Hope took a breath.
Fear that she’d be responsible for setting her mother back extinguished it.
She couldn’t do it.
Not yet.
She had another visit she had to make first.
‘Maybe I’ll go now,’ she said, shooting to her feet the moment Aunt Cheryl reached for the next can of hairspray.
‘Oh, but I haven’t–’ but as if she could sense Kate’s wings threatening to take flight, Aunt Cheryl nodded her head. Reaching out she pulled some of Kate’s long brown hair over her shoulder and tipped her head to the side in consideration. ‘Yes. I think this look will be received well at Wood View High.’
‘I’d say definitely if your motivation is to help curb teenage pregnancy,’ Kate said, thinking no one in their right mind would find this look attractive.
Cheryl winked. ‘With great talent comes great responsibility. Give your mum my love and tell her I’ll pop over on Friday, usual time, to take her to bridge.’
Juliet waylaid her as she was sticking her feet into Juliet’s bright, happy, purple-skulls-and-orange-daisy covered festival wellies. Kate hadn’t exactly unpacked, yet. Not that there was much room to in Wren Cottage. At least, that was her excuse.
‘Sorry,’ Juliet muttered, pulling the front door shut behind her. ‘She just wants the two of you to–’
‘It’s okay,’ Kate answered, cutting her off with a, ‘And I know. Your mum’s been completely Switzerland about all of this, which I know must be hard. It’ll get better. I’ll get better at dealing with it.’
‘You’re going to have to if you’re staying.’
‘I know. I just–’
Juliet gave a brief nod of understanding. ‘Didn’t need this all in your face from the moment you walked through the door? I’m sorry I haven’t been around since you’ve got back. It’s wedding season and I’ve been flat out. But I promise we’ll talk tonight. Hey,’ she looked down, her red hair falling over her shoulder as she noticed Kate’s foot attire for the first time. ‘It’s a little hot for boots – you want to borrow something else and take the car?’
‘No. The walk will do me good. And where I’m going I don’t need to dress up.’ Kate’s denim cut-offs, buttercup-yellow gypsy top and festival wellies would be perfectly acceptable for where she was going.
‘You’re not going to visit your mum?’
‘Nope.’
‘Then, where – oh,’ Juliet flushed scarlet. ‘You’re going to see Oscar?’
‘Nope. God, Juliet, if I can’t pluck up the courage to see mum, you can be damn certain I haven’t got the balls to see my brother-in-law, yet.’
‘Right. But, well, you’ll have to see him eventually. Tell him you’re back and what you’re planning to do.’
‘Why?’ Kate asked, her bottom lip poking out sulkily.
‘What do you mean, why? Don’t you think he’s going to notice if you buy The Clock House and open it up as a spa?’
‘No… yes…’ Kate looked around for something handy to hang her subject-change on and looked right into Juliet’s flushed face. ‘What’s with the red face?’
‘What?’ Juliet swallowed.
‘You,’ Kate answered, waving her hand in her cousin’s face, ‘and the blushing thing you’ve got going on.’
‘Hello?’ Juliet pointed to her ginger hair. ‘Daily occurrence, with this mop, isn’t it?’
‘I suppose,’ Kate said, not sure whether to delve deeper or leave Juliet to her poor excuse.
‘So, if you’re not going to meet Oscar, where are you going then? Oh–’
‘Yep.’
‘Do you want me to come with you?’
‘Nope. And don’t look so worried. This madness was your idea, remember?’
‘I don’t know what I was thinking,’ Juliet ran her hands down the front of her pretty white embroidery anglaise dress and gave Kate a rueful look. ‘Well, yes, I do know what I was thinking. It had a kind of two-birds-with-one-stone sort of symmetry.’
Should’ve delved deeper, Kate realised. ‘When I get back we’ll have a cuppa and you can tell me all about the birds and the stones, okay?’
‘Okay,’ Juliet said, sounding not okay, at all.
Leaning over, Kate gave her cousin a quick reassuring kiss on the cheek. ‘Hey, it’s going to be fine. Promise.’ And before Juliet could say something else heartfelt that would stop her from getting her first look at the whole reason she’d come back, she waved cheerio.
Turning left, she walked down the path that would take her to the cut-through into Whispers Wood and allow her to emerge onto the village green. In a bid to settle the butterflies she took a deep breath and inhaled a lungful of freshly mown grass and early summer flowers.
The scent helped her feel happier. Less weighted-down. Until she started thinking about how she’d have to walk past the little parade of shops on the other side of the village green. Well, she said parade – there were five units and two of them were permanently empty these days. The other three consisted of the Post Office, a dentist and Big Kev’s corner shop.
Should she pop in and say ‘Hi’ while she was out and about? Casually mention that she had re-entered the Whispers Wood atmosphere and had touched down permanently?
Her pace automatically slowed at the thought.
She was such a coward.
It was only going to get more difficult if she kept letting herself off the hook, wasn’t it? Maybe if the first person she’d bumped into as she was heaving her rucksack and wheelie-case out of the taxi after it had pulled up outside Wren Cottage hadn’t been Sandeep, the postman. And maybe if he hadn’t looked agog at her when she’d told him she was back to stay…
And maybe if she wasn’t secretly smarting from every one of the staggered-disbelief expressions she encountered when she went all ‘full-disclosure’ she could keep it up.
As she entered the woods she exchanged the scent of freshly cut grass, with its hint of creeping roses and honeysuckle for the smell of dry, dusty, musty earth and trees. Here, she automatically followed the well-beaten dirt track right through the centre and noticed that street lamps had been installed either end since she’d last used the cut-through.
She wondered how long the village meeting about street lamps versus the existing wildlife’s quality of life had gone on for, because she was betting Whispers Woods’ unofficial ‘mayor’, Crispin Harlow, had called a meeting to discuss the issue.
Crispin Harlow had become the unofficial village head-honcho ten years ago, when he’d moved in, promptly formed the Whispers Wood Residents’ Association, and Aunt Cheryl and Aunt Cheryl’s best friend, Trudie McTravers, had used the AOB section at one of his meetings to present him with ‘robes’ they’d run up from leftover material from the nativity play Trudie had helped put on at the local primary school. Crispin didn’t really do irony and, you know that Shakespeare saying: ‘clothes maketh the man’? As far as Kate was aware he’d been unstoppable ever since.
If Old Man Isaac still allowed Crispin to use The Clock House for ‘all things village-related’ meetings, Kate wondered how she’d deal with Crispin when it was time to tell him she owned the building and meetings would need to be booked through her.
Kate stopped mid-stride.
She