Harriet Kealty had spent almost an hour sitting alone outside the Nantwich Bookshop, and was now nursing her third espresso. She watched the other customers and listened to their conversations as Steve and Denise, the friendly owners of the bookshop, and their staff shuttled in and out, ferrying orders of coffee and cakes. It was a Saturday, so the town center was busy and the square opposite the crooked Tudor building was packed with shoppers buzzing from one market stall to another.
Harri checked her watch: 11:58. Two minutes off an hour. More than any reasonable person could be expected to wait. But she wasn’t a reasonable person. She was desperate to reclaim a life she’d lost a few painful weeks ago. She’d been lured here by hope, and to leave would be admitting it had been extinguished, but in the end, after another twenty minutes of sitting there with a gnawing sense of inevitability, Harri finally accepted defeat. John Marlowe, the man who’d emailed her, promising she would get her job back if she came to this meeting, had been yet another troll, a liar who felt entitled to waste her time and humiliate her because she’d been so successfully cast as the villain by the local papers.
Another dead end.
She asked Denise for the bill, paid in change, and drifted into the shop. There were tables and chairs arranged between the bookshelves, and the hubbub of conversation filled the room. Friends and family bound together by shared experience. She had nothing to keep her company. Ever since that awful night, her life had been one misstep after another. She desperately wanted what all these people had: an ordinary life. She wanted to feel good. Overwhelmed by loneliness, her mind reached, as it had so many times, for Ben. He’d made her feel good for a while, and she was afraid she’d never meet anyone like him again. Self-pity brought tears to her eyes.
Great, she thought. A private humiliation and a public embarrassment. She hurried towards a flight of stairs and a sign that said Toilets.
Her footsteps echoed around the narrow, crooked stairwell, and the sounds of the café faded as she emerged into an almost deserted secondhand-books section. Cracked spines sliced long runs of other less damaged but clearly used books. Beyond the high shelves, almost directly opposite the top of the stairs, was a corridor that led to the toilets, where she might find a mirror in which she could check her makeup, and the privacy to compose herself. There was only one problem. The old man who stood between her and the corridor. He looked startled, as though her rushed arrival had caught him in some mischief.
“I’m sorry,” she said, fighting for composure.
“Please don’t apologize,” he replied, obviously trying to recover his own.
“I didn’t mean to startle you.”
He smiled indulgently and his face creased like an unmade bed. “You didn’t. I was just thinking.”
His eyes fell, and for a moment Harri forgot her own worries. The man’s sadness hit her like a wave. His craggy face was downcast and his eyes were heavy and shining with the prospect of a storm. His mop of gray hair had been neatly combed, and he looked as though he was dressed for a date. His tweed jacket, black trousers, and white shirt were well pressed, and his woven-silk red tie was bright and clean. If he was on a date, then, like her, he had been stood up, because there was no one else around. He was tall and might once have been handsome, but whatever gifts youth had conferred were long gone. Only a brightness in his eyes hinted at the charisma that might have drawn people to him and the energy he might have had long ago. His slight frame was angled against a supportive ebony walking stick. Harri took a generous guess he was the right side of ninety. She wanted to get past him but felt awkward, as it seemed as though he was expecting a conversation.
“My wife and I fell in love the instant we met. She’s gone now, but she’s always with me, you know, in all the moments we shared,” he said, and Harri feared he might cry. He took a couple of breaths, and she prayed he would hold it together, because she didn’t think she’d be able to stop herself if she saw someone else weeping. “She loved to read,” he added at last.
He managed a false smile. The world was full of people like him, their best days gone, their glories forgotten. All they loved, everything they’d done, nothing more than memories fading like writing in sand, washed away by the tide of time.
“I’m sorry. It’s not long since I lost her and…” He trailed off, and they stood in awkward silence for a moment.
“It’s all so overwhelming,” he added sadly. “You take a journey together, and you know everything that starts will have an end, but you can never quite bring yourself to believe it. Somewhere there’s a secret tribe of quiet immortals, right? Some race of souls who never perish. You come to believe you’ll find a way to join them, and you push the end from your mind.”
