The Keeper of Lost Things(51)
“Poor Carrot,” she said. “I bet you’ve been keeping your legs crossed.”
It was still pouring with rain, but fortunately Carrot had been given (among a great many other things) a waterproof coat for Christmas. He trotted out into the garden while Laura made their lunch. He was soon back, padding a pattern of wet paw prints across the floor tiles. After lunch, Laura went upstairs to sort out her outfit for that evening. She embarrassed herself with how long it took to choose appropriate underwear. Appropriately inappropriate. Searching for a favorite pair of earrings, she wondered if she might have left them in Therese’s bedroom and went to look. She turned the cold, brass doorknob. The door was locked. From the inside.
CHAPTER 32
Freddy poked Carrot with his toe from underneath the bedcovers.
“Get up, you lazy hound, and go and make us a cup of tea.”
Carrot snuggled deeper into his duvet nest and groaned contentedly. Freddy looked at Laura pleadingly and she promptly hid her head under the pillow.
“I suppose it’s down to me, then,” he said, hopping out of bed and searching for something to put on for the sake of warmth rather than modesty. Laura’s dressing gown was hardly fit for purpose but conveniently to hand. Freddy threw open the curtains onto a new year and a blue-sky-and-sunshine day. Laura stretched out, naked under the warm covers, and wondered if she had time to nip to the bathroom and make herself look a little more presentable; a little less middle-aged. But then, what was the point? Freddy had already seen her. Laura raked through her hair with her fingers and checked in the small mirror on the bedside table to see if she had any of last night’s mascara smudged underneath her eyes. At least she had nice teeth.
It was a full two hours later before they were up, dressed, and eating beans on toast when Sunshine arrived. They had promised her that if it was a nice day, they would all take Carrot for a walk on the nearby common. Laura and Freddy strolled arm in arm as Sunshine ran ahead with Carrot, throwing a ball-on-a-rope (another Christmas present) for him to retrieve.
“I get the distinct impression that young Carrot is only going along with this for Sunshine’s amusement rather than his own,” said Freddy.
Laura watched as Carrot dutifully returned the ball to Sunshine only to have her fling it away in a random direction and command that he “fetch!”
“I suspect that he’ll only play along for so long before he finds something more interesting to do.”
Sure enough, after the very next throw, Carrot watched as the ball descended into a gorse bush and then wandered off to look for rabbits. Poor Freddy was designated by Sunshine as Carrot’s second and was soon elbow-deep in gorse spines.
“Leave it,” said Laura as Freddy risked multiple puncture wounds. “We’ll get him another one.”
“No!” wailed Sunshine. “It was the Christmas present to him. He’ll be really upsetted and he’ll hate me because I can’t throw straight-in-a-line because I’m a ming-mong.”
Sunshine was close to tears.
“You most certainly are not a ming-mong!” said Freddy, finally surfacing from the depths of the gorse bush, triumphantly waving the ball-on-a-rope. “Who on earth called you that?”
“That’s what Nicola Crow used to call me at school when I dropped the ball in rounders.”
“Well, Nicola Crow was an ignoramus and you, young lady, are dancing drome. And don’t you forget it.”
He handed her the toy, smoothing away the pain from her face. But a smile was still too much to hope for. Tired of rabbits and having missed all the drama, Carrot wandered back and sniffed at his toy. Then he licked Sunshine’s hand. The price of a smile.
As they walked on, Laura now holding Carrot’s toy for safekeeping and Freddy inspecting his wounds, Sunshine pounced on a small, shiny object trodden into the grass.
“Look,” she said, digging it out of the mud with her fingers.
“What is it?” Freddy took it from her and rubbed the dirt away. It was a brass key ring in the shape of a baby elephant.
“We should take it home,” said Sunshine. “We should write it a label and put it on the webside.”
“Don’t you think that we’ve got more than enough lost things already?” said Laura, picturing the study crammed with things still waiting on shelves or in boxes for their gold stars. But Freddy agreed with Sunshine.
“Listen, I’ve been thinking about how we get people interested in the website. Putting all the stuff on there is only half the job. Getting the right people to look at it is the other. Now, Anthony’s is a great story, and I’m sure we’ll be able to get the local press, maybe even radio and television, interested, but if we have some really recent things that have been lost and found as well as all the old stuff, I think it could really help.”
And what really helped Laura was that Freddy had said “we.” She was no longer facing Anthony’s daunting legacy alone; she had help. Help that she had been too proud or too afraid to ask for.
Back at Padua, Sunshine went straight to the study to find a label for the key ring. They had all been invited to tea by Sunshine’s mum and dad, but she was determined to have the label written and the key ring on a shelf or in a box before they left. Laura went upstairs to get changed and Freddy rubbed the worst of the mud from Carrot’s feet and legs with an old towel in the kitchen. On the way past, Laura tried the door handle of Therese’s room. It was still locked. Back in the kitchen, she wrote a label for the key ring under Sunshine’s watchful eye.