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Epilogue
Two and a half thousand kilometres south of Reykjavík, a sweet, summer-warmed breeze blew Down-along, making the sails on the little girl’s windmill spin fast upon its pin.
‘Careful!’ her mother warned. ‘Nobody told me it would be this steep.’
Excited tourists tramped past them, gripping the fence posts and exclaiming to one another what a lovely day it was. Some trundled cases behind them, heading for the Siren’s Tail and a few nights’ dinner, bed and breakfast by the Atlantic, others carried crabbing nets and buckets, looking forward to dropping bait over the sea wall all afternoon.
‘Can we get an ice cream, Mum? Please!’ the child asked in an urgent tone, having spotted the bright flag of Mrs Crocombe’s Ice Cream Parlour lifting gently against a blue sky.
There was a decent queue outside. That meant the ice cream must be good. But her mother was looking at the GPS on her phone and turning this way and that.
‘Let me concentrate, it must be here somewhere.’
‘There’s only up or down, Mum,’ the girl reminded her. ‘Is this it?’
‘Hah! I suppose it must be.’
Between two dazzlingly white, freshly painted cottages there was a sharp turning to the right. The sounds of drilling and hammering resounded within the buildings on either side as they passed between them. Evidently the work of restoring Clove Lore continued even eight months after the world-famous flood.
The young woman dragged the case along behind them and the child shouldered her rucksack – which was stuffed to bursting with her treasures – as though she was used to carrying her life on her back.
They made their way through the passage, past the old sleds leaning against the painted masonry on either side of them. Entering the little square, the girl stumbled on the cobbles, which were freshly laid out in swirling patterns like a mermaid’s scales set in sandy-coloured concrete.
The paint smell, which was strong throughout the whole village, was especially strong here and it mixed with the scent of cut grass and warm soil and something good cooking way down at the pub on the harbour wall.
The woman set down her case and took in the squat little bookshop from its stone steps to its conical roof, squint like a wizard’s hat.
‘Bookshop! Bookshop!’ the child cried, running around the palm tree in its big terracotta planter standing at the centre of the square with its cracks visibly repaired with silvery mortar.
The child dodged in and out of the new tables and chairs of sky-blue metal (which matched the sky-blue shop door perfectly), set out in little clusters all over the cobbles as though the owners meant this to be an outdoor café or some kind of meeting place.
Overhead were strung white bulbs criss-crossing the square, and even higher above circled the gulls watching the latest arrivals in Clove Lore and laughing on the wing.
The woman tried not to think too much about how lovely it would be to sit there on a late summer evening and drink cold wine. She’d be far too busy for that.
‘Mind the paint, I think the door’s wet,’ she told the girl as she found the key in the jacket of her preppy blazer, pushed up her glasses, then slipped the key into the lock.
‘First thing we’ll do is install the code lock, do away with the need for keys,’ she said to herself as the door swung open.
The little girl shoved past her mum’s legs to get inside first.
‘Woah!’ Her windmill was immediately discarded on the freshly sanded and varnished floorboards.
The woman cast her eyes around the bookshop. Empty shelves stood like sentries along the walls, interspersed here and there with brightly coloured vintage armchairs and little reading nooks. Dotted about were old vases filled with dried summer flowers in faded pastels. At the head of each shelf stack was a sign with words painted in curling gold script.
‘Bi-ology, gen-rul fiction, children’s books!’ The girl squealed in delight at discovering what would soon be the children’s corner below the curling staircase of gleaming black iron, also from its glossy sheen, the mum guessed, freshly painted.
Throwing herself across two patchwork beanbags the girl shrieked, kicking happily, before lifting the lid off one of the many cardboard crates shoved under the stairs – matching the others piled all around the shop – and found to her glee it was filled to the very top with picture books and board books and chapter books, all bright and inviting.
‘Gently, they’re not for us. They’re for the customers.’
‘What customers?’ The girl walked her feet all the way round to the other side of the beanbag so her back was turned upon her mum and she huddled over a pop-upBeauty and the Beast.
With brogues clacking on the shiny floor, her mother dodged yet more boxes to peer through a low door into a white café with lace curtains at the windows and red-and-white checked tablecloths and red tomato-shaped squeezy bottles on each of the tables. Framed on the wall by the counter was a handwritten recipe for ‘Mum’s Deluxe Chocolate Crispy Squares’.
Turning for the shop once more, she stepped towards the table by the door which was set out with a display of books, the only unboxed books in the whole place. There was a handwritten note.
It read, ‘Dear Joy, the village’s first Digital Nomad! Welcome to Borrow-A-Bookshop. Everything is ready for your stay. The paint is (just) dry so you don’t have to worry about smudges. Good luck installing all the new shop tech and cataloguing the stock! Who knows, maybe you’ll enjoy a bit of bookselling too! Happy (working) holiday. Love, Magnús and Alex, the last Borrowers. x’
