hatch out of the way and then effortlessly pulled himself up into the darkness. Soon he was handing
down bulging bin bags and boxes of books to Jules down on the landing.
There seemed no point hanging around, so once the car was loaded, Jules left a little note on the kitchen table with her keys,
and they left.
“What’s it like being back?” asked Roman, as he took them, without the benefit of satnav, back to the motorway.
“Depressing,” Jules replied.
“As in, depressing you don’t live here anymore?”
“Ah, no... relieved about that, I think,” said Jules, realizing this was true.
“So, no more London? No more publishing?”
“Whoa, steady. What else am I going to do? I’m going to have no job in Portneath by Christmas.”
“What then?”
“Two words,” Jules said. “LinkedIn.”
“Actually, that’s one—”
“I know!” she said, laughing.
“I mean, I’ve mentioned before, there’s New York? I’ve got contacts.”
But Jules was silent. It wasn’t like she hadn’t felt the allure of the States before in all those years she was slogging away
in London. Who wouldn’t be dreaming of the publishing scene in the United States, with its bigger advances, bigger budgets,
bigger audiences? Without its Net Book Agreement, the UK publishing scene had felt hopelessly impoverished and small by comparison.
But now that it was being offered to her on a plate, Jules wasn’t sure. Despite being delighted to escape Portneath eleven
years before, and despite all these months of struggle and drama, her time in the town had been joyful too. Portneath had
started to feel like home.
It was home.
“Good as new,” said Flo, shaking out the green silk dress and holding it up for Jules’s approval. It was freshly returned
from the dry cleaners, and Flo had just finished sewing a tiny black replacement hook and eye at the top of the zip. “You’ll
be the belle of the ball,” she declared.
“ Still not really my scene,” muttered Jules awkwardly, thanking her aunt for her efforts with a grateful smile. “Bit out of my depth
with all that stuff.”
“Nonsense,” Flo retorted. “Us Capelthornes are just as deserving of a seat at the top table as any fancy Middlemass Montbeau lot, and don’t you forget it. You’ll go,” she said firmly. “And you’ll enjoy yourself.”
“So, tell me more about this mad plan of Diana’s,” said Jules, keen to change the subject. She picked up the estate agent’s
brochure and studied the picture of the little cottage on the front. It did look enchanting.
“Come and see for yourself?” suggested Flo, looking at her watch. “You and I can gang up against Diana. I need all the defenses
I can lay my hands on. She’ll be here in a minute.”
And then, right on cue, Diana breezed in, clanging the shop bell as she flung open the door.
She was an implacable force, all right, thought Jules, resigned to her and Flo’s fate.
Hollyhock Cottage was adorable.
Jules realized when they got there that she remembered it fondly from childhood, the little white-painted picket gate opening
onto the bosky, partly hidden lane that ran down the side of the churchyard. For years, Jules remembered it being inhabited
by a comfortable old lady, almost invariably wearing her hair in a bun and sporting a white French linen apron tied around
her ample middle. Her tiny front garden was a riot of hollyhocks and roses, and Jules remembered a large ginger cat who would
bask in the sunshine on the wide stone step.
Now, the old lady and her cat were long gone.
The hollyhocks were wayward, with no one to tie them upright; they straggled drunken across the little path, rain-sodden and rusty.
Despite that, the years of care and love poured into the little garden were evident.
At the memory of this smiling woman whose name she never knew, Jules’s eyes filled unexpectedly with tears.
It felt like the past was slipping inexorably away from her, and in the passing of time, she saw that her darling aunt Flo too would be a memory.
The thought of being in a world without her aunt in it left her feeling bereft, grieving a loss that hadn’t even happened yet.
Clearing her throat, and deflecting a piercing look from Diana, who missed nothing, she pretended to examine a headily scented carmine rose, shedding petals at the slightest touch of her hand, until she had regained her composure.
The thatch eaves were low and thick, cossetting the little cottage in a comfortable, insulating blanket. The roof rose in
a curve to accommodate the windows on the upper floor and dipped low to form a porch over the studded oak front door. Jules
distracted herself from her preoccupations by concentrating on the details of what she was seeing, ducking a little as she
went through the low doorway, straight into the main downstairs room.
Flo’s eyes were bright as she assessed the cozy sitting room, with its woodburning stove and deep bookshelves on the walls
either side of the inglenook. To Jules, it looked like how she imagined Mr. Tumnus’s place in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe , a book she had adored as a child. She remembered Aunt Flo reading it to her over and over again in the flat above the shop
when she went there for sleepovers.
There was a ledge and brace door leading to the little kitchen, with its stove tucked into a wide fireplace, a stone sink
under the window, and a brick paver floor, burnished to a shine by hundreds of layers of wax. The ceiling was too low for
wall cupboards, but Flo nodded approvingly at the floor-level cupboards and shelves and the pretty gingham curtains concealing
a washing machine and dishwasher. What the kitchen lacked in cupboard space was more than compensated for by the tiny, cool
pantry, with its broad slate counter and room underneath for a fridge.
Upstairs revealed a small bathroom and two pretty, rose-wallpapered bedrooms with sloping ceilings and varnished wooden floors.
There was a huge, high wrought-iron bed in one room and twin beds in the other, all of them with lovingly created patchwork quilts.
Had they been made, over years of toil, by the lady with the bun and the pinny?
