Chapter 6
Heather
It was the worst possible timing. Heather looked at the envelope on the table before her.
She had folded the letter which confirmed her decree absolute and placed it inside.
There was no point reading through those words again, she knew them off by heart now.
Final Judgement, marriage contract, set aside, altogether unconnected – that was the bones of it.
The divorce had been an age ago, her solicitor had only now got around to sending out the paperwork.
He might not even have sent it out yet, had it not been for the fact that the second letter was far more pressing.
Her mother’s will; there’d be no surprises there, but still she couldn’t open that today, there was only so much anyone could take in one day.
Later. She placed it on the table, standing to attention, as if there was any danger she might forget it was there.
Heather wiped a tear from her cheek. It was senseless to cry over something she knew was the right thing for both her and her now ex-husband.
Today, even if it made absolutely no sense at all, she wanted more than anything else the arms of her parents around her.
It was ridiculous, she couldn’t remember the last time her mother had comforted her; as a child, all of that had been from her father, a gentle bear of a man who smelled of cigarettes and hard work.
Now, on the air, she thought she caught a whiff of lily of the valley.
She found that comforting in a way: Constance Macken’s scent.
Old Constance was probably long gone now and that gorgeous house they had by the sea.
Funny, how she remembered it so clearly.
Of course, if they were on Pin Hill, it was down to Constance to make everything better with a kiss and a hug.
Suddenly, Heather craved a soothing voice and the feeling that she was unconditionally loved by one person in the world.
It was crazy; she had never had a bond like that with her own mother.
If anything, she always felt Dotty only tolerated her, never that she actually loved her.
It was the drink, she’d always known it.
As the years had crept past, Heather had found herself building up a relationship with her mother that succeeded best in short bursts, in steering conversations only through trivial topics and never making requests that required any real emotional support.
It seemed to Heather that Dotty had long ago sunk into an all-absorbing bitterness, so it was hard to last for much longer than a half an hour in company that required anything approaching kindness.
And yet, for all the shallowness of their relationship, today, with her divorce papers in her hands, Heather felt as if she needed her mother more acutely than she’d ever needed her before.
Except, of course, it was too late now. She couldn’t even face going back to the house.
The last time she was there had discombobulated her completely.
She wondered now if her mother had known she was going to die.
Certainly, there was a feeling of sparseness to the place, as if she’d tipped every bit of old rubbish that had always hidden in corners.
There was no evidence of a lifelong drinking habit to be seen anywhere in the house.
She’d rung Carmelita, who seemed to think she was bonkers.
‘Bottles? But there are no bottles,’ Carmelita had said in her broken English.
‘Your mother hasn’t taken a drink in almost a full year.
’ Heather couldn’t understand it, her mother had finally given up drinking?
That was something she had never expected to happen.
Indeed, now she was gone, it probably would always feel as if someone had made it up; like a fairy story, she wanted to believe but it was just too fantastical to be true.
She gazed at her reflection in the window opposite.
Forty-nine years of age. Lines across her forehead and creases around her eyes had etched themselves into her face without her noticing over the last decade.
She hardly knew the woman staring back at her and, this morning, she felt every one of those forty-nine years.
She was too old to procrastinate. She needed to make a plan to get on with her life.
It was official now. She was no longer married.
Her business was sold. She had nowhere to call home, unless you counted the little terraced house she’d grown up in and, somehow, that had not felt like home in a very long time.
Desperate to find some anchor or direction, she made an appointment with a life coach, pushing aside the second letter from her solicitor for now.
A life coach, no less.
And after Heather had offloaded all her concerns and detailed as much of her life to date as she could, the woman just sat there and looked at her and said simply:
‘So, it’s time to make a plan. It’s time to move forward.’ And she had the audacity to smile as if this was somehow a ground-breaking revelation.
‘Of course I need to move on,’ Heather snapped impatiently, ‘but the thing is, I don’t know where to move on to next.
’ And she felt that familiar swell of emotion rise up in her, where she didn’t know if she wanted to cry or kick something with sheer frustration.
‘That’s why I came here…’ she said then, examining the woman as if she might give up some secrets just by close inspection.
‘I think, deep down, you know exactly what you need to do next.’ The woman smiled again and Heather only felt more infuriated with her.
‘Actually, I don’t, I really, really don’t,’ Heather said. ‘That’s why I came here, it’s why I filled out that stupid bloody sheet and it’s why I’m paying you over a hundred quid an hour to give me advice that I can actually use.’
‘The purpose of today is not for me to tell you what to do, Heather, I explained this already. It’s so you can uncover what it is that gives you most joy.’
‘Oh, God, seriously…’ And Heather realised she was going round in circles and this wasn’t helping one bit.
‘Seriously, if you don’t know what to do yet, then just do what you have to and a path will become obvious as you move through life.’
And for that, Heather handed over a hundred pounds and stepped out into the spring sunshine on a London street feeling even more at sea than before. That was when she spotted the bookshop across the road.
It was just a door really, with a very narrow window to the side and a small sign on the footpath: ‘Second-hand Books’.
She was attracted to it immediately; since the divorce and selling the flat, she had found herself strangely drawn to other people’s belongings.
