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  ‘What you doing here then?’ he asked gruffly.

  ‘I’m … I’m visiting someone. And maybe staying for a little while. Relax a bit.’

  ‘By yourself?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Rosie crossly. This wasn’t 1953. She didn’t need to have it pointed out that she was by herself. ‘I’m just going to relax and have a look at the local countryside.’

  The driver snorted. ‘Seen the forecast, have you?’

  Rosie never bothered to read the weather forecast, she just checked whether the tubes were running.

  ‘Of course,’ she replied stiffly, as the bus finally creaked its way along the main street of the village. It seemed perilously small to Rosie, with a few shops, a pub, a Spar and not a soul to be seen, even though it was only eight in the evening.

  The bus continued up the little street, then trundled to a stop, the driver ringing a bell and shouting loudly, ‘End of the line! All change! All change please!’

  ‘It’s OK,’ said Rosie. ‘It’s just me on the bus.’

  ‘Just checking,’ said the man. ‘I’ll be back here in three days. Pick you up?’

  Rosie glanced out towards the pub and back towards the now-darkened shop. She swallowed, then braced herself and her heavy suitcase.

  ‘Not sure,’ she said, stepping off the bus and on to the quiet pavement beyond.

  ‘Lilian?’ It had taken her a while even to think who Angie could possibly mean.

  ‘Great-aunt Lilian,’ said Angie. ‘You remember?’

  Rosie looked into the fruit bowl. As usual they were running out of apples (which she liked), but there was a heap of bananas (that Gerard said he liked) going mouldy. Rosie squinted into her memory.

  ‘The lady who smelled of Parma violets? With all the sweets?’

  ‘Yes!’ said her mother triumphantly. ‘I know. She started you off.’

  Rosie’s love of sweets was a long-running family joke. Even now, she was rarely to be found without a bag of Fruit Pastilles or rhubarb and custards about her person. She said it was for the patients, but all the nurses knew it was Rosie you went to if you needed a quick pick-me-up in the middle of the afternoon.

  ‘Oh goodness!’ said Rosie. She did remember, from when she and Pip were children. An old lady – she had seemed very old to them then; it was hard to imagine she was still alive – who would occasionally visit, bringing mounds of slightly out-of-date sweets with her: Edinburgh rock and hard candies, and humbugs and gobstoppers. She and Pip would stuff themselves silly then lie around groaning and feeling completely green while their mum heaved a sigh and said she’d told them so, ‘Lilian, don’t bring them so much,’ and Lilian had sniffed, and said maybe she should raise children with some self-control. They hadn’t seen her often after that. But Rosie had never got over the excitement of the rustling paper bags, the light dustings of sugar, the sticky, fruity smells.

  ‘Wow! I do remember! It was rubbish, having a relative who ran a sweetshop but we never got to go there. Is she still alive?’

  ‘Rosie!’ said Angie reprovingly, as if she’d been popping in to visit Lilian every week for the last twenty years.

  Lilian was Angie’s aunt, the spinster sister of Mum’s beloved dad Gordon, and she lived in the village in Derbyshire her family came from, for reasons completely uninteresting to an eight-year-old who’d just overdosed on liquorice allsorts.

  ‘She must be a hundred,’ said Rosie absently.

  ‘Mid-eighties,’ said her mum. ‘Definitely getting on a bit. Although she was always one of those spinstery women who look old from about forty. Not that you’ll be like that,’ she added, hastily. Rosie hadn’t actually been thinking that, but it was nice of Angie to give her a complex about it. Since Angie had moved to Australia she’d come over all Kath and Kim and got into aquarobics and bleaching her hair and wearing Lycra pastels and having a deep tan, which had the effect of making her look simultaneously much older and much younger than fifty-three.

  ‘But she still writes. And she sent sweets for the monsters, even though you know how sugar exacerbates Kelly’s asthma, and chocolate sends Meridian hyper.’

  Rosie started boiling up the kettle. ‘But why are you telling me this, Mum?’

  ‘Well,’ said her mother. She paused. This wasn’t like Angie at all, who if she needed something tended to holler about it. ‘Here’s the thing.’

  ‘Mmmm?’

