Page 13 of How to Find a Romance in a Bookshop

“I’ll have some when you’ve finished,” he said.

They sat, companionably, as Petra admired the view and sipped rapidly at the coffee, not wanting to keep him waiting.

“How long have you worked at the bookshop?” he asked.

Petra told him.

“You’re a blow-in, like me then,” he said. “I’ve been here since the autumn.”

“I could tell you’re not a local,” Petra remarked.

“The accent? Yeah, I’m not from round here,” he admitted.

“So, what brings you here?” asked Petra, her curiosity getting the better of her, although she instantly regretted it. Let’s not get into a conversation about why I’m here, she thought. But it seemed Ross was as reluctant as her to exchange information.

“I just tend to move around a lot,” he said repressively. The mood had instantly changed, but it didn’t stop Petra from plowing on regardless.

“What about family, though . . . friends?” she enquired.

“I like being alone,” Ross snapped, shutting off any further interrogation by standing up and holding his hand out for the thermos mug, which she handed to him, chastened.

“I should get going,” he said, screwing the top on the thermos with what looked like unnecessary force. “Don’t rush,” he added, apparently just in case Petra was thinking about accompanying him down. “Enjoy the view.”

Obediently, and keen to make amends—although she wasn’t quite sure what she had done, apart from the usual inadvertent insults—she looked fixedly at the horizon as she heard him stomping away. A minute later, when she dared to turn around, it was confirmed that he was gone, and she was alone. Again.

Ross shook his head angrily as he stomped back down the hill. Why was all this stuff so complicated now? He was lonely. She was nice. The intention was to be friendly and instead he was gruff and rude. When did allowing other people in his life get so hard? When he started having something to hide, he answered himself, scowling. For the thousandth time he regretted not hiding behind a writing name as his agent had gently suggested. No. His ego had insisted that he bare his soul to the world with his real name, thinking smugly of old school tormentors—teachers and students alike—and of how proud his parents would be . . . It was vanity, of course. And now, in punishment, the identity he would rather escape from dogged him everywhere. He wasn’t hiding from everyone—just the significant proportion of the population who had seen or heard the interviews, plus the people who might have even read the damned thing. It was too much to expect that someone working in a bookshop wouldn’t have heard of him.

“The highest form of vanity is love of fame.” Who said that? They were right. It was his own fault.

The rest of the day yawned ahead of Petra when she got back to the shop. She was rubbish at being alone and was well aware it signaled a lack of inner resources. As a child she was thrilled to have time on her own; it had given her a precious chance to escape into books for hour after hour. Now, ruined by the tyranny of impossible work expectations along with the distractibility driven by her social media addiction, she could barely read the back of a cereal box without losing focus. Everyone in publishing knew the reality. You enter the profession because of a love of books and then that very thing—the reading—ends up getting pushed into the margins. With whole days spent hustling, editors and agents alike invariably tackled the never-ending “to be read” pile in their own time.

So now, when it came to the simple act of reading, Petra was all burned-out. As for whole books, even picking one up to read it gave her palpitations, unleashing a flood of thoughts about all the people she had let down. What had things come to that she didn’t even have the inner resources to make the most of a day off?

Tugging her coat back on, she grabbed her phone and set off to find the little supermarket Flo had told her about. The one just over the other side of the bridge.

The familiarity of the grocery shop interior soothed her. She could be anywhere in the country; it would look just the same. She felt reassuringly anonymous and rootless. Wandering the shelves, randomly chucking things in her basket—milk, toilet roll, a packet of chocolate biscuits—she paused at the newspapers section. Maybe, if she could no longer lose herself in a book, she could at least read the Sunday papers, like normal people did? She hefted the Sunday Times into her basket on top of the food, added a copy of the Observer to balance out editorial bias, and went off to pay.

