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‘And there’ll be sofas in the windows so shoppers can sit and eat and read,’ Alex told Jón, watching him take down pencil notes in Icelandic.
‘But you’re gonna work yourself to death again?’ Jón asked, letting the pencil stop on the page.
‘Nei!Now we’ll have the holidaymaker booksellers to help. Alex and I will leave after the lunch rush and do our own thing.’
‘And we’ve got trips planned all over Iceland!’ Alex didn’t feel the need to tell him that there was also the matter of her bereavement therapy, now taking place weekly online, alongside her Icelandic lessons, which were proving very slow going but she wanted to be able to talk to the locals in their own language, if they ever let her. She’d found that as soon as anyone realised where she was from they switched to perfect English, and that made her feel utterly inadequate and desperate for her next lesson. Speaking the language certainly helped with her cooking lessons at the culinary school too, and she was learning Icelandic recipes to add to her repertoire of Cornish café classics. She had her own life here in Reykjavík and that would take her away from the bookshop holiday business sometimes, and that was exactly how she and Magnús wanted it.
‘Já!We won’t be hereallthe time,’ Magnús promised his brother.
He had been careful to plan things for himself as well, setting up a reading group for locals to share their love of Icelandic authors and their books. He was looking forward to that only slightly less than all the trips he had planned with Alex in the autumn.
That wasn’t all he’d planned, and the sight of his mother emerging from the shop with the white confectioner’s box, followed closely by his father with the champagne bottle and paper cups reminded him it was time.
Alex was already looking at him suspiciously. ‘What’s this?’
The burst of song from Magnús and his family confirmed her fears. She didn’t know the Icelandic words they were singing but she knew the tune, and when Magnús’s mother lifted the lid to reveal a cake with her name on it, she knew for sure this was a birthday ambush.
Her protest that it wasn’t her birthday for another week was met by the sound of Magnús’s dad popping the cork and everyone applauding.
‘Yeah, well, get used to it,’ Magnús told her as he unstacked the paper cups. ‘You’ve years of missed birthday celebrations to catch up on. This is only the first; next week, we’ll do it all again at our apartment-warming party. OK?’
‘Who wants cake?’ called out Mrs Sturluson, wielding a knife, and the little group gathered round for a slice. As they were being handed round in napkins, Jón carried on with his interview for the paper.
‘And if things go wrong this time?’ he asked, gently.
Magnús knew why Jón was asking. So did Alex. ‘They might,’ Magnús said, shrugging. ‘With this business model and in this district, I can’t see that happening, but still they might. And that’s OK.’
‘Things we can’t plan for will still happen,’ Alex added, before accepting her slice of cake with a practised ‘takk fyrir’. ‘And they’ll hurt too, no doubt, but the going wrong is never the end. There’s always the chance of starting again, if you’re brave enough.’ She squeezed her arm around Magnús’s back. ‘It’s only the end of the story when everyone’s happy.’
‘OK,’ Jón said, smiling, before hugging his brother and his remarkable new English girlfriend, and they all turned to watch the sign artist climb down her ladder. Above the shop doorway, resplendent in gold script, were blazoned the words: ‘Dagalien Books, Bed and Breakfast,’ and below it in bold black lettering: ‘Lestu, borðaðu, elskaðu, dreymdu.’
‘Read, Eat, Love, Dream,’ Alex said, smiling up at their new premises, her head leaning against Magnús’s as Jón raised his camera and captured the scene for his paper’s front page.
