Page 69 of Meet Me Under the Mistletoe
“Wouldn’t you like to finish that glass first?” Isaac smiled.
“Not the wine! Do you have more paintings that I can look at?”
Isaac shrugged and rubbed the back of his neck. “Like show-and-tell?”
Nory pulled a face at him. “I’m interested. Stop being so coy. This is good, I’d like to see more.”
“It feels a bit weird.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I do them for myself, I don’t usually show them to other people.”
“I’m not going to grade you! I’m just interested in art; that’smyhobby.”
Isaac stood cradling his mug for a moment while he deliberated and then finally said: “Okay. Come on. But if you give me any less than a C-plus, I’m taking the mulled wine back.”
Nory followed him through another door, which led into what was once a dining room. The dark wood table was a depository for books, stacked boxes of paints, sketchbooks of varying sizes, and rows of plant pots with seedlings pushing their tiny green heads out of the soil.
A bay window looked out onto the front garden. A generous cushioned window seat had been built in, but for the most part this too was covered in books. The walls were made up of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, leaving just two holes where shelves had been built around and above the doors to the kitchen and hallway.
“This room is pushing all my buttons,” Nory exclaimed breathlessly.
“I know, it’s a mess. I keep meaning to tidy it, but there’s always something I need—”
“No, I mean my buttons are being pushed in a good way,” Nory interrupted him. “It’s almost a library. Wait, are those shelves double stacked?” She moved toward one of the cases and pulled out a book to reveal another row of books behind. “Oh, you, Isaac, are a man after my own heart. My god, I’d like a day in here to root around.” She ran her fingers along old, cracked spines and faded leather bindings, occasionally pulling out a book and examining it briefly before carefully replacing it.
“When I said my parents could never bear to part with anything, that extended to books,” said Isaac, watching Nory. “I got rid of most of the furniture, but I must have the same hoarder tendencies when it comes to these.”
“Keeping books is not hoarding!” Nory said fiercely, clutching an aged copy ofHeidito her chest. “It’s protecting history.The written word is the key to the secrets of this world and all the worlds that live in our minds.”
Isaac was smiling at her, and she felt suddenly self-conscious. This was the point where Andrew would normally tell her to rein in her inner book nerd or risk scaring passersby. But Andrew wasn’t here.
“What I’m saying is, having a book collection is not the same as stockpiling bargains from discount stores or keeping your own urine in lemonade bottles...”
Isaac raised his eyebrows. She was making this worse.Step away from the books, Nory, she told herself.
“Well, thank you, it’s good to know I’m not being lumped in with the body-fluid collectors.” Isaac laughed.
Nory took a deep breath and reluctantly replacedHeidi, turning her back and hoping Isaac didn’t see her give the book a little sniff before she pushed it gently back into its place.Ahh, that old-paper smell.She closed her eyes.
“I saw that,” he said.
Dammit!
“I was checking for damp. Damp is the archenemy of books.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You are headed for a C-minus,” she said haughtily. “Now, where are your paintings?”
Now it was Isaac’s turn to look uncomfortable, as he sifted through the papers on the table and picked bound sketchbooks from a head-height shelf. Nory sipped her warm wine and waited as Isaac pulled his work together in some kind of order and stacked it, ready for her perusal. He stood back and gestured for Nory to come over.
The first book had the wordSpringwritten in a scrawled hand across the cover. Inside were studies of purple crocus, paleyellow narcissus, bluebells, tulips, primroses, snowdrops, and other spring blooms, all dissected, painted, and labeled in the same scientific botanical style as the hellebore in the kitchen.
“These are just...” Nory whispered as she came to the end ofSpringand immediately picked upSummer, forgetting to finish her sentence and almost forgetting where she was. She turned the pages slowly, consuming the paintings with her eyes, absorbing the colors, staring at the fluid lines and then closing her eyes in an attempt to collate the images in her mind, so that she could keep them to revisit later.
She laidSummerdown and took a sip of her wine before reaching forAutumn. When she looked back up, Isaac was watching her, his face pensive, as though waiting for a blow to fall.
