Della’s boyfriend Frank had bagged them a table at the Red Lion. The only pub in the village, it had managed to modernise and bring in new, passing-through clientele, whilst losing none of its faded charm. Frank’s face literally lit up when he spotted Della, as if someone had turned up his brightness. Roxanne never realised that actually happened to people, especially when they had been together for eighteen months, as Della and Frank had. From Roxanne’s perspective, this ranked as virtually a lifetime together. Sean aside, most of her liaisons had petered out after a few weeks.
He hugged each of the sisters in turn. ‘Hey, Rox! Great to see you. I see you’ve dried off.’
She laughed in disbelief. ‘Yes, Frank. So word’s got around. Did you see it on the news?’
‘I did.’ He nodded gravely. ‘Something about a London fashion editor being caught in a downpour in an inappropriately thin cardigan and what could only be described as slippers.’
Roxanne chuckled. Although she had only met Frank a handful of times, he was one of those people who made you feel instantly at ease.
‘Fashion director, actually,’ Della corrected him.
‘Oh, sorry!’ He pulled a mock-alarmed face. ‘Can I make it up to you with a drink, Rox?’
‘A white wine would be lovely, thanks.’
He turned to Della. ‘Same for you, angel?’
He called her angel. What a sweetheart Frank was, Roxanne thought as he headed for the bar.
‘Yes please,’ Della replied, glancing to the door. ‘Oh – Michael’s just arrived.’ She waved over and glanced back at Roxanne. ‘Hope you don’t mind that I asked him to join us. Remember he popped into the shop today?’
‘The Almanac of Grains man? Of course I don’t mind – as long as he doesn’t try to rope me into going to that sourdough workshop.’ Roxanne glanced over to see that Frank and Michael had fallen into conversation at the bar.
‘You should give it a try,’ Della cajoled. ‘Be open-minded. It’s only baking, nothing to be scared of really …’
‘You don’t know until you’ve tried it,’ Roxanne quipped, and they both laughed.
The men arrived at the table and set down their drinks. ‘So, how was the walk?’ Michael asked, taking the seat beside her and stretching out his long, jeans-clad legs.
‘Not so great actually …’
‘I did say to take a whistle and torch.’ He chuckled, and Roxanne found herself smiling too.
‘News of my near-drowning has travelled fast then,’ she added.
‘It’s that kind of place,’ Frank remarked. ‘You know what it’s like around here.’
Roxanne murmured that she did, and turned back to Michael. ‘You’re not from around here, are you? How come you ended up setting up a bakery in Burley Bridge?’
He paused and sipped his beer. Behind the wire-rimmed glasses, his kind, light blue eyes were edged with long dark lashes and undeniably attractive. In his chunky grey sweater he looked like an active sort – a keen gardener, maybe, or a hill walker, always correctly attired.
‘I’m from Canterbury originally,’ he explained. ‘I moved up this way – to York – to take up a new teaching post about ten years ago.’ He smiled briefly. ‘I was a chemistry teacher in a previous life.’
‘Wow, that’s a bit of a jump to running a bakery, isn’t it?’
‘Mum used to say baking was all about chemistry,’ Della remarked.
Michael paused, as if wondering how best to explain it. ‘It was my ex-wife’s idea actually.’ He glanced briefly at Della and took another sip from his tall glass. ‘And it’s all because of your sister, really – or, rather, her shop. Suzy, my ex, and I were driving through the village on our way to see relatives. She spotted the bookshop and we decided to stop. And that was it – she fell in love with it, and with the whole village when we had a wander around. She couldn’t get it out of her head. She was determined that we should live here, and perhaps even set up a small business of our own.’ He smiled at Della. ‘Bought up half your stock, didn’t she?’
Della nodded. ‘Yep – most of the baking section, if I remember.’
