The Bookshop Read Online Free PDF Page B

in England, and with that precious sense of beginning again which she could not expect too often at her age. No doubt it was absurd to imagine that she was being driven out, and that the hand of privilege was impelling her to Deben’s wet fish shop.
    She blinded herself, in short, by pretending for a while that human beings are not divided into exterminators and exterminatees, with the former, at any given moment, predominating. Will-power is useless without a sense of direction. Hers was at such a low ebb that it no longer gave her the instructions for survival.
    It revived, however, without any effort on her part, and within the space of ten minutes on a Tuesday morning at the end of March. The weather was curious, and reminded her of the day she saw the flying heron trying to swallow the eel. While the washing on the lines was blowing to the west with the inshore breeze, the pumping mill on the marshes had caught the land breeze and was turning east. The rooks circled in the warring currents of the air. She left her little car in the garage next to the Coastguards, which was as near as she could manage to the Old House, and took the short lane or passageway from the foreshore which led to her backhouse door.
    The passage was very narrow, and in a hard blow the little brick-and-tile houses seemed to cling to each other, as the saying went, like a sailor’s child. Her back door had to be opened carefully, or the draught blew out the pilot light in the cooker. She turned the key in the mortice lock, but the door would not open.
    She wasted only a moment’s thought on stiff hinges, warped wood, and so on. The hostile force, pushing against her push, came and went, always a little aheadof her, with the shrewdness of the insane. The quivering door waited for her to try again. From inside the backhouse came a burst of tapping. It did not sound like one thing hitting another, more like a series of tiny explosions. Then, as she leaned against her door, trying to recover her breath, it suddenly collapsed violently, swinging to and fro, like a hand clapping a comic spectacle, as she fell inwards on to the brick floor on her knees.
    Everyone in Score Lane must have seen her pitch head foremost into her own kitchen. But stronger than the embarrassment, fear and pain was the sense of injustice. The rapper was a familiar of the bathroom and the upstairs passage. In the backhouse she had never heard or seen any signs of malignancy. There are unspoken agreements even with the metaphysical, and the rapper had overstepped them. Her will-power, which she felt as indignation, rose to meet the injury. The Unseen, as the girls had always called it at Müller’s, could mind its own business no better than the Seen. Neither of them would prevent her from opening a bookshop.
    In consequence, Mr Thornton was instructed to finalize the business as soon as possible, which meant that he proceeded at the same pace as before. Thornton & Co had been established for many years. The court work might be largely left to Drury, the solicitor who. wasn’t Thornton, but Thornton was reliable through and through. He had heard, of course, that his client hadbeen seen falling about the street, holding a horse’s head for that old scoundrel Raven, and calling on Milo North, of whom Thornton disapproved. On the other hand, she had been asked to a party at The Stead, where he himself had never been invited, although he still hoped that the Gamarts would see sense one day and transfer their affairs from Drury, who was simply not up to handling important family business. Well, so Mrs Green knew the Gamarts. But even about that, he believed, there were reservations.
    Taking out his file on the Old House, he explained that there was some little difficulty about the oyster warehouse. It could be upheld that the fishing community, by right immemorial, were entitled to walk straight through it on their way to the shore, and possibly to dry their sails in the