Daisy didn’t want that. ‘Please stay a while.’
‘Very well.’
‘I want to hear more.’ She squeezed hold of the quilt more tightly. ‘I need to.’
‘I’m Anton, by the way.’
‘Daisy. But you know that.’ She laughed.
‘I do. And I’m glad I found you, Daisy.’
She took a deep breath, he waited while she ran her hand across the quilt reacquainting herself with its familiarity, the stitching and designsthey’d carefully thought out and worked on diligently.
And then with the quilt in her arms she stood up. ‘You’re right. I think we need a cup of tea.’ She wanted to know everything, to process how the quilt was still in one piece, how it had found its way home after all this time.
‘I never say no to a good brew.’ He smiled.
She folded the quilt carefully and although it was hard to let it gowhen she’d only just got it back, she set it onto the counter. And with mugs of tea made and a chair brought out from the back for Anton, they sat beside the tree and she listened as he told her everything.
‘When my wife had her car accident it was bad,’ Anton began in a soft voice she could’ve listened to for hours. ‘She’d gone through the window, was lying on the ground, the car upside down.A good Samaritan stopped, called an ambulance, and waited with her, talked to her even though she was unresponsive. He covered her in a quilt.’ He waited for Daisy to realise what his words meant.
Daisy’s voice wobbled. ‘My dad was the good Samaritan.’
‘Yes,’ he nodded. ‘The quilt went with my Lily in the ambulance, the paramedics must’ve thought it belonged to her. And when Lily came to inthe hours after the accident and saw the quilt on the back of a chair I told her what had happened. She was desperate to find the person who had helped her. We asked questions but all I could find out was that it had been a man, that he was local, and other than that I couldn’t get any more details. I don’t know if it was confidentiality or because they didn’t know who he was, but we just knew thequilt was very special to someone out there. Handmade, am I right?’ He took in the view of the interior of the shop, the quilts on display at the far end.
‘We all worked on it – Mum, Dad, us three girls. It was a special quilt for us to snuggle under for movie night. Every Sunday.’ Her voice drifted off.
‘When we couldn’t get the answers we needed,’ he explained, ‘we had the quilt cleaned andput it in a bag for safe keeping. I put up photographs in the local community centre, I asked around, but nobody knew where it had come from. And I’m sorry to say that after a while, it was forgotten about and pushed aside.’
Daisy held onto her mug of tea more tightly as details came rushing back at her. ‘I remember the night it happened.’ She shook her head. ‘I hadn’t thought about it untilnow.’
Daisy had been at home every day since her stint in hospital, ashamed of how she’d acted, wanting to find a way forwards but not knowing how. One evening Harry had been home late from work and she’d hung back from going downstairs because she could tell something had happened. Loretta was hugging him tightly in the hallway and Daisy had wondered whether he was going to confess everythingto his wife. She’d crept along the landing and halfway down the stairs to listen.
‘Dad told Mum how he’d seen an accident,’ she said to Anton, ‘how he’d stopped and seen a woman badly hurt. He was devastated that the hospital wouldn’t give him any details about whether the woman was all right.’
‘The not knowing is often the worst part,’ Anton agreed. ‘If your dad hadn’t been there to call theambulance and keep her warm until help arrived, she might not have made it home at all.’
‘How did you find us in the end?’
‘My daughter, Fay, wouldn’t let it rest. She remembered Lily and I talking about the good Samaritan, about the quilt and how special it was and when she saw the quilt once it was out of the attic she burst into tears.’ He grinned. ‘She’s just had twins, and by her own admissionis a bag of hormones and emotions. And she told me she was crying at the thought of having something so special for her own little family and losing it in a moment. Fay suggested we use social media and cast our net a little wider. She put up a post with a picture of the quilt and we knew the three initials, F, G and D, had to mean something, so she asked if anyone knew somebody into quiltingwith sisters or daughters or best friends with those initials. We said they were most likely, but not definitely, going to be living within a ten mile radius of where my wife’s car accident happened, although of course we weren’t sure, it was a long shot, but we listed all the towns and villages and that included Butterbury.
‘Fay had several responses about the quilting but none specific forthe initials until one reply that said there was a sewing shop that sold haberdashery items, quilts and quilting equipment and that it was run by a lady who had three daughters. They didn’t know the names but a week later several others had seen the post and we had our F, G, and D. Fern, Ginny and Daisy. It still feels strange –’ he smiled ‘– after all these years to finally put names to the initialsand now a face to one of the names.’
Daisy picked up the quilt again and hugged it to her. ‘Thank you, from the bottom of my heart. You have no idea what this means to me and my family.’
‘I think I do,’ he said. ‘That’s why I’m here after all.’
Anton didn’t go straight away. He’d asked her to thank Harry for him and she told him Harry had passed away soon after the accident. She’d managed notto cry though and instead between them they’d opened the quilt up on the counter and she talked Anton through the squares. She told him how Fern was into mathematics, she was a keen photographer, and it had been Ginny who was the most passionate about sewing. She talked about how Harry wasn’t too good at any sort of needlework and that he always complained his fingers were too fat. And when Antonsaid he had to go she almost didn’t want him to.
Fern burst through the door before Anton had a chance to do up his coat. ‘Daisy, I’ve discovered the best gingerbread ever!’ She had a brown paper bag in hand. ‘Oh, excuse me, sorry, customers.’ She pulled a face.
‘Which one’s this?’ Anton beamed and Daisy wondered whether this might be a process that had brought him some comfort, honouring hiswife’s memory by returning the quilt that had helped her on that dreadful night.
‘I’m Fern.’ Fern smiled, extending the hand that wasn’t clutching the bag of gingerbread.
‘Anton, pleased to meet you.’
Daisy grinned and pointed beyond the door. ‘And that lady out there is Ginny, the middle sister.’
