Page 8 of How to Find a Romance in a Bookshop

Once planning ahead was done, the silence in the flat felt oppressive. It was too early to go to bed. There was no Wi-Fi, or at least not a strong enough signal to make it upstairs from the office at the back of the shop. No Wi-Fi! Who didn’t have Wi-Fi these days? It was barbaric. Also, there was no terrestrial television of any kind. Petra had been forced to fall back on a disgracefully patchy phone signal that was far too intermittent to stream anything, denying Petra her usual mind-numbing binge-watching of Friends and The Good Place. Tonight, though, her phone informed her she had hardly any data left either, so TV was out. Great.

What the heck did people do in Portneath?

She had deleted TikTok on the train coming down, because the algorithm delivered nothing but BookTok—which now caused her actual physical pain—and she didn’t know how to train it to show her anything else. This seemed to gloomily confirm that—without books—she was a nobody, with no personality and no interests. Instagram was no better but at least included a million ads that were fascinating in their randomness. Why—in the name of all that was holy—did Insta think she wanted big underpants and comfy bras, to the exclusion of everything else? What had led it to this conclusion? Had her account been hacked by a busty middle-aged woman with an addiction to cake and underwear?

Doomscrolling endlessly anyway, Petra glanced up and—horrified to see she had allowed an hour and a half of her life to trickle away pointlessly—put down her phone and jumped to her feet. Books! She would read. That was what she used to do, for hours, weeks, months . . . her love of books had propelled her through most of the first twenty-eight years of her life. They had been her hobby, her friends, her career, and her solace. She found herself on the shop floor without further conscious thought, but that was where the enthusiasm drained away. Cozy crime, romance, literary feminist retellings of Greek myths . . . all delicious, tempting, absorbing stories, but each possibility left her filled with ever increasing ennui.

Trying again on the second floor, looking this time for the comfort of something she had read a dozen times before, she dismissed du Maurier, George Eliot, Agatha Christie, or even Conan Doyle, although Holmes and Watson were her go-to absorbing read throughout her childhood. She had happy memories of lying wrapped in the sofa throw on the hearth in front of the fire, totally transported by The Hound of the Baskervilles or “The Speckled Band.”

Everything she might re-read now felt stale and dry. Eventually, her eye lighted on the Milton book still on the table. An epic poem might fill the void where a novel felt too large a commitment. Maybe that was the problem? A lifetime of tiny doomscrolling dopamine hits had broken her ability to focus long enough to read a ninety-thousand-word story anymore. Unless it was for work, which had—perhaps for that reason—become increasingly joyless.

The sonorous, magnificent language of Milton would draw her in and fill the emptiness in her mind, she decided.

Petra carried the book upstairs and settled herself, in pajamas, in her new, fabulous bed, with a cup of tea and a packet of chocolate biscuits. Crumbs on the sheets? Who cared! She knew how to live!

Lucifer’s journey echoed her own all too closely, she realized. Hubris and pride had caused her descent into hell. But hell wasn’t all fire and brimstone. As Milton knew all too well, hell was mostly a cold and lonely absence from the world. A casting out. Yup. As delightful as Portneath appeared to be, the mind was its own place. And she was in hell.

Later, back in Ross’s stone cottage, where the top of the main street petered gently into a country lane, he slipped, out of habit, into his normal evening routine. The house—his latest rental in a series of frequent moves—was probably pleasant in the summer. In January, it was damp and dreary when he allowed the woodburning stove to go out.

It was out.

After getting it burning again, he cooked up some supper and ate it without relish straight out of the pan while he had a crack at Wordle. This was usually the one pathetic sense of achievement he obtained all day.

The word was “novel.” Oh, the irony. And it took him six tries.

Staring sightlessly into the flames and spending too much time thinking about the woman in the bookshop, he decided to look on Netflix for something distractingly bad to bury himself in. This evening, though, the gloomy Swedish detective shtick was too predictable, even for him. He guessed the murderer during the first half hour, and the woman detective’s back story didn’t engage him at all. He decided to call it a night, shut down his laptop, and went up the creaking wooden stairs to get ready for bed.

Ross studied himself dispassionately in the bathroom mirror, toothbrush in hand. No wonder that woman in the bookshop thought he was a pirate, although she was definitely a bit eccentric, in a strangely appealing way, he thought, suppressing a smile as he squeezed the toothpaste tube. He turned his attention back to his reflection, sobered at the sight. The state of him! He turned his face this way and then the other, as if seeing it for the first time. The beard was a disaster. Less of a fashion choice, more an absence of the will required to shave, it had grown bushy and unkempt. He also noticed in the harsh bathroom light that there were more than a few gray hairs in it. He was only thirty-four, for God’s sake. The hair on his head wasn’t great either. There was plenty of it, at least—no sign of thinning—but he couldn’t remember the last time he had gone to the barber, and it didn’t know what to do with itself. He looked like the wild man of the woods.

