Counting the Bookshop

Once a year, on a night in October when the clocks had just gone back and the evenings had that new dark in them, Hazel and Miles counted the bookshop.

It was not a big bookshop. It was two rooms on the ground floor of a narrow house on a street that sloped, and a third room up a staircase that had a sign at the bottom saying MIND YOUR HEAD, which everybody read and nobody minded. It had been a bookshop for sixty years and theirs for nine, and in those nine years the count had come out different every time, and neither of them had ever found out why.

“It’s not the books,” Miles had said, on the first count. “It’s the building. It has some of its own.”

“Books don’t breed,” Hazel had said.

“Then explain the poetry.”

She could not explain the poetry. Nobody could.

They started at six, when the sign was turned and the blind was down and the street outside was a strip of lamplight under the door. Hazel had the clipboard, because Hazel always had the clipboard. Miles had the stepladder and the tea. The shop cat, who was called Dorothy and had come with the lease, had the armchair by the radiator, and would count nothing, and would be present.

Fiction first. It was the biggest wall and the easiest, because fiction is orderly and goes from A to Z and knows it. Miles read the spines out in a low voice and Hazel made her marks, and the marks went down the sheet in fives, gate after gate, like a fence being built very slowly along a field. Every now and then he would stop.

“There’s a postcard in this one.”

“Leave it.”

“It’s from 1974. Somebody’s having a lovely time in Lyme Regis.”

“Leave it, Miles.”

He left it. But he read it first, and she knew he had, and that was fine.

The shop had its sounds, and you only heard them on a night like this. The radiator ticked. The floor in the back room said something every time Miles crossed it, always the same thing, always in the same place. The street went quiet. Somebody went past outside with a dog whose claws you could hear on the pavement, tick tick tick tick, and then not.

They found things. You always found things in a stocktake, because a stocktake was the one night of the year when you touched every book in the place, and books held on to what they were given. A pressed flower, brown as a tea stain. A bus ticket. A shopping list in an old hand that said eggs, bread, the good butter, and nothing else, and made them both go quiet for a moment, thinking about whoever it was and the good butter. A photograph of a dog. A ten-shilling note, which Miles held up to the light and said was worth something, and Hazel said put it back, it belongs to the book.

He put it back.

Dorothy came up the ladder, or as far up it as a cat needs to go to make a point, and looked at them both, and went down again.

At eight they stopped for the sandwiches. They ate them on the floor of the fiction room with their backs against the S to Z shelf and the clipboard on Hazel’s knee, and Dorothy came and inspected the sandwiches and went away again, disappointed, and the whole shop stood round them in the lamplight the way it did, all those spines, all those quiet voices waiting to be opened.

“Four hundred and twelve in fiction,” said Hazel.

“Last year it was four hundred and nine.”

“We’ve sold at least sixty.”

“And bought at least sixty.”

“It should be four hundred and nine.”

“It’s the building,” said Miles, and she did not argue, because there was nothing to argue with.

Then the back room, which was history and travel and the shelf marked MISCELLANEOUS that was really a confession. Then the children’s corner with the small chairs, where Miles had to kneel to read the low spines and got a crick in his neck and said so, and Hazel said the children managed, and he said the children were shorter. Then the staircase, and MIND YOUR HEAD, and neither of them minded, and the top room.

The top room was the poetry. It was also, in October, cold, and had a single lamp with a green shade, and a window that looked down on the sloping street and the rooftops going off in steps to the church. It had a smell of its own. Old paper and the particular dust of poetry, which is finer than other dust and settles more thoughtfully. Hazel loved it up there and did not go up as much as she meant to, which is the way with the things you love in a building.

Miles counted. Hazel marked. The green lamp made a small warm room inside the cold one. Miles read the names out as he went, and some of them she knew and some she did not, and one or two he stopped on, and opened, and read a line of under his breath, and shut again, and counted. She did not tell him to hurry. You could not count poetry fast. It would not let you.

“Two hundred and three,” he said, at the end.

She looked at the sheet. She looked at last year’s sheet, which was clipped underneath.

“It was a hundred and ninety-eight.”

“There you are, then.”

“We’ve not bought any poetry.”

“Nobody buys poetry. It arrives.”

She wrote two hundred and three, and underlined it, and did not put a question mark, because after nine years she had stopped putting the question mark.

They stood a while at the top window. Down in the street the lamps went off along the slope one after the other towards the church, and the rooftops were wet with a rain that had come and gone without their noticing, and the church clock said twenty past ten, and was probably right.

Miles put an arm round her. It was cold up there.

“We could get it right,” he said. “One year. Do it properly. Barcodes.”

“We could.”

“We won’t, though.”

“No.”

“Good.”

They went down. MIND YOUR HEAD. They did. The back room, the children’s corner with its small chairs pushed in, the wall of fiction going A to Z in the half-light like a long even breath. Dorothy was asleep in the armchair, on her back, which is how a cat tells you the building is safe.

Hazel put the clipboard on the counter with its fence of marks and its two numbers that did not agree, and would never agree, and she found she did not want them to.

Miles turned the lamps off, room by room.

The shop went dark from the back to the front, the way a house does, and the last light was the strip under the door from the street, and then they were through it, and the door was locked, and the bookshop stood in its narrow house on its sloping street with its eleven hundred and something books, counted, more or less, and holding what they held.

A ten-shilling note. A list that said the good butter.

Somebody, in 1974, having a lovely time.