The musty scent of old books was both damp and dry. It clogged Kate’s nose and throat as soon as she stepped over the threshold, but was not entirely unpleasant. The bookshop was an old stone building set back off the main street of Wigtown, along a narrow alley dog-legging between shops; a crazy-paved path wove through an explosion of dense, free-spirited shrubbery. The shop was an unprepossessing place at first glance, viewed through a curtain of drizzle and wreathed in grey Solway mist. A peeling, hand-painted sign pointed the way to a barn filled with books, the interior almost invisible through its dirty windows. Floor-length, rickety metal shelves and overflowing tables filled up the space with no order, no arrangement, no rhyme or reason as yet; just precious words, mouldering and haphazardly stacked.
Into the midst of this muddle stepped Kate Vincent, just off a transatlantic flight. She was travel-weary, bemused, still to fathom exactly how came she to be here.
Behind the antique counter sat Emily Cotton, wearing a cable-knit fisherman sweater and a loopy scarf of pink and gold. Kate had made this for her, parcelled it up and sent it across the Atlantic – her attempt to resurrect a friendship feared long dead. She got a polite thank-you note in reply – Emily was well brought up that way – and that was their last communication. Until the email.
Emily’s dark head was bent over a book, her lips moving as she read. She had an unhealthy indoor pallor and blue crescent moons of fatigue beneath grey eyes, which, when she glanced up at the sudden intrusion, seemed dull and lifeless. A weird beam of half-sun pushed through the murk and lit her face as she stared at Kate. It transformed her, burnishing her wiry curls to copper, turning her grey eyes mauve and luminous. There was a moment of confusion; then a howl of surprise and delight as she flung herself off her stool, exclaiming, ‘Kate, you came!’
It was a month since the email, composed and dispatched under the influence of three-quarters of a bottle of Merlot. A summons, a plea to an old friend in time of need. Emily had begged for assistance with this hasty new enterprise of hers, this ill-conceived ploy – at least melancholy and Merlot combined to make it seem so; in brighter moments it was more like a dream. Her grand, if undefined plan, was to run a bookshop in a town already famous for them.
Emily’s status as proprietor was signed and sealed, but faced with the enormity of the task ahead – and complete lack of both business experience and, she suspected, general acumen – she needed help. She also wasn’t in the proper frame of mind to be taking on this venture; she had been yo-yoing between delight and despair for weeks now, procrastinating like mad. Most days Emily wandered disconsolately through the cold shop, idly shifting books from one shelf to another; or else buried herself in a novel for a few hours and avoided the hard work, the decisions.
She hadn’t the heart for decisions; even the simplest of them felt beyond her. Fear and expectation of failure had diminished her, chiselled away at her resolve. Joe was in her thoughts all the time, undermining her and reminding her of her weakness.
Now – impossibly – Kate had come and Emily instinctively knew that all would be well.
‘You came!’ she said again, her voice fading to a whisper of incredulity, as if she doubted the evidence of her own eyes. Perhaps she had conjured this Kate-mirage out of sheer desperation. If that was the case, she really was in a bad way, as her family was wont to believe.
Emily threw her arms around Kate and felt the incontrovertible evidence of her friend, breathed in her perfume and shampoo – only Kate could look and smell so good after a long flight. Old envy cloaked her and hastily she pushed the feeling away; she didn’t want the reminders of her worst self.
Kate closed her eyes and returned the embrace, sinking into memories: crystal clear, perfect, untainted for her by disappointment or guilt. They surged to the surface and broke through. The impulsive steamroller embrace – so typical of Emily and her affectionate family – smoothed the awkwardness of the reunion after so long apart; despite Emily’s hair getting in her mouth and her clumsy tread on Kate’s toes, the hug was a moment of perfection, alignment; they hadn’t embraced – or even seen one another – in six years.
‘Of course I came,’ Kate said, when they had disentangled. She held Emily at arm’s length and surveyed her. ‘I was summoned.’ She lifted one eyebrow and bestowed a teasing smile.