  Rosie had a sudden premonition this might be like the time Angie tried to get her to diagnose Kelly down the phone. Only a bit worse.

  ‘The thing is, Rosie, she’s in a spot of bother. And you’re the only one in the family who …’ Angie left the sentence unfinished. She didn’t have to finish it for Rosie to feel instantly cross.

  ‘Who what? Who doesn’t have a job? Who doesn’t have any children? Who doesn’t have a husband to look after?’

  Rosie knew what people thought about her. It was a very sensitive spot. Why did she let her lovely mum always wind her up?

  ‘OK, calm down,’ said Angie. ‘Darling, you know I didn’t mean it like that. But.’

  ‘But what?’ said Rosie, conscious that she sounded like a truculent teenager. So Angie explained.

  ‘So of course you said no.’

  Rosie had bought Gerard an ice cream straight away. She saw to her pleasure that the kiosk also stocked flying saucers. She loved the interplay between the tasteless exterior and the sharp hit of sherbet inside them, and ordered some immediately. It was only the promise of ice cream that could force Gerard out on a Grand Prix day, even a glorious summer Sunday like this one. He really wanted to stay inside with the curtains drawn and watch cars racing round a track, then play a computer game that involved cars racing round a track.

  Rosie wanted to tell herself not to worry, she had loads of friends she could go and visit by herself, but the problem was that over the last year or two those loads of friends had all started sprogging their heads off like there was some terrible shortage of babies in London. They would either be having ‘family time’, which sounded gruesome, or they’d be at some horrible gastropub trying to eat a relaxing meal while mopping up vomit, growling at each other as to who was the most tired and who had changed the last nappy, and trying to get a forkful of food into their own mouths while frantically jiggling a baby and talking about how it was either the greatest thing ever or the worst thing ever and often both at once. Rosie liked babies, she really did, but by the time her new-parent friends got round to asking her how she was doing it was almost always in the form of ‘So, when are you and Gerard going to have one of these?’ and she’d got tired of brushing aside the question. Gerard wasn’t at all tired of brushing it aside. He liked to say, ‘Ha, Rosie’s already got one big kid to look after.’ Then he’d laugh. Heartily.

  ‘Where’s my flake?’

  ‘I didn’t get you a flake,’ said Rosie, trying not to look at his ever-growing paunch. It didn’t matter, she told herself. She wasn’t a model, was she? Everyone got older.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Gerard. There was a pause. ‘I wanted a flake.’

  The more Angie had explained it to Rosie – there had been several phone calls and a long and emotionally punctuated email – the crosser and more hemmed-in Rosie had felt. The situation was this: Lilian, who had apparently been happily living a quiet life in a sweetshop in Lipton for several thousand years, had suffered a bad fall and needed a hip replacement. Whereupon it had turned out that perhaps she hadn’t been living a perfect life after all, that there was almost no money left, that it looked like the shop wasn’t even open, and there was no one to look after her. As she hadn’t (‘selfishly’ snorted Angie, and Rosie had reproved her at once) had any children, it fell on the rest of the family, which couldn’t be Angie or Pip in Australia, or Angie’s brothers who were retired or point-blank refused, and all their kids had families of their own – yes, all of them, Rosie was delighted to learn. In short, Lilian needed to be cared for and put in a home, and her shop and the attached house n
eeded to be sorted out and put on the market and sold to pay for the aforementioned home. And was there a single unemployed nurse in the family?

  ‘I’m not single, I’m not unemployed and I’m not a nurse, I’m an auxiliary nurse,’ Rosie had retorted. ‘Apart from that, spot on.’

  ‘So,’ said Rosie to Gerard, ‘here are the reasons I can’t go. And you have to listen to all of them and not just say, “You’re being very selfish, Rosemary,” hundreds of times like everybody else has.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Gerard, trying to pretend to be listening.

  ‘Number one, I live here, and I’m looking for a new job of my own.

  ‘Number two, summer is in full swing and I don’t want to miss lots of cool outdoor stuff.

  ‘Number three, I don’t know anything about running a shop or selling a shop or any kind of business at all.

  ‘Number four, if I wanted to be an unpaid nurse I’d still be doing my old job, ha ha ha.

