The Bookshop of Second Chances Jackie Fraser (ebook reader macos .txt) 📖

‘Charles told me about you. But I didn’t realize you were the one who knew Eddie.’ She laughs. ‘How strange.’

‘I didn’t know him before I got here,’ I say, irritated. I don’t like the idea of people talking about me. I’m not interesting, after all. What do they say, these awful people with their beautiful bone structures and total lack of Scottish accent? I suppose she comes from a house just like this one. The house is doing my head in. It’s fun to be somewhere like this without teasels or holly leaves on the furniture to stop you sitting down and rope to keep you away from the trinkets – I could touch anything in this room, and although it might look odd, it wouldn’t set off an alarm. But the portraits of pretty young women from the last three centuries and a series of bewigged and uniformed young men who look increasingly like Charles and Edward as they work their way forward in time is just… too strange.

‘Are you going to sell him your house? Charles, I mean?’ Miranda asks, interrupting my thoughts.

‘I’m not sure yet.’

‘He’s very keen. Oh, I probably shouldn’t have said that.’ She laughs. ‘In case you ask for more money!’

‘I’m aware of his interest,’ I say, and then I’m embarrassed for some reason, partly because I think it might have sounded abrupt, and partly because it sounds like I think he’s interested in me, which isn’t what I meant.

‘I expect you are,’ she says blandly. The doors from the hall open and some more people arrive. ‘Ailsa, darling!’ says Miranda, her attention diverted. ‘How lovely.’ Then she’s air-kissing a small round woman wearing a pair of earrings so sparkly they can only be real diamonds, and I wander away absently.

I wish I’d turned the invitation down now. I don’t like small talk with strangers and I sometimes find myself wondering at events like this (not that I’ve ever been to an event like this) what all these people are really thinking. I’m sure none of them are thinking any of the things I am. I catch Jenny’s eye across the room and she pulls a face briefly before turning back to the man she’s speaking to.

I feel overly large and – I try to identify the sensation – coarse. As though my feet are too big and my clothes too cheap, and my entire being just not quite well bred enough. Is it the people or the environment making me feel like this? Or my own attitude? Everyone’s charming, but I wish I was at home or that I had someone with me, so I didn’t have to stand here beside a console table by myself, trying to look self-contained and relaxed. I drift slowly about and am offered canapés by a smart young woman in a vaguely military-style white jacket. I take a tiny mozzarella ball smeared with pea purée and avoid making eye contact with Johnny, a balding man of about fifty to whom I was introduced earlier. We’re the four singletons, he and Charles and Miranda and me. I can’t help thinking poorly of Charles’s choice, assuming he put any thought into it, although he and Johnny seem to be great pals, so perhaps he didn’t choose him to entertain me at all.

I wish Edward were here; it would be amusing to see him hating it. Perhaps he wouldn’t hate it, though – after all, he must know all these people, even if he doesn’t like them.

‘Thea! Enjoying yourself?’ Charles leans his shoulder against the ornately carved mantelpiece and smiles at me. ‘Is that glass empty? We can’t have that.’ He looks round for a waiter.

‘Oh, I only just finished it. I’ll get some more in a moment, don’t worry.’ I clear my throat. ‘More to the point, since it’s your party, are you enjoying yourself?’

‘Always nice to have people in the house,’ he says.

‘It’s quite big, isn’t it, for one person.’ The understatement amuses me, and I smile to myself.

‘I’m not completely on my own all the time. The children are here quite often, and I have a housekeeper, but she’s not exactly company.’

He has two children, Jenny told me, by his first wife Julia, the interior designer. They’re in their early teens, a boy and a girl. They’re away at school most of the time, and spend half their holidays with Charles and the other half with their mother, who has a house up near Dumfries. He and second wife Carolyn weren’t married long, or so I gather. No kids, anyway. I wonder what his housekeeper’s like. A solid woman in tweed is what I imagine, but who knows? She can’t be glam, though, or she’d be at the party, surely? I’m not sure how these things work in the twenty-first century.

‘Do you have one of those enormous kitchens with a million copper pans?’ This has been on my mind for some reason.

‘Well, yes, but we don’t use that for cooking these days. Got a smaller, more sensible kitchen in my part of the house. Luckily it’s reasonably manageable, but there are some rooms we keep shut up most of the year, unless I have a lot of people to stay. And in the winter, we stick in the east wing because it’s easier to heat.’

‘Wouldn’t it be easier to sell it and live somewhere more convenient?’ I ask, curious.

‘I suppose it depends on your definition of “easier”. In some ways, perhaps. But we’ve always lived here. Since the fourteenth century, anyway.’

‘Yes, I know. Not that I can imagine it.’ I wonder what my ancestors were doing in the fourteenth century. Dying of plague, I expect.

‘You must come up sometime so I can give you the tour,’ he says. ‘I suppose it would be rude of me to abandon everyone else this evening.’

I laugh. ‘I should think so.’

He sips his drink and looks around the room at his guests, all of whom are eating and drinking and