The Crafty Celia circles had taken the fundraising bit between their teeth and were planning all kinds of events. They were all up for a sponsored Knitathon, to start off with, producing as many squares of an afghan blanket as possible in a day.
‘That sounds like a lot of knitting.’
‘It’s going to be crochet really, only “Crochetathon” didn’t really sound right. Afterwards we’ll sew all the squares into blankets and sell them to raise money, too,’ she explained. ‘Then we’ll have a selling exhibition of craftwork in the coach house in summer, maybe combined with a garden party. We could lure people in with the promise of coffee and cakes, with entrance to the exhibition included in the admission charge.’
‘I could make the cakes for that,’ I said. ‘Oh, Celia, you and Will have already done so much more than all the rest of my friends put together.’
‘Will says if you have a fundraising auction, you can have one of his bird sculptures as a lot.’
‘He is so kind. Chloe Lyon said the vicar had some ideas and was coming to see me again to discuss them,’ I said. ‘She’s the vicar’s wife, did I say? It’s very odd, because her grandfather is a self-professed warlock and runs the Museum of Witchcraft.’
‘Really? It seems a rather odd village altogether,’ Celia said. She’d usually come over to visit me when I’d been up here staying with Ma, and so had got to know it a bit.
‘It is – but in a good way. Everyone has been very nice to me, considering how Ma has always kept to herself, though that seems to have been an Almond family habit, so I expect they’re used to it.’
‘From what you’ve told me, the Almonds all sounded a bit Cold Comfort Farm,’ she said frankly.
‘Yes, and I think they had their own version of “something nasty in the woodshed” too, that they didn’t talk about, but no one will tell me what it is. Mind you, it must have been so long ago that not many people know what it was, anyway.’
‘Martha seems to be getting about a bit more than she used to, though, from the sound of it,’ Celia said.
I considered it. ‘She is a bit, though even now she rarely goes into the village for shopping. However, she does like the bookshop, Marked Pages, and she’ll go in the Spar if she’s run out of anything vital, like tea or whisky. You know, I have to buy huge amounts of granulated sugar when I do the supermarket shop, because when Hal is here, he brews up endless mugs of sweet tea for them both.’
‘Is that the gardener you mentioned, who seemed to be here a lot?’
‘Yes, he’s a bit of a fixture now. He’s really the under-gardener up at Winter’s End, so he’s moonlighting when he does Ma’s garden.’
‘Maybe it’s a romance?’
‘Well … he’s not bad-looking, I suppose, in a morose older Indiana Jones sort of way, and he’s pretty fit,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘Ma doesn’t seem to mind having him around either. He comes and goes, and hangs out in the new shed she had put up behind the studio … But no, I haven’t really seen any sign of romance, and when I sort of prodded her about him, she said they were just good friends.’
‘Then that’s probably all they are,’ Celia said, and went back to the vital matter of the fundraising. ‘Did you see there have been a few more donations to the site? Nothing big, though.’
‘Apart from you and Will, I don’t think anyone else is fundraising at the moment. Certainly no one we knew in London.’
‘Well, you know what it’s like with that crowd: they’ll be on to the latest trendy charitable cause, preferably something involving a fashion show or a party,’ she said.
‘You were the only real friend I made down there.’
‘And vice versa. Well, except for Will, of course.’
‘He’s not so much a friend as a soul mate.’
She gave a happy sigh. ‘I know, I was so lucky to meet him and I love living in Southport. The Crafty Celia classes in the coach house gallery are going really well, and of course Will has his studio and gallery upstairs and customers can use the outside staircase, so it’s all worked out really well. If I’m not in the coach house I’m in the attic workshops in the house, so there’s always one of us around for the dogs and cats, too.’
‘That Mother and Toddler group I went to on Monday have promised to hold a jumble sale in June.’
‘Oh, yes, you said on the phone – and I want to hear all about this Jago you kept mentioning, too. Jago is a weird name. Very Poldark.’
‘Poldark?’
‘Some novels set in Cornwall I read years ago: I think there was a TV series too.’
‘He is Cornish by descent – his surname’s Tremayne. But his parents are both academics and he was mainly brought up in Oxford.’
‘He sounds really nice – you obviously clicked straight away.’
‘I do feel like I’ve always known him,’ I admitted, ‘but not in a romantic way, just a friendly one, and I’m sure that’s how he sees me, too. I mean, I really haven’t got enough time or spare emotion to invest in a romance until Stella has had her operation and is on the road to recovery.’
‘I suppose not.’
‘Jago was jilted and I’m sure he isn’t over his ex yet: we have that in common too.’
‘Except that you were totally over your ex ages ago,’ she said.
‘Jago’s ex rang him up out of the blue the other day and I think she wants him back. I hope she doesn’t succeed, but it’s quite selfish of me because I love being able to talk cake with him and I’m sure she’d persuade him to go back to London.’
‘Let’s hope she doesn’t manage it, then,’ Celia said, and then we got out the notebooks and discussed plane tickets and Googled budget hotels in Boston. We’d need a room for a few days before Stella went in for her operation, but once she was in hospital, I didn’t suppose I would be anywhere except by her bedside for a lot of the time …
We found one through the hospital’s helpful website eventually, situated nearby, which looked the best option.
‘Ma is going to go with us, which is good, but I feel I’d really like a trained nurse on the plane with us too, just in case …’
‘I’m sure Stella would be fine,’ Celia said. ‘Didn’t your consultant say that if there is no radical decline in her condition by autumn, the journey shouldn’t be a problem?’
‘Yes, but even so …’ I said stubbornly, and then sighed. ‘I suppose it’s out of the question anyway, because it would be extra expense.’
‘Perhaps we’d better just concentrate on raising the twenty thousand for the moment, and see what suggestions the vicar makes,’ she said. ‘If he comes up with some brilliant ones, we can see about finding a nurse to go out with you then. Meanwhile I’ll get Will on to sorting out the flights and hotel reservations because they really need to be booked soon.’
‘I know,’ I said. I’d been putting it off, though I’m not sure why. The operation was booked, after all, and I’d go through hell and high water to get Stella there.
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