Page 14 of The Little Provence Book Shop
Inside, Lili was in a deep slumber, her arms flung above her head, her face smooth and serene. Adeline felt a rush of love that almost catapulted her across the room to take her daughterin her arms. But she managed to resist it, leaning back on the frame and feeling her heart rate settle.
She thought about André, his bag of oranges, and cringed inwardly. What sort of person rushes past someone, knocks their bag flying and disappears into the night? She’d been working so hard to make a good impression on everyone. It wasn’t a great look.
Michel probably thought she was rude or abrupt. She thought about his relaxed attitude, the lazy smile, his joke at her expense. She must have seemed frantic and unkempt.
She reminded herself that it didn’t matter. Nothing else did, really, when it came down to it. Just her and her daughter – her little family.
But her cheeks still burned whenever she thought of the events of the last half hour. ‘Idiot,’ she said under her breath.
Downstairs, she picked up her neglected glass of wine and made her way to the small armchair in the corner of the sitting room. It smelled old, musty – like an antique shop – but she curled into it and took a sip from her wine, trying to recover the equilibrium she’d felt earlier.
She opened the orange book on a random page and read the opening lines:
I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody too?
She felt herself laugh at the witty lines written almost two hundred years earlier. Was Monique trying to offend her? But then she looked again – recognised the sense of not being someone, but yearning for contact. And she realised that the poem did, in some way, speak to her.
8
The next morning dawned bright – the darkness and cloudy skies of yesterday seemed like a distant memory as Adeline threw open the shutters and found light flooding in. Lili was up, playing in her room with her stuffed rabbit; Adeline could hear her prattling away in French and smiled to herself that the language came so naturally to her young child. She thought of her own struggle with the language: the verbs, the conjugations, the grammatical errors, and felt proud that she’d given her daughter the opportunity to acquire the cadences and rhythms of another language at a time when it came so easily.
The tree just outside their house had begun to flower, its pink blooms promising cherries later in the season. And the birds, delighted too at the sunny morning, chirped enthusiastically from their various perches in its branches, on the roofs of the buildings opposite, on windowsills, and flew rapidly through the clear morning air.
‘Hope is the thing with feathers,’ Adeline thought to herself, remembering a line from an Emily Dickinson poem she’d read last night. She thought of how birdsong had always lifted her –the promise of spring in its melody – and felt new meaning in the centuries-old words. She smiled, then wandered to the bathroom to get ready for another day.
This morning, she’d gone to the patisserie to buy breakfast, hoping to see André and apologise for her rudeness last night. But he hadn’t been there. A woman had served her instead, with a cheery grin and aBonne journée!as she left. Part of her was relieved that she didn’t have to stumble out an explanation in the busy queue, part of her wished she’d been able to get it out of the way. She wondered what André made of it all.
Just over an hour later, with Lili despatched happily to school, she was in the bookshop, a pile of orders in front of her and her mind elsewhere. Monique was across the shop floor, in the middle of rearranging the vintage novels, dusting each shelf with a rather extravagant-looking feather duster and talking softly to each book as if they were old friends. Adeline watched with a combination of amusement and fascination. ‘What are you saying to them?’ she asked from where she was arranging an order for a new customer.
‘To the books? Ah, nothing much,’ Monique laughed. ‘I am so used to being here alone, I have started to talk a little out loud. You must think I am crazy.’
‘Not at all,’ Adeline said, thinking of how only last night she’d told the wine bottle that she’d better just stick to one, as she had work the next day. ‘I think we all do that sometimes.’
‘Anyway, it is not as if I am talking to justanything,’ Monique said, her expression light. ‘I am talking to my friends. These books, these older books, they have seen some history. They have stories inside, yes, but I wish they could tell me their own story too. Sometimes, I think of all the people who have read this one book,’ she said, brandishing a green, leather-bound volume with embossed gold lettering, ‘and how perhaps theyhave never met, but have this connection. And I think of the next person the book will go to and wonder about their story too.’
‘I like that,’ Adeline said. ‘The idea of books having stories of their own.’
Monique nodded. ‘Perhaps that is why I am always recommending the older books,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘They carry so many spirits with them.’ She smoothed her skirt – today a vibrant blue – and reached up to return the book to its rightful place.
Adeline wasn’t sure she liked the idea of spirits. But perhaps Monique was being metaphorical. She smiled and turned back to her work.
She’d begun to admire Monique’s style – although the woman was much older than her, she always dressed in vibrant colours, patterns, silk scarves, swishing skirts. She always wore lipstick and earrings and necklaces which sparkled with colour and caught the light. Often, she’d wear a crystal around her neck – usually the moonstone, but sometimes another, a pink stone that radiated a kind of gentle warmth.
Over the years, since becoming Lili’s mum, Adeline had faded. She’d adopted a style that was unconfrontational, dull. Jeans and T-shirts and the occasional summer dress in a non-descript fabric. Modest. Boring. She saw how Monique’s clothes, worn with confidence, added to her boss’s vibrancy and wondered which came first. Did you have to be confident, assured, to wear bright colours and ambitious styles, or did the clothes themselves imbue you with the confidence once you slipped them on?
Just as she was considering whether a trip to the larger town of Avignon was needed to freshen up her wardrobe, the bell made its habitual clinking and the main door of the shop slowlyopened. For a moment she wondered if it was Michel, whom she’d learned had an apartment at the end of the high street. Monique had filled in the details of her nephew – he was a professor in Avignon and rented a room in an apartment there during term time. But at weekends and holidays he’d be back in the space he owned, popping in to see his aunt and catching up with local friends. ‘He likes to look out for me, I think,’ Monique had said.
‘That’s lovely of him,’ Adeline had replied.
‘Yes,’ Monique had said fondly. ‘I suppose he is my only family,’ her expression had darkened briefly, ‘or the only family that I see. He feels responsible for me, I think.’
‘I’m sure he enjoys seeing you though,’ Adeline had said quickly.
‘Mais oui, he is a good boy. A little lonely too, I think.’ Adeline hadn’t been sure whether the look Monique gave her after she’d said those words was pointed, but she’d looked away, studiouslynot noticingif there was any hint being dropped.
But this wasn’t Michel, it was an older man. One she recognised from her first day in the shop. She reached for his name in her memory and it came to her once he closed the door behind him and stood in the entrance, his gait a slight stoop, as if he were carrying a heavy burden. ‘Bonjour,Claude,’ she said, smiling.
