Christmas at Rosie Hopkins' Sweetshop (2 page)

 

Chapter 2

F
IVE
MILES
AWAY
, Lilian slept in a single bed in a neat little room filled with her pictures and knickknacks, snoring gently under a duvet she professed to despise. And she dreamed, as she often did, of the past: of a boy with nut-­brown eyes and curly hair and a ready smile and a farmer's tan who made her laugh when she was happy and comforted her when she was sad, and all the while the silent snow fell and wrapped itself around the house like a blanket, like soft cotton wool covering the well-­heated building.

She was walking down the road at the end of a day in the sweetshop, a busy Friday when the men got paid and the ration books were out. The Red Lion would be packed tonight. The harvest sun was hanging heavy in the sky, bathing everything in soft gold, and she was going to post a letter to Neddy, not yet dead. . . . In the distance, his curly hair springing up, his face wiped clean after a day in the fields with the sheep. He was waving to her excitedly, and all she could feel was the joy bubbling up in her as she prepared to skip down to meet him, to let him walk her home, even though “home” was the cottage next to the sweet shop. They liked to take a circuitous route. The older folk of the village used to smile to see the two of them, their heads together. That was what they would do, just as soon as . . .

Lilian had this dream often. It was real, she knew; Henry did used to meet her from work, trying his best to wash up in the stream so he wasn't too filthy. And they had had happy times before she'd lost Ned, her brother. She treasured them all, because in their short time together, there hadn't been enough of them. She remembered how he used to pull her pigtails at school, and she had thought he was being annoying. How he used to hang around the sweetshops; buying caramels for her because they were her favorites. How the back of his neck turned brown in the sun, and how much she wanted to caress it; the warm sweet hay smell of him when he was near her; his long fingers. The way he held her close when her brother died and made her feel that everything would be all right; the plans they had made. And then he had been caught out; a girl he had slept with before, her erstwhile best friend Ida Delia, had turned up pregnant, and that was the end of everything. And then his call-­up papers . . . and the following year, the dreaded telegram. That Lilian had had to hear about secondhand.

But she didn't like to focus on that. She liked to keep her memories deeply hidden, like pearls, taking them out to polish them. His easy gangling stride, the way he used to put her on the front of his bike and cycle her down to the fields to help him feed the lambs, her dark hair whipping in the wind. The taste of a shared bottle of brown ale, and some butter humbugs, eaten in the sunny churchyard.

But her dreams were never like that. In her dream—­the same one, repeated so often—­she could never reach him, never make herself walk forward to hold his hand. He would be waving, and she could not get to him and she would wake up frustrated and alone.

N
INETY
MILES
AWAY
, a man called Edward Boyd checked that all the lights were off in the house, double-­locked the door and made a final check in the spare room—­he liked to be careful about everything, he couldn't sleep otherwise, plus the old man was always wandering off. Upstairs, his wife, Doreen, was already fast asleep and snoring. The whole house, in fact, was asleep. Well, young Ian wasn't home yet, but he did keep these funny hours. It was odd, Edward had spent so long comforting Doreen when Ian had left home—­and the girls of course, but it was Ian whom Doreen had mourned the most—­and now, here he was, couldn't find a job in Manchester, so he was back living at home.

Edward didn't begrudge it—­and Dor was delighted—­but he found it odd. In his day he'd left as soon as he could and never gone back. He'd been so proud to buy the big house—­as manager of the local building society, he'd explained to Dor, they should live smartly in the community, and the Grange was as smart as it got (it wasn't called the Grange then; it was plain old 39 Cormlett Drive, but Edward liked a name on a house, so the Grange it was).

Of course he hadn't foreseen (though Doreen clearly had) that with its high ceilings and its granny flat it would be a perfect place for the children to come back to, and for his elderly father to move into, so now he felt rather like the manager of a hotel, but that was the problem with being responsible—­everyone just assumed you would do it. He checked the heavy bolt of the back door again. Yup, sorted. The house was still. He could risk going to bed.

Edward was not a man who liked risk.

“G
OO
D
MORNING
!”