  ‘Number five, I don’t even know this woman. What if she has dementia and starts knocking me around?

  ‘Number six, she’s Angie’s aunt. She should do it, I’ve only met Lilian a couple of times.

  ‘Number seven. I don’t want to. I’m not sure that’s going to cut it. Anyway. Lots of good reasons that don’t make me a really selfish person.’

  ‘You forgot number eight, me,’ said Gerard, who had nearly finished his ice-cream cone and was looking thoughtfully at the van.

  ‘No I didn’t,’ said Rosie. ‘But you, I figure, could look after yourself for a few weeks.’

  In fact, though she wouldn’t have admitted it under torture, Rosie had kind of thought, given that Gerard had come straight from his mum’s house to their own flat and seemed to treat it in very much the same way, that one positive thing might come out of this: a few weeks of doing his own laundry and paying the bills himself might be good for him. Angie told her off all the time for babying him, which was hilarious, because Angie babied Pip so much she’d actually moved right across the world to work as his unpaid skivvy, whereas Rosie sometimes felt lucky if Angie managed to remember her birthday. That would have been the only positive side of such an arrangement. If she was going to go. Which she wasn’t.

  ‘So what did she say to that? To your list?’

  They were walking along the South Bank together, clutching their ice creams and flying saucers – Gerard had explained he needed another one because he didn’t get a flake first time round – and looking at the artists and the people out promenading, riding bikes and pushing buggies. On the riverbank in London, Rosie leaned against the railings over the Thames. Boatloads of tourists were going up and down, taking snaps. The view was incredible: the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, all the way round the curve of the river to St Paul’s Cathedral. Bathed in golden high-summer light, the city was stunningly beautiful, full of young families enjoying the day; long-limbed young couples in matching sunglasses heading towards art galleries; happy groups of Italian teenagers whacking each other with their rucksacks. Rosie felt so happy to be a part of it; to be a tiny cog in the buzzing, brilliant wheel of their city.

  ‘Well …’ said Rosie.

  Gerard sighed. ‘Oh, come on. You’re not being soft?’

  ‘Well, it is family …’

  ‘Did Angie kick your arse?’

  ‘It’s not about being soft,’ said Rosie. ‘It’s about … well. I’m only agency at the moment. And it’s family.’

  ‘Hasn’t she got any kids of her own that can do it?’ said Gerard. ‘It’s not very fair that it’s you, you don’t even know her.’

  ‘I know, but.’

  ‘Did you even give your mum the big long selfish speech with all those number things in it that you just gave me?’

  Rosie felt an idiotic wimp. Her mother was always telling her to be more assertive with Gerard (or ‘the ring-dodger’, as she liked to call him). Gerard was always telling her to be more assertive with her mother. Ironic, as he still called his mother Mummy and they had lunch there every Sunday because Rosie couldn’t possibly make roast pork as well as his mother could, which Rosie had to agree with as she could rarely spend two hours perfecting crackling, although just the odd Sunday off every now and again would have been nice. Even if they’d been having a tricky time and Gerard had slept through his work alarm because he’d been up all night playing Portal or he’d spent the holiday money on trainers, she still had to sit there every seven days and listen to the usual litany of what a genius Gerard was and how brilliantly he’d done at school and how much everyone always liked him and how successful he was. At first Rosie had found this endearing, how close they were, mother and son. Now, she wasn’t too sure. Gerard’s mother’s subtext always seemed to be, ‘With me, he is perfect. Don’t you dare ruin it.’ And Gerard would sit there, refusing to eat his vegetables – at thirty-six – and basking in the admiration. The most easygoing of men, the one total no-go area for teasing was, undoubtedly, his mum.

  ‘Well, I know, but I have the training, and no, she never got married or anything.’

  ‘Oh. Lesbo,’ said Gerard.

  ‘No, I don’t think so … well, maybe. But I think she was just – Christ, she must be ancient. I think all the men went off to the war and got killed and then there was nobody left.’

  ‘Did she get really fat and spotty on all those sweets?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Rosie. ‘I don’t know anything about her. Except she needs help and I’m her—’

  ‘Lackey,’ said Gerard.

