Chapter 2
It was beginning to get dark outside as Eve headed through the New Fiction department and up the stairs.
Caffè Nero was on her right. Thankfully, it didn’t look too busy.
She glanced at the smaller section in front of the counter – all young people on laptops – and then walked through the main seating area by the windows, where they’d agreed the first one to arrive would find a table.
There were, in fact, two empty tables beside the windows.
She looked left and right, scanning the remaining ones before taking in the rest of the room, but none of the other tables was occupied by a man on his own, or by anyone who bore any resemblance to the profile photo of the guy she’d been talking to online.
Eve hovered near the counter for a moment to see if anyone might look up and wave her over, but she already knew he wasn’t there.
She ordered a decaf oat latte and sat down at one of the spare tables by the window, picking up her phone again and inspecting the messages they’d both sent.
There were two grey ticks next to her most recent one, indicating that her message had been delivered but not read.
He was now over twenty minutes late, which was a little too long to have gone without letting her know, but she didn’t want to jump to any conclusions.
I’m here, she typed. By the window. Am wearing a light green cardigan, jeans and there’s a stupid fake fur coat draped over my chair.
She pressed SEND and two more grey ticks appeared.
She sipped at her coffee, eyes on the door, glancing down at her phone again intermittently, but still there was no answer.
Anticipation soon gave way to disappointment as the realisation settled inside her: he wasn’t coming.
He’d changed his mind. But … what if something unexpected had happened to delay him, something awful even – a family emergency, perhaps – which had justifiably pushed her to the back of his mind?
She opened her Kindle reading app, thinking she’d wait ten more minutes.
As she did so, her phone bleeped, making her jump.
But it was just her sister, asking how it was going.
Eve felt a small stab of irritation. Couldn’t Sascha have at least waited until the date was meant to be over?
She sighed, knowing deep down that she was annoyed with the wrong person, but sometimes Sascha could be just a little too …
self-referential. She had a heart of gold and loved Eve to bits, Eve knew that, but she also knew it wouldn’t have occurred to Sascha – whose very first online date had gone immaculately and ended in marriage – that her younger sibling might have been stood up.
Eve decided not to respond to Sascha, then saw that the grey ticks on her message to Chris had turned blue.
She eagerly opened the log to see if he was typing, but there was nothing, so she opened the dating app to see if he had perhaps messaged her there instead, but he hadn’t, and he wasn’t online.
She waited another five minutes, then five minutes more, but the light had completely faded outside the window by now.
Taking a last sip of her latte, she slid back her chair and pulled on her coat.
She took one last look around the café, which was even emptier now, and headed towards the stairs.
She felt deflated. Logic told her she shouldn’t take this personally, that it was silly to feel rejected by a person who barely knew you – who hadn’t even met you – but she couldn’t help but wonder what had gone wrong.
After all, he’d been the one to suggest they meet up, and he’d liked her profile photo – at least that’s what he’d told her.
Eve had deliberately uploaded a recent one, one where she looked nice but which wasn’t intended to disguise the fact that she was almost fifty.
Mackenzie had suggested she could look nearer forty with a few filters, but Eve didn’t see the point in pretending, and anyway, she had already mentioned that she had a twenty-six-year-old daughter, which would be a pretty good clue to her true age, albeit not an entirely accurate one.
The thought brought with it the usual reminder of Rich’s new baby and of her own failure in this department.
Mackenzie was adopted, and Eve couldn’t deny that she’d felt quite upset when Rich and his fiancée had announced their pregnancy a few weeks ago, highlighting for the world that the fertility issues she and Rich had gone through were down to her and not him.
And yes, she had mentioned this to Chris in their most recent conversation, but he had been really nice about it – in fact, she was pretty sure it was after she’d told him this that he’d suggested they meet.
But she hadn’t said that much about Rich and his new family, had she?
She didn’t think she had seemed bitter or obsessive because, truly, she wasn’t.
She wasn’t upset with Rich. He was a good person.
He had told her his news in a careful, tactful way, and although it had hurt – even though it still hurt when she thought about it – she was also genuinely happy for him.
So why hadn’t Chris shown up?
She cast her mind back. They’d talked about their jobs: Chris was a property developer; she was a law lecturer at one of the colleges – the same one she and Rich had gone to.
