She nodded. ‘I’m going to pop over after work and try to get my head around what needs to be done. It was tricky, with Roxanne, Jeff and Tamsin there.’
Angie pulled a sympathetic face. ‘I hope there’s no wrangling over your mum’s stuff? It’s just awful when that happens.’
‘No, I don’t think there will be. My sister-in-law’s bagged most of the jewellery already.’
‘No, that’s terrible!’
‘It’s fine,’ Della said firmly. ‘To be honest, Mum didn’t wear it much – at least, not after Dad left because he’d given her most of it.’ She paused. ‘I have taken her cookbook collection though.’
‘Oh, you can never have too many of those,’ Angie remarked, breaking off as a rather dishevelled man in a rain-speckled jacket tumbled into the shop, clutching the hand of a grumpy-looking boy of around eight years old.
‘Eddie, please stop moaning,’ the man exclaimed, throwing Angie and Della a quick look.
‘I wanted to go in the castle,’ the boy muttered. ‘You said the dungeons are haunted. Why can’t we just have a quick look?’
‘We will next time, okay?’ The man exhaled and raked back his light brown hair. Everything about him – the Toy Heaven carrier bag, the sadness in his soft grey eyes that suggested that today wasn’t turning out as he had hoped – said weekend dad.
‘You promised,’ the boy said crossly.
Della stepped towards them. ‘I’m sorry, the castle closes in five minutes.’
‘Yes, I realise that now,’ the man said with a rueful smile. ‘I’ve messed up my timings today.’
Della fixed Eddie with a bright smile. ‘The dungeon’s great, but you really need plenty of time to enjoy it properly. There are tours, you know. They turn the lights off and it’s really creepy.’
With his grumpiness subsiding, Eddie rubbed at his eyes. ‘Cool,’ he murmured.
‘So you should come back when there’s a tour on. That way, you’ll have a better chance of seeing a ghost.’
He regarded her intently. ‘Are there really ghosts here?’
Della paused. ‘Well, no one knows for sure. But there are plenty of stories about them.’
‘Who were they? The ghosts, I mean?’
‘Eddie, we really should be going,’ the man said, resting a hand on his shoulder. ‘These ladies will be closing the shop.’
‘We’ve got a few minutes,’ Angie called over from the till.
‘Who are the ghosts?’ Eddie repeated, eyes gleaming with rapt interest.
‘Um, well, some people think they’re prisoners who died in the dungeons hundreds of years ago.’
‘Why did they die?’ he asked eagerly.
Della glanced at Eddie’s father, wondering whether this line of questioning was okay. As a young child, Sophie had enjoyed the more gruesome aspects of history: floggings and hangings and witches being burned. She had devoured Horrible Histories books and, during one particularly fervent period, had insisted on visiting the castle’s dungeons every weekend for months on end. ‘They weren’t well looked after,’ Della explained, ‘so I think they probably died of starvation.’
Eddie seemed pretty thrilled by this as he turned to his dad. ‘Can we come back tomorrow?’
Della saw the man’s face relax for the first time since they had blundered in. ‘That might be tricky. It’s Milo’s party, remember?’
‘Can we come next weekend then? Please?’
‘I don’t see why not.’ The man smiled at Della. ‘Thank you,’ he added.
‘You’re welcome,’ she said, although she wasn’t quite sure what he was thanking her for. What she did know, though, as the man and boy left, was that she felt different: lighter somehow, as if the weight of her mother’s funeral, and Mark’s grumblings about the cookbooks, had simply floated away. Even more startling was the fact that, when she climbed into her car and glimpsed her reflection in the rear-view mirror, she saw that her red lipstick – Impassioned – was still perfectly in place.
Without the cookbooks lining the walls, Rosemary Cottage seemed different too. It was as if a vital part of its fabric had been stripped away, leaving empty shelves stretching from floor to ceiling in every room of the house. The place looked ransacked, but then, what else could Della have done? Anyway, soon the whole place would be empty and someone else – perhaps a young couple keen to move from town to country – would look around and think, Hmm, well, it needs renovating, of course, and that antiquated kitchen and bathroom need to come out. But it has lots of potential …
Della ran a finger along an empty bookshelf. It came away fuzzy with dust. Striding from room to room – the cottage already felt rather chilly and stale – she assessed what needed to be done. It wasn’t that she relished the thought of sending the polished mahogany dining table or Kitty’s glass-topped dressing table to the auction house; more that, the sooner it was all dealt with, the sooner she could move on from all of this.
In the rickety utility room she found a wicker basket into which she packed hand-printed silk scarves, elegant handbags and a slim box containing a set of mother-of-pearl-handled butter knives. These, plus Kitty’s handmade wooden sewing box, were just the obvious things to take home for safe-keeping: clearly, Della would be making numerous trips back to the house. She continued to flit through the rooms, gathering up small mementoes along the way. Photograph albums were packed into a faded tartan suitcase, along with reams of paperwork to be sorted through later. Perhaps it was for the best that her siblings weren’t exactly clamouring to help. Without Jeff, Roxanne and Tamsin sticking their oars in, Della felt clear-headed and purposeful.
As she investigated the contents of Kitty’s dressing table, thoughts of that man and his son who’d wanted to see ghosts filtered into her mind. With a smile, she realised now what she’d done: overly sympathised, just because he was a dad in charge of his own child. How many mothers had she seen trying to control screaming toddlers and cheer up sullen kids over the years? And how much notice had she paid, really? That was the thing with fathers, Della decided: they didn’t have to do very much to be hailed as superheroes by starry-eyed women. ‘Some woman came up to me in the park,’ Mark announced, when Sophie was a baby, ‘and said I deserved a medal.’ A medal, for taking his own daughter out in her pram for fifteen minutes! It hadn’t even been raining. Della had dragged the buggy through the park in all weathers – driving hail, four inches of snow – and she couldn’t recall ever being festooned with praise. The woman had probably just wanted an excuse to talk to him, Della had decided, aware of how the presence of a small child – like a puppy – heightened a man’s allure.
Satisfied that she’d gathered up everything she needed at the moment, Della locked up the cottage, placed the basket and suitcase on the back seat of her car and, ravenously hungry now, decided to stroll along Rosemary Lane to the chippy. Another shower of rain had given the solid, stone-built shops and cottages a rather huddled appearance. The tang of vinegary chips tickled Della’s nostrils. Rather than grabbing a take-away to eat in the car, she ordered at the counter and took a seat in the cafe at the back. It was warm and bustling with a large family who had perhaps stopped to break up a journey; despite the chippy having been here since her childhood, Della had never ventured beyond the counter before. Kitty didn’t approve of eating out: ‘Why would I pay those prices,’ she’d declared more than once, ‘when I can make it so much better at home?’ Sitting at a red Formica-topped table with a plate of battered cod and chips