Sophie rubbed at an eye and grinned. ‘It’s not as if I’m going to China.’
Della laughed. ‘Well, if you were, I’d be stowing away in your suitcase. You wouldn’t be able to get rid of me that easily.’ She kissed the top of her daughter’s head, then straightened up and checked her watch. ‘I’d better go. What are you up to today?’
Sophie shrugged. ‘Aw, I dunno.’
‘Seeing Liam?’
‘Mmmm … maybe.’ Ah, so Della’s hunch had been right. She knew better than to ask Sophie how her boyfriend felt about her leaving Heathfield in three days’ time. Whereas her girlfriends were heading off to uni or college – desperate to ‘live somewhere where things happen,’ as Sophie had put it – Liam seemed set to stay put, assisting his father in his joinery business. ‘I’ll probably just hang out with Evie,’ Sophie added. Just hang out. How lovely to enjoy these last few days together just dawdling around, Della reflected as she drove through steady rain – it was too wet to walk – towards the castle. She had never had much time for just hanging out with her friends. Even as a child, Della been the one Kitty had sent out on errands, because Burley Bridge was that sort of place: familiar and safe for children to wander, clutching their mothers’ shopping lists, which entailed visiting several shops (butcher’s, greengrocer’s, newsagent’s, haberdasher’s – in those days the village even had a fishmonger and an ice cream shop). Jeff was deemed too important to be sent out to buy butter and Roxanne tended to come home with the wrong kind of flour. After leaving school, Della had been cajoled by Kitty into doing a secretarial course: ‘Because you might not be the brightest button in the box, darling, but you’re extremely good at getting things done.’ Jeff had already left home and Roxanne, whose bedroom was by now papered with pages ripped out of Vogue, was set on a career in fashion. Della was still waiting, as if her true calling might flash before her in a dream.
She suspected Kitty had hoped that, once endowed with secretarial prowess, her eldest daughter would attract the attention of some wealthy businessman, and be safely off her hands. ‘You have the figure to be a secretary,’ she once remarked, as if large breasts and slender legs were all that was required.
Colin, Della’s first boss, had festooned her with illegible hand-written correspondence, which she was expected to type up immaculately. This was pre-computers, even pre-electric typewriters, at least at Belling & Doyle Lift Installations: ‘The dark ages,’ as Sophie laughingly referred to it, whenever Della described office life in the early 1980s. It was also pre-men realising that perhaps it wasn’t quite right to pat a secretary’s bottom as she walked by. When Della complained – actually, no, she merely barked, ‘What are you doing?’ – Colin scratched at his beer gut and said, ‘If you don’t like it, you shouldn’t go around looking like that.’
Della had rushed to the ladies’ where she surveyed her reflection in her neat grey pinafore dress and cried all her mascara off. Then she strode back to her desk, typed out GOING HOME WON’T BE BACK and, leaving the sheet of paper still wedged in her typewriter, did just that.
Afterwards Della had worked mainly with women, though not through any conscious choice; it had just happened that way. She was drawn to Heathfield’s sole veggie cafe due to her love of cooking, and after waitressing there for a year she ended up managing the place. When the owners sold up, she took a job at a florist’s and that’s where she met Mark, a dashing young man with a big, bright smile who needed an emergency bouquet for his mother’s birthday. ‘I forgot,’ he said, catching his breath as if he’d been running, ‘and it’s too late to post anything. Don’t suppose you could deliver to Tambury today?’
‘Of course we can,’ Della replied. ‘What kind of thing would you like?’
He looked at her for a few moments longer than necessary – time actually seemed to stand still – and she was conscious of every beat of her heart. ‘Er, anything really,’ he blustered. ‘Whatever you can, um, throw together. Um, I don’t mean throw, I mean carefully arrange, I’m sure you’ll do a lovely job …’ Feeling as if she had regressed to being sixteen years old – she was twenty-nine at the time – she assured him that she would indeed do her best.
In fact, Della reflected now, she would have somehow managed to find him fifty blue tulips – which don’t even exist in the natural world – so eager was she to help out the flustered stranger who had left her with a fistful of tenners and her head in a spin.
She pulled up into the castle car park, telling herself it was natural for things to become rather humdrum after over two decades together. But occasionally she wondered what had happened to the eager young man who’d come back to Fresh and Wild the next day and asked her out. She supposed he’d just grown up.
Had she, though? As she climbed out of her car and the castle came into view, Della supposed she had. She went to work, she was a mother – at least, as much as Sophie would allow it these days – and cheerfully handled the hordes of schoolchildren who hurled themselves into the castle shop, so grateful were they to have reached the end of their history lesson and be allowed to buy stuff.Two stout stone towers flanked the castle’s main entrance. The imposing archway led to a courtyard, the entrance to the grand hall and the obligatory tearoom and gift shop. Della waved to Georgia, who was manning the ticket office, and to Harry, who was brushing up copper beech leaves in the stone-flagged courtyard.
‘How are you, love?’ Angie greeted Della with a hug as she entered the shop.
‘I’m fine, honestly.’ Della pulled off her jacket and hung it on a hook in the back room. ‘I miss her, of course,’ she added. ‘It’s like, I don’t know …’ She shrugged. ‘A big gap, I suppose. I mean, we spent so much time together towards the end.’ Della cleared her throat. ‘But I’m just glad it all went smoothly, and it was good to see everyone together – all the people I knew from growing up, I mean.’
Angie nodded. ‘You must be shattered, being left to organise the whole thing.’
‘It was simpler that way,’ Della said truthfully.
Angie squeezed her hand. ‘Your poor mum.’
‘I know. All her life, not a single thing wrong with her. She’d never been to a hospital, not even to give birth – she had the three of us at home.’
‘Stoical,’ Angie laughed.
‘Yes, I guess she was. But I suspect she also wanted to do things precisely her way.’ It was true, Della decided; at home, Kitty could manage her births, barking commands to William and even the beleaguered midwife on duty (‘Your mother was very forthright in her wishes,’ William had told Della, when she had asked about the circumstances of her own birth). Only now did she realise how hard it must have been for Kitty to succumb to the routines of the hospice.
As no visitors had arrived yet, Della started to unpack a box of bendy plastic shields that would be as much use as floppy tortilla wraps in even the most mild-mannered battle. It seemed wrong that, while Heathfield Castle had stood for over nine hundred years, most of the souvenirs would barely last the car journey home. ‘Authentic’ tunics – fashioned from something like potato sacking, dyed silver – disintegrated at the first hint of energetic play. (Della knew this, having sent Isaac and Noah one each several birthdays ago.) Generic notebooks, rubbers and chocolate bars were emblazoned with the castle’s logo: a rather shabby drawing of the North Tower. But at least business was brisk as visitors began to drift in, which helped to take Della’s mind off Mark’s ill humour and Sophie’s imminent departure and, of course, what the heck she was going to do with her mother’s books.
By late morning the shop was milling with parents and grandparents and boisterous children. Two little girls launched into a full-scale scrap by the colouring books, and a mournful-looking boy seemed bitterly disappointed when his mother wouldn’t buy him an amethyst the size of a human head. ‘You can have this instead,’ she said, radiating fatigue as she brandished a bouncy ball that was supposed to resemble an eyeball