The Bookshop of Second Chances by Jackie Fraser (e books for reading txt) 📗

of anything worse, though, than telling her. Or more wonderful, if she liked me. But she wouldn’t. If she did. She was beautiful, properly golden hair and skin like vanilla ice cream, freckles like chocolate sprinkles. God, she was lovely.’ He laughs at the memory of his younger self. ‘Honestly. It’s still embarrassing to talk about it, even now.’

I’ve often wondered what it would be like to be beautiful; it must be an odd thing to be objectively attractive, rather than someone’s personal taste.

‘Anyway, he said he’d speak to her for me. I told him not to, but I guess he did. They arranged for me to be thoroughly humiliated anyhow.’

‘Shit, did they? What happened?’

He shrugs, mouth twisted. ‘Oh, it probably wasn’t that bad really. But I was a sensitive youth. I was hurt, and angry. With both of them, but particularly with him, because it was his idea, obviously, and because… they all found it so hilarious.’

‘What did they do?’

He glances at me and then looks away. ‘He said he’d told her, and she liked me too. And she wanted to meet up. We were up in town – Edinburgh – it was the Easter holidays. He said he’d arranged everything. I was – oh, you know. Excited and nervous and all that. Bought flowers. And my favourite book to give her.’ He shakes his head. ‘Because beautiful teenage girls love metaphysical poetry, don’t they? Beautiful teenage girls in the late 1980s, couldn’t get enough of the stuff.’

‘Whose poems?’

‘John Donne, obviously.’

I laugh. ‘I like John Donne. I probably didn’t know about him in 1988 though.’

‘No, well, anyway. She’ll be on the steps outside the National Gallery, he said. She wasn’t though. I waited for half an hour, an hour, two hours. No phones in those days, no way to find out what had happened. I just waited. And waited. Then they turned up together, with a bunch of other people, mutual friends, people from school. Our peer group, I suppose. Everyone thought it was so funny, that I’d been waiting, and then she and Charles were all over each other. Kissing, and… Like I say, it’s embarrassing to think about it.’ He fiddles with his sunglasses and then puts them back on, turning to face me.

‘I’d have killed everyone there, and myself as well, if I could have done. I don’t know. It was the idea that me liking someone was so ridiculous and funny. It was painful. After that I… It didn’t fill me with kindness towards girls. Women. He could have got much the same result without involving her, but she seemed to find it all very amusing as well. That was the worst thing. That she thought it was funny. That she liked him better. That she’d rather let him kiss her, as a joke, than accept anything I had to offer.’

‘Oh, teenagers are horrible,’ I say, sympathetic. ‘How cruel. And then what happened?’

He shrugs. ‘I’ve barely spoken to him since, and I never spoke to her again, or anyone else who was there. I went off to university, where I was mostly aloof and sarcastic. I was surprised and not terribly impressed when that seemed more effective than being sincere and so on.’

I feel so sorry for the awkward teenage Edward. Being laughed at is a horrible thing. I imagine him, earnest with his poetry and his flowers, waiting and waiting. It’s the sort of thing that affects you more than it should, perhaps.

‘Hm. Were you brooding?’

‘I was a bit.’ He laughs.

‘Tall and dark and mysterious.’

‘That was my aim. Well, mysterious was my aim, I’m naturally tall and dark.’ We grin at each other.

‘There was a lad on my course who was much the same. James. I don’t know what triggered it for him, but he was desperately brooding.’

‘Did it work?’

‘Not on me, I’ve got too much of a sense of humour. Also,’ I tell him, ‘you might find this hard to believe, but I was pretty cool myself at university.’

‘I don’t find it at all hard to believe. How did your cool manifest?’

‘I’d had a year out, so I was older, and I’d lived away from home. I spent eight months travelling through Europe with my friend Angela. I’d been to Berlin just after the wall came down, and spent six weeks in Paris.’ I think about my teenage self, smiling at the memory. ‘I acquired a convincing veneer of sophistication. I certainly knew a lot more about “life” than some of the people who’d only just got their A Level results. And I had fantastic hair, which helped. Tremendously sharp Louise Brooks bob, raven black.’ I laugh.

‘So Mr Moody and Mysterious didn’t impress you?’

‘No. I used to call him Lord Byron. Which he probably liked, although honestly, was there ever a man more annoying?’

Edward laughs. ‘Shelley’s much cooler.’

‘Yes, but still quite annoying. Poor Harriet Shelley. But at least there’s a point to most of his poems. Mind you, I’m probably being unfair; Childe Harold is another thing I’ve never been able to get through. I can’t be doing with a poem that goes over the page, really.’

He laughs again. ‘Not even Paradise Lost?’

‘Oh, well, I rather wish it wasn’t a poem.’

‘Philistine.’

‘I know, shocking.’

We’re silent for a moment and then I say, ‘But anyway, so – I’m sorry, this is all completely fascinating – then you set out to sleep with all your brother’s girlfriends?’

‘I suppose I did. The first time was sort of an accident, genuinely. And then I just… I thought, I wonder if I could–’

‘“Sort of an accident”?’ I push my own sunglasses down my nose so I can look over them at him.

‘Yeah. I went to a party, we all did, and Tasha was there. She’d been… I suppose she was his first proper girlfriend, but they split up when he went to university. He was reasonably upset about it. Anyway, we’d always got on quite well, and it was Hogmanay, and we were drunk, and you know how it