The Last Bookshop in London Read online

  “We?” She followed his side gaze to the large plate-glass windows of Primrose Hill Books and found a crowd gathered outside the store. Mrs. Kittering was there, as well as many others Grace recognized, and waved with a hopeful smile.

  Grace turned her attention back to Jack, who gave her a hesitant grin. “Would you be so kind as to read to us still, even though we aren’t in the tube?”

  She glanced to Mr. Evans who looked at her with a paternal pride that crinkled the corners of his blue eyes as he offered her a nod of silent consent to their request.

  Biting her lip, Grace considered the size of the store. Last year, such a request would have been impossible. But now...

  “Yes,” she replied. “I absolutely can.”

  And so it was she settled on the second step of the circular metal stairs while everyone else sat about on the floor or propped themselves against the wall to listen to her read from Middlemarch.

  Mr. Evans’s white hair was visible along the top of a bookshelf one row over and remained there for the duration of her reading, as though he too was listening.

  After that, she read every day, either in the tube, or at Primrose Hill Books when there was no air raid. But while the days were filled with stories and the many people who came to listen to her, the nights were filled with bombs.

  It was, in a single encompassing word, wretched.

  The evenings when Grace didn’t work alongside Mr. Stokes, she was getting only a few moments of miserable sleep in the cramped Anderson shelter buried in the backyard.

  One such evening, she and Mrs. Weatherford had prepared to go into the Andy with their bedding and a small box containing necessities: a candle, their gas masks, though Germany no longer seemed interested in poison, Grace’s latest book, The Waves by Virginia Woolf, and a vacuum flask of tea.

  Rain was pouring down when the air raid siren went off, sending the women racing out into the deluge and through the muddy garden. The Andy rose in the dark like a sleeping beast, its hump wild with bristles of hair where sprigs of tomato plants sprouted from the dirt layering it. But when Grace stepped into the shelter, her foot sank up to the ankle in a pool of icy water.

  She cried out in surprise and leapt back out.

  “Is it mice?” Mrs. Weatherford asked, jerking away in horror.

  “It’s flooded.” Grace shook her damp shoe to little effect. “We’ll have to go to Farringdon Station until the Andy has dried out.” She made her way back to the house, one foot weighty and sodden from the soaking, issuing a derisive squish with every step.

  Mrs. Weatherford rushed behind her, but didn’t set about to prepare to go to the tube station.

  “If we hurry, we might still manage a decent spot,” Grace said by way of politely trying to rush Mrs. Weatherford.

  Already it was past eight, which was usually when the Germans began their nightly raids. Most likely they had been put off by the inclement weather. But that also meant the tube station would be packed with people like sardines in a tin by now. Grace had seen it on her nights as warden. People lay side by side wherever they might find the space to do so, strangers nestled as closely as families. Not only on the floor of the platform, but up the stairs and escalators and even some brave souls who slept beside the tracks.

  Mrs. Weatherford sat at the kitchen table and poured herself a cup of tea from the Thermos.

  “There isn’t time for all that.” Grace’s nerves scrabbled with an anxiety she could no longer temper. “We must be going.”

  Mrs. Weatherford offered a little sigh and set aside her cup. “I’m not going, Grace. I only go in the Andy to soothe your mind, but I confess, I never seek shelter during the day when you aren’t here.” She blinked, slow and tired. “I’ll not go to the tube station.”

  The ire deflated from Grace, replaced instead with a heavy ache. “But it won’t be safe.” Her protest was weak. She already knew there was scarcely any point in arguing.

  Mrs. Weatherford didn’t bother replying and merely stared dejectedly at the floor. Her face was lined with anguish where she sat in the white-and-yellow kitchen, a place that had once felt so cheerful and now seemed dull and stark. While she had once again begun to have a care with her appearance, she wore only dark clothes in place of her floral housedresses, each one belted tighter and tighter on her frame as she lost more and more weight.

