Page 23 of Winter Nights at the Bay Bookshop

LARS

The half-term holiday had been and gone and the Monday when schools returned was the start of my third week at Bay Books as well as the first week without Marcus. Although his operation wasn’t until Thursday, Lily had insisted on him having the start of the week off to get organised.

Last week had been really busy, helped by a few mild and sunny days at the start of the week and only a couple of short rain showers at the end.

Lily had warned me that it was nothing compared to how it could get in December.

I’d been shown how to do most things and I’d quickly grasped the point-of-sale system.

I could now process in-person purchases, search for books we didn’t have in stock, and order them in.

Lily had been friendly all week, even when she was clearly very busy trying to juggle several tasks at once, so I decided that her coolness towards me that first week had just been my imagination.

I’d now met all the staff as well as Lily’s mum, Shelby, who’d covered Cassie’s shift one day with Cassie not working during the school holidays.

Everyone had been so warm and friendly as well as being voracious readers so, in quiet moments, I’d had some amazing bookish conversations.

‘It’s just the two of us today until Cassie gets in at half ten,’ Lily said when I arrived for work at 8a.m. – my new starting time in line with the hours Marcus usually worked.

‘It’ll probably be quiet – Mondays often are – so that’ll give us some breathing space after last week.

The first task is to make yourself a cuppa and then we’ll run through the plan for today. ’

I asked if she’d like a drink but she pointed to a steaming mug of coffee on the counter, so I headed down to make one for myself and sent it up in Jeeves. When I returned, Lily was on a kick stool in the children’s section taking down the Halloween spiders and dropping them into a storage crate.

‘We need to clear out Halloween,’ she said, ‘and make way for autumn with a flavour of Christmas.’

‘A flavour?’ I asked, taking Lily’s lead and removing some of the cobwebs from the shelves.

‘Nothing too full-blown at this point. I like to go subtle at first – a few festive titles in the window to prompt customers that Christmas is approaching plus a section in here for festive children’s books.’

She unpinned another spider and tossed it into the crate while I continued to work my way along the shelves collecting the cobwebs.

‘The autumnal vibes are all about being warm and cosy which kind of introduces Christmas anyway,’ she said. ‘It also works well for Bonfire Night on Wednesday. We don’t tend to do a separate display for that – not enough relevant titles to warrant it.’

She paused to re-position the kick stool.

‘On Thursday, it’ll be exactly seven weeks till Christmas Day so it won’t be long before we go full-on Christmas, but I’ll tell you more about our plans for that as the week progresses.

If we can get the decorations down in here before we open, that would be amazing. We’ll sort the window out a bit later.’

I wanted to ask Lily if they’d ever celebrated Jólabókaflóe at Bay Books but I’d wait until we were discussing Christmas.

If they didn’t – and there was no reason why they would as Lily’s family weren’t Icelandic and I wasn’t aware of anybody else in Whitsborough Bay who was – it would mean a lot to me if we could mark it in some small way, although I wasn’t sure how.

I didn’t even know what happened in bookshops in Iceland to embrace the tradition so I’d have to ask Freyja about that.

We’d almost finished in the children’s section when opening time arrived so Lily left me taking down the last of the decorations while she unlocked the door. I heard her welcoming a customer in and taking a payment moments later so they were obviously on a mission and knew exactly what they wanted.

‘I love it when a customer makes a purchase as soon as we open,’ Lily said, joining me once more as I placed the lid on the crate. ‘I have this fear of a zero-sales day so I feel more relaxed when I’ve made the first sale of the day.’

‘Have you ever had a zero-sales day?’

‘Not yet.’ She reached out to touch the nearest wooden shelving unit.

‘But we had a shocker once when we only had two customers all day and took less than a tenner. Dad and I call it Black Monday. One customer bought a picture book and the other bought a bookmark. The profit that day wouldn’t have even covered the electricity, never mind the wages. Thankfully days like that are rare.’

‘Do you know why it was so dead?’

‘I do, yeah. It already had a lot going against it – a Monday in late January so quietest day of the week, quiet time of the year, just before payday – and then the great British weather did its worst with non-stop torrential rain. No wonder nobody bothered.’

