Christmas at Hope Cottage: A Magical Feel-Good Romance Novel(32)

‘He’d come to visit his friend Gordon for the summer. Liam and he had been to school together before Gordon moved to Whistling as a lad. Well, from what I can remember, he took one look at your mother and decided to extend his stay, got himself a job, here,’ said Uncle Joe, one afternoon when Dot had sent her past to drop off some papers that he needed. They got to chatting, after he offered her a cuppa. ‘The job came with a room – just above the shop, so to your dad it was perfect, I suppose, just what he needed.’

After that, Emma popped in more regularly to visit her uncle and to hear more about her dad. He’d show her the new cars that had come in for sale, and she’d sit in his small back office, which had a view of the high street, and they’d chat.

‘He was a good man, hard worker too. He was studying part-time, something to do with management, marketing, that sort of thing, I think. Good head on his shoulders, but he wasn’t all work, you know? He was funny too, could be a bit of a practical joker at times.

‘On my birthday, the year he worked for us, he took the liberty of breaking into my computer and changing everything to extra-large font, and he and one of the sales guys put up a rail all around the office, just in case I fell. I was only fifty-nine!’

Though, of course, that sounded ancient to nine-year-old Emma, but it helped her to remember some of the practical jokes her father used to play at home when she was growing up.

Like the time he switched the containers of the ready-made meals her mother ordered – for jelly beans, chocolate cake and marshmallows – and how her mother had opened some of them and laughed till tears leaked out of her eyes. The two of them had seemed to hold hands and giggle for a long time after that.

Or the time he’d come home with three pairs of funny slippers for each of them, just out of the blue one winter’s day. Hers were large green monster claws, his were red dragons with ridges on the back and a tail, and her mother’s had been a smiley shark, because that’s what he sometimes called her when she was sorting out people’s finances, ‘Sharky’.

Lots of his jokes weren’t wildly hysterical, but they never needed to be; they were dad jokes, and she missed them, and when she chatted to Uncle Joe, it felt like he wasn’t gone or forgotten.

‘Did I tell you about the time he wrapped up everything in my office in newspaper?’ he told her one day after school.

‘Everything?’ Emma said with a laugh, picturing the scene.

‘Every last little thing. The computer. The phone. My mug, the chair, the walls, the wheels on the chair…’



* * *



By the time Emma was ten, she could spot wild garlic at a hundred paces, and knew nineteen different varieties of poisonous mushroom just from their scent alone, yet she still hadn’t found a way to convince Mrs Allen that she and Jack could be friends.

By the time she was eleven she’d started making some of the simpler recipes from The Book. But she was impatient to do more; she wanted to be the one to say the words, stir in the bits of hope, so Evie would set her to work on mincing herbs. ‘You’ll get there, but it’s important that we get the basics right first,’ she said, peeling a potato, the skin a perfect spiral falling onto the worn table.

It wasn’t long though before she decided to try making a recipe from The Book by herself, when she was alone at the cottage while everyone was over at Dot’s playing cards. Her aim was simple: to mend the feud with the Allens, a noble, if rather self-serving, pursuit. But though she worked hard, using a complicated recipe that spoke of mending fences and healing rifts, and she sacrificed her favourite box of pencils under the mulberry bush, there was still nothing she could do to get an Allen to accept food from a Halloway.

‘Are you mad, Jack?’ said Stella Lea, her dark eyes nearly popping out of her skull in utter horror, knocking the slice of carrot cake out of Emma’s hands.

‘Hey!’ Emma cried in protest.

‘Do you want to be poisoned, or worse cursed?’ said Stella, ignoring Emma. ‘Don’t you know anything?’

Jack looked startled. ‘Um – well,’ he said, staring at the slice of cake on the ground, a small flicker of fear in his eyes.

Emma felt a small stab of guilt, which she squashed. It was for everyone’s good, she told herself. ‘It’s just cake,’ she said, face reddening slightly from the lie, as Stella marched away.

‘She doesn’t know what she’s talking about – here, have another slice,’ said Emma, holding out her lunchbox to Jack.

‘Why do you want me to have it?’ he asked, a slight trace of suspicion in his voice.

Emma blinked. ‘I just thought you’d like some – you don’t think I’d do anything bad to it, do you?’

He stared at her for a few seconds, then looked away. ‘Course not – um, I’m not hungry, but thanks though, see you,’ he said, beating a hasty retreat.

Emma felt like crying. All she wanted to do was help.

‘Well, what did you expect?’ said Maggie, who’d witnessed the whole thing. ‘I mean he is an Allen – you know they’re a bit funny about…’

‘What?’

‘Well, about your family – the food they make, you know.’

‘I know, but I was hoping…’

Maggie gave her a look. ‘What?’