‘Oh, I don’t know. The last student I employed took home enough to keep a roof over his head. Tell me what you need.’
In truth, I knew that I would pay him to just be here every day. ‘Two hundred and fifty pounds a week?’
‘Done.’ Then Orlando smiled. And it was a big smile that showed his uneven teeth. ‘I must warn you, I’m not terribly good with people. I’m aware they think I’m a little strange. I seem to put them off somewhat when they walk in here. Better on the internet, don’t you know? Can’t sell a nut to a monkey, but my books are good.’
‘When do you want me to start?’
‘Tomorrow. If that’s possible?’
‘Ten o’clock?’
‘Perfect. I’ll run upstairs and bring you a set of keys.’ He stood up again and was about to dash upstairs, when I stopped him.
‘Orlando?’
‘Yes?’
‘Do you want to see my CV?’
‘Why on earth would I want to see that?’ he asked as he spun round. ‘I just gave you the most thorough interview possible. And you passed with flying colours.’
A few minutes later, I had collected my clues back into my plastic wallet and a heavy set of brass keys had been pressed into my palm. Orlando ushered me to the door.
‘Thank you, Miss . . . what do you wish me to call you?’
‘Star will do fine.’
‘Miss Star.’ He opened the door for me and I walked through it. ‘See you tomorrow.’
‘Yes.’
I’d started walking down the street before he called to me.
‘And, Miss Star?’
‘Yes?’
‘Remind me to tell you more about Flora MacNichol. And her connection to that animal figurine of yours. Goodbye for now.’
I felt as though I had just been turfed out of Narnia back through the wardrobe. Outside, Arthur Morston Books felt like a parallel universe. But as I took the bus home and inserted my key card to gain entry to the apartment, I felt a little bubble of happiness and expectation. I hummed as I cooked supper, and mulled over whether to tell CeCe about my extraordinary day. In the end, I only mentioned that I’d found a job in a bookshop and would be starting tomorrow.
‘That’s good for now, I suppose,’ she said. ‘But you’re certainly not going to make a fortune selling old books for someone else.’
‘I know, but I like it there.’
I excused myself from the table as soon as possible and went outside to tend to my plants. My new job may not have been much to anyone else, but it was an awful lot to me.
7
My first two weeks at Arthur Morston Books consisted of much the same pattern as the day I’d arrived. Orlando would mostly be upstairs during the morning – the space behind the back door and what lay on the upper floor remained unknown to me – and I was told to call up to him if a customer wanted to see one of the most rare and valuable books, which were kept in a huge rusting safe in the cellar, or if there was a query I couldn’t answer. But there rarely was – a query or a customer.
I began to recognise what Orlando called his ‘regulars’: mostly pensioners, who would pick a book off the shelf and politely ask me the price, which was always written on a card at the back of it. Then, formalities over, they would take the book to one of the leather chairs and sit by the fire to read it. Often, they were there for hours before looking up from the book, then leaving with a polite ‘thank you’. One particularly ancient gentleman in a threadbare tweed jacket came in every day for a week to pick up The House of Mirth and sit down with it. I noticed he’d even added a slip of paper to mark where he’d got to before he slid it back onto the shelf each day.
Orlando had provided me with the cafetière to make coffee in the alcove at the back of the shop, which I was to offer to any ‘customer’ that came in. One of my duties was to buy a pint of milk on my way to work, which I would often pour away unused, as there were so few takers.
And it was above the shelf in the alcove that a picture caught my eye, the style of the illustrations being as familiar as the palm of my own hand. I stood on tiptoe to take a closer look and saw from the writing – now faded to within a ghostly whisper of its original – that it was a letter. The tiny watercolours that peppered the page had fared better and I marvelled at the perfection of them. My nose almost pressed to the glass to decipher the words, I saw a date and the faint outline of a name.
‘My dear Fl—’ The rest of the name was too faded to be conclusive. But the signature at the bottom of the page of small, neat writing was not. It was without a doubt proclaiming the author of this letter as ‘Beatrix’.
‘Fl . . .’ I murmured to myself. Could this letter be to my Flora MacNichol? Orlando had said that Beatrix Potter and Flora had known each other. I was determined to ask him.
At one o’clock precisely, Orlando would hare down the stairs and disappear through the front door. This seemed to be an invisible signal to whoever was reading in the chairs by the fire to leave. When he was back, Orlando would lock the door behind him and swing the sign to Closed.
The china plates, cutlery and starched white linen napkins would appear from upstairs and we would proceed to eat.
This was my favourite part of the day. I loved listening to him as his mind skittered between one topic and another, normally punctuated by a literary quotation. It became a game for me to try and work out what particular subject would lead on to the next. Yet I usually failed to guess, as he veered off on wild and obscure tangents. I managed in between to learn that his ‘sainted’ mother, Vivienne, had perished in a tragic car accident when Orlando was merely twenty and in his second year at Oxford. His father had been so heartbroken, he had promptly taken himself off to Greece to ‘drown himself in the misery of his mythological gods, and ouzo’. He had died of cancer only a few years back.
‘So you see,’ Orlando had added dramatically, ‘I am an orphan too.’
His conversation was also sporadically peppered with questions about my own upbringing at Atlantis. Pa Salt especially seemed to fascinate him.
‘So who was he? To know what he knew . . .’ Orlando muttered once after I’d confessed that I didn’t even know Pa’s country of birth.
Nevertheless, despite his obsession with Pa, he never volunteered any further information on the subject of Flora MacNichol. When I’d brought up the framed letter from Beatrix Potter, there was not the reaction I’d hoped there would be.