“So this is it. Real life.”
“Real life,” Hannah echoed. It wasn’t true, though. Sitting here, in a centuries-old center of learning, surrounded by April’s rich, beautiful things, breathing in the strange heavy scent of some expensive perfume, she had never felt more unreal. She wondered what her mum—presumably still circling Oxford looking for a parking space—would make of all this.
“Better see what he’s left me, I guess,” April said. “The box isn’t Tiffany’s, which is a bad start.”
She swung her legs off the bed and went to the window, where a tall gift box stood on the stone sill. A card was poking out of a gap at the top of the box.
“？‘Start your Oxford life the right way. Love, Daddy.’ Well, he signed it himself at least. One up from my birthday card, which was in his secretary’s writing.”
Digging her nails into the lid, she pried it open and then began to laugh.
“Oh God, just when I think he barely knows my middle name, he proves me wrong.” She held up a bottle of champagne and two glasses. “Drink, Hannah Jones?”
“Um, sure,” Hannah said. In truth, she didn’t really like champagne—the few times she’d had it, at weddings and her mum’s fiftieth, it had given her a headache. But there was no way she was going to refuse such a perfect moment. Maybe Dodsworth Hannah didn’t like champagne. But Pelham College Hannah was different.
She watched as April popped the cork with a practiced expertise and poured out two foaming glasses.
“Well, it’s not chilled, but it’s Dom Pérignon at least,” April said, handing over a flute. “What shall we drink to? How about… to Oxford.” She held out her glass.
“To Oxford,” Hannah echoed. She clinked her glass against April’s and then put it to her lips. The warm, fizzing champagne frothed in her mouth, the bubbles expanding on her tongue and the alcohol tickling at the back of her nose and throat. She began to feel a little light-headed—though whether that was the champagne, or the fact that they had driven through lunch, or just… this, she could not have said. “And to Pelham.”
“And to us,” April said. She threw back her head and drained the glass in four long gulps. Then she refilled, looked at Hannah, and smiled, a wide, wicked smile that shot that deep, beguiling dimple into each soft cheek. “Yes, here’s to us, Hannah Jones. I think we’re going to have a pretty majestic time here, don’t you?”
AFTER
As Hannah puts the phone down, she feels the quiet of the shop close around her like a cocoon. She would never tell Cathy, but these times are the reason she came to work at Tall Tales—not the Saturday hustle and bustle of customers, or the August rush of tourists for the festival, but the quiet midweek lulls when she is—not alone, exactly, for you’re never alone in a room filled with a thousand books. But when she is alone with the books.
Christie. The Bront?s. Sayers. Mitford. Dickens. These are the people who got her through the years after April’s death. She escaped the stares and sympathy of real life, the terrifying unpredictability of the internet, the horrors of a reality where you could be ambushed at any moment by a reporter or a curious stranger, or by the death of your best friend—into a world where everything was ordered. In books, a bad thing might happen on page 207, that was true. But it would always happen on page 207, no matter what. And when you reread, you could see it coming, watch out for the signs, prepare yourself.
Now she listens to the gentle spatter of the Edinburgh rain on the bow window at her back, the tick, tick of old floorboards creaking as the heating pipes come on. She feels the silent sympathy of the books. For a moment she has a visceral longing to pick up one of them, an old favorite perhaps, a novel she knows practically by heart—and sink into the pile of beanbags in the children’s section, shutting out the world.
But she can’t. She is on duty. And besides, she’s not alone. Not really. She can see Robyn now, edging her way back through the maze of little Victorian rooms that make up Tall Tales, each crowded with display tables and dump bins.
“Beep beep! Robyn Grant, tea lady extraordinaire, coming through!” she says as she enters the front of the bookshop. She plonks the two cups cheerfully down on the counter, slopping hot brown liquid dangerously close to the card display. “The one with the spoon is yours. Are you—” She looks over at Hannah, and then stops, taken aback by something in Hannah’s expression. “Hey, are you okay? You look really odd.”