The Bookshop of New Beginnings: Heart-warming, uplifting – a perfect feel good read!. Jen Mouat
looked up, noted how Emily’s eyes slid away from hers as she realised her mistake. Perhaps she was only trying to protect Kate, shield her from the remembered pain of losing him, but erasing him wasn’t the answer; as if Kate could possibly forget.
‘Thanks,’ Kate said softly, pushing the book aside. ‘This is great.’
Emily feigned interest in her ragged fingernails, hands curled around the stem of her wine glass. She took a gulp, realising too late that the gesture of the album had served as a nod to darker times just as surely as rekindling the gentle, happy reminiscences. No Luke, no Joe; but they were there all the same. ‘No problem. I had boxes of pictures lying about and I thought they should be in an album. All the photographs were taken on my camera. I didn’t think you would have any.’
Boxes of pictures? So where was Luke? ‘I don’t. Thank you,’ Kate repeated. She lifted her glass to her lips and slowly took a sip.
Emily stood up, almost knocking over her glass in her haste. ‘Better check on dinner,’ she said. ‘It’s probably ready. Oh, I gave Dan a call. He’s expecting us later. I didn’t tell him about you. I wanted it to be a surprise. He won’t be able to believe his eyes.’
Kate, lost in thoughts stirred up by the album like a gust of autumn leaves, only murmured in assent. She was realising that two worlds could not collide and be expected to mesh. She could not be the New York Kate here at Bluebell Bank, with these people and these memories.
And in New York she had eschewed the memories of this place, this version of herself, in order to be a completely new person: a better one, or so she had thought.
But such a split couldn’t continue; she was either new Kate, aloof and unattached and capable, or old Kate, immersed in this world and these people. One must prevail.
She would have to choose.
Losing the new self she had crafted so carefully seemed like too great a loss, a betrayal, but she wanted to be the girl with the bangles again, the Kate who hoarded simple treasures and clung to the Cottons. Alarmingly, she didn’t feel like Ben’s Kate any more – not here, awash with the memories of love and loss, of Luke and Dan; and not when the person Ben had fallen in love with was a phoney. The Kate the Cottons remembered was the real one.
*
Emily watched Kate leaf through the photograph album and knew her mistake; she had omitted Luke from the annals, which was stupid – also difficult because he was in nearly every bloody photograph! She had been trying to save Kate the pain of seeing him, and also – if she was honest – to save herself too. Luke Ross was dangerous territory; they definitely didn’t need to venture there tonight.
Kate’s expression was soft as she studied the images of her teenaged self, Emily and the brothers never far from her side. The album had achieved the desired effect of reminding her that once they had been her world.
And they could be again. She and Kate could start fresh, put past differences behind them. They would make the bookshop work together. And maybe everything else would be easier with Kate here: bearing Lena’s illness; bridging the ever-widening gulf between Noah and Dan – permanently at each other’s throat; forgetting Joe. For the first time since she had fled home to Bluebell Bank, Emily felt wildly optimistic.
They ate in the dining room – not quite one of the epic dinners of family lore; not enough people seated around the table for that – but comfortingly evocative all the same. The walls were cherry red, the bay windows shrouded in net curtains that danced in the breeze, and the paisley patterned carpet was wearing thin in places. They ate Emily’s unconventional Bolognese, though for authenticity’s sake they should have been eating salad and cold cuts; with cherry tomatoes and avocado, little octagons of cucumber, folds of pink meat and shiny, quartered hard-boiled eggs. If they ever ate anything else those summer days at Bluebell Bank, Kate didn’t remember it.
Kate reached for her wine glass, watching Emily and Lena laugh over recounting one of Fergus’s famous temper tantrums. ‘Red hair,’ Lena said sagely. ‘I should know, I was a redhead myself. I once threw James’s plate of dinner at the wall when I was in a temper over something or other.’
‘You didn’t?’ Emily’s eyes widened. ‘That should go in the memory book.’ She sprang up from the table and went over to an ancient sideboard. A moment later, she returned with a pad of Post-it notes and a pen. She hastily scribbled. ‘I don’t want to forget,’ she explained, glancing up from her writing to see Kate watching her curiously.
‘Memory book?’ Kate enquired.
Emily nodded. ‘The story of Lena’s life. I’m preserving it all for her.’ And for all of us. The matter of fact way she said this, and the unspoken addendum, laid Lena’s illness before them.
Kate looked at Lena, but she was unconcerned. Lena caught the look and grinned irreverently. ‘Like downloading me onto one of those memory stick thingies. On a computer. She’s making a backup.’
Kate wasn’t sure how to deal with this candour. She hid her face in her wine glass to avoid having to reply. Emily and her grandmother had always been close and, watching them now, Kate felt the depths of their bond still. Emily seemed unfazed by the indisputable evidence of Lena’s illness; she faced the moments when Lena’s lucidity slipped with unfailing calm and gentleness, barely a crack in her composure. This was a good sign, for Emily had always been highly strung.
After dinner, carrying the glasses to the kitchen to be washed, Kate overheard Lena in the kitchen saying petulantly; ‘But who is she? Has she come to clean? I told you I don’t need a cleaner.’
‘No, she’s not the cleaner. She’s an old friend of mine, Lena. She’s Kate.’
‘Kate? Don’t be silly. Kate’s just a child.’
Kate had to return the glasses to the dining room to catch her breath, feeling dizzy and thrown off orbit. How on earth did Emily cope?
By the time they set out to Dan’s farm, Lena was back to herself again. It was a perfectly lazy summer evening, the air sweet and heavy. A last slice of sunlight spilled over the rain-damp fields, the long grass was bowed with the weight of water and soft mud sucked at Kate’s borrowed wellingtons as they walked beneath the cool shade of the trees. The woods were alive: chirruping, rustling, crunching, squelching.
‘We walk this way most evenings after dinner,’ Emily said. ‘Even if we don’t go to the farm to see Dan and Abby. It’s a good walk for Bracken and Lena knows it like the back of her hand. She’s been doing it for seventy years so I don’t worry about her losing her way.’
True, but Lena had also been handling cutlery for more than seventy years, yet earlier when she tried to set the table Kate had seen her freeze, bewildered, staring from the silverware in her hand to the empty space on the table, as if she had been asked to complete a puzzle, the key to which hovered beyond her ken, before finally dumping the whole pile in the middle in frustration. Everyone had extricated their own and it didn’t matter. Except, of course, that it did.
The path from Bluebell Bank to the farm – shaped mostly by generations of Cottons – led down through the woods at the bottom of the garden, crossed stream and stile and skirted the fields, leading eventually down the slope of the lower pasture to the farmhouse nestled in the valley in the lea of two rolling hills.
A lifetime of tramping the fields and hills of Galloway had made Lena thin and rangy and fit. She looked so strong striding out ahead of them in her manly boots, her wide-brimmed hat squashed on top of her wild, white hair, that Kate could imagine for a few moments that she was completely well. This physical wellness seemed unfair in the face of the insidious disease creeping at the corners of her mind, erasing parts of her. Kate wondered if Emily would have traded the mental disease for a physical, debilitating one, if it meant keeping Lena sharp and clever and herself? Would Lena? If she got to choose. She tried