Rosie had made poached eggs. It is not easy to poach an egg. Poached eggs, as far as she was concerned, meant love. As far as Stephen was concerned, they meant a shocking waste of an egg. He looked at them in perturbation.

“Ugh, these eggs have skin.”

“You're not at boarding school now,” warned Rosie. “They're lovely! Eat them. You need a good breakfast.”

Stephen grumbled, still cross at the weather. But Rosie had woken with the lark, lying on her back in the big attic room, wondering at the lovely pattern of white light that danced frostily across the ceiling. She felt excited, as if it were Christmas, even though it had never once snowed at Christmas during her childhood. She had always felt cheated by those adverts that insisted that it would, that a Christmas without snow was somehow lacking.

But now, here it was: November, and snow was here already! She wondered if it was too early to go and get a tree. Probably. She wondered if Stephen would get a tree from his land, like last year. What a lovely thing that had been. They had gone mad and gotten one that was far too big for the little cottage, so they had had to leave the staircase to the attic door down all the time which meant they had to slide past the stairs to get to the kitchen and basically climb a tree to get to bed at night. The intense scent of the wild pine invaded everything until Rosie had felt that she was sleeping in a forest. It had been wonderful.

She had already stoked the fire—­they didn't really have enough money for the fire to be on all day, but Rosie figured they could make an exception for the first day of snow—­and had peeked her head out into the garden.

“Close the door!” barked Stephen, trying to fill up on toast and wondering if he could slip the eggs into his pajama pockets and dispose of them later.

“Just a sec,” said Rosie. She couldn't resist it; she hopped into her special wellington boots with the little sweets printed on the lining—­a peace offering from Stephen's mother—­and leapt out into the virgin snow.

Stephen watched her through the window. Even though Rosie had told him a million times that she'd had a happy childhood—­that she and Angie (her mother, very young when she'd had her) and her younger brother Pip (who now lived in Australia; Angie had joined him and was looking after Pip's three children, who according to Rosie were wholly terrifying) had had a good time, growing up in a council flat without a garden, eating fish fingers in front of the television, catching the bus to a school that had one high-­fenced concrete play area and not a blade of grass; even though she, on balance, had probably had a better childhood than he himself had had, isolated, and butting heads with his father, his mother always busy with her dogs and the crumbling, creaking house, and money troubles at every turn—­Stephen still enjoyed seeing her take pleasure in her new life.

He knew Rosie had grown up poor, but she had never seemed to feel it; she had related to him without embarrassment how one year Angie had had absolutely no money and had resorted to wrapping everything in the house in cheap paper—­toothbrushes, hair combs, ashtrays, forks, individual Quality Street chocolates—­and leaving it all under the tree, which had led to much joy and jubilation as Pip and Rosie had exuberantly torn off all the packaging, breathless at the sheer mound of gifts and display of plenty, and caring nothing for what lay within. Perhaps it was because no one she knew had much, whereas the schools he had been sent to had made him always aware of the gulf.

Anyway, he relished the sheer joy she got from things he had always taken for granted—­a garden, for one. He liked working in there too, growing things, providing the odd stunted lettuce or minuscule carrot.

However happy Rosie's childhood, though, she was certainly adding to her enjoyment of life now as she played hopscotch in her pajamas, the daft wellingtons flying. Stephen finished the last of his coffee with a gulp, then used the last of his freedom to hurl the poached eggs into the bin before the cold drove Rosie in again. Although, he reflected on seeing her delighted face, obviously she was now just going to think he adored poached eggs and make them three times a week.

“D
O
YOU
WANT
me to make you a packed lunch?” asked Rosie as she prepared to open up early—­catching passing school traffic was always lucrative.

Stephen made a face.

“I'm not GOING to school, I am a teacher,” he said grumpily. Rosie knew better than to try and talk him out of a mood like this. His handsome face looked a little taut and nervous. For a man who had walked into war zones unprotected, who had worked in some of the most dangerous regions on earth, it was quite amazing that he was so anxious about a clutch of eight-­year-­olds. But, wisely, she said nothing, instead kissing him lightly on the nose.

Stephen opened their front door—­which opened directly onto the cobbled main street, still thick with snow, but showing a ­couple of Land Rover tracks and some hoofprints—­and sniffed. The snow was still falling.

