back, my lips pressed in a straight line because otherwise I thought I might scream.
And then, once I was standing back on the Harley Street pavement, I folded the list and slid it into the side pocket of my rucksack. The manifesting power of the universe indeed. What a load of absolute, Grade-A nonsense.
Chapter Two
LATER THAT WEEK, I was dealing with Mrs Delaney and didn’t notice the blond man loitering in the biography section. It was raining, which drove more people into the shop since it was a peaceful place to pass time until the clouds moved. Unhurried. Relaxed. No assistant ever approached you in a bookshop and said, ‘Would you like to try a pair of heels with that?’ Customers could browse undisturbed while their coats dripped quietly on the Turkish rugs.
Mrs Delaney had been visiting Frisbee Books for decades. She lived in a big house overlooking St Luke’s Church, a short wobble away on her walking stick, and liked to come in every week to discuss new gardening books. She was exceptionally keen on gardening (although she didn’t do it herself, she had a man called Cliff who did that), and Eugene and I took it in turns to deal with her. This morning it was my turn, so I was leafing Mrs Delaney through a new book about rewilded gardens. It wasn’t going well because she declared every photo of daisies and cow parsley ‘a disgrace’.
‘That’s even messier than the last!’ she said, as I reached the final page, a picture of a butterfly on a clump of grass. ‘Not for me,’ she said. ‘I’ll be off.’
Mrs Delaney waved her stick in the air as a goodbye before tottering out into the rain. I stepped under the wooden beam separating fiction and non-fiction to slide the rewilding book back onto its shelf.
‘I’m so sorry to trouble you,’ said the man.
I turned to help him, my automatic smile in place.
‘It’s only that I’m here to pick up a book my mother ordered.’
My mouth fell open like a trapdoor but no words came out. It was his old-fashioned clothes that struck me at first. Over a white shirt he was wearing a pair of blue braces which fastened with little buttons to the top of his trousers. Then I stared at his face and wondered whether his pale blue eyes and almost invisible blond eyelashes meant he was Scandinavian.
‘She said she got a message saying it’s in,’ he persisted. ‘If you wouldn’t mind…’
‘Yes, sure, sorry,’ I said, shaking my head as if to wake myself up. He didn’t sound Scandinavian. He sounded very English. ‘What’s she called?’
‘Elizabeth Dundee.’
‘OK, give me a second.’
I stepped behind the till into a small side room that led off from it and ran my finger up and down the shelves until I found the order slip that said Dundee.
‘Here you go,’ I said, carrying the book round to the front of the shop again. I held it out and only then saw what it was called: The Art of Arousal: A Celebration of Erotic Art Throughout History. There was a painting of a woman having sex with a swan on the cover.
‘Oh,’ I said.
‘Ah,’ said the man, in a low, clipped tone. ‘Yes. I might have known. It’s Zeus. He transformed himself into a swan and seduced Leda. Quite odd, those gods.’
‘Looks like it,’ I replied, and we both gazed at the book in silence for a few moments before he spoke again.
‘I’m also looking for something else.’
‘What is it?’ I asked, keen to alleviate the awkwardness of discussing bestiality with this handsome blond man.
‘A book called The Struggle. You don’t happen to have it, do you?’
‘Should have, but it’s a novel so it’ll be back through here.’
I waved him into the fiction area after me. The Struggle was a book as fat as a brick, one of the summer’s biggest sellers, partly because the Irish author had given a series of interviews in which he denounced anyone he was asked about. The Prime Minister? A gobshite. The English in general? A load of gobshites. The Queen? A rich gobshite.
I leant over to scan the table of hardback fiction to find a copy, suddenly very aware that the handsome man was behind me and I was wearing my biggest knickers, the ones with an elasticated waist that pulled up to my belly button and gave me a very obvious VPL. Mia had once insisted that I needed ‘to give thongs a chance’ and left