How to Find Love in a Book Shop(23)

‘I’ll put a gate up, shall I?’

Dillon’s voice startled Sarah and dragged her back to the matter in hand.

‘Yes. And put a lock on it for the time being. I don’t think the folly’s safe. We don’t want anyone getting injured.’

Dillon nodded. But he was eyeing her with interest. Sarah started to doodle on the edge of one of the planting plans. She couldn’t quite look at him. He knows, she thought. How she wished she could talk to someone about it, but she knew the importance of keeping secrets. And if you couldn’t keep your own secret, how on earth could you trust someone else to keep it?

‘Right.’ Dillon stood up. ‘I better get on. It’s starting to get dark early. The days are getting shorter.’

‘Yes.’ Sarah couldn’t decide which was worse. The days or the nights. She could fill her days with things to do but she had to pretend to everybody, from Ralph and Alice down to the postman, that nothing was wrong, and that was wearing. At night she could stop; she didn’t need to pretend any more and she could sleep. But her sleep was troubled and she couldn’t control her dreams. He would appear, and she would wake, her face wet with tears, trying not to sob. Trying not to wake Ralph because what could she say? How could she explain her distress?

She sighed, and took another custard cream. Her brain had no respite these days. Everything whirled around in her head, day and night; a washing machine filled with thoughts, fears, worries that seemed to have no answer.

And she missed him. God, she missed him.

She picked up their used mugs and took them back to the kitchen. On the kitchen table was a copy of the Peasebrook Advertiser. Ralph must have been reading it, or one of the staff. Sarah kept her kitchen open to the people who worked for her, because she felt it was important for them to feel part of the family. The kitchen was enormous and there was a back door out into the courtyard so they didn’t have to traipse through the rest of the house, and there were just less than a dozen full-timers working in the estate office and the tea room and the shop, and in the grounds. They were usually all gone by five o’clock so it wasn’t too much of an imposition, and she was convinced it was an advantage.

She looked down at the paper. There was a picture of him on the left-hand page. His dear face; his kind smile; that trademark sweep of salt-and-pepper hair.

Memorial service to celebrate the life of Julius Nightingale …

She sat down, reread all the details. Her head swam. She knew about the funeral – it was a small town, after all. It had been tiny, but this memorial was open to anyone who wanted to come. Anyone who wanted to do a reading or a eulogy was to go and see Emilia at the shop.

A eulogy? She would never be able to begin. Or stop. How could she put into words how wonderful he had been? She could feel it coming, a great wave of grief, unstoppable, merciless. She looked up at the ceiling, took deep breaths, anything to stop it engulfing her. She was so tired of being strong; so tired of having to fight it. But she couldn’t afford to break down. Anyone might come in, at any moment.

She gathered herself and looked down at the page again. Should she go? Could she go? It wouldn’t be odd. Everyone in Peasebrook knew Julius. Their social circles overlapped in the typical Venn diagram of a small country town. And in her role as ‘lady of the manor’ Sarah attended lots of funerals and memorials of people she didn’t know terribly well, as a gesture. No one would think it odd if she turned up.

But they would if she broke down and howled, which is what she wanted to do.

She wished he was here, so she could ask his advice. He always knew the right thing to do. She imagined them, curled up on the sofa in the folly. She imagined poking him playfully, being kittenish. He made her feel kittenish: soft and teasingly affectionate.

‘Should I go to your memorial service?’

And in her imagination, he turned to her with one of his mischievous smiles. ‘Bloody hell, I should think so,’ he said. ‘If anyone should be there, it’s you.’





Five

Jackson had been dreading his meeting with Ian Mendip. Well, meeting made it sound a bit formal. It was a ‘friendly chat’. In his kitchen. Very informal. Ian had a proposition.

Jackson suspected it would mean doing something he didn’t want to do yet again. Breaking all the promises he had made to himself about getting out of Ian’s clutches and getting some backbone. He had no alternative though. He had no qualifications, no references, no rich dad to bail him out like so many of the kids he’d been at school with.

That was the trouble with this area, thought Jackson, as he took his seat at Ian’s breakfast bar: you were either stinking rich or piss poor. And whilst he had once been filled with ambition, and optimism, now he was resigned to a life of making do and being at Ian Mendip’s beck and call. Somewhere amongst it all he’d lost his ambition and his drive. The galling thing was he knew it was his own fault. He’d had the same opportunities as Mendip: none. He just hadn’t played it as smart.

He looked around the kitchen: white high shine gloss units, a glass-fronted wine fridge racked up with bottles of vintage champagne, music coming as if from nowhere. There was a massive three-wick scented candle oozing an expensive smell, and expensive it seriously was – Mia had wanted one, and Jackson really couldn’t get his head round anyone thinking spending hundreds of pounds on a candle was a good idea.