Emily was sheepish, remembering the drunken, superlative-laden email. She looked Kate up and down; Kate seemed unsuitably dressed for a rainy, Scottish summer-town, in a well-cut, navy sateen dress printed with bird motifs. Navy stockings, whisper soft, and grey suede ankle boots – now trailing mud from the path – completed the ensemble. Her hair fanned out across her shoulders like corn-silk and her smile was vibrant with vermillion gloss.
Emily smiled nervously back, her chapped lips as pale as rose petals, skin bloodless. She was utterly overwhelmed by the moment and stepped away from Kate, wrapping her arms around herself. ‘Sophisti-kate,’ she said wryly – an old nickname, given when Kate emerged, swan-like, from her tomboyish, ugly-duckling years, ‘I didn’t think you would come.’ The awe in her voice revealed the magnitude of this gift of Kate’s presence: a whim to buy and renovate a run-down bookshop, one drunken email, and here Kate stood. So easy. I should have done this long ago, Emily thought. I should have brought Kate home.
Kate shivered and cast another appraising look around the room, concerned mainly with the temperature, but not overlooking the dust, the cobwebby corners and the shop’s general listlessness. ‘Well, here I am. It’s really cold in here, Em. Don’t you have heating?’ Emily shook her head, her face falling. Kate began to wander, already redesigning the place in her head: planning how to order and stack and present to best advantage. ‘No matter,’ she said briskly, and clasped her arms to her sides, suppressing a shiver.
‘I can lend you a jumper,’ Emily offered, glancing doubtfully at Kate’s outfit, and producing from beneath the counter a hoodie that had seen a lifetime of better days. Kate made no complaint as she pulled it on over her dress, distracted by a ribbon of memory, tangled around so many others; this was Emily’s hangover jumper. Adding a pair of fingerless gloves to the outfit brought further relief, and she cared not for the lack of sartorial elegance; the chill inside the barn was of old, neglected stone.
The jumper looked every bit as incongruous as Emily had feared, but Kate only tossed her head, struck a funny pose and made them both laugh. And the jumper was an invisible thread between them, bringing them snapping back together. The memories surged, unfettered, like moths shaken free from the fabric.
Laughter was the overriding memory. Laughing long and loud and often, in a succession of crumbling student flats. Wine-nights in vibrantly painted kitchens amongst the detritus of a thrown together meal, and lazy weekend mornings watching old films on the sofa, beneath Kate’s duvet because they so often couldn’t afford to turn the heating on. Boys came and went and other friends hovered on the periphery. But always Emily and Kate. Together. A unit.
Since the first days at South Morningside Primary School. A playground that resonated with the cries of major victories and minor conflicts, with melodies of skipping rhymes and football feuds and the brutal games of tig – a place of conquest, chieftains and queen bees and imperative allegiances; of friendships forged that might eventually wither, and one day die.
Or else last a lifetime.
The jury was still out on whether Kate and Emily’s friendship would stand the test of time – for a while both had been doubtful they’d ever see each other again – but here Kate was, which was a good start. They would need all the laughter they could muster to undertake this venture together, to repair what was broken – the barn with its rotting timbers and decaying books, and their friendship. Every word, every smile, every girlish giggle so reminiscent of old times, broke through the barricade and began the painstaking process of shoring things up.
‘You could offer the customers jumpers to keep them warm,’ Kate said, only half joking, plucking at the sleeve of the threadbare hoodie. ‘Keep them in a basket by the door.’
Emily’s tone was gloom-laden. ‘That presupposes there will be any customers.’ Kate looked stern at that and Emily quickly smoothed over her doubts with a paper-thin, unconvincing smile. ‘Cup of tea?’ she offered brightly.
Ah, the Emily of old, thought Kate, healing all the ills of the world with tea. And when tea failed: Merlot. ‘Sure. Is there electricity?’ Again, only half in jest. She was quickly realigning her ideas of this bookshop; the cheerful images that had sustained her across the ocean were fading now. This was not a bountiful business yet: nowhere near. It was not even a germ of one; it was just four walls and a roof and piles of books, and Emily so weighed down by the last few years that all the hope and verve had been squeezed out of her. Emily, who had been the schemer, the imaginative one, who had masterminded all their games and commanded Kate and the brothers to her will during Solway summers past.