‘She was working in the council’s press office back then,’ Michael went on, ‘and pretty much hating every minute, and she’d always loved to bake. Redundancies were on the horizon so she started studying baking, huddling over all these vintage books, memorising methods, getting to grips with the science behind it all …’
‘Wow,’ Roxanne murmured.
‘… She started baking for friends – celebration cakes, breads, that kind of thing, then supplying a local deli and selling at farmers’ markets. Unbeknown to me, she was also keeping an eye out for properties, and then the perfect place came up on Rosemary Lane …’
‘What was it before?’ Roxanne asked, delicately sidestepping the ex-wife issue, as she figured that they could barely have launched their business before splitting up. In fact, she genuinely couldn’t remember what the shop had been prior to its incarnation as a bakery. Until Della had moved back here, when Roxanne had returned only occasionally to visit their mother, everything had sort of merged together in a sprawl of dismal grey stone.
‘A hardware shop.’ Michael chuckled. ‘We breezed in, like you do when you haven’t a clue about the nightmare you’re about to launch into—’
‘Nightmare?’ Roxanne cut in, unable to rein in her curiosity.
However, Michael’s story was cut short when Nicola Crowther, the hairdresser whom Roxanne knew from way back in primary school, hurried over to join them. ‘I thought it was you. You look amazing, Roxy! I love your dress …’
‘Thanks, Nicola,’ Roxanne replied. ‘So, how are things with you?’
‘Where’s it from?’ Nicola asked, ignoring her question. ‘Designer, I expect?’
‘No, er, Oasis actually …’ How ironic, Roxanne thought, that she worked on a fashion magazine yet had never had her clothing scrutinised as much as it was here. ‘So, how are you?’ She tried again.
‘Oh, just the same, you know how it is around here …’ Nicola gazed some more at Roxanne’s blue and white spotted shift dress, then turned and beckoned to her companion at the bar. ‘Bev? Remember Roxy Cartwright?’
‘Yes, of course! Always won the art prize at school …’ The other woman hurried over to join them.
‘You won’t remember my sister,’ Nicola said.
‘Of course I remember Bev …’ Roxanne said truthfully, recalling her being something of an athletic champion back in the day.
‘You never age, do you, Roxanne?’ Bev exclaimed. ‘I swear – not a day. I don’t know how you do it.’
‘That’s so kind,’ Roxanne blustered. ‘You’re both looking great …’
The sisters beamed at Roxanne, and Roxanne caught Della, Frank and Michael exchanging bemused expressions over the table. Although Nicola and Bev knew Della too, they had barely given her a cursory greeting.
‘Look who’s up from London!’ Nicola trilled, and another woman – Penny Rattan, who ran a garden centre just outside the village – hurried over to join them. Roxanne squirmed in her seat, wondering if this was how it felt to be a minor celebrity.
‘How long are you here for?’ Penny asked.
‘Erm, a couple of months, I think,’ Roxanne replied. She remembered Penny from primary school too; a terribly popular girl who was always given the much-coveted role of Mary in the nativity whilst Roxanne never progressed from being a lowly shepherd. It amazed her how many familiar faces were still here.
‘A couple of months? Gosh, that’s a long time to be away. Has something happened?’
‘No, uh, I’m just having a break from work. A sort of sabbatical.’
Penny frowned. ‘Oh, I see.’ So you’re in the throes of some kind of breakdown, her tone suggested.
Possibly in an attempt to rescue her, Michael passed Roxanne a menu. ‘The fish and chips are supposed to be the best in Yorkshire,’ he remarked. ‘They’ve just brought in a new chef here.’
‘I might just go for that.’ Fish and chips. What could be more delicious? she thought, picturing the look of alarm this would provoke on her colleagues’ faces back at the office. Zoe, the beauty director, once confided to Roxanne that she hadn’t had a chip for fifteen years. Although her mind was made up, Roxanne continued to study the menu in the hope that her hovering audience – who were all standing up, looming over her – might drift away.
