The Bookshop on Rosemary Lane is about to get bigger, better, brighter …
Come and celebrate the opening of our new-improved shop!
Double the size, hundreds more books to browse!
Join us for drinks and nibbles
Retro cocktail (and mocktail) demonstration and tasting
The Bookshop on Rosemary Lane, 27 Rosemary Lane, Burley Bridge
Friday June 9, 6.30 pm
Children welcome
By Tuesday afternoon, Matt and Chris were packing up their tools in their van for the final time. The plastic curtain had been removed and the two rooms flowed together beautifully, the deep raspberry paintwork lending the shop an exotic air. The shelving and counter were complete, the floorboards sanded – thankfully this had been undertaken in the evenings, when the shop was closed – and a cheerful chequerboard rug laid down. There was a central island for events, and the existing kitchen at the back had been upgraded to enable Della to use it if she was giving a demonstration. She had chosen elegant table lamps, plus strings of fairy lights for the children’s section. It looked wonderful, and Roxanne and Della gazed around in awe.
‘Not bad, is it?’ Della said, flushing with pride.
‘Not at all,’ Roxanne replied, hugging her. ‘I’m so proud of you, Dell.’
Della looked at her and laughed. ‘Oh, stop it.’
‘C’mon, are you really taking in what you’ve done here? Look!’ Della gazed around, and Roxanne did too. As they closed the shop for the evening, the sisters conceded that, considering this had been a bonkers idea, all based on Kitty’s old books that no one in their right mind would ever want to buy, even their rather formidable mother would be proud if she could see her own cookbooks displayed so beautifully today.
‘I think I’ll walk Stanley,’ Roxanne said. ‘It looks like it’s brightening up out there.’
‘It does,’ Della agreed, glancing out of the shop window, ‘now the rain’s just about stopped. Why not see if Michael wants to join you?’
Roxanne caught her sister’s eye and laughed as they made their way upstairs to the flat. ‘Don’t start that again …’
‘I’m not starting anything! But I’m sure he’ll be pleased. He seems to enjoy being around you.’
Roxanne considered this. She enjoyed being around him too, she reflected. While she still felt as if she should tread a little carefully around him, there was something about him that intrigued her. It was his determination, she decided: how he had soldiered on and was well on his way to making the bakery flourish. She couldn’t help admiring him for that. ‘You don’t think he’ll find it a bit much,’ she ventured, ‘with me spending time with Elsa, and then dropping by …’
‘Of course not,’ Della retorted as they stepped into the flat, where she called Stanley immediately and clipped on his lead – which apparently settled the matter.
As Della had predicted, he was delighted to join her, and soon they were gazing in wonder at the perfect rainbow which hung, as if placed there just for their delight, over the valley in which Burley Bridge nestled.
‘Isn’t that stunning?’ she gasped, whipping out her phone to photograph it.
‘It’s rare you see one so vivid,’ he agreed.
She took photo after photo but, of course, her pictures didn’t do any justice to the real thing.
‘I wonder why that happens?’ she asked, showing him the screen. ‘Why it loses its brightness like that?’
‘I guess it’s one of those things you need to experience for real,’ he said. ‘Like, um …’
‘The Northern Lights?’ she suggested.
‘Yeah.’ Michael smiled. ‘Suzy and I went on a sort of pilgrimage to see them, actually, about twenty years ago now. One of those trips-of-a-lifetime type things …’
‘Where did you go?’ she asked.
‘Northern Lapland. We stayed in a glass tree house – it was a big family thing to mark her dad’s sixtieth. Suzy’s parents had always wanted to see the lights …’
Roxanne called for Stanley as they strolled through the area of woodland just off the main path. ‘That sounds pretty impressive,’ she remarked.
‘Oh, it was. Where we were staying, they’re meant to appear pretty much every second night, but of course, when you’ve travelled thousands of miles and built yourself up for the whole experience – well, you wait for days and days and nothing happens …’ He laughed.
‘And then you come out on an ordinary dog walk and see that!’ Roxanne said with a smile. They had emerged from the woods to see the rainbow still there, shimmering. It was perfect. ‘There are two,’ she exclaimed suddenly. ‘It’s a double rainbow. Isn’t that magical?’
‘It’s beautiful,’ he agreed.
Roxanne breathed in deeply, filling her lungs with fresh Yorkshire air.
Michael turned to her. ‘Feels good being up here, doesn’t it?’
‘It does. I really love it. It’s funny, but I hardly ever came up here as a kid …’
Just for a moment, their eyes met, and something remarkable seemed to happen to Roxanne. It didn’t matter that she had never appreciated how beautiful this place was, because she was here now, with a man she had only met a handful of times, and who she didn’t know – not really – yet she felt utterly right being here.
Michael smiled at her, as if reading her thoughts. Flustered now, she glanced quickly away at the dogs, who were snuffling around the still-damp undergrowth, and when she looked back at Michael his smile triggered something, like a shoal of tiny fish, in her stomach. Butterflies, that’s what they were. She was experiencing a flurry of butterflies over being in close proximity to the bakery man. Had he looked at her in a certain way? Or had she just imagined it? She scolded herself, and tried to think of Sean, back in London.
‘So, um, did you ever see the Northern Lights?’ she asked, flustered now.
‘Yes, on the very last day of our trip,’ he replied.
‘Was it amazing?’
He was looking at her, with a bemused look on his face now. ‘D’you know, it wasn’t actually as amazing as this.’
She blinked at him, then laughed in realisation at what he meant. ‘And you haven’t had to travel all the way to northern Lapland to see it.’ Her phone rang in her jeans pocket, and she flinched.
‘It’s fine, take it,’ Michael said lightly.