“Half the kids won't be in,” he said. “They'll be needed on the farm, or their parents won't send them in case it doesn't let up and they can't get them home.”

“Excellent!” said Rosie. “Well, you inspire the hell out of the ones who do make it.”

Stephen smiled, shrugged on his heavy waxed jacket and stepped out into the snow.

“AHEM,” said Rosie, and he came back into the doorway and kissed her firmly on her plump pink lips.

“That's better” said Rosie. “I always fancied my teachers anyway.”

“Your PRIMARY teachers?” said Stephen, horrified.

“Oh, God. No.” said Rosie.

“Oh, well, that's a relief.” said Stephen. “One CRB check was quite enough, thank you.”

Suddenly he grabbed her face and gave her an another kiss.

“I love it when you make me breakfast,” he said. Rosie smiled up at him.

“Well, don't expect poached eggs every day.”

“A tiny piece of toast to me,” said Stephen, pushing a strand of hair behind her ears, “is like a feast. Sorry I'm a bit cranky and nervous.”

“I like you cranky and nervous,” said Rosie, kissing him again. “Anything else would make me suspicious.”

Stephen laughed, extricated himself from the kiss before it threatened to turn more serious, tightened up his heavy boots, then tramped out down the road, which was slowly beginning to fill up with ­people—­the baker's, down by the war memorial, was already open and doing a brisk business; Malik's Spar, of course, would have been getting the daily papers in since six
A
.
M
. Rosie looked at the falling flakes and the pale blue dawn light. She would need to get moving herself. She watched his tall figure, limping only slightly down the cobbled street, lifted the tea towel she was still holding and waved it at him.

A
T
8:30,
SHE
unlocked the door of the Hopkins' Sweetshop and Confectionery, the sign to which had been standing outside the door now for nearly ninety years, give or take something of an interregnum when Lilian hadn't been able to manage on her own.

Rosie, sent up from London to close down the shop and arrange care for Lilian, had instead completely fallen in love with the old place and had ended up restoring it to its former glory. She still used the old pre-­decimal till (with a card reader on the side), and had kept the great glass apothecary jars, filled to the brim with favorites old and new: flying saucers; barley sugar, lemon sherbets, lime sherbets, melon sherbets, chocolate peanuts (all the peanut candies Rosie now kept on a side shelf, like dynamite, to avoid the possibility of their mixing with another sweet and affecting an allergic child, something Lilian thought was modern nonsense simply, Rosie knew as a nurse, because she hadn't ever seen it happen).

The old wooden shelves with the library ladder that swung along them held the less popular and out-­of-­fashion items: travel sweets, humbugs, jujubes, jawbreakers; rhubarb and custards; rosy apples and fairy satins; farther down were the sharp, sour flavors, the branded jellies and soft flumpish marshmallow items popular with their younger clientele.

There were tightly packed rows of mints and gums, and of course a traditional selection of chocolate bars, excepting Topics, which Lilian had taken against in a fit the previous summer; despite Rosie's insisting that it was the most innocuous of chocolate bars, she had never been able to stock them again.

The old advertisements—­cleaned up and polished if they were tin—­still lined the walls; for Cadbury's Cocoa and Dairy Milk, all with healthy apple-­cheeked children wearing purple, or skipping, with large blue eyes and extravagant hats.

The bell above the door, taken apart, degunked and cleaned, now made a healthy ting when rung, which it did now. Rosie, distracted with counting change from the till, hardly glanced up until she saw who it was.

“Good morning, Edison!”

Edison was the son of Hester and Arthur Felling-­Jackson. His mother was terribly up on all the latest fads in child care, which meant she had been utterly horrified when he had befriended Rosie with her refined sugary ways (although not too horrified to let Rosie take care of him all the time when she was out at yoga classes). This morning he was wearing a coat with an ethnic scarf tightly wrapped around the bottom half of his face and coming nearly up to his glasses, and the kind of ridiculous hat ­people bought when experimenting with substances at music festivals. Rosie wished Hester would just let him wear clothes like the other kids; it might help him make a friend. Plus, it made him a little difficult to understand.