  There were no more WVS meetings or elaborate meals or anything to show she was doing more than simply surviving, as if life was a book full of blank pages to be turned. Uneventful. Holding no purpose but to get to the back cover and be done.

  Grace remained in the townhouse with Mrs. Weatherford that night, resolved to find some way to encourage the older woman to join her at the tube station going forward. Each attempt afterward, however, was met with the same refusal and once, a sobbing confession for a wish to join Colin. Grace could not argue against something as powerful as grief.

  * * *

  The rest of September passed with nightly bomb raids and more afternoon attacks than not. Somehow, London adjusted.

  After all, no one in the world had the spirit of the British. They were fighters. They could take it.

  Shops began to close at four every afternoon to allow employees the opportunity for sleep before their night shifts began. Nearly every person had two jobs now. The ones they operated by day and the ones they volunteered for by night, whether putting out fires, watching for bombs, searching through the rubble for survivors or offering medical aid in the many various places it was needed—London came to life at night to help.

  Grace found she now could sleep rather effectively in small moments, falling immediately into a deep, dreamless slumber in short snatches of time.

  Queues at tube stations and shelters began before eight when the first sirens would inevitably begin to sound, people arriving early on to ensure they received a prime location on the floor. Or in a bunk if they were truly fortunate.

  As a result, people grew used to sleeping fully clothed. Some even confessed to bathing in their knickers, far too frightened to be caught unawares and be found dead in the buff.

  Yet even with the upheaval and uncertainty, letters continued to pour into the postal service despite the bombings and damaged buildings, operated by way of candlelight with signs declaring they were still open. It was a sad sight to behold, however, when a postman stood before a home reduced to a pile of rubble with a letter held in his hand.

  Whatever had stifled the Royal Mail service in the beginning of the war had begun to ease somewhat and Grace received letters from Viv and George with more regularity. It was ironic that their correspondence expressed as much concern for Grace’s safety now as hers did for them.

  George had suggested a new book, South Riding by Winifred Holtby, after she’d told him she’d begun reading in the tube station. A copy had been delivered to her at the store just that morning from Simpkin Marshalls, its dust jacket crisp and glossy with newness.

  The day held a chill from the previously sodden weather, but a beam of light streamed in through the window. No customers had entered the shop yet and Mr. Evans was busy with his “work” in the history section, so she found herself sitting in a little nook by the window.

  A sliver of sunlight broke through the clouds and shone on her with a gentle warmth. Grace paused for a moment and ran her fingers over the book cover, savoring the quiet peace. Relishing the joy of reading.

  The jacket was smooth, the print black against a yellow background dotted with small red houses. She slid her fingertip under the lip and drew it open. The spine, not yet stretched, creaked open, like an ancient door preparing to unveil a secret world.

  She turned the pages to the first chapter, the sound a quiet whispered shush in the empty shop. There was a special scent to paper and ink, indescribable and unknown to anyone but a true reader. She brought the book to her face, closed her e
yes and breathed in that wonderful smell.

  It was startling to think a year prior to this, she hadn’t been able to appreciate such small moments. But in a world as damaged and gray as theirs was now, she would take every speck of pleasure where it could be found. And much pleasure was to be had in reading.

  Grace cherished the adventures she went on through those pages, an escape from exhaustion and bombs and rationing. Deeper still was the profound understanding for mankind as she lived in the minds of the characters. Over time, she had found such perspectives made her a more patient person, more accepting of others. If everyone had such an appreciation for their fellow man, perhaps things such as war would not exist.

  Such considerations were easy to muse over there in a rare beam of sunlight, but far more difficult to hold tight to in the blacked-out streets of London with Mr. Stokes.

  The improved weather brought with it an influx of bombers who sailed easily through the clear skies to unload their destruction. It was on one such night that Grace found herself on duty when the familiar droning of planes announced their unwanted arrival.