‘So, how’s life in the big smoke?’ Bev asked.
‘It’s great. Really great.’ Roxanne forced a wide smile.
‘I spotted you briefly at Kitty’s funeral, swanning about looking gorgeous, of course, but we didn’t get the chance to chat.’ Did the whole world think she had just ‘swanned about’ at her mother’s funeral? ‘Still working in fashion?’ Bev quizzed her.
‘Yes, just about hanging on in there,’ she replied. A young waitress with her dark hair in skinny plaits came over, and they all ordered. Even now, Nicola, Bev and Penny remained clustered around her.
‘Bet it’s exciting,’ Penny remarked, pushing her black-rimmed spectacles up her nose. ‘So, d’you have any kids?’
‘No, that’s never happened for me,’ Roxanne replied, for the second time in a week.
Bev raised a brow. ‘Are you married?’
Roxanne baulked at the woman’s directness. ‘Er, nope, that hasn’t happened either …’
Nicola grinned. ‘They must be mad, those men in London!’
‘Oh, they are. Every single one of them.’ Roxanne smiled stiffly, catching her sister’s bemused glance across the table and wondering whether that might be the end of the interrogation for now. I do actually have a boyfriend! she wanted to announce, like a fifteen-year-old desperate for kudos. I mean, someone desires me. Okay, he did finish with me on Saturday but by Monday it was all back on …
She’d forgotten what it was like here; how every little thing became everyone’s business. For almost three decades she had lived fairly contentedly, a tiny speckle in the vastness of London, in which anonymity was pretty much guaranteed, and where you could pop out to the shops in a top hat and a pair of marabou-feathered hot pants if you so desired, and no one would even give you a second look. Perhaps the anonymity aspect wasn’t quite so ideal if you collapsed in your flat and lay there, slowly bleeding to death and being nibbled by mice. But in the general scheme of things it suited her just fine.
Finally, Nicola, Bev and Penny said their goodbyes and wandered off to the bar. Pinging impertinent questions was clearly thirsty work – or had they merely been expressing a friendly interest? Perhaps Roxanne just wasn’t used to that northern directness anymore.
As the talk turned to Frank’s architectural work, Roxanne waited for an opportunity to steer the conversation back to Michael’s bakery. He had piqued her interest. If his ex-wife had driven the whole project from the start, then why wasn’t she still around, up to her elbows in flour and yeast and God knows what else?
‘Frank’s just completed an amazing glass-and-oak house in Hestlebridge,’ Della was saying proudly as platefuls of cod and chips arrived. The portions were enormous, the great mounds of chips the most enticing thing Roxanne had laid eyes on since that bowlful of creamy carbonara at the little Italian place near her flat.
‘That’s brilliant, Frank,’ she said, vigorously sprinkling her plateful with malt vinegar. ‘So, is business pretty healthy at the moment?’
‘It’s not bad,’ Frank replied with a self-deprecating smile, ‘but for every one of those kind of projects there are twenty-five garage conversions.’
‘D’you mind that?’ Roxanne asked. ‘The less exciting jobs, I mean?’
‘Not a bit. It’s all work, and obviously, I have Becca to see through the rest of college, and Eddie to think about too. Whatever the scale of the job, I just try to do it as well as I possibly can.’
Roxanne nodded. ‘I like your attitude – that sort of getting-on-with-things approach.’
Frank smiled and shrugged. ‘What else would I do?’
They tucked into their cod and chips, and when their plates were finally cleared by the cheerful young waitress, Frank wrapped an arm around Della’s shoulders. Roxanne couldn’t help but notice again the way he looked at her sister, as if, even now, he could hardly believe his luck to have found her. Would anyone ever look at her that way, she wondered? She couldn’t recall that Sean ever had – and he certainly wasn’t one for an affectionate arm-draped-around-shoulders scenario in the pub. Her mobile rang, and she pulled it from her bag. It was Sean – twice in one day, which was most unlike him – just as he’d popped into her mind.