‘The hours must go by slowly when it’s like that.’

‘They really drag. It’s a good opportunity to get ahead with the admin and crack on with the things we can’t do when the shop’s busy.’ She grinned at me. ‘Or we can drink tea, eat biscuits and moan about the weather. So British! Do Icelanders go on about the weather?’

‘Definitely. They have a colder, wetter climate than the UK and, oh my God, the wind! They know this about their home, but they do still like to complain about it, just like Brits do about the weather here. Icelanders also have something called sun guilt. A nice sunny day is a rarity so it’s a case of dropping everything, if that’s possible, to do something outside and make the most of the sun.

Those who don’t take advantage of that then feel guilty for wasting the day. ’

‘Sun guilt. I love that.’ She narrowed her eyes at me. ‘You referred to Icelanders as they . You see yourself as a Brit?’

‘I was born here and Mum’s British so officially I am too. If anyone asks me my nationality, I say half-British, half-Icelandic, but I’ve never thought of myself as Icelandic. I love the place but I’ve never spent longer than a week at a time there and I haven’t fully explored the island.’

‘I couldn’t help noticing you’ve lost your accent.’

I nodded. ‘It wasn’t an intentional thing. It just disappeared over time.’

Geraldine had been the one who’d pointed it out.

She’d visited Nanna the day before my twenty-first birthday and had kindly bought me a card and gift.

She’d asked how I planned to spend the big day and I remembered her staring at me, frowning, before asking me what had happened to my accent.

Nanna and I were stunned that neither of us had realised it had gone.

Lily looked poised to ask another question and I’d have happily told her whatever she wanted to know. I liked that she was interested. However, the door opened and a couple maybe in their sixties asked if we had any soup or slow cooker recipe books.

‘We’ve got both,’ Lily said, smiling at them warmly. ‘Lars, would you like to show our customers where they are while I move these crates?’

‘They’re on level two,’ I said, leading the customers towards the stairs. ‘Who’s the chef in the house?’

‘Both of us,’ the woman said. ‘We’ve always enjoyed cooking together but we’ve never made soup before so we thought we’d give it a try.’

‘And we always make the same thing in the slow cooker so we want to mix it up a bit,’ the man added. ‘Our daughter told us to get some recipes online but that’s not our thing.’

The woman nodded. ‘You can’t beat a proper recipe book with mouthwatering pictures in it.’

We reached the section and, as I talked them through the books we stocked, I couldn’t help noticing the affectionate looks they exchanged and the brief touches.

The woman pointed out a recipe she thought the man would love and he did the same back to her and I wondered what it felt like to be with someone who knew everything about you.

I’d never experienced it but it was what I longed for.

This epitomised perfection for me. After checking if they needed any further help, I returned downstairs.

Lily had told me that there was a fine balance between being helpful and pushy.

Hovering over a customer definitely fell into the latter camp.

‘I’ve put the crates inside Jeeves so we’re not tripping over them,’ Lily told me when I joined her downstairs. ‘Don’t send them down just yet as we need to add in the decorations from the window first.’

‘Okay. Do you want me to clear the window?’

‘I do, but not just yet. First I’ll show you how we deal with the online orders which have come in overnight as they’re normally a morning priority. Do you want to come round to this side?’

I’d just joined Lily when the recipe book couple came down with a soup book and two slow cooker ones so I ran the transaction through for them and wished them lots of fun creating their meals together.

With the shop empty again, Lily guided me through what happened when a customer ordered anything via their website.

Standing so close to her, I kept getting whiffs of her perfume – something fresh and zesty like oranges – which I hadn’t noticed before but which I really liked.

She was a natural as a trainer; clear and precise with her instructions and providing sufficient insight into why things worked the way they did without getting bogged down with detail.

With pauses to help or serve customers, it took us until Cassie’s arrival to finish going through the system.

‘Have you seen it?’ Cassie asked Lily after she’d greeted us both. ‘It’s a pixie haul full house.’

‘Really? Aw, that’s brilliant. It’s been ages since the last one.’

As Cassie headed downstairs, Lily took out her phone and clicked a few buttons, smiling. ‘That’s made me happy. Good manners cost nothing.’

I looked at her expectantly.