Chapter Twenty-Two
Although he pleaded with her, tried to make her see reason, it was useless because Ella had always been a very unreasonable person.
Unreasonable since birth according to their parents.
Ella had been a screamer while Gabe had been a placid baby.
‘Once she started to walk, there was no stopping her and once she started talking, there was no shutting her up,’ their mother always recalled fondly.
‘While you, Gabe, you wanted to be carried everywhere and we worried that you were never going to talk.’
Probably because he couldn’t get a word in edgeways, but once he did start talking, he didn’t bother with one-word declarations but skipped straight ahead to full sentences.
But now Ella had reached the peak of unreasonableness. #peakunreason as his undergraduate students would probably say.
It was the day after the speed dating event, (though Ella kept referring to it in very unflattering terms like debacle and disaster and ‘lawsuit waiting to happen’ when she’d filled Mona in on all the details, which also completely undermined Gabe’s authority).
Now that everyone had calmed down, it clearly made sense for Gabe to continue overseeing The Love Library.
Ella still wasn’t having any of it. ‘Over my dead body, you will,’ she insisted. ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you? To stress me out so thoroughly that I drop down dead.’
Completely unreasonable.
‘But you’re meant to be on maternity leave,’ Gabe pointed out.
‘Yes, I should be but you can’t be trusted to do head librarian stuff unsupervised,’ Ella said, which was untrue and actually rather unkind too.
The previous evening after Tess had left, without even saying goodbye, just shooting a dark, unfathomable look in Gabe’s direction, he’d gone home with Ella.
Or rather, the little fat baby was still asleep and rather than wake him, he’d gone back with them and had spent a very uncomfortable night on his sister’s sofa with Avi curled up on his chest.
‘You’ve had a decent night’s sleep,’ Gabe said now as they stood behind the Loans Desk, with Mona not even bothering to hide the fact that she was eavesdropping.
Even Patrick had put down his phone. Ostensibly so he could add some new library users’ names to their database, but Gabe knew that he was earwigging too.
‘I don’t know why you’re still being so moody. ’
‘Oh my God, you did not say that,’ Mona muttered gleefully while Ella sucked in a furious breath.
‘I’m being moody because last night’s shenanigans …
You don’t want The Love Library to be a success and you used poor Tess as a tool to bring about its downfall,’ Ella said, which wasn’t what had happened.
Not at all. She turned to Mona and Patrick AKA the peanut gallery.
‘Did I mention that Mellors from Lady Chatterley’s Lover grabbed her bottom? ’
‘No!’ Mona breathed, her eyes gleaming. She was enjoying this far too much.
It was time to get things back on track; to make Ella see reason. ‘I would never do anything to hurt or even upset Tess. I can’t believe that you think I would be that underhand. There’s a reason why I have never championed the works of Machiavelli.’
That, at least, gave Ella some pause for thought. ‘I suppose it is quite out of character. I mean, you can be an idiot but you’re not evil.’
Well, Gabe certainly wouldn’t be going to his sister for a character reference any time soon but at least she was softening and might eventually see sense. ‘If this ill-advised date with Darcy, even though he has a six-month waiting list, is a success …’
‘No “if” about it,’ Patrick piped up. ‘It will be a success. Tess is lovely!’
‘She is, isn’t she?’ Ella agreed.
‘Always so friendly. Not like some of our patrons,’ Mona added. ‘If I was Darcy on a date with Tess, I wouldn’t know where to put myself.’
Darcy had better not put himself anywhere too near Tess. ‘As I was saying …’ Gabe rechannelled his unhappy thoughts. ‘If the date is a success, there’s still absolutely no way that she’s taking him for an overnight. It wouldn’t be proper.’
‘It’s Darcy! He wouldn’t do anything improper, not like your mate Mellors,’ Ella reminded him, because she was never going to let that go. ‘You didn’t object to the idea of taking loans out overnight when you were planning your boring philosophers’ speakers’ tour.’
‘That was completely different …’
‘And just to make sure that you don’t do anything else to jeopardise things …’ Ella picked up the three-volume set that was resting on the counter. The library copy of Pride and Prejudice. ‘I’m keeping this under lock and key. Because you obviously can’t be trusted.’
‘Well, as I can’t be trusted and as you are apparently no longer on maternity leave, then it’s clear that my services here are no longer required,’ Gabe said and he marched out with his dignity still very much intact.
