Chapter 2
“I’ve called us a taxi. It’s coming in an hour,” announced Flo as Jules shuffled into the kitchen for breakfast, rubbing her
eyes sleepily. She had slept badly and, without supper the night before, was in the market for several rounds of toast and
marmalade and a pot of strong tea before being forced to make anything approaching a sensible plan for the day.
“You eat like a little old lady,” Flo went on, watching Jules assemble her breakfast.
Jules shot her a look. “You’d know,” she observed mildly.
Despite the trickiness of the situation and the fatigue from the journey, she found being back in her beloved Middlemass calming,
as if, after just a few hours back at home, she was slightly less tightly wound. Her London life was so frenetic and stressful,
even her mother and her great-aunt in a state of chaos was relaxing by comparison. Having a good couple of hundred miles between
herself and her tyrant boss was relaxing too, even if the Monday morning make-or-break deadline was already inducing low-level
panic. She literally had a weekend to resolve this almighty muddle, she thought, sighing as she poured another cup from the
familiar brown stoneware teapot.
“I’m so sorry, darling,” said Flo softly, reading Jules’s thoughts. “I’ve got myself into quite a pickle, haven’t I?”
Jules mustered an upside-down smile. “We’ll sort it,” she said firmly, although she was struggling to convince herself , never mind anyone else.
Flo and Maggie together were a disaster—that was obvious—which was funny when you think of it. Her mother had so much to be
grateful to Aunt Flo for. It wasn’t as if she were even Jules’s proper grandmother. There was no obligation on her to have
stepped into the parental role when Jules’s real grandmother had died, leaving her mother, Maggie—just a child at that point—without
either of her parents. In truth, Flo, having raised Maggie as her own, then took up the role of stand-in grandmother for Jules
when Maggie got pregnant in her late teens. Nobody had thought twice about it or wondered whether Flo, perennially single,
had minded being lumbered with a child to raise. By the time it became clear that Maggie was too selfish, immature, and petulant
to raise her own child as a single mother, it had seemed natural that Flo would be there for little Jules too.
Yes, Flo was the lynchpin of the little family. They were a trio of strong, opinionated women, the standard-bearers for three
generations of Capelthornes. And they were the last of the family too, excluding a couple of distant cousins—the remaining
upholders of the family feud between themselves and the Montbeaus for reasons that Jules could barely remember and perhaps
never really knew. But that was a side issue now, Jules told herself, swallowing a last mouthful of toast and bracing herself
to get up and clear the table. The priority was sorting out Aunt Flo. This time the older woman needed her , and it was about time the tables were turned.
“Let me go and see what I can do at the shop,” Jules said. “I don’t think there’s much point in you coming as well...”
“I’m coming,” said Flo firmly.
And that was that.
Feeling more cheerful after her substantial breakfast, Jules manhandled Flo into the car, with Terry’s help. He seemed remarkably chipper for a man who had been driving drunk people around until the early hours of the morning.
They bowled along toward Portneath, with the watery late winter sunshine making the daffodils in the hedgerow glow golden,
the sea a thin ribbon of aquamarine sparkling in the distance.
“That Roman’s quite a catch, isn’t he?” Terry remarked over his shoulder to the two women in the back.
“Can’t see it myself,” said Jules repressively, but Terry was not easily daunted.
“What a family the Montbeaus are, though, eh?” he continued. “Real gentry... You can always tell good breeding, can’t you?”
He didn’t wait for a reply. “The house in Middlemass is grand enough in itself, but they own half of Portneath going back
hundreds of years too, I’ve been told.”
This time he paused for Jules’s response, but she pretended not to have heard, looking out the window as if the view were
the most fascinating thing she had ever seen. Clearly Terry knew nothing of the history, and she had no desire to inform him.
She only hoped Flo was going to be able to contain herself.
Predictably, though, Flo, demonstrated no such tact or diplomacy: “There’s nothing venerable about that family’s history,”
she enunciated haughtily. “They represent nothing other than a dynasty of thieves and scoundrels. And I do believe I am right
in saying that the young man to whom you refer is not a single jot better than the rest of them.”
Even the ebullient Terry got the hint after that, and the rest of the journey was carried out in uncomfortable silence.
