“Stunning,” said Surinder. “Now tell me what you did last night, under pain of death.”
Nina smiled. “I delivered two lambs! Well, I helped. No, I totally did it. With help.” And she explained.
“Oh, ffs,” said Surinder. “I knew it. Not a sniff of a bloke around you for four years, then you move up here and five seconds later it’s men central. I KNEW it! So you went back to the farmhouse . . . Is the farmer hunky, by the way? In my head they’ve all got round red cheeks and Wellingtons and crooks and jolly expressions.”
“You’re thinking about a picture of a farmer. In a children’s book,” said Nina.
“Oh yeah,” said Surinder. “Okay, surprise me. Topknot? Dreads? Sandals?”
“No,” said Nina. “No, you’re right, nothing like that. He’s grumpy. Getting a divorce. He’s kind of tall and wiry and pointy looking. Bit sad.”
“Oh, right,” said Surinder. She thought for a moment. “Is he like that farmer in Babe?”
“No!” said Nina. “You’ve got to stop thinking about farmers you’ve seen on television! He’s a real bloke. Young. Who just happens to be a farmer.”
“Well, he’s not that much of a real bloke,” said Surinder. “All the real blokes I know are obsessed with cars and have started doing cycling at the weekend and being really, really boring about it and going on about their Fitbits and growing stupid beards and talking about being on Tinder. That’s what all the real men are like these days.”
She lowered her voice.
“They’re rubbish.”
“You seem to like them.”
Surinder ignored this.
“Also, you fell asleep on his sofa and he didn’t even vaguely try it with you. That doesn’t sound much like the blokes I know either.”
She sighed.
“Right. What are we doing today? If it’s unpacking books, you can sod off. I helped Marek pack them all up.”
“Fine,” said Nina. “What I will totally not do is get on with work really, really loudly, giving big sighs every so often, while you recline on the sofa.”
“I don’t give a toss,” said Surinder. “This is the most comfortable sofa I have ever sat on in my entire life. I don’t think this is a sofa that gets advertised on television as costing very, very small amounts of money on vacation weekends.”
“Neither do I,” said Nina. “I don’t think this is a sofa that advertises at all. I think this is a sofa you have to beg to come and live with you in exchange for lots of money and a blood sacrifice.”
“And if the sofa doesn’t think you’re worth it, it won’t bother,” said Surinder. “It just keeps sitting in its palace. Whoops.”
“Did you just spill coffee on it?”
“Your furniture makes me really nervous.”
“Me too,” said Nina, looking around. “Shall we head out?”
“But I’m staying and lying on the sofa!” said Surinder. “I took vacation for this!”
Nina didn’t say anything, just put on her Wellingtons with a martyred expression, refilled her coffee cup, went out into the cool sunlight, and started work on the van.
She’d managed to put up the shelves she’d ordered from Inverness—there were useful grooves in the walls for exactly that—without too much trouble, so she turned the radio up loud and went to work with a will, scrubbing down the walls and floors until it was utterly spotless, then starting on the happy task of dusting down the books and figuring out what went where.
Fiction to the right, she decided, as you came in, seeing as that was what most people would be looking for; nonfiction to the left, and children’s at the far end, so they could get right inside the van and up close. She had bought several cheap colorful bean bags for the children to jump on for story hour. Her Right to Trade certificate was proudly displayed on the inside of the window. What had caused a lot of teeth-sucking and head-shaking in Birmingham had been granted with a ready smile up here.
She sang along to the radio, making everything just so, and although it took all afternoon, it still didn’t feel long before she was opening her very last box and gasping with surprise. It wasn’t books at all, but all the little things she’d collected over the years to go with the books and show them off. She had always wondered why she had picked up these bits and pieces of bric-a-brac (or junk, as Surinder called it). But now, as she surveyed the clean, bare walls of the van, she realized exactly why she had been stockpiling all this time, without even knowing herself what she’d been doing.
She strung garlands of fairy-light blossoms here and there, added funny bookends: a lighthouse, a gruffalo for the little ones. A set of huge cut-out bronze letters with lightbulbs in them, spelling out B-O-O-K-S, which could be placed outside the van whenever she parked on her rounds. Beautifully ornate notebooks she could use as book ledgers. Framed Mother Goose prints to make an old-fashioned A–Z around the children’s section. Some banners printed with pages of a vintage book.
“This van is going to rattle like anything,” observed Surinder, slopping the tea a little as she crossed the farmyard, slightly wary of the chickens.
“It won’t,” said Nina. “It’s not going faster than twenty miles an hour. Ever. I don’t care who’s behind me. They’re just going to have to wait.”
She pulled out a can of blue paint.
“Okay,” she said. “Something for you to do.”
“Nooo,” said Surinder. “I’m still sleepy. I’ll muck it up.”
“Then we’ll paint over it,” said Nina. “Come on, you’re so good at it.”
Surinder stuck out her bottom lip, but Nina knew how beautiful her handwriting was. She was always being prevailed upon to do people’s wedding invitations. She moaned about it nonstop, but she always did it in the end.
“Really?”
“I’ll make you breakfast again tomorrow,” said Nina. “Wait till you taste the sausages they have around here.”
Surinder groaned. “Seriously?”
“Better than anything you’ve ever eaten in your life. Oh, and I think I have some local biscuits in.”
“What are they like?”
“A surprise,” said Nina, who hadn’t tasted the round red-and-silver-striped Tunnock’s tea cakes herself. “You get started, I’ll go and find them.”