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The Shakespeare and Company business was either bigger than Claire remembered, or it had expanded in the intervening years. It took up the whole row now, with a coffee shop on the left, the main bookshop on the right, and squeezed in the middle a small addendum of a shop with a painted sign that readAntiquarian Books. There was neither a guard nor a queue at the door.
‘Let’s go in there,’ said Ronan, and Claire followed.
The interior was minuscule, maybe six metres wide but less than three metres deep. To the left of the door was a small counter space, behind which a young Black man with enormous hair sat chewing on a biro. He had a spiral notebook splayed open on the counter in front of him and seemed to be in the process of covering a page in minute doodles.
The three internal walls of the shop were lined, floor to ceiling, with rough, homemade shelving, and a narrow pine ladder of complementary shabbiness leaned against the upper shelves. Cloth-covered hardbacks in faded blues and mossy greens lined up with cracked bindings of brown and burgundy leather.
Claire took down a copy ofLe Petit Prince. A discreet pencil had marked it6thEd,€250. Very gently, she slid it back onto the shelf. Ronan was flipping through a cardboard box of vinyls. He held upAn Appointment with Mr Yeats, a Waterboys album.
‘You can put it on, if you like,’ said the sales assistant, indicating an orange plastic record player on the windowsill. His accent was American – the cheerful, enthusiastic sort.
‘ButshouldI?’
Claire could tell that Ronan was keen and trying to act cool.
‘It’s .?.?. interesting.’ The man came around the counter, lifted the lid of the player and engaged Ronan in a conversation about poetry in lyrics.
Claire took the opportunity to steal a closer look at a glass case tucked into a safe corner beside the counter.Ulysseshad the top shelf, along with a photo of James Joyce and Sylvia Beach outside the original Shakespeare and Company. The lower shelf held Steinbeck’sTheLong Valleyand a letter written by W.H. Auden. She reached out and ran her middle finger down the spine ofThe Beautiful and Damned. It wasn’t signed, and it wasn’t a first edition. She could take something like it out of the library for free any day of the week. It was just an old book, but even so, it sat there on a glass shelf, like a magical thing.
Glancing sideways at the notebook on the desk, Claire saw that the tangle of doodles surrounded what seemed to be a poem in a neat, rounded script. She tilted her head to decipher the words.
‘See anything you like?’ Ronan was at her shoulder.
She took a guilty step back, a blush rising. ‘Not if we want to eat this weekend.’
‘Speaking of which – Dan, here, has told me where to go for dinner.’ He gave a nod to the shop assistant, who bounded back to his position behind the counter.
Claire took a couple of postcards from the display.
‘What’s the best time to visit the main shop?’ she asked Dan as he counted her coins into the till.
‘How long are you here?’
‘Just until Monday morning.’
He handed her a paper bag for her postcards. It seemed to Claire that he took a fraction of a second too long to let go of it, as if he was reading her.
‘Come on Sunday afternoon. That’s the best time.’
Outside the shop, they joined the throng of earnest tourists milling around, sipping takeaway americanos, swapping advice on museum queues and jazz clubs. A tall, strikingly beautiful girl with long blonde hair was leaning against the rack of second-hand books, evidently entranced in a cheap paperback. Pretty as a postcard,Claire thought. Ronan held his bag in one hand while flipping through a box of yellowed crime novels with the other. A young woman in tie-dyed flares nudged her friend and nodded towards him. The friend checked him out, head cocked to one side, then mouthed, ‘No way.’
‘Your fans are out in force,’ said Claire.
It was a running joke. Ronan often attracted second glances on the street because he looked, people said, like one of the Weasleys, though usually they couldn’t pin down which one.
‘I’m always disappointing people.’
‘Only if you tell them the truth.’ She took her camera from around her neck. ‘Let’s take a picture.’
‘Of us?’
It wasn’t like Claire to put herself in the frame.
She held the camera at arm’s length, trying to figure out how to press the button, imagining a close-up shot of her nostrils.
‘It’s not far enough away, is it?’
Ronan was reaching for his phone when a man who was leaning against a tree trunk a few feet away reached out for the camera.
