He looks thoughtful for a moment, crossing his arms over his broad chest.
‘But if I want to get lost for a whole day I like heading to the big Foyles at Charing Cross.’
Tilly freezes, a wooden chair half-folded in her hands. In a heartbeat she is back in the huge bookshop on a wet August day, bumping into a man in a grey hoody and shorts, with blond hair and sparkling blue eyes, who smelt of rain and cedarwood.
She forces herself to swallow down the lump in her throat and finish folding the chair, handing it over to Alfie.
‘Did you always want to run a bookshop?’
He stiffens. ‘It’s … complicated.’
He slips his phone from his pocket, pulling up an image and handing the phone over. It’s a scan of an old photograph which shows the inside of Book Lane almost exactly as it is now. There is a large, tall man standing in the middle holding a stack of books and smiling, his eyes exactly like Alfie’s. He iswearing corduroy trousers and a moth-eaten cable-knit jumper that skims over his broad shoulders.
‘Is that your dad?’
He has Alfie’s deep brown eyes flecked with amber, his long lashes and long limbs. He’s heavier than Alfie, his chest and stomach barrel-round, and his hair is cut short, his face clean-shaven. He’s smiling with a carefree joy that Tilly has never seen on Alfie’s features, but the resemblance is unmistakable.
Alfie nods, taking the phone back and returning it to his pocket.
‘This was his shop.’
He reaches behind the counter for a bottle of wine that still has a couple of glasses left, and retrieves two fresh paper cups. Then he sits down heavily on one of the empty chairs, running a hand along his jaw and looking around at the shelves of books.
‘Oh wow, Alfie. I had no idea.’
She joins him on the chair beside him, moving it until they are facing each other in the small space, their knees almost but not quite brushing against each other. Alfie silently pours the wine and hands a cup to Tilly.
‘Thanks.’
They tap their cups together, wine sloshing with the quietest of sounds and making Tilly aware of how still it is in the shop. Compared with the noise and laughter of earlier it feels like that bit after a party where it’s just you and the person you arrived with, having a debrief in your pyjamas over cups of tea. Her favourite part.
She watches as Alfie takes a long sip, the soft skin of his neck exposed as he tilts his head. When he looks back at her it’s with a tight-lipped expression, his brown eyes shining with a vulnerability that makes Tilly want to reach across and take his hand.
She keeps her hands wrapped around her drink as he says, ‘He worked in publishing when I was young but he always wanted to open a bookshop. And eventually he did. This place came up to rent when I was ten, and he jumped on it. He started it from nothing. It was just an empty shell, but he built all the bookshelves himself and Mum found the counter at a flea market and together they completely transformed the place. Dad made it exactly the bookshop he wanted it to be.’
‘Wow, so you grew up here, then?’ Tilly exclaims.
It suddenly makes sense; no wonder it’s felt strange the couple of times Tilly has seen Alfie outside of the bookshop. He seems woven into the very fabric of the place. Alfieisthe bookshop.
‘I always wished my parents had their own bookshop,’ she confesses. ‘Did you always know you’d take over from your dad?’
Alfie lets out a breath, the muscles along his jaw tightening.
‘I think that’s always what Dad hoped. He didn’t pressure me, exactly, but it was this unspoken expectation. My sister was never interested in it – she’s always been more into films than books. But I’d help out when I could, after school and in the holidays, and I always enjoyed it. But when I was coming to the end of school I had this sudden urge to rebel. I didn’t like the idea that someone else had written the book of my life and I didn’t have a say in it. I wanted to live my own life, at least for a while. So, I left London and went to Edinburgh to study geology.’
‘You studiedgeologyto rebel?’
She can’t hide her laughter and Alfie flashes her a look, making warmth pool in her stomach.
‘In my family studying anything other than the arts was as good as a revolt. My mum is an antiques dealer, and even Tashchose film studies and history. But I’d always been interested in science as well as reading.’
‘And you love rocks?’ Tilly adds with a raised eyebrow.
It is surprisingly easy to imagine Alfie as a teenager, all long gangly limbs and a messy mop of hair. She pictures his childhood bedroom, its stuffed bookshelves, the windowsill brimming with rocks and shells carefully carried home from beaches in sandy pockets.
‘Hey, I know geology doesn’tsoundespecially interesting,’ he says, his dark eyes meeting hers and his voice soft and low. ‘But rocks tell the story of life on our planet. By learning about different rock formations, you can learn the history of … well, everything really.’
‘I’ve never thought of it that way before. When you describe it like that it does sound pretty cool. When did you swap rocks for books, then?’
