Dear Thing Read Free

any good concerts?’
    Posie stuck her head into the kitchen. ‘Auntie Claire, can we have a tea party for the animals? Can we use your tea set?’
    ‘Of course. I’ll put some squash in the teapot for you. Do you want to take the blanket from the sofa and spread it out on the floor? It’ll be like a picnic then.’
    ‘Ambrosial!’ She disappeared, and Claire gave a clear, lovelylaugh that was so happy that Romily looked at her more carefully. She did look good. Maybe even better than usual. Sort of glowy. Romily heard that happened.
    ‘“Ambrosial”,’ repeated Claire. ‘Her vocabulary is getting better every day. I don’t know if my eleven-year-old students even know that word.’
    ‘She reads a lot,’ said Romily, though Claire already knew that. Posie was their main topic of conversation.
    ‘I’ll get the tea set out for the girls. Do you mind putting the candles on the cake?’ Claire gestured to the cake, sitting on a high stand on the worktop. It was an incredible thing, towering with pink icing and scattered with delicate pink flakes.
    ‘What kind is it?’
    ‘An angel cake with rose-flavoured icing.’
    Romily picked one of the flakes off the icing and tasted it. ‘Sugared rose petals? You didn’t make these, did you?’
    ‘We had a lot of roses last year.’ Claire was deftly tipping warm biscuits onto a plate.
    ‘I hope you checked for aphids.’ Romily extracted a candle from the packet and put it haphazardly near the centre. ‘It was a good year for them. That said, they’re probably quite tasty. They make honeydew.’
    ‘I’ll remember that. You can have aphid-flavoured cake for your birthday.’ Claire went out of the kitchen, leaving Romily wondering whether that was an affectionate joke or some kind of dig.
    It wasn’t as if Claire and Romily were a mystery to each other. They’d known each other for years. They’d been at university together and spent quite a bit of time hanging out in a big group. Over the years their group of university friends had coupled up and all got on with their adult lives.In the normal order of things, Romily would have kept in loose touch with Claire the same way she kept in touch with other people she’d been with at uni: status updates on Facebook and maybe a brief reunion at weddings. She would have asked about her news and nodded politely and moved on to talking to someone else.
    Except for the fact that Claire was married to Ben.
    She put the candles on the cake, probably more crookedly than Claire had meant her to. Through the French windows to the garden, she could see that it had stopped raining and the clouds had parted to let some sun through. She wandered out to the living area. The girls sat on a blanket on the floor with the stuffed animals arranged around them; Claire was pouring pink squash into flowered porcelain cups. Posie’s friend sat tidily between the toy giraffe and the toy lemur, wearing a silk scarf around her shoulders. Romily noticed that her school uniform fitted her quite well, unlike Posie’s, whose jumper was too small in the sleeves and kept riding up to show her shirt-tails. Posie had acquired a large hole in one knee of her tights, and also a broad-rimmed beribboned straw hat which was wider than her body.
    ‘Lorna is an actress,’ she was telling her friend, pointing to the cuddly bear in a tutu. ‘She’s in a big play in London. And Joe is an astronaut, and Rita is a dinner lady but she also trains elephants. What do you want to be?’
    ‘Um. A princess?’
    ‘A princess is
boring
. You can be a – an archduke. And I’ll be your wife, the archduchess. Okay, would you like a biscuit, archduke?’
    The front door opened and three heads lifted in happy expectation. Posie jumped up. ‘Ben!’ she cried, running to him.
    He wore a dark suit, but he’d loosened his tie and he carried a large box wrapped in silver paper, tall enough to come up to nearly his chest. Fresh air and sunlight streamed through the door