  They flew like a murder of crows in the blackened sky, their presence evident in the scrolling beam of a searchlight. In previous raids, they would have opened their bellies by now.

  And yet still they came, growing larger, louder until the small hairs in Grace’s ears trembled at the noise. The ack-ack guns cracked in the thin night air; the hint of their smoke in the distance acrid. She craned her head back to stare up at the formation above her head. A searchlight passed over a plane just in time to see as its bottom split open and a large, pipe-like shape slid free into the sky.

  A bomb.

  Above her.

  She watched, transfixed. Her mind screamed run, run, run, but her legs wouldn’t listen. The bomb whistled a note that pitched higher as it gained speed. As it came closer.

  That shrill note called her to her senses and she turned from it, grabbing Mr. Stokes’s arm as she did so, pulling them back behind a wall framed with sandbags. The whistle became a shriek and her entire body went cold with fear.

  The sound stopped abruptly and her heart with it.

  That was the worst moment, when it fell, in the split second before it detonated. When you didn’t know where it had gone.

  The explosion was an immediate burst of brilliant light and a powerful bang that made the world go eerily silent. A flash blew hot as an open oven at her back. The force of it shoved Grace and sent her sprawling forward several feet.

  Her body smacked hard into the ground, knocking the wind from her lungs. She blinked, stunned, as a pitched whine rang one lofty note in her ears, tuning out any other sound.

  Her cheek ached where it had struck the pavement, her chin tender where the leather strap of her hat had kept it on her head as she landed. She huffed out a breath and a cloud of dust billowed up in front of her face.

  Slowly, the world came back to her, starting with the booming anti-aircraft guns, odd and distant like an underwater echo. She lay a moment more, taking in the broken bits of rubble around them, waiting for a rush of pain to announce a missing limb or a fatal wound.

  Her chest throbbed where she’d landed. But nothing more.

  She pushed herself to sitting with arms that almost seemed too weak to lift her. With shaking hands, she patted her jacket, pressing over the thick, gritty layer of dust for any indication of injury.

  There was none.

  She looked to her left and found Mr. Stokes sitting beside her in a similarly dazed fashion.

  They had survived.

  But others might not have.

  All at once, sound rushed back at her. Not just the ack-ack guns, but the whistles of bombs and the explosions. So many explosions.

  She and Mr. Stokes appeared to recover their senses simultaneously. They looked to one another and immediately jumped to their feet. The wall they’d been standing behind had a hole at its center, the sandbags ripped to shreds.

  Had they not been behind it, those shreds of fabric might have instead been their bodies.

  It was a realization Grace couldn’t allow herself to process at that moment. She tucked it into a neat box, locked tight in her thoughts, and set it to a dark, dark corner of her mind.

  Several homes had been obliterated to rubble before them, and the glow of fire pulsed like wounded hearts within. Quickly Grace assessed the numbers on the homes and deduced that three of the ruined dwellings had inhabitants she’d seen to the shelter herself. However, the one to the left, which was still standing, belonged to Mrs. Driscoll, the middle-aged widow who had stopped coming to the shelters a fortnight ago.

  Grace pointed to the home. “Mrs. Driscoll.”

  She needn’t have said more. Mr. Stokes broke into a run toward the standing townhouse and continued through the gaping entryway, its door having been blown off. Grace followed and waited for him to go in and return, as he’d always instructed her to do.

  Except he did not reemerge.

  Grace cautiously entered behind him to find Mr. Stokes standing in the parlor, staring at something. “Mr. Stokes?”

  He said nothing.

  She came to his side and followed his stony gaze. It took a moment to realize that what she was looking at had once been a person. Had once been Mrs. Driscoll.

  Grace’s stomach roiled, but she gripped her hand into a fist to hold herself together as she added this sight into the neat little box in her mind, along with her fears of what could happen to Mrs. Weatherford in such a circumstance.

  “Mr. Stokes,” Grace said.

  He didn’t look at her.