‘Sorry, I’d better take this,’ she said quickly, jumping up from the table and stepping towards the wood-panelled wall as she took the call. ‘Hi, darling,’ she said. ‘This is a nice surprise …’
‘Hi,’ he said brusquely. ‘It sounds noisy there. Where are you?’
‘In the Red Lion. We’ve just had dinner. Frank’s here, and Michael, he runs the local bakery—’
‘Rox, can I ask you something?’ Sean cut in abruptly.
She frowned. ‘Of course.’
‘Did you give Tommy my phone numbers?’
‘Tommy?’ she repeated.
‘The joiner. That guy who fixed your door. He’s been calling me constantly about doing that job for him.’
Roxanne sensed her cheeks blazing. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry. He asked again, he seemed so keen – and you did say you’d photograph Jessica, remember?’
‘Yes, but only to get him off my back. You knew that. I had no intention of actually contacting him, and I didn’t realise she was a bloody dog!’
Roxanne glanced over her shoulder. Della and the others were in earshot. She hated conducting phone conversations in social situations; it seemed so rude. Michael’s gaze caught hers, and she mouthed ‘sorry’ and flapped her hand about. Still clutching her phone, she edged her way past convivial groups in the bustling pub and stepped out into the cool evening. ‘I didn’t think for a minute that he’d start bothering you,’ she murmured.
‘Stalking, more like! And it’s hardly what I do, is it? Pictures of pets on fluffy rugs? Christ!’
A small chill ran through her. Back home in London, Sean’s rant might have sounded perfectly reasonable. Yet here, standing outside the impossibly picturesque pub in her childhood village, his response to Tommy’s pretty innocuous request seemed ridiculous. He’d been asked to photograph a puppy, for goodness’ sake, not clean a petrol station lavatory with his tongue. ‘Oh, come on,’ she muttered. ‘Just do him a favour. You were all mate-this, mate-that when you met, laughing about all the inept women you’d both known …’
‘I was just being friendly,’ he insisted. ‘So, anyway, what d’you suggest I do now? He’s called my mobile four times. He’s tried my landline too. For God’s sake – I’m being hounded!’
‘“Hounded”,’ she repeated, trying to lighten the mood. ‘Very appropriate …’
Sean sighed heavily. Roxanne waited for him to ask how the rest of her first day here had been, and how Della was – the usual questions one might expect from a caring boyfriend who was far away. She waited for him to add that he was planning to come up to see her, as soon as humanly possible – it was only two hundred miles north, for goodness’ sake, hardly the Arctic Circle. But Sean said nothing.
Roxanne inhaled a lungful of cool evening air. ‘Just tell him you’re too busy,’ she murmured to break the silence.
‘Yeah, that’s what I said.’
‘Good. Oh, come on, honey. I’m sure you’ll figure something out. Do we have to end the day on this note?’
‘Well, I don’t want to,’ he huffed.
‘Neither do I,’ she said, stepping back into the pub and glimpsing Della, Frank and Michael all chatting animatedly at the corner table. At this moment, rejoining them was a far more appealing proposition than appeasing a fifty-year-old man about a dog.
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he conceded.
‘Okay, darling,’ she said quickly. ‘I miss you. Bye for now.’
‘Bye for now, babe. Miss you too.’
She hung up and made her way back to the others.
Michael turned to her. ‘Everything okay?’
‘Er, yes – just some mini crisis at home.’
Della frowned. ‘Something at your flat?’
No, that was last week … ‘I, er, met this joiner guy who wants his dog photographed – you know, a pet portrait kind of thing. So I gave him Sean’s numbers.’ She looked around the table. Three bewildered faces peered at her.