Yes, her job was the more academic of the two of them, but it wasn’t like she taught at the university, the one everyone thought of when they thought of Oxford, and he’d seemed interested in her work, not fazed by it.
Well, if it was her age, she was glad he hadn’t showed up. Chris was already fifty – he’d told her that – but if his preference was for a younger woman with no baggage, there were plenty of those to choose from on the dating sites, although did anyone really come with zero baggage? She doubted it.
Eve reached the bottom of the stairs and exited the lobby, then stopped abruptly, briefly disoriented as she realised she wasn’t on the ground floor that led to the exit, but had instead gone down an extra flight and was now in the basement of Blackwell’s, which housed the legendary Norrington Room.
She hadn’t been down here for years, and as she took in the incredible sight in front of her, all thoughts of her online dating fiasco were pushed from her mind.
She had forgotten quite how awesome this room was.
It was the biggest display of books she’d ever seen in her life, stretching almost as far as the eye could see.
Looking out into this vast ocean of knowledge was, she thought, like looking up at the night sky and realising you were a part of something incredible, something so much bigger than you and your minuscule problems.
She began to walk around the perimeter, taking in the hundreds, even thousands of books in each section, before going down some steps and then down again into the lower terrace, where she knew there was a law section.
There was a big law library at college, of course, but she was interested to see what was new here.
She found the law books to her left and began browsing the shelves.
As she did so, she became aware of a man standing behind her.
Feeling a little uneasy, she turned to catch a glimpse of him.
The bookshop was quiet at this time of the evening, and she had thought this section of the room would be empty.
‘Sorry,’ the man murmured, pushing a pale blue paperback back into its place on the shelf and stepping away from her.
She smiled warmly, feeling for him. She, too, was prone to over-apologising, and as far as she could tell, he hadn’t done anything wrong.
Or had he? For a split second, she wondered if this could be Chris, her date, but she quickly dismissed the idea as stupid and desperate.
Chris had stood her up. Chris was an arsehole. Why did she want this man to be Chris?
She cast her eyes over his face, his hair, his clothes.
He wasn’t Chris, but he looked a similar age, give or take.
He was dressed in jeans and an Oxford motorcycle jacket that had clearly seen better days but which she liked.
It reminded her of a boy she once used to date before she met Rich, which was comforting somehow. There had been life before Rich.
Could he be Chris? After all, she’d only seen the one photo of him and it was worth asking, surely?
What if he wasn’t an arsehole? What if he was just shy?
She hesitated, studying the man in front of her.
He had greying brown hair which was nicely cut and he was wearing reading glasses – she could tell by the way he pulled them down his nose to look at her. Behind them, he had steely blue eyes.
She cleared her throat. ‘Is your name Chris, by any chance?’
The man smiled, just a hint of a smile, as if he found this amusing but was trying not to show it. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s not.’
Eve felt herself flush. ‘Sorry. It’s just I was supposed to be meeting someone and—’
He raised a hand. ‘It’s fine. Really. You don’t need to explain.’ He smiled again. He had a nice smile.
‘Are you a law student?’ Eve asked.
He shook his head. ‘I’m not really here to buy anything.’
‘Me neither. And that’s OK,’ she told him. ‘Or so says the placard on the wall over there.’ She pointed.
The man eyed her. ‘Does it?’
She nodded. ‘It dates back to the nineteenth century. It says something along the lines of Mr Blackwell – the original Mr Blackwell – wanting those coming in from the noisy cobbled streets to find a warm and friendly vibe, and that we should feel we can pick up and handle the books on the shelves without an obligation to buy.’
He looked back at her, unblinking. Eve couldn’t tell if he was interested in the history of the bookshop or if he thought she was showing off. Maybe he just wanted her to leave him in peace so that he could get on with checking out the books before closing time.
‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘I should be going.’
The man didn’t answer, so she shrugged, gave a slight dip of her head and didn’t say, ‘Bye. Nice to meet you,’ as she ordinarily might have done, but instead pulled her stupid fake fur coat around her shoulders and walked away.
The coat wasn’t hers, in fact. It was Sascha’s, and she wished she hadn’t worn it.
‘I hope you find him,’ the man called after her gently, as she reached the steps to the upper level.
She turned and smiled, feeling self-conscious, then headed up the stairs.