Read Online Quiet Neighbors by Catriona McPherson - Free Book Online

that Children’s Books be tucked under the eaves up there too.
    â€œI’m not so sure,” Jude cautioned. “Parents might not want their little ones climbing the stairs.”
    â€œGood,” said Lowell. “Plenty of children’s bookshops around. Mine are for collectors but, dear me, there’s a stink if you say so.”
    The stairs. Jude lifted the latch on the door between Coasters and Key Rings (the name had stuck) and Miss Buchan’s Boudoir and began to climb. Each rise was steep and each tread was shallow and the turn was tight and the rail was loose, and if ever a health and safety inspector came near the place, Lowland Glen Books would be gone forever.
    â€œI get the odd claustrophobe,” Lowell had said. “But if they tell me what they’re after, I can dot up myself and bring it down to them. I made a mint from a very … Ah, a very … Well, quite a solid Canadian lady who wasn’t so much claustrophobic as in real danger of getting jammed—Winnie-the-Pooh-style, you know? So she sat out the back in the shade of the apple tree and I brought everything we had on the Russian royals. An Anastasia complex opens the wallet wonderfully.”
    â€œI was just going to say what a sweet man you are,” Jude told him, straight-faced and twinkle-eyed. “But then you kept talking.”
    Russian royals were still in need of a permanent home. All the royals were, come to that; Biography in general, and History too, and Travel and Non-Scottish Poetry, and Plays and all the really dusty stuff like Theology, Philology, the Humour that was never funny, and the now heart-breaking Reference section. As she emerged from the staircase, there on the landing was a beautiful set of the poor old Encyclopaedia Britannica, half calf, buff buckram, tooled in gold, tissue over the woodcuts, clicked into Wiki-oblivion.
    I know how you feel, she said silently to them, trailing a hand over their gilt-edged pages as she passed. You and me both, Britannica. Then the portcullis came down.
    Up here it was easier to see that Lowland Glen Books had once been someone’s home. There were fireplaces in Fiction and Literature. Shame they couldn’t be lit when the wind whistled in around the rags plugging the windows. Jude looked at a shelf or two in each and tried not to form a view. John Irving and his brothers were in Literature; Sarah Waters and her sisters in Fiction. She turned away from both and from the awkward conversation she might need to have with a kind man who’d taken her in, given her a roof over her head and a bed to sleep in, and filled her pockets with tenners.
    The little back room above Miss Buchan’s Boudoir that Jude had earmarked for Poetry and Plays, since its shelves were so narrow, was actually a bathroom. It had a plate screwed over the old toilet hole, but the washbasin was still there, filled with Beatrix Potter, heaped up against the taps, held together with cobwebs. She could look at it, holding one wrist in the other hand, and feel her pulse slow and steady, like a lizard’s. One day soon she would have to empty that sink, and then she would soak herself pruny in scalding water in the cavernous Jamaica House bath as every stitch she’d had on sloshed around downstairs in the drum of Lowell’s washing machine.
    The room next to it, above … Jude wasn’t familiar enough with the layout to say … but the next room was a bedroom decorated in the sixties with those emetically cute rabbits on the wallpaper—long lashes and little satchels—and Blu-Tak marks from where posters had been removed. As though the child that chose the bunnies had been stuck with them into the pop group years and had covered them with posters.
    She was at the landing window, by the foot of the stairway to the attic floor (even steeper, even narrower, behind an even smaller door), when she heard something. It was a short chunk of sound halfway