‘Rox’s boyfriend’s a photographer,’ Della told Michael, before turning back to her sister. ‘I don’t understand why this is an issue, though. This dog thing, I mean …’
Roxanne shrugged, wondering how to explain it without sounding quite mad. She glanced at Michael, who was regarding her intently, and realised how reluctant she was to go into this now. ‘Well, it’s not really Sean’s thing,’ she started to explain. ‘I suppose, where photography’s concerned – or anything creative, really – some jobs are more prestigious than others. He’s sort of reached a certain level, and it would be bad for his profile to do anything below that.’
She glanced at Frank, an architect who was as willing to draw up plans for simple garage extensions as he was to design a stunning glass-and-oak home. It was all work, after all. It paid the bills and enabled him to support his children, and wasn’t there something honest and admirable about that?
‘Sean shoots for all the big fashion magazines,’ she continued, sweat prickling at her underarms now. ‘He does major ad campaigns. You’ll have seen his work on billboards.’ She paused, waiting for someone – any one of them – to look impressed. She was still met with bemused looks. ‘Honestly,’ she went on, ‘he’s at the stage where he can pick and choose his jobs and so, the way he looks at it, he doesn’t want to lower himself to shooting some joiner’s dog.’
She stopped and laughed. ‘Poor choice of phrasing,’ Michael chuckled.
‘You know what I mean.’
He was peering at her now, amusement glinting in those clear blue eyes. ‘Is the dog terribly unattractive?’
‘No,’ she exclaimed. ‘She’s a very cute Cavalier King Charles spaniel, from what I saw on her owner’s phone …’
‘Ah, a pedigree. We just have a mutt – your typical fifty-seven varieties …’
‘But the breed isn’t the point,’ she added, aware of how petty and silly the whole episode sounded. ‘I mean, any dog he’d have a problem with …’
‘Or in fact any pet at all?’ Michael suggested, raising a brow.
‘Yes!’
‘Like a hamster or gerbil?’
Roxanne nodded, and wondered if he was gently teasing her now.
‘It’s what the actual assignment might do to his reputation,’ he added.
‘Yes, that’s it exactly.’ She drained her glass, excused herself and made her way to the ladies’, irritated at Sean for interrupting her evening with this whole ridiculous business. She had been enjoying talking to Michael, getting to know someone new who wasn’t involved with magazines or fashion. But of course, Sean had just wanted to offload to her, which was understandable. She reminded herself now that he wasn’t really pretentious, and that they really did have the best times together – plus she fancied him terribly. She was still prone to sitting up in bed of a morning, taking in the glorious sight of him as he wandered naked around her bedroom, casually stretching and tugging on his clothes.
Roxanne washed her hands unnecessarily – she didn’t actually need the loo – torn between bubbling annoyance and a fierce desire to see Sean right now and jump into bed with him. It had felt good to be here tonight, until he’d called – now it seemed as if her two lives had slammed together, awkwardly, and thrown her off course.
Back out in the pub, she made her way to their table. She recognised a few faces and briefly said hi, but kept on moving through the crowd. It was busy for a Tuesday night – but then, the village had a feeling of having been woken up and revitalised, and that had all started when Della’s shop had put Burley Bridge on the map. Without the bookshop, there would be no bakery, no boutique, no gift shop or art gallery, and even the Red Lion would have been pretty dead on a week night a few years ago. When she considered what Della had done for the village, Roxanne’s own achievements seemed rather paltry.
She registered a male voice – Michael’s voice – floating above the general chatter. ‘I know what you’re up to, Della. Bit of matchmaking, wasn’t it? You couldn’t resist!’
Roxanne froze as Della laughed awkwardly. None of them had noticed that she had stopped by the old-fashioned jukebox; the one that had sat there, glowing gaudily, for as long as she could remember. A song finished, and the inner workings clicked and whirred as another was selected.
‘I just thought you’d get along,’ Della said lightly, a trace of defensiveness in her voice now.
‘Yes, but she’s seeing someone, isn’t she?’ Michael retorted. ‘You conveniently forgot to mention that part.’