“I never understand,” he said, shaking his head, “why anyone would go to the trouble of making up new people in this world when there’s already billions of the buggers I don’t give a shit about.”
Nina spent the rest of the day moving in, having paid Lennox a month’s rent. He had taken the envelope gruffly, then gone back to work, disappearing over the horizon even as Nina wondered just how far the farm actually extended.
She unpacked her meager possessions into the stylish built-in wardrobes—far too stylish, now she thought about it, for a humble vacation cottage. They couldn’t have hoped to recoup this investment in a hundred years. She wondered if the mysterious ex-Mrs. Lennox was simply looking for excuses to call back the interior designer.
She touched the heavy lined curtains and gazed out across the beautiful fields, wondering what Lennox’s wife had been like. Perhaps she had longed for the city, just as Nina, sitting in her tiny bedroom in Edgbaston looking out on the long street of row houses opposite, had begun to dream of wide-open spaces and fresh air. Perhaps they had had the wrong lives all along. It was a strange thing to think. She looked at the quality of the pale oak flooring, the tongue and groove in the bathroom, the claw-footed bath and the huge bed, almost as wide as it was long, and smiled wryly to herself. Yes, she and Mrs. Lennox were almost certainly quite, quite different. But for once, Nina had had her stroke of luck.
Chapter Twelve
After she’d unpacked her few possessions, Nina wasn’t quite sure what to do with herself. Then she looked at the van, and realized it would need a massive scrubbing. The problem, she realized, having been used to zipping around in a tiny Mini Metro, was that if she ever wanted to go anywhere, the van had to come too, like a huge lumbering elephant too wide for half the streets of the town. She gave it a severe look and considered extending her rental on Edwin’s bicycle.
She steeled herself, though, and trundled down to the village at ten miles an hour—she wasn’t entirely sure she and the van trusted each other at this point. As she drove, she pondered the further problem of how she was going to get the rest of the books up from Birmingham. In reality she should simply drive down and fetch them, but it was such an incredibly long way, and she wasn’t a hundred percent sure yet she had the nerve, especially following her near-death experience the last time she had set out for Birmingham.
The village had a small grocer’s shop, painted a pretty pale blue. A woman said a curt hello as she went in, the bell dinging overhead. Although the shop was tiny, it appeared to sell absolutely everything.
Nina looked at the paper-wrapped lamb chops. They were marked “Lennox Farm.” Back in Birmingham, meat generally came from the supermarket, encased in plastic. This was kind of new. There was chicken, too. She thought of the jolly little hen scratching outside her new window. Of course it was having a much better life than any chicken she normally bought, she told herself. Even so, she found herself choosing some cauliflower to make cauliflower with cheese instead. There was also a plethora of local cheeses she’d never seen before. The woman noticed her looking.
“Do you need any help?” she said. “I know it’s a bit confusing.”
“I’m new here,” said Nina, smiling.
“Oh, I know that!” said the woman. “I’m Lesley. You bought Wullie’s van, for some crazy reason, and you can’t drive it, and you’ve moved into Lennox’s mystery palace.” She gave a rather pleased-with-herself smile. She was small and neat, with weather-beaten cheeks and a tight look about her face.
“Mystery palace?” said Nina.
“Oh yes, nobody’s seen that place since Kate left. What’s it like? I heard she spent a fortune, got people up from Edinburgh; even Inverness wasn’t good enough!”
“Right,” said Nina.
“Well?” Lesley folded her arms. Obviously gossip was something you paid for together with whatever you were actually buying.
“It’s very nice,” said Nina. “Kind of all glass at the front, with a little balcony for sleeping, and a good view.”
Lesley sighed. “That sounds nice. Is it insulated?”
“I didn’t ask.”
Lesley stared at her. “You rented a house without finding out if it was insulated? You can tell you’re foreign.”
Nina had never thought of herself as foreign before.
“There’s a wood-burning stove,” she said hopefully.
Lesley looked at her. “Okay then,” and she laughed in a way that made Nina feel slightly uncomfortable.
Nina picked out as many scrubbing and cleaning products as she could carry.
“What’s all that for?”
She had absolutely vowed to support the local shop and the people who worked in the area, but found she was quickly going off the idea.
“It’s for the van.”
“What are you going to do with a van anyway? You don’t look as though you could do furniture moving.”
“Actually,” began Nina, feeling timid and trying to force herself to speak a little louder. This was her life now; she was going to have to own it, even though she felt as you often do when you’ve had to do absolutely everything by yourself: rather like a grumpy child. She took a breath. “Actually, I’m going to run a mobile bookshop. Go around to the towns where they don’t have one, like here.”
Lesley’s eyebrows lifted. “Really?”
“Uh, yes,” said Nina, glancing around anxiously just in case Lesley was already hiding a full bookshop in the back of the little blue shop and wouldn’t appreciate her competition in the slightest.
“Have you got the new E. L. James?”
“I’m afraid not,” said Nina apologetically. “But I can get it! Also, I have something I think you might like even more.”
Lesley looked suspicious. “I doubt it.”
“You should trust me on this.”
“I know what I like,” said the woman.
Nina looked down and fumbled in her wallet. “Well, um, hopefully see you down there anyway.”
Outside, she found a cluster of people around the van, who peered inside as she unlocked the back. The books were still in their boxes on the floor, but people reached out their hands to pick them up and look at them.
“Um, hi, everyone,” said Nina shyly, her own hands full of cleaning bottles.