Nina unpacked a book she knew well and straightened up. She looked at Lesley, who worked crazy hours, who lived above the shop, seemingly on her own, who always seemed angry about how life had turned out. She wondered.
“Try this,” she said gently, handing over a copy of The Heart Shattered Glass.
The woman looked at the cover suspiciously. “I don’t think so.”
“Just give it a shot and let me know what you think.” Nina lowered her voice in case anyone else heard her. “If you don’t like it, no charge.”
It had become a matter of professional pride now to find something that would suit Lesley. She just seemed to be a woman absolutely in need of the right book. There was, Nina was fervently convinced, one out there foreveryone. If only that went for everything in life.
“I hate the longest day,” said Ainslee, who had fallen on the new book boxes with alacrity and was unpacking them with utter reverence, exclaiming over every shiny new hardback, every precious early edition or unbroken spine. It was a marvelous collection. Nina had promised she could borrow some as long as she treated them well.
“Why, what happens?”
Ainslee sighed. “Oh, everyone dresses up in stupid clothes and runs about singing and dancing and being idiotic all night,” she said. “It’s rubbish.”
“Seriously? Because that sounds quite nice.”
“Well, it isn’t. I don’t know why people can’t just stay inside by themselves if they want to and listen to their own music rather than stupid horns and jingly-jangly stuff.”
“Horns?”
“Yeah, great big horns. And drummers and stuff. And they light a big fire. It’s totally stupid.”
“You’d better be coming,” said Dr. MacFarlane, the GP, who was standing by practically licking his lips as Ainslee unpacked the big boxes, in case there were any obscure 1920s American gangster novels he hadn’t yet read. “Everyone does.”
“Oh, that’s a great reason to do things,” said Ainslee, rolling her eyes.
Nina noticed from the corner of her eye that Ben had crept in. She was keeping her last copy of Up on the Rooftops by the cash desk, so he could help himself, and she noticed him picking it up, sitting carefully, sounding out the words on the back jacket, moving his lips as he slowly moved his finger. She smiled, and decided not to approach him quite yet.
“What clothes?” she said.
“Oh, you know, the boys in their kilts right enough, but the lassies, they do look braw,” Dr. MacFarlane replied.
Nina had been in Scotland long enough to understand that was a compliment. Since she’d started working for the shop, Ainslee’s plain way of dressing had changed. She looked at Ainslee, whose eyeliner today was a startling purple, clashing with her green hair. She looked like Wimbledon. Nina figured it was a good sign she was beginning to express herself and decided not to mention it. She had attempted to talk to Ainslee about her exams again, but the girl had clammed up right away and it had not been a success.
“It’ll be grand,” said Dr. MacFarlane, surprisingly turning up trumps with a book, the cover of which showed a flapper being held up by a space alien with a ray gun. “Ach, this’ll do.”
“Wow, I haven’t even priced those yet,” said Nina. “You are fast.”
He handed over some cash anyway and said, “Look forward to seeing you at the party tonight.”
“Can I go, too?” Ben was whining as Ainslee dragged him away.
“No,” she said.
Work was easy to deal with, but coming back to the empty barn, with no Surinder to cheer her up, no midnight strolls to look forward to, no thinking of poetry or little jokes or drawings to scribble down to go in the tree: that really was hard.
During the day, she got to see lots and lots of people, but as the endless white nights stretched on and on, and you had to tell yourself to go to bed at ten thirty whether it was daylight outside or not, she felt the hours drag heavy on her hands.
She hadn’t heard from Marek at all, and hadn’t been down to the train crossing to check. She didn’t want to know. But she sensed too that he himself knew how far they had gotten, and how close they had been to making a terrible mistake.
Or maybe he didn’t, she thought with a particularly self-pitying sniff one evening, halfway down a tub of Mackie’s ice cream. Perhaps he just thought she was some easy British girl who had turned him down, and now he was on to the next one. Perhaps he never thought of her at all. She sighed. It was even harder with Griffin and Surinder thinking she was doing so tremendously well up here, that she had it easy. It felt like there was no way back, even if she wanted one. Which she didn’t. But oh, she felt so lonely.
Sighing, she switched on her very slow Internet connection and turned to her Facebook page. Surinder had made her start one up for the bookshop, which she had thought was a stupid idea, but actually it had been very useful; for starters, it meant that everyone knew where she would be on particular days so that people could find her.
In addition to this, she’d received a message from someone whose name appeared to be Orkney Library—this couldn’t be their real name, she decided—suggesting that if she wanted to expand or relocate, their rural visitors would also love a mobile bookshop to complement the lovely independent shop in Kirkwall. She had looked at the message, smiling. She already felt remote from the rest of the world; Orkney would surely be the ends of the earth. If she ever found the Highlands too dramatic and fast moving . . . she thought, and filed it away just in case.
There was a knock on the barn door. She looked around, bemused. She didn’t get a lot of visitors, except sometimes local children in a complete and utter desperate state of need for the next Harry Potter/Malory Towers/Narnia, whom she generally managed to oblige, remembering the feeling so well.
She opened the door expectantly. To her surprise, it was Lesley from the grocer’s.
“Hello,” she said. “Um. Hi. Can I help you? The van isn’t really open just now, but if you need something . . .”
“No,” said the woman. “Look, I just wanted to say . . . I finished that book you recommended.” There were tears streaming down her face.
Nina glanced at her watch. “Wow, that was fast.”
The Heart Shattered Glass was a courageous scream from the abyss from an abandoned woman, written in four days from the side of a precipice down which she was hurling all her worldly goods, one at a time, meditating on their meaning. It had taken the world by storm with its candor and wit. The fact that the author had subsequently fallen madly in love with and married the book’s publicist had only prolonged its popularity, but it was truly a book that deserved its worldwide fame.