“I’d like that.” Patrick smiled tentatively. “Can I ask you something?”
Star and Simone nodded.
“Has Mum said to you she’s worried about anything? Other than Christmas, work, and the whole organize-a-massive-festival-in-record-time thing? I feel like she’s even more stressed than normal.”
Star, who found it impossible to lie convincingly, bit her lip and looked wide-eyed at Simone. It wasn’t their place to tell Patrick about the eviction but equally his asking about his mum made things awkward when they knew that losing the greengrocer’s and the flat above was foremost in Maggie’s mind.
“We will keep a close eye on your mum.” Simone used her best comfort voice, the one she used on her patients. “Don’t worry.”
* * *
They left Betty’s with takeaway coffees and a lot to think about.
“You know, you should go into politics; you did a great job of not actually answering Patrick’s question.” Star nudged Simone gently.
“Politics would be a breeze compared to this family.”
20
“Oooee!” Sonja Moorhen—chairwoman of the Rowan Thorp Historical Society—pushed her way into the greengrocer’s, her arms full of books. As a historian, her to-be-read pile was never-ending, and she always appeared to be carrying some of it with her.
The weather seemed to have decided today was the day to really get winter started and had taken great pains to slather the whole village with ice. Now, at half past four in the afternoon, it was beginning to add another frosty layer, and Sonja was taking no chances dressed as she was in full arctic attire, including padded trousers.
Maggie’s shop was light and airy, with exposed brick walls, a bright white ceiling between the black beams, and a cobblestone floor. Floor-to-ceiling Georgian kitchen dressers lined the walls. The topmost shelves housed vestiges of the shop’s history—old weighing scales, weights, earthenware jars and pots—while the rest were lined with bowls and baskets of fresh produce. At the bottom, the cupboards were left open to reveal sacks of potatoes and deep wicker baskets full of root vegetables, artfully arranged to look as though they were spilling out of the cupboards and lending the place a sense of abundance. Bunches of bay, rosemary, and curry leaves hung from drying racks, while tenderer herbs ballooned out from tall jugs on the sideboards. The only warmth came from a small fan heater, which Maggie used to defrost her hands at regular intervals.
Maggie was refilling the stock. The sudden drop in temperature had inspired half the village to make vegetable soup. She was piling parsnips into a wooden display crate while Joe was serving the last customer from the latest rush.
“Afternoon, Sonja! Making soup?”
“As a matter of fact, I am. Is that grocer’s intuition?” She handed Maggie a list.
“Something like that.”
“I’m not only here for shopping. I’ve been looking through my great-grandmother’s almanac and journals about the winter solstice.”
“Oh?” Maggie checked the list and filled Sonja’s cotton tote accordingly.
“As part of the lead-up to the season, they would fill the trees with edible decorations for the birds and wildlife; lard and seed pomanders, dried fruit slices on strings, that sort of thing. It’s all part of honoring the land, looking after nature so that nature will look after you. Is that helpful?”
“It is, thank you, Sonja. What a lovely idea.” Her mind was suddenly whirring with possibilities. This could be the sisters’ gateway to the community spirit their dad was trying to force upon them.
As soon as Sonja left, she messaged their newly set up “Summer Sisters” WhatsApp group.
Anyone found anything in Dad’s papers about decorating trees? Edible bird decorations? Think we’ve just found our first event. Use the woods? Get the church flower association involved? What do you think?
* * *
Simone’s phone dinged with a new WhatsApp message. She saw it was from Maggie but ignored it; edible bird decorations could wait.
“I don’t think I’d realized how jaded I am.” She was lying on the chintz sofa in the Dalgleishes’ sitting room, a log fire crackling in the hearth. On the other side of the road, a projector Santa in his sleigh flew repeatedly across the front wall of number 62.
Evette chuckled lightly on the other end of the phone. “You’re not jaded, darling; you’ve had a lot of knocks lately and it’s set you back.”
“I was looking at those photographs last night with Maggie and Star and thinking, ‘I was really happy.’ How did I forget that?”
“You buried it to make your home life easier.”
“You mean how I used to pretend I’d had a less good time than I did to avoid upsetting my mother.” Even thinking about her duplicity reawakened a crawling unease in the pit of her stomach that as an adult she recognized as guilt.
“Bingo. I know she’s your mum and I don’t want to start a fight, but boy did she do a number on you!”
“She’s a realist, that’s all.” Simone could feel her spine stiffening; she sat up and stretched. “She didn’t believe in sugarcoating things simply because I was a child.”
“From what you’ve told me, she showed nothing but disdain for your father or your sisters from when you were very young.”
She couldn’t argue with that. Some of her earliest sensibilities were of a war of conflicting internal emotions: to love her sisters was to hurt her mum and vice versa. The resulting self-loathing made her reactionary.
“It pains me to say it, but it rubbed off on me.”
She remembered how close to the bone Patrick’s earlier comments had grazed.
“Of course it did, you were a child. Children are malleable and impressionable—they look to their caregivers to set their moral compass. Her negative assertions colored your images of your family and made you feel guilty for enjoying your time with them. You were too young to go against the status quo, so you pushed your feelings down.”
“Wow. Way to sum me up.”
“Only with love, baby. Only ever with love.”
Simone stood and began to walk between the sitting room and the kitchen and back again, like a cat in a cage that’s too small. “I don’t want to be an emotional fortress.”
“So take down your walls. You’ve already begun with Patrick. Take those feelings forward. Every time you want to stump a conversation in its tracks, ask yourself why you feel defensive before you snap.”
“Every conversation with my family makes me feel defensive!”
Evette laughed softly down the phone. “And what does that tell you?”
“That my family is annoying?”
“You know the saying ‘You always hurt the ones you love’?”
“Oh, ick!” She totally loved them, and Evette knew it. God, she missed Evette so much. “I wish you were here.” She sighed down the phone and flopped back into the dent she’d left in the sofa.
“And you know why I’m not.”
“It is helping, I think, being away. I didn’t think it would, but I’ve been so busy with Dad’s nonsense that sometimes I’ll go hours without thinking about baby stuff.”