‘I’m sure Auntie Carmen would like to hear you sing,’ went on the inexorable Pippa.
‘I don’t mind,’ said Carmen. ‘You can sing or not sing, I don’t care. Nobody sings worse than me anyway.’
‘I know,’ said Phoebe. ‘I’ve heard you in the shower.’
‘I know!’ said Carmen. ‘And that’s with the good acoustics.’
They grinned at each other. Pippa immediately took out her bassoon and started on an extremely loud rendition of ‘Once in Royal David’s City’， all ninety-five verses.
‘You got Blair Pfenning!’ said Sofia in a tone that she thought was proud and encouraging but Carmen thought was patronising and irritatingly astonished.
‘Just wear a bit of lipstick!’ she added, as Carmen headed downstairs. ‘That’s all I’m saying.’
Carmen couldn’t believe it. At 9.30 in the morning, in the freezing cold, snaking all the way down Victoria Street and into the Grassmarket, there was a queue! A queue, to get into their shop! This was completely unprecedented.
It was almost entirely women, with a few men staring at their phones and not looking up or around, possibly in case anybody recognised them. The women were dressed up in tweed coats and smart scarves, boots clopping across the cobbled road. Carmen’s mobile phone went off after she’d wandered up the Grassmarket to get the good coffee. The little café was done out beautifully for the holiday season in a Nordic snowflake theme, with little paper snowflakes tumbling from the rooftops, and every cappuccino coming with a little flake on the side. Carmen treated Mr McCredie to a cappuccino, but she accidentally ate the flake before she made it all the way up the hill.
‘Hi, yeah, we’re in the hotel?’ said a busy-sounding publicist. ‘Are you ready to go?’
‘Um, no,’ said Carmen, swallowing the last piece of flake. ‘I haven’t opened up yet.’
There was a disappointed sighing noise.
‘Only our schedule’s really tight?’
‘I get that,’ said Carmen. ‘We’re on it. Come when you like.’
A camera crew were stamping their feet around the entrance and already setting up; Carmen knew enough to aim straight for the person with the clipboard.
‘We have to do the filming first,’ she tried to explain to the queue. ‘It’s going to be a bit of a wait … if you want to go away and come back again?’
The faces turned towards her were steely. Nobody was going away and coming back again.
‘I’m afraid I can’t let you in till we’re done?’
The wind whistled through the stairwells; up the hill and over the top of the terrace. Clouds scudded overhead, occasionally letting in a flash of light, but mostly reminding you that daylight had not arrived before 8.30 a.m. and would be leaving promptly at 3.30 p.m. and not really showing its face much in between so if there was ever an opportunity to be somewhere nice and cosy inside, nature couldn’t give you much more of a clue than to do it now.
Still, the feisty women were in no mood to desist, so Carmen smiled apologetically at them and made her way indoors, even as she could feel the daggers shot at her back.
The camera people did mysterious things with lights and trailing cables and tried not to drop more books on the ground than was strictly necessary under the circumstances. The woman with the clipboard smiled and talked into a walkie-talkie, and told them to turn off the train set. Carmen reminded Mr McCredie that they were bringing the superstar in through the back door, i.e. the alleyway close that led into his house, and he smiled weakly then promptly forgot all about it again.
Finally, the shop was looking as lovely as it could. The TV people had brought along a lot of extra holly garlands and had hung them on the shelf with little sparkly fairy lights which, while they looked very pretty, Carmen had to admit would be absolutely useless for anyone actually attempting to browse or buy a book on the shelves. The people trying to peek in the window were politely shooed away and everything was cued up and at 10.45 a.m. ‘He’s on the move!’ was heard over the walkie-talkie, and Carmen scampered up to the back alleyway to escort the great man through the McCredie home and in through the stacks.