Christmas at Rosie Hopkins' Sweetshop Read Free Page B

risk going to bed.
    Edward was not a man who liked risk.
    â€œG 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.
    â€œUgh, these eggs have skin.”
    â€œYou’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.
    â€œClose 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.
    â€œJust 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