‘You coming back any time soon?’ Harri asked, dispirited. Annie had no idea of the pains he’d taken to craft the perfect Hawaiian espresso – made with eye-wateringly rare and expensive Mount Loa beans, topped with the lightest slow-whipped, Korean-inspired dalgona creme. She couldn’t know how his heart dropped at the sound of it being sloshed into a cardboard carry cup.
‘I have some stuff to do,’ she said. ‘Can you hold the fort by yourself?’
‘Course.’ He’d shrugged like it was nothing. ‘We should talk, though, about last night… and the night before that, and…’
‘Can’t stop,’ she’d said, breezing out the door.
Out on the slope, however, with her bag over her shoulder, she realised she didn’t quite know where she was going and for a moment it didn’t matter so much because the white cloud cover was broken through here and there, revealing glimpses of watery blue sky and a hazy sun.
In the little front gardens that lined the slope, bare branches covered in spring buds dripped with morning dew and Annie spotted her first daffodils of the year, tiny yellow trumpeters heralding the coming spring.
She didn’t have time to stop and stare however, as a bright blur of pink and red was coming down the slope towards her. All smiles and chatter, Austen and Patti seemed to carry springtime with them just as much as the early garden blooms.
‘Hey!’ Annie called, and they waved back.
‘Going sightseeing today?’ asked Patti when they drew nearer.
‘Actually, I have some work stuff to do. But I can’t concentrate in the bookshop.’
She ignored the brief amused glance that passed between the two women. A glance that said they suspected why she couldn’t concentrate. Was the whole village whispering about her and Harri? They’d read it so wrong if they were.
‘Is there a library round here?’ asked Annie, trying to maintain her poise.
‘Nope,’ said Austen. ‘The council closed the library out on the main road years ago.’
‘Aww, no!’ Annie recoiled. Another one bites the dust.
‘Yep,’ added Patti sagely. ‘It’s a Starbucks now.’
‘So what does a person do for wi-fi and when they need a place to work? That isn’t an expensive coffee shop, I mean?’
With a glance of communication, Austen and Patti reached a wordless agreement.
‘Come to ours?’ they said at the same time.
Meanwhile, at the bookshop, Harri was settling William in for the day. Or rather he was watching on as William made himself at home re-ordering the ‘Languages’ shelf.
‘TheVarronianusought to be here with theEtyma Latina, keeping David Crystal on English here, next to Chomsky on language acquisition. You see? It’s simple Dewey Decimal four hundred, you know? And what isthisdoing here?’ He pulled a Wilfred Thesiger from the shelf. ‘Photography section, surely? And thisGalloping Gourmetcookbook is clearly lost.’
‘Ah! We’ve an expert in our midst, Harri,’ quipped Jowan, taking the offending titles to the correct shelves. ‘I always arranged things loosely by theme and some cursory alphabetising, but Borrowers over the years have imposed their own order on parts of the shop. One time, a young lass arranged the general fiction by spine colour.’
William shuddered noticeably.
‘I know, ’twas a dark day for Clove Lore,’ added Jowan with a smile. ‘There’s bound to be a fair amount of cross-pollination on these shelves,’ he went on. ‘Being a living, breathing bookshop, our own little garden of books, and not a neat and tidy library.’
Nevertheless, he took instructions from William for as long as it took the older man to find a book that caught his interest, carry it to the armchair and bury his nose in it.
Harri liked Jowan very much, now that all the matchmaking and betting-book stuff seemed to be forgotten about. He’d made both men espresso con panna at ten, fixing himself one too, even though he had no enthusiasm for it. Even though he really needed the caffeine.
It had been hard to sleep after Paisley’s call. She’d been to Neath to drop in a bag of his books along with some clothes she’d found at the bottom of the laundry basket and washed for him, which was really nice of her. Her visit had clearly got Harri’s dad worked up. She’d said he’d ‘not been best pleased’ when she mentioned his son wasn’t planning on coming back to their flat in Port Talbot, but more than likely moving back to the family home.
‘Just a heads up,’ she’d said, and Harri had sighed and thanked her.
It was a timely reminder that the first week of his holiday had flown by and in five more days he’d be standing at the station deciding what to do next. By then, Annie would be on her flight home.
It had been a jolt, but one he needed. This escape was only a passing dream. Reality was just there, waiting.
His mum mustn’t have broken it to his dad about the break-up. Paisley had ambushed him with it. He’d have been hopping mad, Harri knew. Mad enough for Paisley to call and warn him.
