Welcome To Rosie Hopkins' Sweetshop Of Dreams (6 page)

‘Ha,’ said Rosie. ‘We’ll get a wee farm with some lambs to gambol about in the fields.’

Suddenly, against all her better instincts, she had a swift vision: of little dark curly-haired children running around a farmyard, feeding chickens and chasing about with dogs. She quickly reminded herself how much poo animals produced.

‘You never know,’ she said. ‘We might be natural country lubbers.’

Gerard gave a theatrical shudder. ‘You’d never get me up there in a hundred years,’ he said. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Oh God, I know,’ said Rosie. ‘It’s going to suck.’

‘And you’ll miss the rest of the summer! Sitting out in pubs and drinking pink wine and lovely evenings and loads of parties and fun.’ Gerard pouted. ‘Don’t go.’

‘But a little bit of money,’ she said. ‘If I got a couple of thousand from the sale of the house … I mean, we could even think about moving. Into a bigger place. Big enough for … I don’t know … It’ll be quiet.’

She found her heart beating faster even as she said it. Maybe she should go for the unselfish reasons. But a little bit of spare cash to punt them up the ladder … maybe it was the right time for the two of them. Together. When she got back from this stupid bloody thing. To bite the bullet and go for it.

‘I think they’re making ice creams smaller,’ said Gerard, once more looking unhappily at his extra cone. ‘I’m sure of it.
They whack the prices up and put less in on hot sunny days. Stands to reason.’

He eyed her up. ‘You’ve said yes already, haven’t you?’

And that was the end of that conversation.

Chapter Three

Licorish

Modern language seems to think it can change things willy-nilly for no reason. Licorish is a perfectly adequate word that also manages to sum up onomatopoeically the consistency of a thick black sweet in your mouth. Liquorice is French, and we know where that ends up – in crème de marrons and macaroons and all sorts of other unpleasantnesses.

The push for modernity in the sweet industry – or, as our vulgarian cousins would term it, ‘candy’ – has been entirely unnecessary since the very first refining of sugar. Sweets do not need dragging into the twenty-first century. Unlike the bastardisation of the humble crisp into more and more repulsive flavourings, a decent bonbon is timeless, a work of art, and few more so than the licorish, an endlessly pliable substance capable of forming whorls, twists, strings, cords and the like.

For those for whom the dark, complex flavourings of the fruit of the liquorice root and aniseed flower are too overwhelming (not all sweet appreciators can be connoisseurs), it comes too in adulterated form, notably (see sub-section 41) the allsort, the bootlace and, possibly its crowning achievement for non-purists, the sherbet fountain.

Lilian Hopkins hated staying up late. It gave her more pain than she could let on, and it made the day seem so terribly, terribly long – and it didn’t help her sleep any later in the morning. Her internal clock had been stuck at 6.30am for a very long time now. And they showed such rubbish on the television, which was in any case hard to see, no matter which pair of glasses she had on, so she normally listened to the radio at full blast – it was company – and read her magazines and wrote in her notebook with her elderly Parker and tried to ignore the aching in her hip until it was a reasonable hour to retire to bed and not think about how she was going to get through another day tomorrow.

But tonight was different, of course. Tonight the girl was coming. She’d always had a soft spot for little Angie, her brother’s kid. She’d been so blonde and funny and spunky and full of life, and had ended up pregnant barely out of her teens, two babies, dad long gone, and she had rolled up her sleeves and got on with it. The two women had exchanged letters (Lilian always sent sweets) for years, and it was a sadness to both of them that Lilian hadn’t managed to get to know Angie’s children. She herself had never married, but it
was hard to leave the shop, and she’d never learned to drive, and was quite frankly frightened of London, and between the kids being at school and Angie working and all of them trying to keep their heads above water, the dreams they’d had of Hopkins holidays up in the beautiful Derbyshire countryside had never quite materialised. And they grew up so fast.

So to meet Rosie again after all this time … Well, she wasn’t quite sure what to expect. A bit of a slacker, she suspected. Angie had said she was nursing-trained, so maybe she could help her out with everything. Since the operation … well, there was no getting around it, she was finding life very difficult. Anyway, she wasn’t sure this Rosie could help. She didn’t seem to be making much of a go of her own life. Perhaps she was a bit of a party brat. She hoped Rosie wasn’t expecting too much. After all the bright lights and noise of London, she was going to find Lipton very quiet indeed. She couldn’t think of a single thing to do with her, or even what you said to a young person. It had been a while. She looked at the clock. Another five minutes till the bus got in. She would say her hellos. And then perhaps this girl wouldn’t mind helping her to bed.

You would have had to torture Lilian before she would let you know she’d been sleeping every night in her chair.