Roxanne winced apologetically as she pulled it from her pocket and looked at the screen. Sean.
‘Sorry. I guess I’d better.’ Roxanne accepted the call. ‘Sean? Everything all right?’
‘Yeah,’ Sean replied. ‘Well, no – not really, to be honest. I had another call …’
She frowned. ‘Who from?’
‘From Tommy, your joiner mate.’
‘Oh, not again. What happened this time?’
Michael had called for the dogs and set off a little way ahead as they began to make their way back to the village.
Sean sighed audibly. ‘Okay, so this time he says he really needs the pictures doing soon as possible because it’s his girlfriend’s birthday coming up and he’ll need to get them framed. I said, sorry, I don’t have time – as I explained very clearly last time we spoke. I told him to contact a high-street photographer, there’d be someone local who’d be delighted to do the job …’
‘Good advice,’ she murmured, carefully sidestepping a patch of mud.
‘But no, he wants me to do the pictures. Jessica’s worthy of a top photographer, is what he says. Won a commended at Crufts two years in a row …’
‘Oh, how awkward for you. Well, I suppose it’s flattering …’
‘Huh? I can hardly hear you …’
‘Probably the signal,’ she fibbed, realising she had been keeping her voice low deliberately. She didn’t really want Michael to overhear her part of the exchange.
‘… and it turns out he’s googled where I work from,’ Sean went on, ‘and he was standing right there, outside my bloody studio!’
Roxanne spluttered, and Michael looked back and gave her a quizzical look. ‘You mean, he’d turned up with his dog?’
‘Yeah!’
‘What did you do? Did you let him in?’
‘Well, I didn’t have much choice, did I? I just thought, well, I have nothing else on this afternoon apart from the hundreds of things I should have been doing, of course – and this’ll get him off my back once and for all. So I’d said, “Okay, this is totally irregular, I never do this for anyone, I don’t even take my own bookings normally. Britt handles all that …”’
‘What happened?’ Impatience had crept into Roxanne’s voice. She glanced up at the rainbow and saw it fading before her very eyes.
‘So, in they come, Tommy and his little dog – I mean, he’d just taken her to the groomer’s, he’d gone to that trouble, so she was all freshly washed with a pink bow in her fringe, if dogs have fringes …’ Michael was striding further ahead now, the dogs scampering at his side, and Roxanne quickened her pace to keep up ‘… I told Louie to set up a plain white background and some lights. We’d keep it nice and simple so, in theory, it should all be over in half an hour …’ He paused for breath. ‘We even found an old rug in a cupboard, not too shabby – but would Jessica sit there and pose nicely?’
‘Er, I guess not?’ she suggested. ‘Shame you didn’t have any treats to bribe her with. I met this lovely girl from the village. She bakes these home-made dog cookies—’
‘Charging about, she was,’ Sean cut in, as if she hadn’t spoken, ‘crouching down by my light stands, has a pee …’
‘No! Really?’
‘… then another pee on a socket board so the damn thing’s fused, and it’ll probably stink forever …’
‘Oh, Sean.’
‘… and only then does she finally sit on the rug – no, it’s not sitting, it’s more of a squat, and she does a sh—’
‘No!’ she gasped, gripping her phone. Michael glanced back again briefly, and she fell silent.
‘Rox?’ Sean snapped.
She continued to plod down the hill, picturing his face, his mouth set firm, jaw clenched, puddles of wee all over the floor. ‘That’s terrible,’ she muttered, a bubble of mirth starting to build in her now as Michael rounded a corner, out of sight. ‘But, come on – don’t you find it a little bit funny?’
Silence. The effort of displaying no emotion whatsoever was giving her a pain in the side of her head.
‘Well,’ she added, when no response was forthcoming, ‘at least that’s him out of your hair once and for all. That’s good, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah, I guess you could look at it that way. So, thanks for that, Rox. Thanks for dishing out my number when, actually, I could have spent the afternoon prepping for tomorrow’s shoot instead of having my studio used like a giant dog toilet.’
And with that, he ended the call.
Roxanne frowned and thrust her phone back into her pocket, wondering whether she had deserved that telling off. Seemingly, yes. In giving out his phone numbers, she had chalked up yet another misdemeanor – along with burning his birthday biscuits, guzzling too much champagne at his party and haranguing the DJ for 70s pop.
Trying to shrug off her unease, she hurried after Michael and the dogs, and by the time she caught up with them they were nearing the end of the path. ‘Sorry about that,’ she said, clipping Stanley’s lead onto his red leather collar.
Michael flashed a quick smile as they made their way along the roadside towards the village centre. ‘Oh, it’s no problem – really.’
She grimaced. ‘That was Sean. Dog trouble again.’
‘So I gathered,’ he said, amusement flickering in those light blue eyes.
‘It went on a bit longer than I’d imagined. The call, I mean.’
He nodded and smiled briefly. ‘Really, it’s fine. I’d better get back, though. Jude’ll be wondering where I am, complaining about child exploitation at nineteen years old …’ He paused. ‘Are you coming to the sourdough workshop at the bakery tomorrow?’
‘Oh, yes, of course,’ she said quickly, adding, ‘It’ll be fine, you know. But I realise Elsa’s sort of pushed you into it …’
He grinned. ‘And I’m pushing you into coming, aren’t I? I imagine it’s not quite your thing …’
‘Maybe it could be,’ she said, hoping she sounded convincing as they said goodbye.
Roxanne stood for a moment, watching as Michael and Bob crossed the road and disappeared into the bakery. She did want to show her support at the bakery tomorrow. However, Sean’s tetchy call had somehow knocked the wind out of her, and when she glanced back up at the sky, there was just a wash of pale grey and the rainbow had gone.