Page 17 of Christmas at the Borrow a Bookshop

Chapter Eight

Magnús Receives an Invitation

Magnús had burnt the first cake – not too badly but it was definitely singed. He’d been peering out the bedroom window, trying to crane his neck and catch a glimpse of the harbour – not possible at this angle, he’d found – and for a few moments forgotten he now had a café to cater.

He’d shaken his head coming down the winding stairs, telling himself to concentrate; there was a second batch of cake mix to deal with.

He’d been looking for her boat on the shore, he admitted, as though checking it was definitely real and not something he’d dreamt.

This morning’s events had certainly taken on the haziness of a dream. He worried he was losing his grip on reality, and he’d only been here one night. What would he be like at the end of a fortnight? He couldn’t explain his reactions at all. He was pragmatic and realistic, not at all the type to lose himself in daydreaming.

He weighed out the flour all over again, cracked the eggs and mixed and folded. That felt real, at least.

Just as the secondJólakakawent into the oven, Magnús’s spine stiffened at the brassy sound of the bell ringing from the shop. An actual customer.

Two in fact, he discovered, as he stooped under the low door from the café. Men, his age, or a little older, he reckoned, and holding hands.

‘Hallo,’ he said, approaching the till. ‘Welcome to my bookshop.’ The words were already out but he still clamped his lips shut in surprise. What on earth?Mybookshop? Not good. None of this was permanent – not that he wanted it to be more than a holiday. Not at all.

‘You’re Magnús?’ asked the slighter of the two, and seeing the bookseller’s surprise, quickly added. ‘I’m Izaak, one of the volunteers, and this is Leonid.’

Leonid wore glasses and had thick, curly blond hair, with eyes as blue as Magnús’s and an endearingly big gap between his front teeth.

Once hands had been shaken, Magnús asked, ‘Can I help you, or are you here to help me?’ He pressed his palms together awkwardly. ‘There doesn’t seem to be anything I need.’

‘We’re after a book, any books in fact, on camellias?’ said Izaak.

‘Camellias?’ Magnús repeated, his eyes shooting around the shop. ‘The flower?’

‘Shrub, actually,’ Leonid put in.

‘Leonid is Minty’s new gardener up at the Big House,’ Izaak announced proudly, in what Magnús had decided was definitely a Polish accent. ‘She brought him in to rescue the camellia grove that the gardens were once famous for.’

‘A long time ago,’ Leonid added, not telling Magnús that Minty had really brought him from Moscow so that Izaak, her loyal estate gatekeeper and groundsman, would have a chance of living with the love of his life who’d been languishing in a Russian university and unable to leave the country for years.

They’d married a few months ago in Exeter with none of their Polish or Russian families in attendance. Minty and Jowan had been the only witnesses and they’d stopped off for fish and chips on the drive back to Clove Lore in Minty’s rusty old Discovery. And that had been it; a far too small celebration to mark the culmination of years of long-distance yearning, during which time the pair had read to each other in three languages every evening via Skype, wishing there was a way for them to be in the same time zone as one another.

Minty, for all her battiness, held the answer, and had arranged the paperwork, and provided the permits and the permanent address.

Now the husbands resided in Minty’s converted attic rooms, which they’d turned into a jungle of hanging plants and climbing greenery, never quite daring to believe they’d actually been left in peace in England and always waiting for letters demanding yet more documentation to prove they weren’t somehow aliens or – Leonid’s deepest fear – simply telling him he must leave.

Perhaps that was why they clung to each other the way they did, like it was their last day in the other’s company, and why anybody who so much as glanced at them could see their devotion.

The sight of their hands clasped so tightly made Magnús simultaneous happy for them and desolate for himself. He rubbed at the little twinge in his chest. All he knew was that these two were hard to encounter when he’d been so bleak for so long.

‘Let’s look,’ Magnús told them and they scoured the shelves of gardening books, eventually turning up a general guide to acid-loving shrubs.

‘You’re coming to the donkey blessing tomorrow?’ Izaak said, having held out his card to pay the four pounds fifty that made Magnús want to roll his eyes at the pricing system. That wouldn’t even cover the cost of his favourite double-shotíslattein a Reykjavík coffee shop. A timely reminder that this place was a sham, and he shouldn’t be falling for its charm.

‘The what?’ He couldn’t have heard that correctly. ‘My English…’ he began, even though he’d spoken English fluently for as long as he could remember.

‘You heard right,’ Izaak told him. ‘A service for the village donkeys up at the Big House chapel. We’ll be there.’

‘Minty wants you to come,’ Leonid said, gravely, making Izaak smile.

‘I can’t,’ Magnús told them bluntly, hitting the buttons on the card machine and working the till. For all that this was a play shop, this part still felt good.

‘You can’tnotcome,’ Izaak laughed. ‘Trust us. Minty will only send Bovis to escort you. It’s easier if you come of your own free will.’

Magnús appreciated his dry tone, and only nodded his acceptance.

‘Six thirty tomorrow, drinks afterwards in the ballroom,’ Leonid threw in, placing his new book under his arm.

‘Do I bring anything to an English donkey blessing?’ Magnús wanted to know.

‘Just your incense and white robes,’ Leonid smirked.

As they stepped outside again into the little cobbled square, Izaak called over the sound of the whistling winds, ‘Is something burning?’ making Magnús curse and run for his forgottenJólakaka.

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