The Christmas Bookshop(2)

‘She told me I looked like a tramp,’ said Idra.

‘What were you wearing?’

‘I literally took off my cardigan. For, like, ten seconds.’

Carmen laughed, then fell silent as the person they were talking about glided noiselessly into the room. Decades of working on shop floors had taught Mrs Marsh to glide despite being a heavy woman, constantly on the lookout for miscreants, pilferers, time-wasters, malingerers and basically anyone who looked like they might actually be enjoying themselves shopping in a department store.

She was silent on her tiny feet – always clad in smart black court shoes, however much they must pinch and contribute to the varicose veins spreading up her legs year on year like slow-growing ivy, just visible through the American Tan tights. Her midriff was solid and her large bosom was trussed into something from the Larger Madam section of the lingerie department which rather made her look like she only had one very wide breast which could also function as a shelf in a shop emergency.

Carmen and Idra agreed that Mrs Marsh’s idea of perfection was a completely empty, perfectly clean and tidy store with absolutely no customers in it messing things up, letting their kids knock over glassware, dirtying the polished floors with their muddy shoes or disrespecting lift etiquette (Mrs Marsh remembered the days when the lifts had an attendant, and mentioned it often). Having nobody in the shop was just about the way Mrs Marsh liked it.

The awful thing was, as they had seen for the last few years, it looked like Mrs Marsh was finally getting her wish.

One by one, the other shops had moved away from their unimportant regional satellite town – BHS, Next, Marks and Spencer, WH Smith – and had all fallen like ninepins.

Dounston’s, where generations of local brides had made their gift lists and chosen material for their wedding dresses, where mothers-to-be had bought their prams, where families had bought their china and sofas, their material, their white goods; Dounston’s, which stocked school uniforms in August and fancy perfume at Christmas, and toys in the wonderful toy department that made children gasp every year as they came to queue for a photo and a small present from Santa in the grotto: Dounston’s was widely predicted to be next on the high street casualty list.

It didn’t seem possible to Carmen that something so solid, so intertwined with the life of the town and its citizens – with its stained-glass window depicting the ships the men built up the road on the Clyde, and its coffee shop selling French cakes and scones and disdaining the very concept of something as fancy as a latte – would ever shut its doors. It was the heart of the town.

But the town seemed finished. Dead. The high street was nothing but charity shops and mobility scooter hire shops and money-sending places and the occasional doomed enterprise by the council to sell local paintings or craft.

People wanted the town centre to work but not quite enough to pay for parking when the out-of-town retail park didn’t charge you and was all shiny and had a Wagamama’s.

People wanted the town centre to work, but not really enough to pay ￡17.99 for a bone china mug with a shepherdess on it when they could get something perfectly serviceable for under a fiver on Amazon. Or to traipse all the way into town for three metres of pink ribbon only to find there wasn’t any pink ribbon in stock and they’d have to have burgundy even though they wanted pink and actually it would have taken two minutes to click on the precise shade of pink they wanted on that online store and get it delivered the following day.

Carmen got it. She was as guilty as anyone else at convenience shopping, even when she was in town every day. Plus who used napkin rings these days? How many scatter cushions could any sane human even buy in their lives? And bridesmaids didn’t make their own dresses any more, from the big swathes of purple and pink satin (sateen if you were economising). They ordered them from overseas, from where they arrived, late and ill-fitting, and they would have to come in, red-faced, asking for advice on adjustments and hemming and buying the odd spare zip at the very last minute.

But only three days after the Christmas chat, it happened. They were summoned. Idra loudly protesting that she should have poisoned that bloody mug, as Mrs Marsh, who must have been past retirement age – Idra reckoned she was ninety – was taking a certain pleasure in telling them they were all getting their jotters or, in her smart poshed-up elocution voice, ‘sadly being made redundant’.

She looked around through her wide glasses with the pastel rims and patted her short, sprayed-down hair.

‘Some of you, I’m sure, will get excellent references and find another job without any trouble at all,’ she said, looking pointedly at her favourite: bloody suck-up Lavinia McGraw.

At this, Carmen and Idra glanced at each other and Carmen got that awful feeling when you know you’re going to laugh at something incredibly inappropriate.

Because it was awful. It was devastating. A disaster. And she had seen it coming. Everyone had seen it coming. And she had done absolutely nothing about it. No point blaming Mrs Marsh now.





Sofia d’Angelo née Hogan eyed up the wreath on the shiny black front door, narrowed her eyes and adjusted it again, then stood back to admire the perfectly symmetrical effect.

She couldn’t help it. As soon as she’d seen the house, she’d just known. She’d fallen in love with it right away. Okay, so the basement was a little damp. It was an old house. Love was love. Nobody was perfect. Although today, number 10 Walgrave Street looked as close to it as made no odds.