And his clothes weren’t going to speak up for him either, he thought, unable by now to stifle the critical voice in his head. He had that morning—while giving it the usual zero thought—put on the ragged-hemmed dun-colored trousers that she had first seen him in, a once-white T-shirt, and one of his several crumpled khaki shirts. This one had faded quite badly, he noticed now, and the pocket had started to become unstitched. Also why was his T-shirt so dingy? Could it be that washing your colored clothes separately really was a thing?

Ross didn’t separate his whites. And he didn’t do ironing. So sue him . . . But—hmm—the shaving and showering? The occasional haircut? Yeah . . . he should really raise his game. Not because he had a reputation to maintain; not because he was an award-winning writer; not because he was Ross McCloud; but purely because he thought he might like to have further conversations with this bookshop woman, who made him laugh and knew her Milton. And he had a sneaking suspicion she seemed interested to know him too. Just him. Without that crushing “literary genius” nonsense, a label hanging around his neck like he was a prize bull.

First impressions counted, wasn’t that what people said? Oh dear. It might already be too late to persuade bookshop woman that he was someone worth knowing. Although she currently believed he was a grown man who thought it was cool to dress up as Bluebeard, surely one of the most misogynist of all the serial killers. Which might be even more off-putting than the truth. And hey, from such a low bar, the only way was up, right?

On Saturday morning, Petra was feeling refreshed, purposeful, and maybe a little bit optimistic. Actually, the optimism might just be relief, because she knew Flo was going to be in. Whatever . . . Petra skipped down the stairs bright and early to get everything perfect before Flo arrived.

“You’re here!” she blurted witlessly, finding Flo looking elegant and serene, waving a duster around in the Booker Prize short list compilation.

“I promised I would be,” said Flo, raising impeccably arched eyebrows. “Just having a whizz ’round, before we open. I hope that’s all right?”

“You don’t have to ask me! This is your shop.”

“Was,” corrected Flo, sounding perfectly cheerful about it. “I know it will benefit enormously from what you have to offer. Jules tells me you’re a literary agent.”

“Was,” said Petra, inadvertently echoing Flo. “Long story,” she added, shaking her head repressively. Thank goodness, Flo took the hint and was too well-mannered to push for more.

Checking her watch, Petra went to turn over the sign and noticed how bustling Portneath was, even though it was barely nine in the morning. Today a central spine of dark green awnings had sprung up along the wide cobbled street between the two rows of shops. It was hard for Petra to see what each of them was selling, as they were obscured from view by a mass of shoppers in brightly colored coats, hats, and scarves, muffled against the chill.

There was a man in a dark blue coat, with a small child hanging off each hand, both of them wearing matching woolly hats with pom-poms. He and his pretty blond wife looked as if they were laughing together at something one of the children said. She pinched the child’s nose fondly before packing another white-paper-wrapped parcel into the backpack her husband was wearing.

Petra was overtaken by a wave of longing to be that woman, with her partner and her children, doing normal Saturday morning things. She imagined them all going off to a café for coffee and—for the children—hot chocolate with whipped cream and grated chocolate on top. Maybe they would have a late breakfast there too: pancakes with bacon and maple syrup or eggs Benedict. Perhaps then they would take their dog—a fox-red labrador, Petra decided—for a walk on the beach, before returning home for homemade vegetable soup and fresh bread bought from one of the stalls that morning. She pictured what they would do later too: perhaps a family board game, or baking, or an invitation to another child’s birthday party, then supper and bedtime, and the couple finally sitting down in front of the fire with a glass of wine, sighing in relief, and settling to watch something on television together, snuggled up in each other’s arms.

Petra blinked away her daydream and made to move from the window, just as a graceful older lady in a trailing aquamarine scarf and tumbling blond-gray hair waved cheerily in at her. Petra turned to see Flo waving back before the woman carried on up the steep hill of the main street, a basket on her arm already packed with goodies.

“That was Diana,” Flo explained. “A great friend, and tremendous fun. You’ll meet her soon, but she looks like she’s on a mission this morning. Probably heading up to see Vanessa in the flower shop.”

“Talking of shopping, I was going to ask you where there was a supermarket so I can stock up with some groceries,” said Petra, “but I hardly need a Sainsbury’s with all this on the doorstep.”