  “Mr. Stokes,” she said sharply.

  He turned his head to her slowly, his gaze wide and distant, in a dreamlike state. A single, silent tear spilled over his lower lash line and crawled down his cheek. He blinked, as though startled to see her standing there.

  “We can’t do anything for her now,” Grace said in a matter-of-fact tone she didn’t know she could possess in such circumstances. “We need to see if there are survivors we can help. I’ll go next door to Mr. Sanford’s.” She nodded to the wall to indicate the townhouse standing on the other side of Mrs. Driscoll’s and hoped the elderly man hadn’t suffered the same fate. He had stopped going to the shelter as well. There were too many who had.

  They wanted a night of sleep in their own beds. They wanted normalcy.

  But one couldn’t wish the world into its previous state. Not when it was rife with dangers.

  “Will you go around to the townhouse beside Mr. Sanford’s?” Grace asked of her partner.

  Mr. Stokes nodded and shuffled outside. She followed behind him, pausing only to ensure the mains had all been cut off, to prevent an explosion.

  She did not turn to look back at Mrs. Driscoll again as she left.

  The rest of the night was a blur, a forceful redirection of thoughts into that box in her mind. She focused on calling up her training, binding the bloodied limbs of survivors, helping put out meager fires with her stirrup pump, or sand if the oiled ground and odor indicated a recently dropped incendiary. It was one task after another until the sun rose and the night watch came to a blessed end.

  On her way home that morning, despite Grace’s resolution, that locked box in the back of her mind began to rattle.

  As if it too were a bomb whistling toward her. She threw open the door to the townhouse and raced upstairs as its shriek in her mind went silent.

  And the box erupted.

  The horrors she’d seen peppered her thoughts like shrapnel.

  Sorrow for Mrs. Driscoll. Fear that Mrs. Weatherford could end up like her. Shock at how close Grace had come to being blown to pieces herself. The destruction. The gruesome injuries. The blood still smeared on her jacket. The death.

  Mrs. Driscoll’s was not the only body they had found that night.
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  Grace threw open her bedside drawer and dug frantically at the contents until she found the identity wristlet with Viv’s neat script detailing Grace’s name and their address at Britton Street on the smooth oval surface. Grace’s hands shook so hard, it took several tries to secure it on her wrist. Once there, she slid to the floor and let herself be pulled under by the powerful wave of so much horror.

  She had to deal with it now, to face its overwhelming and extraordinary force. So she could return to her shift tomorrow and do it all again.

  FIFTEEN

  By some miracle, Grace found sleep that morning, but as soon as she woke, the memories of the bombing were there. It was as if they’d been lying in wait, hiding in the shadows of her mind for her awareness to return.

  They followed her as she made her way to the bookshop, each bombed-out building a nudge at her wounded thoughts. Buildings she saw every day on her quick walk to Primrose Hill Books had been reduced to heaps of brick with broken beams jutting from the destruction. The grocer who always reserved a few raisins for Mrs. Weatherford when he had them, the apothecary who helped them through the cutworms, the café on the corner where she was supposed to go on a date with George. And so many more. They were not the only losses. Many homes were shells of themselves, their missing walls revealing the rooms inside like a child’s macabre dollhouse.

  People she passed on the street observed the damage with dull curiosity. A couple strode by, powdered with dust and clutching filthy bundles in their hands, the man’s face hard set and the woman’s eyes red-rimmed from crying. No doubt they had lost their home that night.

  They were lucky to have not lost their lives.

  Grace entered the bookshop and anxiously swept a loose wave of her hair over her right cheek. She’d taken to wearing her hair in pinned rolls to keep her face clear as she worked. Except that the bruised scrape on her cheek had stubbornly refused to be covered with makeup, and Mr. Evans would no doubt worry.

  He looked up and narrowed his eyes, immediately suspicious. Grace patted her hair once more, self-conscious, and his attention drifted to the wristlet.