He took a step forward, and for a moment Harri thought he’d reach out and touch her, but he stopped a pace away and settled on his cane.
“It was sudden. Heart attack. We never had the chance to say goodbye.” His voice was cracked with age, but as he spoke of his loss, emotion fractured it further. “I couldn’t save her. It was one of those things. I’m so sorry…”
His words drifted to nothing, but his eyes stayed on Harri before shifting away.
“She was very beautiful, you know? Like you.”
Harri didn’t feel at all beautiful. She’d gained six pounds since her dismissal, and even though she wasn’t overweight, she felt the extra baggage on her normally slight five-foot-six-inch frame. She hadn’t been to the salon for months and had her light brown hair tied in a tail to conceal the tangles and split ends. Her usual wardrobe of suits had been replaced by scruffy sneakers, jeans, and T-shirts, and whereas she’d once taken time over her makeup, she could barely muster the enthusiasm for lipstick. She might be many things, but right now beautiful wasn’t one of them.
She thought he was just being polite, so she didn’t thank him for his dishonesty and grew increasingly uncomfortable in the beat that followed. She could hear the hubbub rising up the stairs and longed to be part of the crowd. Fate had thrown her in the path of this broken old man, but she didn’t have what it took to fix him. She was just as damaged. Her discomfort must have shown, because his demeanor changed.
“Listen to me.” His voice brightened, but his eyes told her the levity was forced. “I’m a blathering old fool.”
“Not at all,” Harri said automatically. Her mother had raised her to be polite. “Death is difficult.”
“If you could know the moment of your end, would you want to?” the old man mused.
She thought about all the bad things that had ever happened to her. Would it have helped to know about them in advance?
“No. No. I don’t think I would,” she replied. “It would hang over me like a cloud.”
“True.” He nodded. “I promised myself I wouldn’t get carried away, that I’d be strong, but it’s so hard. I’m so alone, you see. Almost everyone I’ve ever known is gone. She was my love. She still is. Just being here is so difficult.”
“It’s okay. That’s normal. In the police we call it survivor’s guilt.”
The man bit his lip and cast around the room, as though something in the old books might support him in his grief. He found strength from somewhere.
“You’re good and kind. You have a big heart,” he said, and Harri almost broke down in tears. He was a soul in torment and he was trying to be nice to her. “We all face the same end. Whatever our road, we finish the journey pleading with the void. Begging for just one more moment. But there’s never enough time. The relentless turn of the seconds. The ticking clock. That is our enemy. I loved her so much.”
His eyes met Harri’s and they shimmered.
“What would you give for just one more moment with someone who meant everything?”
Harri found herself wanting to take the old widower’s hand and soothe the pain, but he moved back a half step and eyed her with the sudden alertness of someone waking from a dream.
“Listen to me casting a shadow over your day. That’s not who I am. I’m a bringer of smiles. You know what my wife used to say? ‘You are my star. You light up the darkest day.’ Don’t you think that’s beautiful?”
“Very,” Harri replied.
“That’s what I should be doing; lighting up days, not darkening them. I’m sorry I’ve upset you.”
“Not at all,” she assured him.
“I’ve wasted your time at the very least. It’s most selfish of me. Clinging to moments. Hoarding memories. I’m old. My day is done. Yours is ahead of you, and I have no right to waste another second. It’s been my absolute pleasure. Thank you for your kindness. Goodbye.”
Harri couldn’t suppress a surprised smile when the old man abruptly pivoted around his walking stick and hurried past her. Within moments, he was clanking down the stairs.
She was about to head to the toilet when she noticed a book on the floor. It had been concealed by the man and lay with the cover spread wide, spine broken, like a dead bird. Had he been looking at it when she’d startled him?
Happiness: A New Way of Life.
A woman smiled up from the cover. She looked annoyingly contented. Harri preferred thrillers and normally would never have been interested in such a book, but she was desperate, and if the smiling author, Isabella Tosetti, had just one useful nugget of advice, she’d take it. Harri picked up the book and checked the inner leaf. Fifty pence for a whole new way of life.
Bargain, she thought, and she took the book with her.