After half an hour wandering through the cemetery, they are back at their bench. Karl Marx is still glowering at them, but it is difficult to take him so seriously with his toupee of snow. Malcolm walks over and clears the snow off Claudia Jones’s grave. Meanwhile, Jo tucks herself in under the blankets. She picks up her cocktail glass and, while Malcolm and Ruth study the gravestone, she tips some Christmas cocktail onto the earth. Well, she presumes the gods like cocktails too.
‘So out with it,’ Ruth says, sitting down. ‘What are you going to do, Jo?’ She holds the blanket out for Malcolm to tuck himself under.
Jo smiles, remembering the decision she reached on the moors a few days ago. ‘I’m going to start my own stationery shop.’
‘Ah,’ says Ruth, beaming. ‘Good for you.’
‘Delightful,’ says Malcolm. ‘Then you don’t intend to continue with your Uncle Wilbur’s establishment?’
‘I did think about it, but no. I want to live closer to home. Nearer to the hills.’ Near to Lucy and to Mum and Dad, she thinks.
Ruth and Malcolm nod.
‘Uncle Wilbur is definitely helping me, though,’ she says. ‘His flat and shop have been left to Mum, and they are worth a ridiculous amount of money. She wants me to have some of this to help me start. Plus I still have my redundancy money. I thought I would take up the bronze and indigo floor tiles that are in the doorway and put those in my new shop, oh, and keep the oak cabinet. And the noticeboard, of course.’
‘And your uncle’s armchair was exceedingly comfortable …’ Malcolm reflects.
Jo grins. ‘Yes, I’ve got my eye on that too,’ she confesses.
She wants to always have something of the spirit of Uncle Wilbur in her new shop. Her favourite uncle walking beside her, never forgotten. She is going to call her shop Dear Wilbur, and she is planning a website, too – a way to keep in touch with her tribe of Stationery Lovers.
‘Where will your new shop be?’ Ruth asks.
‘I’m not sure yet,’ Jo says, reflectively. ‘I think these last six months have made me realize I need a new start. But somewhere closer to home.’ She smiles. ‘My heart will always be in the North-East, but I don’t want to just go back to the old places.’ And she thinks, the old habits. ‘So I’ve been looking at towns like Ilkley – it’s about an hour from my parents and not too far from where my best friend, Lucy, lives.’ She nudges Ruth’s arm, ‘I guess it would be about an hour from Richmond too.’
‘Excellent.’ Ruth says this first, but Jo notices there is a quiet echo from Malcolm.
Jo tries to find the words to describe her walkup on the moors and all she had thought about. ‘I think being in London made me see that you can find communities, and friendship, anywhere.’
‘Go on,’ Ruth prompts.
‘I realized that you can make friends in unexpected places. When I had to shut up Uncle Wilbur’s shop, I had so many messages of support from customers via Twitter – people who love stationery. They spread the word about what was happening, and now I feel like I’m getting to know some of them too.’
The candle in the lantern is burning low, and it won’t be long before they have to leave. The thought of Eric the Viking starts to intrude, but there is more Jo wants to say.
‘When I was home, it made me realize I wanted a new start where I wasn’t just Average Jo—’
‘You certainly are not …’ her friends begin.
But Jo stops them. ‘I’ve always been somewhere in the middle when it comes to most things, and though it isn’t necessarily a bad thing, I think it became a problem for me.’
‘How?’ Ruth asks.
‘I guess I settled for things when I shouldn’t have done.’ Jo thinks of James, taking over her life. Of her job at the bank, which she liked but never loved. ‘And because I thought of myself as average and ordinary, I was always looking at people who seemed to be doing better than me, thinking maybe I should try to be more like that, but doing nothing about it.’ Jo thinks specifically of the ‘popular crowd’ who she started to hang out with.
‘So,’ Jo continues, ‘I ended up feeling inadequate, andthen bad, because I didn’t do anything to change it.’
‘And now you want to change something?’ Malcolm asks.
‘Well, yes and no,’ Jo laughs. She looks out into the cemetery for inspiration. And she finds it. ‘I am glad that there are people who can write like George Eliot; who have huge brains like Marx; are campaigners like Claudia; have the skill of John Lobb, the business acumen of William Foyle; people who can sing and play like Hutch, and who have big ideas like Issachar. But I’m not one of them. And I’m okay with that. I now know what I want.
‘I’d like to run a stationery shop. I need to be able to walk out onto the hills. But I’ve also found I like cities. So I think Ilkley could be perfect – it’s on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales, but not that far from Leeds. And it’s okay to not want much more than that.’ Jo doesn’t mention her longing for a family. One of the things she realized up on the moors was that, for her, this really was up to the gods. She continues, ‘So, I don’t need to be extraordinary. I want to run a small shop, I want to spend time with my friends and family, I want to walk, go to the pub, cook, write with a fountain pen.’ She smiles. ‘I think I might like to try some more wild swimming …’
Ruth nudges her. ‘I might even come with you.’
‘… but that’s about as adventurous as it’s going to get. And that’s okay.’
‘I would say that it is more than okay,’ Malcolm agrees.
