CHAPTER ONE
RULE NO. 17
Tea shall be served promptly four times a day.
“The Tyrant beckons.”
Grace looked up from her small desk at the rear of the shop. Here she marshalled all manner of what the bookshop staff called couches: the piles of letters, requests, adverts, journals, newspapers, trade cards, catalogues, magazines, announcements, invitations, and all the rest of the paper ephemera that kept Bloomsbury Books in commerce with the outside world.
Her colleague Vivien stood in the doorway, swinging the kettle in her right hand. It was Monday morning, and Vivien was always on elevenses duty on the first day of the week.
“And now the fuse to the cooker’s gone again.” She made a face. “You know they can’t function without their tea. The Tyrant’s in a particular mood today.”
The Tyrant had a name, but Vivien refused to use it in private, and Grace often found herself failing to do so as well—just one example of how Vivien’s attitude at work sometimes seeped into her own. Grace stood up and stacked a pile of papers neatly before her. “If he were ever to catch you calling him that…”
“He can’t. He can’t hear anything but the sound of his own voice.”
Grace shook her head at the younger woman and stifled a grin. They had been working at the bookshop together since the end of the war, and Vivien’s friendship was a big reason why Grace stayed. Well, that and the wages, of course. And the fact that her unemployed husband could not begrudge her the opportunity to earn those. And the time away from her demanding boys. And the fear of drastic change. In the end, Grace supposed there were quite a lot of reasons why she stayed. She wasn’t quite sure why Vivien did.
“Is Dutton not in yet?” Vivien asked, glancing past Grace to the empty office behind her.
Herbert Dutton, the longtime general manager of the shop, had never been given a nickname by Vivien, let alone a term of endearment. He wasn’t the kind of man one would ever bother to put in a box, being so fully contained on his own.
“He’s at the GP.”
“Again?”
Vivien arched both eyebrows, but Grace only shrugged in response. As the two female employees of Bloomsbury Books, Grace and Vivien had mastered the art of silent expression, often communicating solely through a raised eyebrow, earlobe tug, or barely hidden hand gesture.
Vivien placed the kettle on top of a nearby filing cabinet, and the two women headed wordlessly for the basement. Whenever they strolled the shop corridors together, their matching height and tailored clothes gave them an indomitable appearance from which the male staff instinctively shrank. Both women were unusually tall, although very different in physique. Grace had broad shoulders which did not need the extra padding so fashionable at the time, an open, un-made-up face, and a peaches-and-cream complexion—her one inheritance from a family that had farmed the upland hills of Yorkshire for generations. She dressed in a simple manner that flattered her height: the strong lines of military-style jackets and pencil skirts, with low-heeled pumps for walking. Her most delicate features were her calm, grey eyes and fine brown hair with just the slightest hint of auburn, which she always kept neatly pinned back at the crown.
In contrast, Vivien was as angular and slender as a gazelle, and just as quick to bolt when impatient or displeased. She preferred to dress in formfitting monochrome black—most often in tight wool skirts and sweaters embellished by a striking Victorian amethyst brooch, her one inheritance from a beloved grandmother. Vivien’s face was always dramatically made-up, intimidatingly so, which was part of the point: by looking so in control of herself, she succeeded in keeping everyone else at bay.
On their way to the basement, the two women passed by the rear, glass-windowed office belonging to Mr. Dutton, who was both the store’s general manager and its longest-serving employee. To reach the back staircase, which Vivien had nicknamed Via Inferno, they had to brush up against the towering boxes of books that were delivered daily from different publishers, auctions, bankrupt stocks, and estate sales across central England and beyond. The shop turned over five hundred books a week on average, so a healthy and frequent replenishing of stock was required from all these sources.
The misbehaving fuse box was in the mechanical room, which was adjacent to the infrequently visited Science & Naturalism Department. The entire basement floor was unseasonably warm and humid due to the inept workings of the prewar boiler. Through the open doorway of the mechanical room, Grace and Vivien could spot the small wire-rimmed spectacles and placid brow of Mr. Ashwin Ramaswamy, the head of the Science Department and its lone staff, peeking above the table where he always sat behind piles of books of his own.
“Has he said a peep yet today?” Vivien almost whispered, and Grace shook her head. Mr. Ramaswamy was notorious for keeping to himself within the shop, which was easy enough to do given how rarely his department was visited. The basement collection of biology, chemistry, and other science books had been there since at least the time of Darwin, but remained the most forgotten and least profitable floor of the shop.
A trained naturalist and entomologist, Ash Ramaswamy did not seem to mind being left alone. Instead, he spent most of his day organising the books in a manner that put the other department heads to shame, and peering through a microscope at the slides of insects stored in a flat wooden box on his desk. These were the creatures of his homeland, the state of Madras in southeast India. Ash’s late father, a Tamil Brahmin, had been a highly placed civil servant in the British colonial government who had always encouraged his son to consider the opportunities offered by a life in Great Britain. Ash had emigrated after the war in the hopes of securing a post at the Natural History Museum in London. As a member of the most privileged caste in his home state, he had not been prepared for the overt prejudice of the British people towards him. Unable to obtain even an interview at any of the city’s museums, he had ended up employed at the shop instead.
“You said a mood,” Grace started to say, as she fiddled around with her head inside the fuse box.
“Hmm?”
“A mood. The Tyrant. What is it now?”
“It is Margaret Runnymede.”
Grace poked her head out from the fuse box. “The new book is out?”
“The way she bustles in here every release day, just so he can give her that ridiculous posy of purple violets to go with her latest purple prose and tell her everything she already thinks about herself. It’s nauseating. He wants everything in the shop just so for her today.”
Grace raised an eyebrow at the younger woman. “Is that all he wants?”
Vivien made a disgusted noise from the back of her throat. “He’s so full of himself. As if she’d ever.”
“Enough women do. Have an interest in him, I mean.” Grace shut the door to the fuse box and wiped her hands together. “All done.”
“As he’s plenty aware.”
“Well, one can’t necessarily fault him for that.” As much as Grace herself did not care for the head of fiction, Vivien expressed a degree of dislike that Grace thought best to temper, for all their sakes.
They headed back up the stairs together, pausing in Grace’s office for Vivien to retrieve the kettle before going her separate way. Through the glass divider to the farthest rear room, they could see the moonfaced Mr. Dutton sitting idly behind his desk as if waiting for someone to tell him what to do. Above his head hung, slightly askew, the framed fifty-one rules for the shop that Mr. Dutton had immediately devised upon his ascension to general manager nearly twenty years ago.
“One biscuit or two?” Vivien asked loudly and officiously, suddenly all work as Grace settled down into her chair, delicately pulling the folds of her A-line skirt out from under her.
Grace hesitated. She was nearly forty years old, and lately she had noticed just the slightest increased weight about her hips. Her husband, Gordon, had noticed it, too. He was never one to let something like that slip by.
She held up one finger with a sigh. Vivien scoffed as she ambled back to the kitchen, swinging the kettle widely to and fro by her side, as if hoping to hit something along the way.
Grace looked about her, at all the familiar papers, the boxes of books, and the bills of lading she had yet to type up. It would be pointless to start anything this close to the hour. So, she waited.
Copyright © 2022 by Natalie Jenner
