Welcome To Rosie Hopkins' Sweetshop Of Dreams (26 page)

Mrs Isitt looked at the new vegetable patch, sniffed, then, without a word, set down the tray and turned back indoors. Jake inspected it. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that’s her way of saying thanks.’

On the tray sat two foaming mugs of beer, and two plates with gigantic slices of buttered fruitcake alongside a large pale-yellow hunk of cheese. Jake and Rosie sat down side by side on the edge of the grass.

‘I don’t think I’m going to like this,’ said Rosie, picking up the tankard. ‘I’m not really a beer drinker. More rosé.’

‘More rosé,’ mimicked Jake. ‘Well, I am sorry, your majesty. I’ll have yours.’

But when Rosie tried the beer – dark, not too fizzy, not too cold – and found it bitter and slightly peculiar at first, by the third sip she was a convert.

‘This is
gorgeous
,’ she said.

‘And about the same proof as a bottle of wine,’ said Jake.
‘Go easy on it, old Mr Isitt has been felling the men of the village with that stuff for years.’

Rosie stuck her tongue out at him, took another long draught, giggled and sank her teeth into the melting, tangy fruitcake.

‘Oh God,’ she sighed. ‘I am going to get as fat as Mrs Isitt if I hang around here. This is amazing.’

Jake smiled. ‘Maybe it’s just being outdoors.’

‘No,’ said Rosie. ‘It’s because it isn’t a kebab or KFC.’

‘What’s KFC?’ said Jake.

‘Shut up,’ said Rosie.

‘No, I mean it. I’ve heard of it, but I don’t really know what it is.’

‘Well, you know a chicken, right?’ started Rosie. Then, halfway through her beer, the thought of explaining seemed too stupid for words, and she started to laugh.

‘Right,’ said Jake, laughing because she was so helpless.

‘And you know frying, right?’

‘Right.’

‘OK,’ said Rosie, breathless with laughter. ‘Well, it’s just the Kentucky bit you’re having trouble with. Ahahahaha!’

Jake shook his head and munched on his cheese. ‘You’re mad, you are.’

‘Who eats cheese with fruitcake?’ wondered Rosie, then took another bite of cake, quickly followed by another bite of cheese and a slug of the beer.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh, wow.’

Jake took a long look at her.

‘I think I’d better get you home,’ he said, neatly gathering up the cups and plates. ‘Before you start blundering around and muck up that bloody veg patch again.’

Up the hill, Rosie found pushing the bike hilarious for some reason, and when Jake dropped her off at the house she found herself inadvertently leaning on him.

‘Whoops!’ she said. Then she leaned in. ‘But I have … I have a boyfriend, you know. He’s not got as many muscles as you though.’

Jake moved away as if he’d been scalded.

‘I didn’t know you had a lad,’ he said, scowling slightly. Then he looked at her. ‘Why did you move here without your lad?’

‘Uhm, it’s only …’ Rosie suddenly sobered up as she realised that what she had taken for daft flirting might have meant something more.

‘Uhm, I’m not … I’m not here for very long.’

‘Oh no?’ said Jake, temporarily brightening. ‘Well, maybe we can still have some fun then.’

‘Oh … Oh.’

Rosie was mortified. She hadn’t expected her silliness to mean anything.

Rosie was used, in London, to a world of high-achieving, glamorous women. She never felt in step with them, never felt she could keep up. She was never the one picked up in bars, chatted up on the tube. There was always somebody younger, more gorgeous, more exotic, wherever she turned. Maybe, she wondered deep down, maybe here, where people stayed for a long time, where a lot of young people left the village as soon as they were college age, maybe here she was the exotic.

Jake was looking at her with a definite spark of interest in his eye. And there was no doubt, she thought regretfully, no doubt at all that he was absolutely gorgeous, blue-eyed and straw-haired and firm of muscles. If she took him to London he’d be snapped up by some long-limbed blonde-haired Chelsea clothes horse in about ten seconds flat. She was so used to there being no men around, or at least none she particularly liked or who liked her. She’d been single for two years before she met Gerard. She was out of practice. She smiled anxiously.

To her complete and utter horror, Jake took his hands off his thick blond mop of hair, reached out one thickly muscled arm and touched her face, gently drawing her towards him.

‘What are you doing?’ she spluttered, although a part of her was curious; was smelling his fresh hay scent and feeling the rough calluses of work-hardened hands on her skin. But she wasn’t crazy, even with the soft golden light of the evening and the faint, sexy scent of the beer on his breath.

‘I have a boyfriend! I just told you about him!’

‘Yes, in
London
,’ said Jake, in the same way you might say ‘in
Mars
’. ‘Come on, lass, you’re in the country now.’

‘I very much am
not
!’ said Rosie, scrambling backwards.

‘Oh well,’ he said. ‘Worth a shot.’ He winked at her.

Rosie’s feelings changed from indignant to slightly peeved.

‘And that was it? That was your shot?’

Jake shrugged. ‘Well, I’m not going to kiss a girl who don’t want kissing, am I?’

‘It wasn’t exactly romantic,’ complained Rosie. ‘You could show a bit of dedication.’

