‘Dad always used to say I don’t do numbers. And I don’t either, really. It all seems to be a bit disorganised. I think he let things slip towards the end. There’re a couple of boxes full of receipts. And a horrible pile of unopened envelopes I haven’t been able to face yet.’
‘Trust me, it’s nothing I haven’t dealt with before.’ Andrea sighed. ‘I wish people wouldn’t go into denial when it comes to money. It makes it all so complicated and ends up costing them much more in the end.’
‘It would be great if you could have a look for me. But no mate’s rates.’ Emilia pointed a finger at her. ‘I’m paying you properly.’
‘I’m very happy to help you out. Your dad was always very kind to me when we were growing up.’
Emilia laughed. ‘Remember when we tried to set him up with your mum?’
Andrea snorted into her wine glass. ‘That would have been a disaster.’ Andrea’s mother was a bit of a hippy, all joss sticks and flowing skirts. Andrea had rebelled completely against her mother’s Woodstock attitude and was the most conventional, aspirational, law-abiding person Emilia knew. She’d even changed her name from Autumn when she started up in business, on the basis that no one would take an accountant called Autumn seriously. ‘They would never have got anything done.’
Julius was very easygoing and laissez-faire too. The thought of their respective parents together made the two girls helpless with laughter now, but at the age of twelve they had thought it was a brilliant idea.
As they finished laughing, Emilia sighed. ‘Dad never did find anyone.’
‘Oh come off it. Every woman in Peasebrook was in love with your father. He had them all running round after him.’
‘Yes, I know. He was never short of female company. But it would have been nice for him to have met someone special.’
‘He was a happy man, Emilia. You could tell that.’
‘I always felt guilty. That perhaps he stayed single because of me.’
‘I don’t think so. Your dad wasn’t the martyr type. I think he was really happy with his own company. Or maybe he did have someone special but we just don’t know about it.’
Emilia nodded. ‘I hope so … I really do.’
She’d never know now, she thought. For all of her life it had just been the two of them and now her father had gone, with all his stories and his secrets.
Two
1982
The book shop was in Little Clarendon Street. Away from the hurly-burly of Oxford town centre and just off St Giles, it was bedded in amongst a sprinkling of fashionable dress shops and cafés. As well as the latest fiction and coffee-table books, it sold art supplies and had an air of frivolity rather than the academic ambience of Blackwell’s or one of the more cerebral book shops in town. It was the sort of book shop that stole time: people had been known to miss meetings and trains, lost amongst the shelves.
Julius Nightingale had started working there to supplement his student grant since he’d first come up to Oxford, just over four years ago. And now he’d completed his Masters, he didn’t want to leave Oxford or the shop. He didn’t want to leave academia either, really, but he knew he had to get on with life, that his wasn’t the sort of background that could sustain a life of learning. What he was going to do he had no idea as yet.
He’d decided to spend the summer after his MA scraping some money together, working at the shop full-time. Then maybe squeeze in some travel before embarking upon the gruelling collation of a CV, job applications and interviews. Apart from a brilliant first, there was nothing much to mark him out, he thought. He’d directed a few plays, but who hadn’t? He’d edited a poetry magazine, but again – hardly unique. He liked live music, wine, pretty girls – there was nothing out of the ordinary about him, except the fact that most people seemed to like him. As a West London boy with a posh but penniless single mother, he’d gone to a huge inner city comprehensive. He was streetwise but well mannered and so mixed easily with both the toffs and the grammar school types who had less confidence than their public school peers.
It was the last weekend in August, and he was thinking about going up to his mother’s and heading for the Notting Hill Carnival. He’d been going since he was small and he loved the atmosphere, the pounding bass, the pervasive scent of dope, the sense that anything could happen. He was about to close up when the door open and a girl whirlwinded in. She had a tangle of hair, bright red – it couldn’t be natural; it was the colour of a pillar box – and china-white skin, even whiter against the black lace of her dress. She looked, he thought, like a star, one of those singers who paraded around as if they’d been in the dressing-up box and had put everything on.
‘I need a book,’ she told him, and he was surprised at her accent. American. Americans, in his experience, came in clutching guidebooks and cameras, not looking as if they’d walked out of a nightclub.