‘I didn’t do much.’ It was awkward riffling through the titles that, until last week, had been in William’s care. Harri wanted to do nothing but apologise and offer them all to William to keep, but the antiquarian had a different take on things.
He saw the bookshop’s purchases as a rescue of sorts. ‘They’ll do well here on your shelves. One day just the right person will come for each one and Nicholas’s books will gradually become dispersed into libraries everywhere. That’s no bad thing.’ But it didn’t stop him looking fondly at the book in his hand. ‘General Fiction, H,’ he said, passing Harri a Radclyffe Hall to shelve.
‘Ah,The Well of Loneliness,’ said Harri. ‘We studied this at uni.’
‘It was banned, you know?’ said Jowan.
‘Obscene Publications Act, eighteen fifty-seven,’ said William in an offhand way. He really was a walking encyclopedia. ‘Ah, I’m glad you saved these!’ William pulled out Harper Lee and two Iris Murdochs. ‘Oh, and here’s a Huxley. A particular favourite of Nicholas’s.That man could see the future, Nicholas used to say.’
It was small, but Jowan spotted it, the pinch of stress and sadness between William’s brows.
‘You are welcome to keep any of these books, you know?’ said Jowan. ‘T’would be our pleasure to return them to their owner.’
‘No, no,’ said William, swiftly wiping his eyes with his handkerchief. ‘Let us carry on.’
He had a tireless energy for unpacking and correctly cataloguing the works on the shop’s stock system, telling Harri their publication dates and rough value without having to consult any databases or compare prices across book merchants.
William lifted the very last title from the second to last box. ‘John Donne. A favourite of yours, I believe?’ he addressed Jowan. He remembered him reading a collected works at the silent reading night.
‘’Twas the favourite of my Isolde,’ said Jowan. ‘My late wife. My latefirstwife,’ he clarified like a man not quite used to saying the words yet. ‘We set up the bookshop at her insistence. Oh, she was some woman! A poetry lover.’
‘I was never one for Metaphysicals,’ said William, unromantically, but handing the Donne to Jowan nonetheless. ‘Perhaps you should keep this one?’
‘Thank you, but I only care for the collected edition, up there on the top shelf. It’s overpriced so no one buys it, but I like to keep it in the poetry section so anyone that needs it can find it.’
William nodded his understanding and Jowan flicked through the book. He thought hard for a little while before passing the book to Harri.
‘Poetry shelves, please.’
Harri entered the book’s details into the shop laptop.
‘You know,’ said Jowan in a pointed way. ‘My Isolde and my Minty were great friends.’
This stopped Harri on his way across the shopfloor with the book. ‘They were?’
‘Aye, and for a long, long time after Isolde’s passing, I found I couldn’t even entertain the notion of my liking Minty.’
William motioned for Jowan to cut the tapes on the last box, marked ‘miscellaneous’. Romantic stories evidently weren’t for him. Jowan worked the scissors as he talked.
‘Mint and I were great friends for a long time. She helped me so much with my grief, maybe because she shared it? After losing Isolde, I couldn’t bear the thought of losing Minty, my friend and my comfort, as well. But my avoiding loving Minty almost broke us apart anyway.’
‘It did?’ Harri couldn’t help asking.
Deep laughter lines radiated out from Jowan’s eyes like sunrays as he gave a throaty chuckle. ‘Got to the point where I’d gone way past liking Mint as a friend, and we were both dancin’ around each other, trying to avoid our feelings. I loved her, deep down, and I knew if I couldn’t have her, my wanting her would break us anyway. So, I chose to tell her. It was a risk, of course, but I was going to lose her completely, the way things were heading.’
Harri’s shoulders dropped. He knew exactly what Jowan was up to. He shelved the book without another word.
Jowan wasn’t done yet. ‘Came a point where I had to ask myself what would happen if she met someone else and I missed my only chance,’ he said.
William looked up from the box as though wondering why they were still on this topic when there were deeply fascinating library papers to sort.
‘Luckily for me,’ Jowan continued, ‘she was of the same mind, and we married soon after I confessed my heart.’
‘Pfft!’ William evidently didn’t agree with this strategy.
Harri was grateful for William’s curmudgeonly insistence on starting the unpacking of the last box right away. It would at least prevent Jowan talking about friends becoming lovers as if it were an easy thing to navigate, as though it weren’t in fact near impossible.
Harri plunged his hands inside the last box, his fingers falling upon a yellowing packet. He handed it to William right away.