In no way could it be described as a storming out.
Or even, perish the thought, a flounce.
Gabe was still brooding about everything that had come to pass a couple of days later.
It was a Friday, which meant he had to take the infamous second-year undergraduate class on a tour of Nineteenth-Century German Philosophy and Idealism. If Gabe managed to get through their seminar without making one of them burst into tears, or bursting into tears himself, it would be a miracle.
Two of them were meant to have prepared a presentation on the pessimist philosophers. Gabe really wasn’t in the mood for their pedestrian views on the likes of Schopenhauer and Mainl?nder, no doubt assisted by ChatGPT.
As they filed into his office, fighting to sit in the chairs furthest away from Gabe’s desk, like that would make them inconspicuous, he cast a jaundiced eye over his students. It was going to be a tedious two hours. It always was.
Really, what was he doing with his life?
‘Oh, that’s my favourite book!’ His maudlin reverie was interrupted by Kristin, the student most likely to weep if Gabe so much as glanced in her direction.
She’d drawn the short straw, or rather the chair closest to Gabe’s desk, but her attention was on the paperback that he’d dumped there a couple of weeks ago.
It was the copy of Pride and Prejudice, which Tess had bought for him, which he’d promised to read but hadn’t got round to.
After all, he had been a little busy reading all those other novels, entirely for her benefit.
So she’d have some fun and flirtatious dates but not so fun and flirtatious that she’d continue to think that her best chance for love was to be found in the pages of a novel.
Well, that had spectacularly backfired. Now she was going on a date with her Regency himbo, the alleged dreamboat Darcy and there was nothing that Gabe could do about it.
He certainly wasn’t going to read all about how great Darcy was.
How handsome he was. How kind he was. How he took care of widows and orphans and little puppies and …
‘Have you read it, Mr Sharma?’ Kirstin was obviously feeling very brave today.
‘I’ve told you countless times to call me Gabe,’ he said heavily, which was enough to make Kirstin blink rapidly and tearfully. ‘And no, I haven’t read it. Generally, I don’t read novels.’
‘But don’t you think that some of the greatest philosophy can be found in novels?’ asked Louis, sitting by the door, who rarely did the set reading. No wonder if he was filling his head with all manner of fictional nonsense.
‘No, I don’t,’ Gabe said flatly.
‘If you didn’t want to read it, then you could always watch the film,’ Kirstin said, who clearly didn’t know to quit while she was ahead.
‘Oh my God! Why would you watch that film when the 1995 BBC version is the best ever adaptation?’ shrieked Penny from the corner, making it the first time that she’d ever expressed an independent thought in all their time together. ‘Young Colin Firth in a wet shirt. I rest my case!’
‘I see your young Colin Firth in a wet shirt and I raise you Matthew Macfadyen’s hand flex,’ shouted someone else.
And so it came to pass that for the first time ever, no one cried during a seminar on Nineteenth-Century German Philosophy and Idealism, though Gabe was sure that he came close a couple of times.
Instead, even though he usually had to drag opinions (ill-informed and very uninspired opinions) out of them with every tool in his academic arsenal, for the next two hours a fierce debate raged over which of the different adaptations of Pride and Prejudice could be said to be the best. The 1995 BBC version finally nosing ahead and Kirstin standing up to punch the air with both fists in triumph.
‘We haven’t even talked about Bridget Jones,’ she said, once Gabe had told her, very sharply, to kindly sit down.
That name again. ‘Where do you know Bridget Jones from?’ he asked in some surprise. ‘She’s a friend of er, well, a friend. An acquaintance really.’
Kirstin stared at him brazenly. So brazenly that it made Gabe feel nostalgic for all the times that Kirstin had wept in his class. ‘Are you even for real, bro?’
Life was currently far too real for Gabe’s liking and instead of heading for the library after the tutorial, he found himself making his way home.
Home was a top-floor flat in a warehouse conversion in Bermondsey.
A ten-minute walk to Borough Market and Tess’s friend, the infamous Bridget Jones.
As soon as he stepped through the door, he dumped his satchel, not even bothering to sort through his papers or reshelve the books he’d taken to work.
He toed off his shoes, shrugged out of his jacket, got a beer from the fridge and flopped onto the sofa, which was positioned in front of a huge picture window so that the afternoon sun poured in.
Then he opened the book he’d taken home with him. Not even a book. A novel.