1942

If it hadn’t been for Ida Delia Fontayne, it seemed unlikely that Lilian would ever have given Henry a second thought. Although he had lingered … A young man, even an infuriating one, asking her to a dance wasn’t something that happened every day. Lilian was too thin for the current fashion; too pointy of nose and elbows and knees to be considered one of the village beauties, like Ida Delia Fontayne, whose thick blonde hair and round blue eyes and soft high bosoms drew the eyes of every man in the village up to Lord Lipton himself, it was rumoured; and didn’t Ida know it. Mind you, she’d been a general showbox since Miss Millet’s schoolyard, always in charge of the games, elbowing out shy, caustic, wiry-haired Lilian; fluttering her eyelashes at teachers, the vicar or anyone even passingly likely to show favour. They’d been best friends when they were little; Lilian’s father thought she was adorable and would let her have an extra piece or two of fudge, and Ida Delia caught on to the wisdom of this arrangement and started inviting Lilian to her birthday parties, or to play dominoes, or to summer hangouts round the swimming hole
.

At first scrawny Lilian, with no mother and three big brothers and no knowledge of fashion or Hollywood film stars or lipstick, felt out of place and awkward. But as they grew older, Ida Delia took to Lilian’s sharp, funny tongue and clever ways with homework (handy for copying) and for a time they were close. Then adolescence had begun in earnest, like a winnowing of who the boys liked and who wasn’t going to quite make the grade. Lilian could tell, as Ida Delia announced loudly how embarrassing it was being measured up for a brassiere then getting the same bus home as the vicar, that their friendship might not survive the dawning interest from the lads of the town, and she had been entirely correct. Ida Delia had palled up with Felicity Hayward from the neighbouring farm, whose russet curls and bright green eyes made cows out of boys all the way to Hartingford, and left Lilian with Margaret, who didn’t always look directly at you. Margaret was fun enough, but Lilian hated the idea of friendship being traded as a commodity, and could neither forgive nor forget
.

Lilian liked to think that since she’d started working and living like a young lady, she was less bothered by the likes of Ida Delia Fontayne, or so she thought that summer until she saw her walk down the main street side by side with Henry Carr, laughing uproariously at one of his jokes. Lilian knew Henry wasn’t anything like as funny as that. Mind you, nobody was as funny as the way Ida was going on. She held up her shopping basket and smiled at them politely, but inside her guts were twisting furiously. So, you ask someone to a dance one day and then the next you’re up and down the high street with the town flirt. That was clearly how it worked. Lilian was amazed to find how annoyed she was about someone she didn’t even like. It was just bad manners, that was what was getting her riled
.

‘Miss Hopkins,’ said Henry
.

‘Hello, Henry,’ said Lilian, as coolly as she could muster
.

Ida obviously wanted to stop and show off her prize. ‘Henry and I were just heading the same way,’ she said, flicking back her elegantly permed hair that, as she never tired of telling everyone, she had to get done up in Derby at Gervase’s as nowhere else could quite get it right. ‘It’s a shame you missed the dance on Saturday – such fun!’

She turned to Henry. ‘Lilian’s not really one for the dancing. Do you remember that school dance when she tripped over the squash table? I thought I’d die laughing.’

Lilian waited for Henry to laugh cruelly along with Ida, but surprisingly he didn’t; he merely nodded and smiled, almost sympathetically. Well, she didn’t need his sympathy now. She hadn’t, she remembered, had it at the time
.

She’d been thirteen years old, just after she and Ida Delia had gone their separate ways, and it was the school’s summer dance. Her brothers – Terence, Ned and Gordon – had teased her ragged round the table. Well, Gordon had, he was always a bit of a rascal. Terence tried to tell him off, and tell her off for dressing loosely – Terence was a prig, always had been, thought he was in charge. Gordon, the youngest, little (he had been born early), always the joker, was carrying on about how Errol Flynn would be all over her when he saw that dress and Lilian had coloured and told them to shut their holes. It was only Neddy, sweet Ned, the middle brother, whom Lilian absolutely adored, blond and handsome, sweet and dreamy, who had told her not to worry, she looked absolutely beautiful. And he had made her feel like a princess, right up to the point where she had tripped over the stupid tablecloth in front of everyone and drenched herself with squash
.

Henry Carr had laughed every single bit as hard as Ida and her cronies and everyone else, as the juice had run down the old-fashioned dropped-waist dress someone had passed down to her. Ida, of course, had been taken to a dressmaker for the occasion and wore a neatly cut dress with a full skirt. It was a beautiful dress, and its pale blue colour had set Ida’s cream skin and wide eyes off perfectly
.

Lilian, in dated hand-me-downs, taller than nearly every other child her age, had felt awkward enough to begin with, even before she’d tripped over. Henry had been in the corner with the older boys, guffawing mightily
.

‘I must get on,’ she murmured in the street, banishing the memory while feeling the colour rise once again in her cheeks, and Ida raised her eyebrows and waved gaily. Just once, Lilian glanced back at Henry, and was shocked to find him also looking after her. There was something in his nut-brown eyes that, for once, wasn’t mockery or teasing. Something that, however much she wanted to fight against it, suddenly seemed to make her heart jump and flutter on the wind
.