Read Online The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald - Free Book Online

uncharitable.
    It may increase your amusement to learn that I am not writing to you on the subject of books at all!
    There were several pages of thin writing paper, from which it emerged that the writer was called Theodore Gill, that he lived somewhere near Yarmouth, and that he was a painter in watercolours who saw no reason to abandon the pleasant style of the turn of the century,and that he would like to organize, or better, have organized for him, a little exhibition of his work at the Old House. The name of Mrs Gamart and of her brilliant nephew would, he was sure, be sufficient recommendation.
    Florence looked round at her shelving, behind which scarcely a square foot of wall space could be seen. There was always the oyster warehouse, but even now, in the height of summer, it was damp. She put the letter away in a drawer which already contained several others of the same kind. Later middle age, for the upper middle-class in East Suffolk, marked a crisis, after which the majority became water-colourists, and painted landscapes. It would not have mattered so much if they had painted badly, but they all did it quite well. All their pictures looked much the same. Framed, they hung in sitting-rooms, while outside the windows the empty, washed-out, unarranged landscape stretched away to the transparent sky.
    The desire to exhibit somewhere more ambitious than the parish hall accompanied this crisis, and Florence related it to the letters which she also received from ‘local authors’. The paintings were called ‘Sunset Across the Laze’, the books were called ‘On Foot Across the Marshes’ or ‘Awheel Across East Anglia’, for what else can be done with flatlands but to cross them? She had no idea, none at all, where she would put the localauthors if they came, as they suggested, to sign copies of their books for eager purchasers. Perhaps a table underneath the staircase, if some of the stock could be moved. She vividly imagined their disillusionment, wedged behind the table with books and a pen in front of them, while the hours emptied away and no one came. ‘Tuesday is always a very quiet day in Hardborough, Mr—, particularly if it is fine. I didn’t suggest Monday, because that would have been quieter still. Wednesdays are quiet too, except for the market, and Thursday is early closing. The customers will come in and ask for your book soon – of course they will, they have heard of you, you are a local author. Of course they will want your signature, they will come across the marshes, afoot and awheel.’ The thought of so much suffering and embarrassment was hard to bear, but at least she was in a position to see that it never took place. She consigned Mr Gill’s letter to the drawer.
    She had been almost too busy to realize that the holiday season had arrived. Now she noticed that bathing towels hung and flapped at every window of the seafront houses. The ferry crossed the Laze several times every day, the fish-and-chip parlour extended its premises with pieces of corrugated iron transferred from the disused airfield. Wally appeared to ask if Christine would like to come camping, and she wondered if he was not hanging roundrather often, and in a marked manner. Christine, however, rejected his invitation with a dignity imitated from her elder sisters. ‘That Wally’s after your washboard for his skiffle group. I’ve seen him eyeing it in your backhouse.’ ‘Then he’d better have it,’ Florence said. ‘I’ve never known what to do with it. He can have the mangle too, if he likes.’
    She ought to go down to the beach. It was Thursday, early closing, and it seemed ungrateful to live so close to the sea and never to look at it for weeks on end. In fact she preferred the winter beach; but, reproving herself, she had a bathe and then stood in the sun at the end of the long swale of multi-coloured pebbles. Children crouched down to decide which of these pebbles they would put into their buckets; grown men