Emily drew herself up with all the dignity she could manage. ‘Yes. No need to look so surprised. No coffee, I’m afraid. But come and look around.’ Walking Kate around the small shop, she visibly swelled with pride, a queen in her domain. For all its faults, every stone and timber of the shop was her own and she loved it. ‘The electrics are actually not bad,’ Emily said, leading Kate through a little door at the rear of the shop. ‘The lights flicker occasionally, but … look, there’s a kitchen here and a toilet through the back, and some outbuildings where we can keep the spare stock.’
The use of the word ‘we’ did not go unnoticed, but hovered in the air between them, somehow tangible and reassuring. The brightening of Emily’s tone cheered Kate.
She peered through the postage-stamp window, coated with decades of dirt, and nodded, enjoying Emily’s enthusiasm. Her arrival, she realised, had stoked Emily’s fire, released little tendrils of optimism that flared from her like smoke – shades of the little girl with grand schemes who had learned her obstinacy at her grandmother’s knee. But, at the same time, Kate could also see how fragile Emily’s confidence was, how very breakable her friend had become.
They stood in the cupboard-sized kitchen, which boasted a small sink, a cracked countertop and a merrily bubbling kettle, and stared at each other, breaking into foolish, incredulous grins and feeling just as shy and unsure as that first day in the school playground, when Emily had shared her crisps for no better reason than that Kate didn’t have any – and Emily had known instinctively that this wasn’t an oversight but a matter of course.
Back then, Emily and the Cottons were all twelve-year-old Kate had to cling to; they had become her life raft in the maelstrom of her mother’s depression and drinking. Lily Vincent had succumbed to her demons before Kate was born and even a small daughter dependent on her hadn’t been enough to drag her out of the slough of despair she found herself in. Kate had learned to survive, relying on her wits and a sense that there was some other life, just waiting to be uncovered. That she had managed to do more than simply survive – had crafted a new life for herself and dared to dream of a future in which she could achieve something – was entirely down to the Cotton family.
Emily laid out a box of tea bags, two cracked mugs and some sour-smelling milk – they opted to drink the tea black. Wrapping their hands around the mugs, they wandered back through the shop, their thoughts unconsciously unspooling in perfect harmony. The moment had a vibration, shared thoughts humming between them. This is awkward. This is brilliant! Why didn’t we do this before? And, Why are we doing this now?
They exchanged shy sidelong glances. Emily weighed her words, a furrow between her brows as she considered how to broach the question. Why had Kate come? She must surely have left so much behind in New York: a career, boyfriend, friends – all abandoned for a cold, damp summer in Wigtown, renovating a dilapidated bookshop with an erstwhile former friend who probably didn’t deserve her sacrifice. ‘I had no right to expect you would come,’ Emily said finally, struggling with the enormity of her gratitude. ‘Or even to ask it of you.’
Kate sipped her tea and looked at her levelly. ‘You had every right to ask it, and expect it too. You’re my best friend.’
‘Still? After all this time?’
‘Time makes no difference, Em.’
Emily’s grey eyes were trembling with a mix of hope and doubt, the intensity of her gaze unnerving beneath heavy brows. ‘Doesn’t it?’
The look – the hope – was too much for Kate. Time was not the problem, but rather the nature of their parting; immediately after university, Emily running off with gorgeous, unreliable Joe, quite determined to make a life with him in spite of her family’s objections; and Kate, tired of fighting Emily on the subject, still heart-sore over her own lost love and desperate to put as many miles between her and her mother as possible. She stuck a pin in a map and came up with New York. It seemed glossy and glamorous, ambiguous, anonymous: the ideal stage for her reinvention.
Time mattered only in as much as all the moments lost, and all the things they hadn’t said.
Kate knew what she needed to say to mend the moment, what Emily needed to hear. ‘Not to us.’ Her words were emphatic and brooked no argument. They’d work the rest out later.
