The Bookshop on the Square

The sixth plate in Curtis's twelfth volume was foxed along its lower edge, and Margot had spent ten minutes deciding whether to say so in the description or leave it for a buyer to find. She decided to say so. People who bought hand-coloured botanicals wanted the truth about them; it was the ones who pretended a book was perfect who lost the trust of the trade. She wrote light foxing to lower margin, not affecting the image in pencil, in the small upright hand she kept for stock, and turned the page with the flat of her thumb. The loupe hung from a chain at her chest. Beside it the day book lay open to a fresh page, the morning's only entry a postal order from a vicar in Norfolk who collected printed sermons and paid, always, within the week. The radio was on low, a string quartet she could not place, set to the volume of a thing kept company by rather than listened to.

The shop smelled of old paper and beeswax, with the coffee from the cart on the marketplace reaching her when the wind came round. Two narrow rooms knocked into one, dark green to the picture rail, a window onto the square at the front and the till at the back. Eighteen months ago it had been a cheese shop. On damp days the chimney breast still gave up a faint ghost of cheddar, which she had stopped apologising for and started rather liking.

Through the window the square was doing its late-September thing with the light, the stone gone the colour of weak honey, the shadows long off the war memorial. Two women stood talking while their terriers wound the leads together. The man from the antiques place opposite wound out his awning though there had been no rain in a week. No customers. There were never customers before eleven, and often none after, and she had learned to spend the morning on the books and not resent the quiet of it.

She had been in Stow-on-the-Wold eighteen months and was still, some mornings, surprised to find she lived here. London had been loud in a way she had mistaken for being alive. She was not yet sure she had landed. She thought she was getting there.

The bell over the door went.

The woman who came in was tall and lean and somewhere past fifty, with dark hair gone grey at the temples and cut to the shoulder. She wore jeans and a thick fisherman's jumper and looked, in them, more deliberate than most people managed in their best clothes. A black labrador sat down on the pavement outside without being told, and watched the door close between them, and did not whine.

'Don't get up,' the woman said, though Margot had not. 'I've come to be a nuisance about a book.'

'That's most of the job.' Margot set the loupe down against her chest. 'Which one?'

'The Repton. The Red Book. You've had it on the shelf behind you for, I think, two months.' She did not look at the shelf. She had placed it without looking. 'I kept meaning to come in, and kept finding reasons not to, and this morning I ran out of reasons.'

Margot took it down. It was the thing in the shop she was proudest of and least likely to sell: a slim quarto bound in faded red morocco, the watercolours inside still soft after two hundred years, the overlays hinged at the edge so a client could lift a flap and see his park remade as Repton proposed it. It had come to her in a house clearance near Cirencester, in a box that held nothing else worth the drive, and she had very nearly wept when she opened it on her kitchen table that night. The morocco had been rebacked long ago by someone who knew the work, and the plates had never met damp, which for a book that had spent two centuries in a Gloucestershire attic was close to a miracle.

'It was made for a place called Aldsworth Park,' she said, and turned to the title leaf. 'Broken up before the first war. The house is flats now and the lake is a car park.' She lifted the overlay, and the lake that was a car park filled again with water, the way Repton had wanted it and the way it had stayed for thirty years before the money ran out. 'People don't buy these. They go to the Mellon, or they sit with a London dealer for ten years until the right collector dies. I had half decided to send it to auction and be done.'

'Aldsworth,' the woman said, and turned the name over a moment. 'He took out a maze there and put in a cedar. It will still be standing, I should think, if the car park left it the room.' She knew the place, or knew Repton, or both. 'A melancholy trade, landscape gardening. You draw a thing you will not live to see finished, and the client's grandson grasses it over.'

'Most of my stock is people drawing things they didn't live to see finished,' Margot said. 'It's half of why I love it.'

'Yes. I thought it might be.' The woman turned the overlay back herself, with one finger, the way a person handles a thing they have handled before. 'What would you have to have for it?'

'Twelve thousand.'

'Yes,' she said, as though Margot had told her the time.

The dog had lain down on the warm stone outside with its chin on its paws.

'How long have you been here?' the woman asked.

'Eighteen months.'

'From London.'

'Is it so obvious?'

'You wrap a book like a Londoner. Quick hands, no wasted paper. What made you leave?'

It was the question everyone asked, and Margot had a short answer she gave at parties and a longer one she gave to no one. She heard herself begin the longer one. The lease on the old shop had been coming up for renewal. Her marriage had ended the year before and left a flat she could neither afford to keep nor bear to sell. One ordinary morning, in the basement off High Holborn, she had stood among the shelves and understood that she had built something that did not need to be in London and never should have been. She did not say the part about the marriage. She said the rest, and the woman took all of it in without once looking like someone waiting for the gap in which to speak.

'And the worst of it behind you,' the woman said, when Margot had finished, 'or you would not tell a stranger any of it. People talk freely only once a thing has stopped hurting enough to guard.' She said it without unkindness. 'And the shop keeps you?'

'The shop barely keeps the shop.' Margot smiled. 'The rest is online. I put up photographs. Books, and the light on the square at the right hour. A great many people who will never come to Stow like to look at it before they fall asleep.' She had taught herself not to be embarrassed by it and managed it most days. 'It pays for the privilege of selling Repton at a loss to people who do not buy him.'

