Christmas at Rosie Hopkins' Sweetshop Read Free Page A

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