It was funny, because although she’d been a voracious reader over the years, she’d never been one to hold onto books.
There hadn’t been one bookcase in the flat over which to pick out what would be hers and what would eventually go in the huge crates that had finally taken Philip from her home and her world.
‘Hello.’ The old man hardly lifted his eyes from the paperback he was absorbed in when Heather walked into the shop.
It was a tiny space, with books old and new in every corner.
They were crammed to the ceiling on overflowing shelves and spilling out of boxes haphazardly placed on the floor, what little there was of it, and permeating everything the smell of old books: woody; vanilla; utopia.
Heather inhaled it and thought she couldn’t remember the last time she’d smelled that faint aroma since her childhood.
The old man left her to look around without interference.
It was that sort of place, a small disorderly corner of London to browse and lose half an hour or maybe more, among books other people no longer wanted.
He seemed oblivious to her and even that was strangely comforting.
There was no real order to the place, no point coming in looking for the latest thriller, because it was unlikely you’d find it here, unless someone had dropped it in by accident.
Even the disorganisation of the place was soothing; Heather was quickly lost in shelf after shelf, picking up books she’d heard of and reading the fly covers.
Some books she’d read and had forgotten about and others that just spoke to her from the spines or the slightly battered-looking covers.
She picked up three paperbacks, not classics, but books that had been on her radar at some point but she had never managed to get round to reading.
‘Ah, a good choice,’ the old man said when she brought them to the cash desk.
‘I’ve never noticed this place before,’ she said as he rang up her purchases.
‘No, most people don’t. My daughter says I should call the books pre-loved, rather than second-hand,’ he said.
‘Oh no, I hate that term, much better to call a thing what it is. After all, if someone loved them that much, they’d never have parted with them to begin with, would they?’
‘I don’t know about that.’ The old man looked at her now and handed her the little carrier bag with her purchases.
‘I had a woman who called me up regularly looking for this book.’ He bent down and took a battered-looking old hardback from under the desk.
It looked like a library edition to Heather, but then she looked more closely.
‘Oh my God, is that a Maggie Macken?’ she asked, holding out her hand and taking it from him.
‘You’ve heard of her?’ The old man shook his head as if wonders would never cease.
‘I know, what are the chances? She was a friend of my family.’ It was the easiest way to describe the relationship between her and this writer who had died long before Heather really had a chance to get to know her.
‘Her books are long out of print, I mean, the chances of picking one up are so slim these days…’ The old man was talking as she turned the book over in her hand. ‘But the woman who had been looking for a copy is mentioned on the dedication…’ he said.
‘Oh.’ And Heather opened the cover to see the faded typeface that had long gone out of fashion.
To Constance and Dotty, may the friendship you share last as long as the sea is hitting the shore and remember that home is always within a whisper of Ocean’s End.
With love. Maggie . ‘Oh, my God.’ It felt as if she had been gut-punched.
‘All right, love?’ The man was looking at her as if she was about to collapse right across his cluttered counter.
‘I’m fine, it’s just the—’She had to stop to catch her breath. ‘It’s just the Dotty in the dedication is my mother and she died just recently.’
‘That’s…’ The old man scratched his head as if trying to figure something out. ‘That might be the biggest coincidence I can put down in all my days here…’ And he went on to explain that it was Dotty who had been ringing him up on a regular basis to find this very book for her.
‘That’s…’ Heather felt the book like a tonne weight suddenly in her hands. The idea that she had arrived in this very shop and now had this very book in her hands. It sent a shiver down her spine.
‘A gift,’ the old man said. ‘From me, for your mother and now for you.’
‘I couldn’t possibly accept it,’ she said, but she knew she was going to buy it if he’d let her. She had no intention of leaving this shop without it; that suddenly felt as if it was the most important thing she could possibly do right now, as if it might somehow put something right in her world.
‘Of course you can, it’s not worth anything to me and I have a feeling you are meant to have it.’
‘Isn’t it rare, I mean, if it’s out of print?’
‘Probably, but no-one reads those old-fashioned romances any more, it’s all about killing and terrorising you and giving you nightmares before you go to sleep these days.’ Again he shook his head as if he’d never understand the modern world.
‘That’s really kind of you…’ She looked around the shop and, before she thought about it, she blurted out, ‘I don’t suppose you could keep an eye out for any of her other books that might come your way?
I’ll leave you my card.’ But, of course, she didn’t have a card any more.
‘Well, I’ll leave you my mobile number, if that’s okay? ’
‘I’ll keep an eye out, but the chances of another of her books arriving in here now, well I’d say I was just lucky to get that one. It was in a box that some lady had found under her mother’s bed, tucked away for years like guilty secrets.’ He smiled kindly now.
And for the first time in weeks, even though she couldn’t understand why it was, Heather felt as if she had something to look forward to.
She pushed the door into the next coffee shop she came to, ordered an Americano and lodged herself in a deep armchair before sinking into Never Lose Heart .
This was one of the last books Maggie Macken had written, but the publisher had listed all her others – twenty-four in all.
Somehow, that was an unexpected source of comfort to Heather as she dived into the story.