The Lost Bookshop(93)

‘I am sorry.’

‘Don’t be.’

After a moment, we both smiled.

‘It’s a shame,’ he continued, opening another box of books. ‘It must have been a wonderful shop.’

‘It was.’

I closed my eyes for a moment and tried to remember how it once looked. To feel the warmth of customers coming inside and finding the one thing they didn’t know they were looking for. Could I do it? Could I afford not to? Without my manuscript to sell, I had no way of providing for myself. I couldn’t keep relying on Josef’s charity. It was sheer luck that he had helped me in the first place. He saved my life. Perhaps he was right. What was the point in gaining my freedom, only to remain locked inside?

‘I would have to be careful,’ I said, and his broad smile gave me a tickle of hope.





The shop began trading quietly and without fanfare. I simply opened the door and invariably people began to wander inside. I used the money from whatever sold to begin restocking the shop properly, as well as stocking my larder. I could even afford some essential items that now seemed like luxuries. I bought soap, undergarments and a brand-new pair of shoes. I began to see a way forward again. I suppressed my worries about being found out; as long as Lyndon believed I was still in St Agnes’s and Dr Lynch kept receiving the money, they would have no reason to bother me. Little by little, I returned to myself. Bruised but still intact – and that was more than some.

Reliance is something that happens without you noticing it. In the weeks that followed the shop’s reopening, I grew to lean on Josef and his quiet, dependable ways. He asked nothing of me and sometimes I couldn’t quite work out why he returned, day after day, without ever questioning the past or the future. Perhaps it was because he was not one to discard broken things. I discovered that about him the day he arrived at the shop with the tiniest tools I had ever seen, rolled up in a satchel.

‘Where did you get those?’

‘From the clock repair man. Is not far from here.’

He said it as though it were perfectly obvious. That a prisoner of war could wander into town and borrow some tools from an horologist and fix an antique music box belonging to a woman who had just escaped a madhouse. I couldn’t help but giggle, which utterly bemused him, though he didn’t ask. He never asked. He just went about his work.

‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ I asked him, before setting out for groceries, now that I had some money again.

‘In Salzburg, I used to repair organs.’

I shook my head, unable to assimilate this new information.

‘What do you mean?’

‘For the church,’ he said, gently unscrewing the casing from underneath the gold-plated box.

‘You used to repair church organs?’ I repeated and he nodded without making eye contact.

‘As a boy. With my father. Then I studied mechanics at G?ttingen University. I like fixing things,’ he said, a broad smile stealing across his face.

How had someone like him ended up on a Luftwaffe airplane, crash-landing in Ireland? Perhaps for the first time, I began to wonder if he had killed anyone. He had been stationed in occupied France. I watched his eyes flicker keenly over the minute workings inside the music box and how he gently removed the little automaton bird that sat on top. His hands were smooth; long fingers with clean, precisely cut fingernails. His blonde hair had grown long at the front and without the gel he once used, it slipped into his eyes, and he shook his head to dislodge it. Sitting in my shop, he looked perfectly at home. He had brought two old wooden chairs and a table from who knew where. Josef just had a knack for finding what was needed. Nothing ostentatious, but simple and sufficient.

He made me laugh without meaning to. In fact, that was how he seemed to exist in the world. Just making it better, without meaning to.





Dublin, 1944


‘I am to be repatriated.’ Josef stood in the doorway, rigid from head to foot in his uniform.

‘When?’

‘Now.’

His voice betrayed no emotion. I nodded as if this information was perfectly fitting. Surely some part of me had expected this. Nothing lasted for ever and his precarious position here was clear to us both. And yet we had created a bubble of existence where the outside world and its changing winds could not penetrate, until now. I was holding a book that had constantly tumbled from its space on the shelf, no matter where I put it or how snugly it fit between its neighbours. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. I clung to it now, trying to find some kind of steadiness.

‘Is there someone waiting for you? In Austria?’

I had never asked. Truth be told, I had not wanted the answer before now. But now it was time to face reality. Perhaps it would help me to let him go.

‘My father. There is no one else.’

He looked at me and I could see in his eyes what his words meant. I ran to him, threw my arms around his neck and buried my face in his chest. It was the first time we had even touched and so it should have felt unfamiliar, but it didn’t. It felt like the only place I ever wanted to be. He hesitated at first, but after a moment’s pause, he encircled me with his arms and I could feel his warm breath on my neck.

I pulled back to look at his face. His eyes looked straight into mine and held all of my world within them.