The Book Group 50

Epilogue

Three years later.

The bookshop is quiet. Vivien is at the counter, inventorying the books that Penny and Sid purchased in an auction at a soon-to-be-demolished stately home. On the counter is a small radio, and she is listening to a new morning drama series, The Archers, described by the BBC as “an everyday story of country folk.” Paul is sitting at a coffee table chatting with an older man. Outside it is raining, the only benefit of which is, the rain has dispersed the heavy smog, while downstairs, the Children’s Book Group is going full swing, and they have a new member of staff, Nancy, a Polish refugee who, when war ended, decided to stay and become a British citizen. She is reading the stories as Penny Carter nee Ward, has taken some time off.

When Paul’s guest goes to leave, Vivien asks him to sign one of his books, a memoir of life in Hungary and his escape to the West, recently published in hardcover by Chatto and Windus. He signs his original name Iacob Shwartz, not the Anglicised James Black he is using less and less as his fame grows. He asks how many books have sold. ‘Not many,’ Vivien says, with a sad smile, but that is alright, his story is out there and it is a story worth telling. Paul walks him to the door, where he takes his leave.

An hour later, a pretty English woman parks her pram beneath the awning outside, lifts her child from it, and trots to the shop doorway, pushes it open with her bottom and steps inside. ‘Penny!’ Vivien exclaims, and immediately comes from behind the counter to lift the infant from mum’s arms and hug her to her own bosom. Vivien’s voice immediately lowers and softens as she talks to Julia Carter, age three months, and Penny, knowing that Julia is in safe hands, goes to find her husband, who is in the office, recording the as-ever precarious sales returns. The shop is doing well, but this is as much due to the attached café, the mother’s group in the basement, and the well-used dance studio above the shop. The various income sources mean the bookshop is healthy and quietly thriving. This, as Paul well knows, is entirely due to his wife, though, as she says, the bookshop was his idea and his alone. She recently mentioned opening the basement as an evening coffee shop for the local teenagers, but Paul thinks this is a step too far, though Penny is using Terrence and his schoolfriends as leverage for that idea, so we shall see.

All in all, in February 1951, Carter’s Books is a thriving little business just off the King’s Road, Chelsea, itself an up and coming neighbourhood in the west end of that smog-bound seaport and capital city called London. England is still a grey little nation, subject to rain, rationing and the end of Empire, former Prime Minister Winston Churchill is busy planning his return to high office, while two million London homes burn coal fires to keep warm against the seasonal chill, and factories, workshops, docks, shops, and a hundred thousand other businesses produce the wealth that the city is famed for.

Meanwhile, The Book Group, that ad hoc little adventure from three years earlier is barely mentioned, and never to be repeated.

Well, not unless…

The End.

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