‘My name’s Radia,’ came the voice from by her side. ‘And this is my mum. Yourtwincooked us a big fish and we put all the books on the shelves.’
‘Ah, so that makes you Joy,’ said Tom. Lou seemed to be hiding a knowing smile. ‘Monty mentioned you at the pub last night. Mentioned you quite a bit, actually.’
Was she hearing this right? And did Lou really nudge Tom’s arm in a very conspicuous way? Was he… was heteasingher, about Monty? She felt a burn across her cheeks that told her she wasn’t imagining any of it.
Radia, however, was oblivious. ‘We were looking for a helper, but we’ve got nobody. Doyoulike working in the bookshop?’ she asked bluntly.
Tom, who was gathering his cigarettes and a lighter from the counter, had to tell her he’d been fishing since dawn and was heading home now. Then Lou put in that she was off to work at the local newspaper offices or she’d definitely have helped.
‘We’ll manage,’ Joy told her daughter.
Radia’s heart seemed to swell at the words. She made a high-pitched squealing sound and swung her mum’s hand back and forth. ‘Are we doing it, then? Even if it’s just you and me? Are we going to sell our scones and make drinks and sell books today?’
‘It was nice to meet you,’ Joy told Tom and his girlfriend, trying to bring this all to an end.
‘Arewe?’ Radia wasn’t going to drop it now.
‘Yes, we are,’ Joy told her with a heavy sigh, mainly to keep her quiet and so the couple could get out of the shop without making any more comments or smirking about Monty, who had apparently been talking about her when she wasn’t there.
As Lou and Monty’s twin left, holding hands and whispering, the small, almost forgotten, part of her that was still an excitable seventeen-year-old wanted to call after them to ask what exactly he’d said about her. The rest of her, which was a circumspect twenty-nine-year-old and afraid of everything, told her to keep quiet.
Joy looked down at Radia, who was jumping and twirling around the wheelie basket.
‘OK, Rads,’ she said. ‘We’ll need to get some café stuff then.’
‘What stuff does a café need?’ she replied.
Joy scanned the shelves with another big sigh. She had absolutely no idea.
Chapter Fifteen
Joy wasn’t so set in her ways that she couldn’t admit this job was proving to be the most enjoyable contract she’d taken in a long time. Even if it was going to mean getting up early to get her work done so she could spend the rest of the day dealing with the book-buying public, who were, on the whole, quite a bit weirder than the corporate clients she was used to dealing with.
One man had come in alone that morning after their convenience store visit and spent a long time browsing the thrillers, before asking Joy if she had a book in which someone was murdered by an undetectable nerve agent and, he stressed, ‘got away with it’.
Joy had gathered Radia behind her, told the man she wasn’t sure she had anything like that and attempted to sell himThe Lost Apothecary, where a lady chemist helps a bunch of women bump off the men who have wronged them. He said that didn’t interest himat alland left.
That was just moments before the coach-load of women in their seventies had arrived – a ‘wild swimming’ society all the way from Morecambe, they told her. They’d stormed in like a blizzard, talking over each other and laughing like drains, all the while touching every book in the shop – or at least that’s how it felt to Joy, who experienced near-physical pain at the state of the shelves after they’d left.
Between them, they bought only five postcards and two copies of the same Richard Osman novel, which they all discussed loudly as they left the shop and headed down to the beach, while two of them protested, ‘No spoilers, please!’
Radia had helped tidy the shop once more and was proving really very good at giving recommendations to browsers – simply pulling a book at random from the shelves and saying, ‘This one’s good, get this one.’
Joy told her repeatedly to stop, but on the fifth try Radia’s tactic actually worked and a young person in elaborate rainbow make-up had bought a copy ofSpells for Modern Witcheson her personal recommendation.
Still, Joy didn’t think she could cope with a busy café too. There was a reason the place was supposed to be let to two grown-up holidaymakers at a time. It was too much work for one person alone.
She had been about to tell the first group inquiring about food that she was sorry, the café wasn’t fully up and running, and suggest they’d maybe like to come back tomorrow, but Radia had skipped ahead of them into the little white room with the red-and-white gingham tablecloths, saying, ‘It’s through here.’
Even though Joy’s hands were visibly shaking when she served it all up, she had managed to get the espresso machine to produce two frothy coffees that looked reasonably good and she’d made silver pots of tea for the four others.
‘See? It’s easy,’ Radia had whispered from behind the café till, watching them eating the scones which they’d quickly warmed through in the oven and served with a freshly opened jar of strawberry jam, plonked right on the table beside a big blob of the clotted cream turned out of the catering-size tub and onto a saucer.
‘We’ll have to work on finessing the presentation,’ Joy told her. ‘If we’re going to really make the café thing work.’
Joy had been amazed when they’d left a tip, a whole five pounds, which she surrendered to Radia at four o’clock once all the doors were locked and the sign turned to ‘Closed’.
‘Your wages,’ Joy told Radia. ‘Where do you want to spend it?’
