‘It’s a tough field this week.’ Yvonne pulled a chart from one of the desk drawers. ‘You’re going to have to up your game if you want to topple the supreme champion,’ she said, gesturing to herself with a smug smile. ‘I’ve been top of the league every week since I started here.’
‘You have an unfair advantage,’ Claire said.
‘I do seem to be a bit of a magnet for the unhinged.’
‘It’s not that you’re a magnet for them. You encourage them, so you get all the loony repeat business.’
‘I just try to be helpful.’
‘Right, like the time that customer was looking forsigned copies of Jane Austen’s books and you said you could get them for him.’ Jane Austen was his wife’s favourite author, he had explained, and he wanted them as a gift for her birthday.
‘And I did!’
‘Yes, signed byyou. It’s fraudulent.’
‘No, it’s not. I signed them “on behalf of”, so it’s not like it was forgery.’
Claire rolled her eyes. ‘And every time someone comes in trying to find a book they can’t remember the title of, you always sell them something.’
‘You say that like it’s a bad thing. I’m giving them what they want – that’s good service.’
‘You’re a charlatan.’
‘You’ll miss me when I’m gone.’
It was still a few months away, but shewouldmiss Yvonne when she left, Claire thought, as they giggled their way through a quiet morning in the shop. She was only working part-time at Bookends while she was at college, and would leave at the end of the summer, when she was taking a year out to go travelling. Tom, the owner of the shop, would miss her too, much to his own bemusement. Yvonne had never ceased to surprise him since the first day she’d turned up for work, looking like she’d got lost on her way to aVoguefashion shoot. She’d been a vision in cashmere and silk, and the bag clutched under her shoulder would have cost most of Claire’s monthly salary. With her smooth blonde hair and flawless skin, she looked like she lived on Evian water and alpine air. Claire and Tom had watched with wary skepticism as she’d taken up her position behind the cash desk, clapped her hands and said, with kindergarten-teacher enthusiasm, ‘Right. Let’s sell books.’ But then she had proceeded to do just that, with breathtaking capability.
Claire had never met an actual trust-fund baby before, but Yvonne was the real deal. Her father, a multi-millionaire who had made his fortune in plastics manufacturing, gave her everything his money could buy – from the pony she’d got when she was ten to the car she’d picked out for her upcoming twenty-first birthday. At first Claire couldn’t understand why she was working at all. She certainly didn’t need to pay her way through college, and her meagre salary wouldn’t cover so much as the tips of her Hobbs shoes or the taxis she regularly got to work when she was running late, which was most days. But she soon came to realise that what Yvonne craved most was her father’s attention, and this job was one way of making him sit up and take notice. Yvonne had father issues up the wazoo.
But she was unfailingly good-natured, a cheerful, willing worker and a good laugh, and Claire had grown very fond of her.
‘You’re still coming on Friday, right?’ Yvonne asked.
‘Oh yes. Definitely.’ Claire made an effort to sound excited about the party. One of Yvonne’s friends was opening a new upmarket bar, and Yvonne had asked her to the launch. Claire wasn’t really a party person and she wouldn’t know anyone else there. For once she wished she had the excuse of needing to keep her mother company, which was her usual fall-back. Yvonne was constantly inviting Claire out, but Claire usually had to turn her down. This Friday, for once, there was nothing stopping her.
‘Yay!’ Yvonne clapped her hands. ‘It’s great that your mum’s in hospital and you can go out and have a bit of fun.’
‘Yeah, brilliant.’
Yvonne gasped, clapping a hand over her mouth. ‘Oh God! Sorry. I didn’t mean it’s great that your mum’s in hospital?—’
‘It’s okay,’ Claire said, with a reassuring grin. ‘I know what you meant. And itisnice to be able to go out on a Friday night for a change – even if I do feel a bit guilty that I’m enjoying myself because Mum’s in hospital.’ Her mother was undergoing hip-replacement surgery.
‘Oh, you shouldn’t feel guilty. That’s not fair. You should be able to go out at the weekend anyway. Why should you always be the one staying home with her?’
‘Well, I live with her…’
‘Even so, you shouldn’t have to give up your social life completely. What about your brothers? Why don’t they take a turn sometimes and let you go out?’
‘Well, they have kids, so I suppose it’s difficult,’ she said, without conviction, parroting the excuses her brothers and their wives would make for themselves. It was okay for her to criticise them, but if anyone outside the family did, she automatically leapt to their defense. But neither of them was much help, and Claire sometimes felt she might as well have been an only child. Neil and Ronan were both considerably older than her so she had often felt like one growing up. There were only a couple of years between her brothers, but Claire was what their mother, Espie, termed ‘the shakings of the bag’, arriving ten years after Neil, the eldest, when Espie was forty and her marriage to their feckless father was stuttering to its end.
‘All the more reason,’ Yvonne said. ‘Your need is greater. You’re single – you should be out there having fun and meeting people. They’re married. They have kids. Their lives are already over. They’ll only be sitting at home watching TV or talking about gardening and… kitchen islands and stuff,’ she said, wrinkling her nose. ‘They can do that just as easily at your mum’s house and give you a break.’
It was nothing Claire hadn’t frequently thought, butshe didn’t want to dwell on it now. ‘Anyway, I doubt I’ll be meeting anyone on Friday. They’ll all be too young for me.’
‘Oh, come on, you’re not that much older than me.’
Though there were only seven years between them, Claire felt positively ancient next to Yvonne. That was the effect living with a sixty-eight-year-old woman had on her.