Getting Flo safely out of the car and into the shop was no easier than it had been at the other end.
“That’s the guilty spot,” she announced, pointing with her good arm to the high stone step leading into the shop doorway. It was worn down in the middle from hundreds of years of feet passing over it and was also, Jules noted, coated in bright green algae.
“Arse over tit, I went,” Flo continued. “Of course it was market day, so there I am on the ground with my skirt up and my
knickers showing, making a right exhibition of myself in front of a rapt audience, just my luck... Although I have to say,
people were marvelously kind.”
Jules, looking up, saw the culprit immediately: a broken gutter right over the doorway, meaning that even now, with no recent
rain, there was a steady drip of water onto the step. The constant moisture had rendered it as slimy and slippery as a block
of ice. It might already be too late for Flo, but a gutter repair, a scrubbing brush, and a bucket of bleachy, hot water were
going to be essential if Capelthorne’s was to avoid being sued by an injured customer.
And it wasn’t just the gutter that had deteriorated since Jules had last looked. How long had it been? All the infrequent
trips back to Middlemass had been cursory, with barely a moment spent in Portneath other than her arrival at the station.
And that was despite the shop and Flo’s flat above being a home from home for her as a child. Now, at last, there she was,
seeing the little shop anew. Jules had always loved the many-paneled Georgian windowpanes, with their rippled glass that twinkled
in the sunlight like a beaming smile, but the glass was dull and dusty now, the glossy scarlet window frames cracked and peeling.
The hand-painted sign above the windows proclaimed the simple legend “Capelthorne’s Books” picked out in loopy gold italics,
with “est. 1925” smaller, in the right-hand corner. It was faded now, with bare wood showing in parts.
This Aladdin’s cave of book-treasure—the little shop in the heart of the high street that stretched crookedly down the hill from the castle to the sea—had gone from being a jewel and a landmark to something that spoke of fatigue and decay. It looked weary. Spent.
Jules blinked back sudden tears as she took the key from Flo and fumbled with the lock, the past flooding back as muscle memory
kicked in: a little turn to the left with the key, push it in firmly, and then fully to the right. Yes, the shop—and Aunt
Flo—had been a haven for her once. With a feckless mother who was rarely in the house when Jules returned from school, Jules
had been delighted when she got old enough to leave Middlemass Primary and start attending secondary school in Portneath.
Then, rather than catching the first bus home, she would trot down the hill to Flo’s shop most days, slipping in through the
door in relief, with the shop doorbell announcing her arrival.
Flo would immediately break off from whatever she was doing to greet her, interrogating her about her day, insisting that
she take her schoolbag and climb the three flights of stairs to the little flat on the top floor where, on the tiny, Formica-topped
kitchen table under the window, there would be a glass of milk and a plate of biscuits or even a slice of homemade cake.
Refreshments eaten, Jules would do one of two things: If Aunt Flo’s wise counsel was required to decode a friendship trauma
or bolster confidence after a school test that had not gone as well as Jules hoped, then she would return to the shop to bask
in the sunshine of her aunt’s praise, outrage, sympathy, or whatever was required to heal the hurt. If, on the other hand,
things had gone well that day, then she would settle straight down to her homework, rushing to finish, because what Jules
usually craved was reading time.
In the flat’s cozy sitting room, tucked into the eaves, with its angled walls and its low ceiling, the little upholstered window seat that overlooked the bustling high street was her domain.
In it, wrapped for warmth in a checked wool blanket from the back of the sofa, Jules would sit, alternately reading and quietly watching life pass by in the busy street below.
The last of the sun would stream in through the window, lighting up the dust motes in the air like fireflies, and Jules would be restored, losing herself in books so familiar it was as if the characters became her friends: Jane Austen’s Emma, Becky Sharp from Vanity Fair , Jane from Jane Eyre , and the swashbuckling Katniss from The Hunger Games —all vibrant, brave young women living lives that seemed so much more vivid and relevant than Jules’s. The window seat became
a portal to other worlds. Flo called it Jules’s “book nook” and made sure Jules could spend time in it whenever she needed.
How fast the years had flown. And how desperate she had been to ditch her old life and run away, first to university and then
to a succession of publishing internships on starvation rations. Finally, she had landed a modestly paid job that allowed