'I bought him.'

'You did. I am still adjusting.'

'How many of them?' the woman asked. 'The ones who look.'

'A million and a half, the last time I let myself count.'

The woman took that in without surprise and put it somewhere, the way she had put the shelf without looking. 'That is a great many people,' she said, and left it there. Margot had the brief, passing sense of having been added up, and then the woman smiled properly for the first time, and the sense went.

'And you?' Margot said, warm now and a little reckless with it. 'Are you local?'

'I lived in London a long time. I came back ten years ago.' That was all of it. She gave it plainly, without apology and without the small embroidery most people use to fill the silence after a fact, and the not-filling was not rude. It was a kind of manners Margot had no name for. She had talked for five minutes and learned one sentence in return, and she did not feel managed by it. She felt she had met someone who knew how to hold a thing back without making a performance of the holding.

The quartet on the radio finished and the announcer named it, a late Haydn, and moved on to the afternoon's weather over the Cotswolds in the same even voice.

Margot wrapped the book at the counter, two sheets of the good heavy paper and a length of string, folding the corners the way her first employer had shown her twenty years and three shops ago, while the woman wrote against the edge of the till. She wrote leaning forward, and her shirt fell open a button at the collar as she bent to it, and Margot saw a fine gold chain there against her skin, and on the end of it something the shirt closed over again before she could see what it was. She went back to her knot. The cheque, when it slid across the counter, was drawn on the account of a firm of solicitors in Cirencester, the figures formed in the same upright certainty as the voice. She blotted it with the side of her hand, an old habit from a time when ink still ran, and tore it free.

'You keep your reading glasses on a chain on the counter,' the woman said, 'rather than on your face. May I ask why.'

'They were my grandmother's.' Margot touched them before she knew she meant to. 'I don't need them yet. I like to have them where I can see them.'

'Sensible.' The woman tucked the parcel under her arm. At the door she turned, her hand already on the latch. 'I have lunch at the Sherborne Arms on Sunday. Come, if you can. One o'clock.' It did not ask for an answer. It was said the way one tells a stranger where the post office is.

'I'd like that,' Margot said.

'Good.' A small nod. 'You'll do better here than you did there. I can usually tell.'

And she was gone, the bell going behind her, the dog up off the stone and turned at her heel before the door had shut, the two of them crossing the square into the honey-coloured light without once looking back.

It was only afterwards that Margot understood she had not asked the woman's name, and that she had not minded not asking.

She slid the cheque into the day book, squared it, and stood a moment with a small private smile she would not have let the woman see.

Her phone had been face down beside the till all morning. Ignoring it was a discipline she had taught herself and was proud of and broke about once an hour. She picked it up.

An email from Tom Brennan. His name did a complicated thing in her chest that was neither pleasure nor the opposite of it.

Margot. I have done a foolish and wonderful thing and taken a cottage in Lower Slaughter for six months, on the theory that no one can write honestly about English food in a Holloway flat that smells of the neighbour's. It is damp and lovely and I have already burned the only decent pan. I would love to see you. I am told you are a Cotswolds woman now, which I shan't believe until I have seen it with my own eyes. T.

She read it twice. The last time she had seen him had been eighteen months ago in London, at a dinner she had not been enjoying for reasons that had nothing to do with him, and he had been the one person at the table she was glad to be seated beside. That was the difficulty with Tom. He was a man it was easy to be glad to sit beside, and she had learned to be careful of the things that came easily.

She wrote a reply, read it back, and cut it in half before she sent it.

How nice. Stow isn't far. I'm in the shop most days; drop in when you're passing. M.

No we should catch up. No exclamation mark. No question about the cottage she would rather not be told more about. She sent it, locked the phone, set it back face down, and returned to the folio.

At Coln St Aldwyns, in the dining room of a converted stable that had once been part of a larger house, Helena lit two candles.

The afternoon brought a couple buying a christening present, who took twenty minutes over a thing they had settled in the first two, and the retired schoolmaster who came every Thursday, read standing up for the better part of an hour, bought nothing, and was always welcome. Today it had been a county history he had read a dozen times, and he laughed once, quietly, at something a hundred years dead. Between them the shop was quiet. Margot finished the folio's description, shelved it, and squared the day book again out of habit rather than need. She turned off the radio, which had been talking to itself about gardening since four, and the shop took on the particular quiet it kept when the music stopped.

The last hour of a Wednesday had a shape she had come to know: the school-run cars, and then the long slide of gold light down the house-fronts opposite as the sun went off the square. At half past five she turned the card in the window from Open to Closed. The antiques man across the way wound in his awning at last, and the light went from honey to the flat pewter of a stone town at dusk, which she had not expected to come to love and had. She locked the front door. The key was brass and heavy and original to the building, and turning it was one of the small good moments of the day.

She crossed the floor in the half-dark, past the green walls and the smell of the place, and lifted the curtain at the foot of the back stairs to the flat. The stairs were narrow and turned once before the top. She did not climb them. She stood at the bottom with her hand on the rail, the shop settled behind her and the rooms waiting above, and for the first time in a long while she did not feel there was something she ought to be getting on with. Sunday was four days off. She stood there a little longer than she needed to, and then she went up.