Opening the stable door from the kitchen into the back garden, Flo was unable to stifle a cry of pleasure and excitement.
“Now this is what I call a garden,” she declared delightedly, examining the gnarly gray-brown stems of the wisteria that had wound
their way across the entire length of the cottage and over the kitchen door. “That’s taken some work,” she said approvingly.
“Wisteria can be quite a challenge. And this”—she toed a bare piece of dark, crumbly earth—“is jolly good soil.”
“You know what you’re talking about,” said Diana, sounding thrilled that her campaign was being so well received.
“Theoretically perhaps,” admitted Flo. “The courtyard at Capelthorne’s doesn’t offer much of an opportunity.”
“You have always wanted a proper garden,” said Jules, earning herself a conspiratorial look of approval from Diana.
“It’s a hundred feet long,” contributed the sweet, little estate agency girl, who had said practically nothing up to that
point. “That’s generous for a house of this size.”
Examination of the garden took longer than the house, but eventually the anxious fidgeting of the estate agent grew unignorable,
and Flo reluctantly wrapped up her exploration.
“It’s very charming, I’ll give you that,” conceded Flo, when Diana had persuaded the two other women to repair to the Middlemass
Arms for an illicit mid-afternoon glass of wine.
“It’s perfect for you,” said Diana, plonking her hands, palms down, on the table for emphasis. “Tell me it isn’t, I dare you.”
“What a shame it’s completely beyond my reach,” continued Flo.
“It staggers me that such a small place should cost such an extraordinary amount of money. How can all our young families possibly afford to put a perfectly ordinary roof over their heads at those prices is beyond me. What are they to do? Tell me that?”
“It’s you we’re talking about now,” said Jules.
“You’ve got savings?” queried Diana, eyebrow raised.
“Yes, of course,” admitted Flo, “but not in that order of magnitude.”
“Put your savings down as a deposit and get a mortgage?” suggested Jules, realizing, even as she said it, what a ludicrous
suggestion that was.
“At my age,” snorted Flo. “Who’s going to lend to me? An old baggage with no job and no capital,” she added, with an involuntary
downturn of the mouth.
“Not much to show for all those decades of work,” agreed Diana sympathetically, all bombast spent in the face of her dear
friend’s admittedly very difficult position.
“But the grimoire!” declared Jules, raising her glass. “May Bridget reach through the centuries and have the last word in
the Montbeau versus Capelthorne face-off. A woman to the rescue—it’s long overdue—and if anyone’s capable of it, our Bridget
would rock it.”
“To the grimoire!” echoed Flo and Diana, raising their glasses with a certainty that—it was obvious—neither of the older women
felt.
“And anyway,” said Flo firmly, “even if an insane amount of money could be magicked up by the sale of the grimoire, then the priority is obviously to sort out the lease on the shop. Which, of course,
is also an impossibility.”
And that, Jules had to admit, was probably very true.
Flo, being a war baby, had packed cheese and pickle sandwiches for their trip to London.
She couldn’t bear to spend money on the buffet car sandwiches, which, Charlie and Jules had to agree, weren’t up to much anyhow.
She did consent to Jules buying a round of coffees at the station café as they waited for their train to arrive, and the three of them stood shivering on the platform, hands clasped around the cardboard cups for warmth.
Autumn had most definitely arrived now. The air was raw, and a dull gray haze shrouded the sun. Winter awaited, soon enough,
and with it, a dramatic change in circumstances again. Jules would be out of a job and homeless. She had felt insulated and
warmed by her relationship with Roman—they were spending every moment they could together—but reality had to intrude at some
point, or what was she going to do? Let the man keep her in the style to which she would like to become accustomed? She could
see his family loving that.
“Of course, there’s every possibility it will sell for just a few hundred pounds,” Flo mused. “It’s not in great condition,
after all. Perhaps no one will bid.”
“They’ll bid,” Charlie reassured her. “Feedback from the auction house is that they’ve got at least two buyers lined up for
telephone bidding, and there’s this private collector in the States who they reckon will really want to get their hands on
it. Plus, we’re destined to make a few thou from the other six books they’ve listed for us.”
“Yes, but you never know,” insisted Flo doggedly. “You just never know...”
Jules knew what her aunt was doing. By talking it down she was insulating against a disappointing result. It had always been
her way. Jules worried about the effect any profound failure would have on her. The stakes could hardly be higher. And in
a more mundane, practical sense, she worried about the older woman’s stamina. Doing the London trip twice in one day, with
the excitement of the auction in between, was a lot for a woman of Flo’s age, not least one who had so recently been unwell.
“I’m perfectly fine,” said Flo, noticing Jules’s anxious gaze.
Arriving at the auction house, Jules was amused to watch Flo being swept up and feted as quite the celebrity.
The three of them were met in reception by a charming woman who announced herself as the auction house’s communications manager, Vanessa.
She professed herself thrilled to meet not one but two Capelthorne women.
Corralled into a meeting room, the three of them discovered a feast of sushi laid out alongside some darling tiny Danish pastries, tea, coffee, and even a gold-foiled bottle of Crémant de Loire, which Vanessa popped the cork of with practiced ease.
“A toast,” she declared, when they all had a glass. “To Capelthorne women. Long may they reign.”
Jules caught Flo’s eye with an amused look as they raised their glasses. It hardly seemed the time to point out to Vanessa
that the Capelthorne name looked set to die forever with the self-same women in that room.