Daisy passed it to her mother. ‘Read it for yourself, I’ll sweep up.’ Leaves had blown in after the postman and even more after Loretta so Daisy grabbed the dustpan and brush from beneath the counter.
Loretta still had her coat on and as she read the card she loosened the neck button. ‘I’m glad shehad a nice time, we should get the Paris postcard soon enough as she’s already home now. She said Paris was magical, she and Melanie had a wonderful time at dinner, just the two of them, on the last night.’
‘You spoke to Ginny?’ Loretta was hanging her coat on the hook past the wall of photographs and the pinboard with the postcards. ‘You never said.’ Loretta was usually so vocal about beingin touch with Ginny or Fern, as though Daisy might forget she had sisters if their names weren’t mentioned often enough.
‘I thought I did,’ she dismissed.
When her mum didn’t expand, Daisy recapped what jobs she’d managed to get done in the shop, what she hadn’t quite got to yet. They were well-versed in this type of handover. She left her mum unpacking another box of fat quarters, shruggedon her coat, looped her scarf around her neck, tugged on her gloves and picked up the bags she’d tucked away out of sight earlier.
‘Did you read the card?’ Loretta’s question stopped her before she could escape. The card was already pinned up with the others.
‘Of course,’ Daisy lied.
‘What have you got there?’
She didn’t miss much. ‘Just some old clothes for the second-hand shop.’
‘You should’vesaid you were going to drop some off, I have a few things I want to get rid of.’
Daisy quickly pre-empted any suggestion her mum might run to their house at the end of the street to get them. ‘Sorry, I can’t hang around. I promised Grandad I’d be up there by one o’clock.’ And she had no intention of going to the second-hand shop either.
Loretta looked again at the pinboard of postcards. ‘Youknow, you could take yourself off for a long weekend in Europe if you liked, I really wouldn’t mind.’
‘I know you wouldn’t. But I’m not all that fussed.’ Nobody else had ever understood Daisy’s fixation with the great outdoors, as though Europe and a hotel or apartment were the preferred experience. Loretta, Fern and Ginny had no desire to embrace nights beneath canvas, waking to the rugged outdoorsthat Daisy and her dad had both had a passion for. Daisy loved how the weather made it different every time and no matter how inclement she always embraced it and the wonder of the skies, the clouds, the way mother nature was the boss on each and every day of the year.
Daisy had almost made it to the door of the shop, bypassing an elderly man and pointing him in the direction of the turquoisewool, when Loretta’s voice stopped her in her tracks. ‘I’ve asked your sisters to come home for Christmas.’
Perhaps blurting it out when Daisy was in a rush and they had a customer had been on purpose. ‘For a couple of days, you mean? And both of them?’ They hadn’t all shared Christmas for years and Daisy was sure she wasn’t the only sister to be glad of that.
‘I’ve asked them both to come fora few weeks, some concentrated family time.’
Daisy almost burst out laughing.Concentrated family time?It wasn’t something that the Chamberlains did well at all. ‘It’ll be lovely to see them,’ she said, putting on a front, because she could tell her mum was serious.
It wasn’t that Daisy didn’t love Ginny and Fern, and it wasn’t that she didn’t like them either, it was that none of them seemedto understand one another at all. Fern was a high-flying career woman who somehow juggled family and a husband to huge success, Ginny lived a life without bounds flitting wherever the mood took her, and Daisy was here in the shop taking responsibility and making sure their mother got the happiness she deserved.
‘I want you all to be on your best behaviour,’ Loretta went on.
‘We’re not children.’Daisy felt eleven years old rather than the grown woman that she was.
‘You’remychildren.’
‘Why this year, why all of a sudden?’ A feeling of panic flooded her bones. ‘Mum, are you sick?’Please don’t let that be it, please don’t let this be a prelude to something sinister.She’d almost forgotten there was a customer at the other end of the shop he was so quiet until he put the wool he’d selectedonto the counter by the till and told Loretta he was going to select some buttons.
Loretta came to Daisy’s side and spoke quietly, reassuring her youngest daughter. ‘I’m not sick, no. Do I look sick? Is it this lipstick, is it the wrong colour?’
Daisy began to laugh. ‘Don’t joke, you got me worried.’
‘It’s your grandad.’ Before Daisy could ask whether he was sick, she added, ‘He’s fine, enjoyinghis new life at Butterbury Lodge, as you know, but when I talk to him there’s a sadness. He misses you three girls. And I don’t mean individually, you all see him, you most days and your sisters whenever they’re home. But I’d like to give him one more Christmas with us all as a family. It’s been years since we all sat around the table together and I know how special it would be.’
Daisy’s eyesfilled with tears at any reference to her grandad getting older. Daft, it was a fact of life, but she couldn’t bear the thought of being without him.
Joshua Abney chose that moment to come into the shop, almost knocking into Daisy with the door. ‘Sorry,’ he grimaced. He was carrying a rather plentiful wooden box of winter fruits and vegetables. A stalk of Brussels sprouts poked out of one sideas he leaned around it and added, ‘Didn’t see you there. Are you OK?’
‘Of course.’ She shook away the tears and the look of melancholy that clearly gave her feelings away. Along with the zing from the lemons and the sharp aromatic scent from the grapefruits balanced on top of something else came a subtle undertone of a woody aftershave that Daisy realised had begun to be a familiar associationwith Joshua as much as his deep brown eyes which were almost a match for his hair.
The Abneys, much like the Chamberlains did with their business, had been running the Hawthorn Lane Farm for generations and Joshua, who was only a few years older than Daisy, worked on the land at his family’s fruit and vegetable farm along with his brother, Lucas, and their parents. When Ginny had dated Lucas,Daisy had had the biggest crush on Joshua. He’d been dating someone at the time and Daisy had become well versed at hiding her feelings, resisting his good looks, the hair with a little peak in the fringe that suited him, sexy thick dark eyebrows and full lips her gaze was drawn to every time he spoke.
Loretta beckoned Joshua into the shop. She, and Mrs Ledbetter, knew full well that Joshua likedDaisy. Daisy just hoped neither of them had cottoned on to her own feelings because although tempting at times, she really had no desire to get lost in romantic notions of falling in love and living happily ever after when people could hurt one another so badly.