  ‘No, I mean relation-wise.’

  ‘Yeah, what are you?’

  ‘I’m her great-niece,’ said Rosie.

  ‘Great-niece?’ said Gerard, dobbing her on the nose with ice cream. Rosie laughed but wiped it off, still thinking.

  ‘You never know,’ said Gerard. ‘Maybe she’s got thousands in a box under the stairs and she’ll make you her heir.’

  ‘Ha,’ said Rosie. ‘That’s right, someone in our family with money. Hilarious. Anyway, I know for a fact she hasn’t, because that’s why I’m going: she’s had to run that crumbling old sweetshop for ages, years after she should have retired. I think if there was a big box stuffed with money she might have used some of it to get hold of a nurse and get herself into a decent home.’

  ‘Mmm,’ said Gerard. ‘But how long for?’

  Rosie shrugged.

  ‘Well … I mean, I can apply for jobs, obviously, while I’m up there. But I need to get a buyer for the shop, find her a home, check she’s all right then sign something with a lawyer, so the money from the shop goes straight to the nursing home. With a little bit for me for expenses, Angie says, to pay for my time. There’s a house with the shop, so it should be a useful bit of cash if I can sort it all out.’

  ‘That sounds like shitloads of work,’ said Gerard, ‘in the middle of bloody nowhere. With some old bag who doesn’t know you from Adam and will hardly pay you anything.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ said Rosie, sighing. ‘What could I do? You know what Angie’s like.’

  ‘She lives in Australia,’ said Gerard. ‘What’s she going to do, attack you by satellite-phone death ray?’

  ‘I know. Maybe I should try saying no again. Will you come and visit me?’

  ‘No chance! I’m allergic to the countryside, and they don’t have KFC.’

  ‘You’re teasing.’

  ‘I’m not. You’ll see. You’ll hate it up there. What do you know about the country? You were born and raised here. What are you going to do when you’re surrounded by, I don’t know. Cows.’

  ‘I’m not going to be a vet,’ said Rosie, cross that Gerard was so dismissive of her adaptation skills. ‘Anyway, I don’t think I have much choice.’

  ‘Can you ride a horse?’

  Rosie shook her head. ‘No one said anything about riding a horse.’

  ‘Have you ever touched a horse?’

  Rosie, after another pause, shook her head again.

  ‘Oh well, I’m
sure you’ll be totally fine and fit right in.’

  ‘I’m not going up there to make friends,’ said Rosie. ‘I’m going up there to do a rubbish, lonely, boring family job. With maybe some money as a bit of an incentive when I’m done. Then come back in five minutes.’

  ‘What if you fall in love with the countryside and never want to come back again?’ said Gerard. ‘I’ll pine away without you.’

  ‘Ha,’ said Rosie. ‘We’ll get a wee farm with some lambs to gambol about in the fields.’

  Suddenly, against all her better instincts, she had a swift vision: of little dark curly-haired children running around a farmyard, feeding chickens and chasing about with dogs. She quickly reminded herself how much poo animals produced.

  ‘You never know,’ she said. ‘We might be natural country lubbers.’

  Gerard gave a theatrical shudder. ‘You’d never get me up there in a hundred years,’ he said. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Oh God, I know,’ said Rosie. ‘It’s going to suck.’

  ‘And you’ll miss the rest of the summer! Sitting out in pubs and drinking pink wine and lovely evenings and loads of parties and fun.’ Gerard pouted. ‘Don’t go.’

  ‘But a little bit of money,’ she said. ‘If I got a couple of thousand from the sale of the house … I mean, we could even think about moving. Into a bigger place. Big enough for … I don’t know … It’ll be quiet.’

  She found her heart beating faster even as she said it. Maybe she should go for the unselfish reasons. But a little bit of spare cash to punt them up the ladder … maybe it was the right time for the two of them. Together. When she got back from this stupid bloody thing. To bite the bullet and go for it.

  ‘I think they’re making ice creams smaller,’ said Gerard, once more looking unhappily at his extra cone. ‘I’m sure of it. They whack the prices up and put less in on hot sunny days. Stands to reason.’

  He eyed her up. ‘You’ve said yes already, haven’t you?’