Jake smiled at her. ‘Well, you know where to find me if you want to pedal over …’

Just then, thankfully, in reach of a signal for once, her mobile rang.

Apologetically she reached for it, but Jake was already wheeling the bike round the back of the cottage.

‘Hey,’ she said into the phone.

‘There you are!’ came Gerard’s familiar voice. She was ecstatic to hear from him. ‘It’s impossible to get hold of you, you know. Are you switching your phone off?’

‘Of course not!’ she said. ‘The signal up here is appalling, that’s all.’

‘Really?’ Gerard sounded dubious. A world without a consistent mobile signal – he was wedded to his iPhone – seemed very strange to him. ‘Hmm.’

‘So …’ said Rosie, hoping she didn’t sound guilty. Because she wasn’t. So why did her voice sound so guilty? It was very annoying. ‘How are you? I haven’t had the chance to speak to you properly in ages.’

‘Oh, you know, babes,’ said Gerard. ‘Desperately sad without you.’

‘Good,’ said Rosie.

‘In fact,’ said Gerard, ‘I was wondering if maybe you fancied a bit of …’

‘A long weekend?’ said Rosie excitedly.

‘Phone sex?’ said Gerard at precisely the same moment.

‘Uhm, yes, well …’

Jake came round the back of the house.

‘I’ll be off now then?’ he said, but the query was clear in his very loud voice.

‘Who’s that?’ said Gerard.

‘No one … just Jake.’

‘No one?’ said Jake. Rosie wanted to shush him, but couldn’t figure out a way to do that without a) being hideously rude and b) making Gerard suspicious.

‘Jake and I have been planting a vegetable garden,’ said Rosie in as dignified a manner as she could muster when she was half pissed, had just been propositioned, and had a horny boyfriend on the phone.

‘Yeah,’ said Jake. ‘Shall we go get another pint?’

Rosie cursed inwardly and tried to cover the speaker with her hand.

‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I’m taking this very important call.’

‘Who
is
that?’ Gerard was yelling.

‘I can wait,’ said Jake, smiling at her again.

Finally, Rosie took the initiative by waving sternly to Jake, going inside the cottage and closing the door. But with Gerard, the mood was most definitely gone.

Chapter Ten

Younger children often disdain boiled sweets in favour of a more instant hit, and they are quite right to do so; the boiled sweet is the sweet of the older connoisseur, one who knows that it releases its pleasures slowly. Boiled sweets – particulary boiled butter sweets – are a sweet of contemplation; the relaxed pleasure of the cigar, as against a quick rush that doesn’t last and needs to be immediately replicated. So keep the originals, the gobstoppers, the pineapple chunks and the red hots for your slower, more fruitful years. They will repay you in kind.

1943

When there was no one, Lilian felt, to hold on to that autumn – the shop, all but closed; her father, sitting at the scrubbed kitchen table, staring into space; Ned’s letters – daft, most of them, full of silly little pictures of dogs and birds, piled up on the dresser with some stupid, useless medals – the house was a dismal place. And they had no body for burying, nor would they ever have, and no brothers home to mourn him. So Lilian had nothing to do but escape, hour after hour, the sympathetic, pitying faces of the villagers – or worse, the sobbing heartbreak of other families who had suffered their own losses. She had absolutely nothing to give Mrs Archer, who had lost her darling only son, with four little girls after that, who would launch herself at near-total strangers, talking about how her boy could never sleep at night without her there to tuck him in; that he must not have been sleeping right, he needed his mother, he couldn’t do without her, he wasn’t himself, which was why he got shot
.

She was deranged by grief, and threw herself on Lilian as a fellow passenger on this ghost train, this awful ride into oblivion, where everyone else was on another track, but you were shunted off into a siding that went nowhere. Lilian couldn’t bear that either
.

Henry, though, did nothing, and it was everything. He didn’t say anything, didn’t mention Ned, didn’t engage her in conversation. He just came away as often as he could from the farm, at lunch or in the evening, and let her lie there, her head on his shoulder or sometimes by his knees like a child, and weep till it was out. Then she could go home, and make supper, and try to get her father to eat, and answer questions from the ministry and fill in papers and orders and sometimes – not often, but sometimes – get some sleep
.

One morning, just before the dawn, she lay there trying not to think about Ned, sleepless, her eyes gritty, her head feeling like it was on an endless loop; the same thoughts, the same fears going round and round again, until she couldn’t think straight; such a mess of exhaustion and fear and horror and gloom she wanted to black herself out completely; felt like hitting her head against the narrow iron bedstead, just to get it to stop for five minutes. As she turned under her hot bedspread once more, she heard the rattle of a little stone against her window
.

At first she got a shock of terror; she had been thinking so strongly about her brother that she thought it was he, summoning her. But as she jumped up, heart pounding, and went towards the front dormer, she saw in the early light a figure wearing brown canvas trousers held up with braces, one of which, she noticed, was missing a button; a collarless shirt which was open at the neck and had been washed so often the thin stripe had faded to almost nothing. His throwing hand held the back of his sunburned neck, the other supporting his bike. Nothing else stirred in the village, except far away over the hills, where a kite circled lazily
.