‘Yes!’ said Mr McCredie.
‘What?’ said Carmen. ‘He’s stealing parking!’
‘He’s doing business,’ said Mr McCredie. ‘Paying for parking would kill his profit margin.’
‘Is that what he does?’
‘Well, technically he’s a laird. But poor as a church mouse with a property to keep up, and land, and about a thousand children, only some of them his own.’
‘Don’t make me feel guilty for changing your buying methods,’ said Carmen. ‘Because I shan’t.’
And they worked together, setting out the beautiful new editions. They piled them irresistibly near the door whereupon, to Carmen’s delight, they started to sell straightaway – not to children, but to adults, drawn in by their own childhood memories, and the beauty of a thing.
Every time the bell dinged, Mr McCredie would glance up in wonder and surprise, and Carmen would smile secretly to herself and make sure the lovely books were somewhere adults could pick them up and admire them.
Marbled endpapers, Mr McCredie observed, meant nothing to children. But they meant a lot to those who loved colour and beauty and stories that would never end. And Carmen made sure to put lots of children’s books next to them, so the adults would buy a fancy gift for themselves and then often something not quite so precious for the children. Carmen also emailed Ramsay and told him she could sell as many Christmas books as he could unearth, and he sent her a jolly thumbs up and started on a mission for her.
Flushed by her own success, Carmen was feeling unstoppable.
‘Maybe I should do a story time next,’ she said. Mr McCredie raised his eyebrows.
‘Do I have to be there?’ he said. ‘It’s just … there would be rather a lot of children.’
She noticed how anxious he got when sticky fingers approached his beloved first editions.
‘Quite the opposite,’ she said. ‘You’ll need a rest from manning the till so much. I order you to stay in the back sitting room while I do it.’
He smiled at her, and Carmen had the oddest sensation that this might just work.
One morning, the bell tinged just as Carmen was wondering why young Mr McCredie didn’t turn some more of his books out with their covers facing customers – it seemed a reasonably obvious retail thing to do, but then things seemed to work differently here.
She got down from the stepladder and smiled brightly, waiting for the inevitable, ‘Is young Mr McCredie not about?’
This could be said in a variety of different ways, Carmen had learned, and in this man’s case – he was thin, with a knobbly red face, wearing a long greasy-looking overcoat and clutching a much-used plastic bag stuffed with papers – it was said furtively, and for the first time, she saw a sigh of relief when she said, ‘No, it’s just me.’
‘Well then,’ he said, arriving at the glass-topped desk, pushing aside several copies of Christmas with the Savages Carmen was cheerfully planning to recommend to today’s customers.
‘Doesn’t look very Christmassy, your shop,’ he said.
‘I know,’ said Carmen, who was thinking the same thing, but she couldn’t spend the shop’s money as they didn’t have any and it wouldn’t help to get them further on the red side. Maybe she should ask Sofia, although she baulked at the idea.
Although things were going better at the shop, relations between the sisters were still frosty, and their mother was refusing to be drawn in and had declared herself Switzerland. Sofia complained to Federico every night, which was first thing in the morning in Hong Kong so he was rarely at his best. Plus, he just liked to hear her voice, loved the rattle of the children in and out: Jack barking short answers to questions about how things were going; Pippa on the other hand elaborating on exactly who had misbehaved at school that day and why and how the boys hadn’t listened to Mrs Bakran, and had got into trouble; and Phoebe, more often than not, simply breathing snottily down the phone. He liked it all, just let it wash over, soothed by familiar noises. Which actually rather fired Sofia up, thinking he was agreeing with her, when he was just generally soothed by thoughts of home. He was a good man, Federico, but like many others he was guilty of letting his wife handle the domestics, despite the fact that she’d been to law school and graduated higher than he had.