A woman looked around. “Goodness,” she said, smiling. “I don’t know where to start.”
“I know what you mean,” said Nina.
The woman glanced down at her rambunctious toddler in a harness, who even now was cheerfully gumming the bean bags. “I kind of . . . I only read baby books when I was pregnant, and now I’ve totally gotten out of the habit.”
Nina’s heart leaped, and she jumped into action.
“Well,” she said. “Maybe you need this.” And she brought out a beautiful book translated from Russian called We Are All Big Girls Now. It was a series of very short chapters about the experience of early motherhood, illustrated in glorious colors like a medieval book of hours, ranging from the deeply profound—the passing on of the female bloodline—to the scary tales of Baba Yaga that the author’s own grandmother used to terrify her with, to the simple logistical difficulties of a toddler who wouldn’t keep his snowsuit on in St. Petersburg in January. It was a book that had made Nina herself feel entirely and deeply maternal without ever having given a thought to motherhood, and she had never met a new mother who hadn’t adored it.
The woman’s face lit up as she looked at the beautiful illustrations.
“Perfect,” she said. “Thomas, stop that! Stop that at once!”
But Thomas was not into stopping; he had spied, and retrieved, the biggest, shiniest book about buses and trucks and diggers and forklifts that Nina had on the shelves.
Nina looked away, feeling awkward; she wasn’t at all used to people having to actually pay for books, unless they were late, in which case, if they looked suitably poor and/or distressed, she always waived the fine anyway.
The woman looked at it, then said, “Do you know what, this might even keep him quiet while I’m trying to do the shopping, instead of grabbing at the sticky buns.”
And she took that one too, and Nina found that actually taking the money and handing over change wasn’t a problem at all.
An old lady came in next and sighed and said she hadn’t realized the books were all so new, because nobody was writing the old-fashioned style of books anymore, did Nina know what she meant, and what a shame that was, because all she wanted was a modern book with old-fashioned values. As it turned out, Nina did know exactly what she meant, and pulled out a rather charming series called St. Swithin’s, about a young nurse starting work in a hospital, but instead of lots of paperwork and reorganizations, this nurse—whose name was, pleasingly, Margaret—managed to exist in a contemporary multiracial world by simply loving and caring for all her patients wherever they were from, while regularly taking time out to go and perform daring deeds of rescue. She was also in the early throes of an exciting, but also excitingly chaste, love affair with the gorgeous, sensationally brave, and daring surgeon Dr. Rachel Melchitt.
“Try this,” Nina said with a smile. “If you don’t like it, you can swap it, and if you do like it, there’s about another forty-seven to read.”
The woman had already lit up reading the back blurb. “No, I think this might do nicely,” she said. “Do you have a large-print edition?”
Nina cursed to herself. The problem was that the large-print copies were so in demand and well borrowed, there hadn’t been anything in good enough condition to liberate.
“No,” she said. “But I promise I’ll source the large print for the next bunch.”
After that, there was a steady stream, some people just wanting a look around, some with specific titles in mind. If they didn’t know what they were after, Nina tried to get a grip on the kind of thing they liked and steered them toward the appropriate item. As she bagged and took money—and credit cards, on an incredibly clever little device Surinder had taught her to stick on to her iPhone—she spotted a young girl hovering outside. She appeared to be about sixteen, awkward looking, glasses, a little puppy fat still. She was wearing a long-sleeved cardigan with the sleeves pulled right down over her fists, with big holes through which her thumbs poked.
“Hey,” Nina said gently. The girl looked at her, startled, and backed away.
“It’s okay,” said Nina. She gave the girl her best smile. “You can just come in,” she said. “I don’t mind. Just come and have a look, you don’t have to buy anything.”
“Neh, it’s okay,” said the girl, and walked away with her head down.
It had been a more successful launch than Nina could possibly have imagined, and she drove back later that afternoon full of the joys, and with a bottle of Prosecco, which they used to toast their enormous (relative) success (“Well, I did do the painting,” said Surinder). Then they sat in the sitting room while Nina got down to doing the books and checking to see what she needed to order next.
“This is the less glamorous side of running your own business,” pointed out Surinder.
“Wait till I get a puncture,” said Nina. “Oh Lord, I’m so tired.”
“Go to bed, then.”
“I was going to . . . I was going to maybe pop down to the train crossing. Wave to Marek.”
“Seriously?” said Surinder. “What is this, The Railway Children?”
“No. I was . . . I found a book he might like.”
It was a very old but mint-condition edition of I Am David. She had no idea if he’d read it or not, but she thought he would like it. After all, he knew a little bit about what it was like to roam.
Surinder gave her a stern look. “Are you sure about this?”
Nina flushed. She didn’t want to admit how much she had thought about him, his gentle, melancholic, poetic nature. He seemed so exotic, so sad.
“Just a thought,” she said.
“Well, maybe have that thought when you’ve had a little more sleep,” said Surinder.
Chapter Eighteen
After several days busier than she’d have thought possible, Nina decided it was time to start story hour. The sky was overcast and gray, so she didn’t have to keep the blackboard outside for very long before lots of families started to crowd into the van.
She read the children the story of the nine tumbling princes who wove the sky, and they sat, snot encrusting noses, missing teeth whistling occasionally, utterly rapt, and she sold lots and lots of books afterward, but my goodness they left the most dreadful mess, particularly if they had small, clambering siblings. She was just looking up with a cloth in her hand, and trying to deal with other customers, when she saw the girl again.