The Air Raid Book Club(2)
They were married a few years later and moved south of the river when Harry qualified as a librarian. The newly married Binghams had assumed that their snug little house would soon echo with the sound of infants, but years of heartbreaking disappointment resigned them to the fact that this wasn’t to be. Ever the practical stoic, Gertie continued with life as she knew best, and when she spied the “For Lease” sign in Buckingham Milliners on the high street, her impatient mind saw a solution and an exciting new future for them both.
“A bookshop?” said Harry as she linked an arm through his and led him on a lunchtime walk around the rose garden next to the library.
“Why not? We could run it with our eyes closed, and besides, wouldn’t you like to work in a place where you don’t have to whisper all the time or get snapped at by Snipp?”
“Now, Gertie, Miss Snipp isn’t that bad.”
“Yes, but she’s not a patch on your wife,” said Gertie, leading him behind an oak tree out of sight and planting a kiss on his lips.
Harry smiled and kissed her again. “Where would I be without you, Gertie Bingham?”
“Tragically alone and terribly brokenhearted,” she said.
They applied in person to Miss Maud and Miss Violet Buckingham, the sisters who had run Buckingham Milliners ever since their father died thirty years previously. The pair seemed very taken with the young couple who stood before them, complimenting Gertie on her “elegantly demure” choice of hat.
“Oh, aren’t they a darling couple, Maud?”
“Absolutely darling, Vi.”
“And what will your business be, dear hearts?”
“Books,” said Gertie.
“Ah, books. How wonderful. Isn’t that wonderful, Vi?”
“Wonderful,” confirmed Violet.
It was indeed wonderful, as Violet and Maud not only agreed to sign over the lease but also became long-term customers of the Binghams. Gertie always delighted in sending any newly published romances to the two retirees in Suffolk. She imagined the pair of them, happy in a cozy cottage surrounded by a garden filled with the lavender, delphinium, and plump, fragrant roses befitting two devoted romantics.
On the day they opened the doors of their new venture, Gertie inhaled the rich scent of new books, more intoxicating than French champagne, and couldn’t imagine wanting to be anywhere else in the world. Harry took her hand and kissed it.
“Welcome to Bingham Books, my love.”
Part One
London, 1938
Chapter 1
Our deeds still travel with us from afar,
And what we have been makes us what we are.
—George Eliot, Middlemarch
Gertie arrived at the shop early that morning. She didn’t sleep much past five these days. It was a nuisance, but there it was. Hemingway, the mild-mannered yellow Labrador, was at her side as usual. He had become something of a local celebrity since joining their staff four years ago. Gertie noticed that he had the ability to raise a smile from even the most austere of customers, and several mothers had been known to make a detour during shopping trips so that their eager children could pat his bearlike head.
Little had changed in the town of Beechwood since Harry and Gertie first opened the doors of Bingham Books all those years ago. The Tweedy family still ran the bakery, and Mr. Piddock the butcher had retired only last year, handing over his impeccably sharpened knives to his son Harold, who, according to local gossip Miss Crow, left too much sinew in his leg of beef. Gertie glanced along the high street now. Her shoulders dipped at the sight of the honey-colored lettering of Perkins’s Confectioners. Harry had bought a bag of cinder toffee from Mrs. Perkins every week without fail for them to share during evenings beside the radio.
“Come on, Hemingway. Good boy,” said Gertie, ushering the dog inside the shop, grateful as ever for his distracting presence.
The sun’s early rays cast a spotlight through the window, as motes of dust danced and swirled like fireflies. Gertie paused to inhale the exquisite possibility of unopened books as she had done every morning for nearly thirty years. This place had brought her such joy for so long. She and Harry had built something wonderful. Their own world full of ideas and stories. At one stage in her life she thought she’d change the world in some dynamically public way, but she soon realized that she could do the same with books. They were powerful. They forged ideas and inspired history.
That joy was beginning to diminish now, however. She gazed toward the doorway at the back of the shop and imagined Harry standing there, arms full of books, smiling at her. Instinctively she reached down to stroke one of Hemingway’s velvet ears as the memory pinched her heart. The dog stared up at her with mournful eyes.
It had been the medical condition that won Harry his exemption from the Great War that had also caused his death two years ago. Gertie counted herself lucky when Harry was granted exemption on medical grounds, although Miss Crow had not missed the opportunity to dismiss him as a “shirker” to anyone who would listen. If Harry was hurt by these comments, he didn’t show it. His quiet service as a volunteer air-raid warden made Gertie burn with pride. But life has a way of catching up with you eventually, and the respiratory illness, which Harry had endured since childhood, meant that his body wasn’t able to fight the tuberculosis that finally stole his life. Gertie still couldn’t believe it. How could he be gone? They still had so much life to live.