She set down her lipstick-printed mug on a nearby table and her boots rang on the flagstones as she made yet another loop of the shop.
Completing her circuit, she paused, lips compressed in contemplation as her plans began to form, spider-webbing in her mind. She had flown through the night, navigated airport queues and driven for hours in a rented car for this. She had had next to no sleep, but she barely felt tired at all now. When she turned back to Emily, her eyes were bright. ‘It’s going to be great,’ she enthused. ‘We’ll start with a good clean up. We should redesign the layout of the shop floor, get new tables, chairs, rugs. We must start thinking about our advertising strategy, our unique selling point …’She paused. She could already see it all – buttery light spilling from low lamps, plump cushions and overstuffed armchairs, and row upon row of books awaiting the ready smiles of the regulars and the meandering casual browsers, and, pervading it all, the smell of good coffee.
So real was the image that she could almost feel the crisp, thick covers of new books beneath her fingertips, hear the murmur of rustling pages and the hum of happy voices. Kate didn’t even like books all that much but she was desperate to begin, to create the very best bookshop imaginable. Together.
Emily buried her head in her hands as bubbles of panic rose and burst and she began to deflate like a popped balloon. ‘Please—’ she began.
Kate looked confused. ‘I’m sorry, should I slow down? But … this is why you brought me here – no?’
Emily dragged her hands from her face with a sigh. ‘Yes. But it’s all so fast. I need some time to get accustomed to the idea of you being here, never mind thinking about rugs and chairs and … and selling points.’
Kate gave her a cool, meditative stare, deciding that Emily’s dithering ennui had best be ignored. ‘Nonsense,’ she said briskly. ‘Find me a notebook and point me in the direction of the nearest deli. We’ll make some notes over lunch.’
Equipped with legal currency and directions – it had been a long time since Kate’s last visit to Wigtown and shops had come and gone in the intervening years – Kate headed for the door, only to turn back abruptly. Emily remained anxiously in the middle of the shop. ‘Emily, I came all this way with no warning. I should have called … and I didn’t even ask where I would be staying.’ Suddenly it seemed impulsive and imprudent to have leapt on the plane and come on the strength of so very little.
Emily set aside the book she had picked up and pushed her hair back behind her ears. ‘You’ll stay with me of course.’ As if it was a stupid question.
Kate spoke with exaggerated patience. ‘Yes, but where is that exactly? Sleeping bags in one of the outbuildings?’ With Emily, she wouldn’t rule it out.
Emily shuddered at the prospect of the scuttling spiders. ‘I live at Bluebell Bank, with Lena. You’ll stay with us there.’
A thrill ran through Kate. Full circle. Back to Bluebell Bank. It was more than she could have hoped for. Missing those years with Emily had meant losing the rest of the Cottons too. Bluebell Bank was the source of the only happy, carefree memories of Kate’s childhood. When she had been welcomed into the clan she had been transported from her life of poverty and loneliness and brought here to the Solway, to share the Cotton’s idyllic summers with Lena, their unconventional grandmother, and all Emily’s brothers.
‘Will that be all right with Lena?’ she asked, flinching from the prospect of coming all this distance only to be turned away, or worse, treated like an old acquaintance from an era long gone. She was family. She belonged. And they belonged to her.
‘Yes,’ Emily said stoutly, ‘it’ll be grand.’ She was keeping something back, Kate could tell. She lingered in the doorway, watching, noting how Emily’s eyes remained fixed on the floor as she reached for another book and began nervously rifling pages. A spasm of fear caught Kate in its iron grip, squeezing the breath from her lungs. For the first time since the email – the precipitous decision, the termination of her New York life and the plane ride over the ocean – she began to contemplate the dreadful possibility that the sanctuary she had returned to was not, as she had always imagined it must be, simply waiting for her, unchanged.
‘Bluebell Bank,’ Kate whispered, as Emily’s anxious eyes rose to meet hers again. ‘We were so happy there as kids, weren’t we.’
Emily’s smile was every bit as pale and determined as the thin beams of sun that strained through the shop windows - nearly opaque with grime. ‘Yes. And we will be again.’