Back at the flat, she lit the fire in the sitting room, committed to getting cozy. It was soon blazing merrily, combating the chill outside. Making herself a pot of coffee and then settling on the sofa with the throw wrapped around her, Petra started to read the papers. Usually, if she read them at all, she would read on her phone, but it was strangely soothing to have all the sections of the paper slewed onto the coffee table in front of her. The Sunday Times had a great culture section. Knowing about all that stuff in the wider cultural arena other than just books was her job. She needed to bring herself up to speed, and browsing the Sunday papers on a chilly weekend afternoon away from work was what normal people did. She had almost forgotten that.

Now Petra learned from reading that there was a surprising amount of “culture” happening in Devon. She had been snobby in her London-centric assumptions. A couple of important plays were touring in Exeter before their London runs, and there was a huge concert hall with a full program in Plymouth, not too far away. Soon she was wired from all the coffee—Ross’s coffee, in particular, had been caffeine-loaded—she needed to eat something. She broke off for a bread and cheese lunch, and then—bringing a large bar of nut chocolate with her back into the sitting room and putting another log on the fire—she braved the literary section with a flutter of anxiety.

She was confronted immediately with a sharp reminder of her own failings. In the column devoted to new releases, there was a debut novel by a writer who had requested representation from her. She had politely declined, and he had gone to another agent who had negotiated him a significant deal, by the look of it. Oops. But she was glad for him. Breaking out with your first book was an amazing achievement. Petra smiled, as she broke off another square of chocolate. She loved sharing those moments with her authors. They were to be savored. Not that a good debut necessarily heralded a stellar career, of course, and sometimes the weight of expectation with a big first publishing deal could be crushing.

Petra turned the page, and her eye was immediately drawn to a “Where are they now?” article. Echoing her thoughts, it outlined how six authors with big contracts had fared after their keenly awaited debuts. It wasn’t all bad. One of them was now adapting their own books into screenplays. Another had produced a second novel to a tepid response and had finally, the article reported, returned to teaching English with their tail between their legs. Another broken dream.

And then, the last, brief, example the article writer had chosen to follow up was a novelist called Ross McCloud.

As soon as she read the name, Petra instantly remembered the book he had written. How could she forget? It was a sensation that summer and was widely agreed to be one of the most accomplished debuts the literary world had ever read. It was a novel called Destiny, and its simultaneous storylines and multiple protagonists all tracked over a single twenty-four-hour period, up to the end of the book, where—as the reader knew all too well—their lives devastatingly converged at the 7/7 London terrorist bombings.

The year it was published, it became one of the novels she had most often noticed people reading on the Tube—always a litmus test of a book’s penetration into the market. It meant big sales. Huge. And big sales were not a given: Sometimes even the major literary prize-winning books somehow failed to translate into actual money. This was just one other reason why writing books was the most absurd way to earn a living.

Petra stared into the fire, remembering. She tended to resist reading the books that everyone else was yammering on about, stubbornly seeking out the books for her “to be read” pile that hadn’t caught the public imagination quite so well. It had always felt like a tiny gesture to remedy the capriciousness of it all, the horribly unfair element of luck, on top of talent, that dictated a writer’s career. But for Destiny she had succumbed to the hype and made an exception. She still remembered the gorgeous but spare language, the writer’s skill at giving a different voice to each character, their inner monologues shared with the reader as their secrets and motivations were gradually revealed. It had been an experimental but accessible book. The Holy Grail. Turning back to the article, she noticed this—unlike the others—was the briefest of notes, and then she saw why.

A second novel from McCloud is eagerly awaited but has not yet appeared. Our journalist enquired, but McCloud’s agent, Veronica Bampton, of the Bruce Bampton Literary Agency, declined to give an update. The agency also declined to confirm whether McCloud was still represented by them. Enquiries directed at the publisher went unanswered. Mr. McCloud could not be traced.

Well!

Petra sat back and blew her bangs out of her eyes. Five years and not a peep? Something had clearly gone horribly wrong . . . Had he died? No, they would have said . . . How old even was he? She had never been particularly interested in how old the writers who approached her for representation were, even less what they looked like; physical appearance, background, gender, and age mattered less than the writing. The writing was everything. At least to start with.