He turned and started to walk away down the side of the house before coming to a stop as I shooed Muffin inside.
‘So, out of interest, what would be the best?’
‘Excuse me?’ I looked at him, confused.
‘If me worming my way in for… not a coffee… is the worst. What’s the best?’
‘I don’t understand.’
He grabbed the rucksack straps with both hands. ‘I’m asking what you’d like to do on a date. With me. Well, I suppose the first question would be whether you’d like to go on one. The next question is what kind of thing you’d like to do.’
I stood there for a moment, my brain in an internal tug-of-war with my heart, currently flip-flopping like one of the fish Gideon hated to catch.
‘I don’t date clients. Or their families.’
‘Why not their families?’ he asked, sounding genuinely interested rather than annoyed.
‘Because there’s too big a chance the family ends up being involved in my work.’
‘And that’s a problem?’
‘It can be.’
‘Okay. How about we hang out on a non-date?’
‘Um… really?’
He laughed again. ‘I think I can handle seeing you just as a friend. Or a temporary neighbour?’
Gideon might be able to handle it, but I wasn’t at all sure that I could. While it was true that I didn’t date clients or their family members, the bigger reason for me saying no was that I only ever dated on a casual basis. There was nothing casual about my attraction to Gideon. I’d thought far too long and hard about the intensity of connection I’d felt the first time we met, but I still had no idea what it meant, let alone how to handle it.
‘I’ll think about it.’
Well, that was honest at least. I’d find it almost impossible to think about anything else.
* * *
On Monday, Hattie had a start-of-the-week meeting with Lizzie in the morning, then retreated to the studio until three, when we met in the attic for our next session. She already appeared tired – I imagined that therapy could be draining – but she insisted we press on and tackle another container. I opened the trunk nearest to the one we’d already looked through, but, after glancing inside, Hattie closed it again. The third trunk was the one she wanted.
Like the first, this also contained a mixture of toys, personal items and clothing. There was a careworn, knitted elephant tucked in with a matching giraffe. I found three boxes engraved with initials that I now recognised as belonging to Hattie’s grandfather Cornelius and his sons, Edgar and Michael, each with a neatly stashed shaving kit inside. There was an ornate box stuffed with costume jewellery and a fabric doll with a missing arm.
The clothes ranged from a carefully wrapped christening dress through increasingly larger childrenswear up to two hand-tailored morning suits and a graduation gown. There were also a gas mask and a ration book from the Second World War.
‘This belonged to my mother, Verity,’ Hattie said, cradling the doll. ‘She called her Penelope. I can still remember when I was especially miserable, or ill, she’d ask if I could take care of Penelope for a while. It always worked. Somehow, remembering that my mother – who I viewed as something akin to an angel – had once been a little girl like me helped me to feel a little stronger, and more grown up. It was just the two of us, you see, in so many ways. She was much older than most of my friends’ mothers, and I assumed that was why she had no family, why the stories she told about my uncles Edgar and Michael and Grandpa Cornelius were all from so long ago. It was only later on that she told me the real reason why, for the second time, the sole inhabitant of Riverbend was a young woman with a broken heart.’
* * *
Riverbend
Verity Abigail Hood had an idyllic childhood. In a similar fashion to its original owner, during her earlier years, she relished the freedom of Riverbend, roaming the acres of forest either with her brothers or alone. School was a tedious necessity, her mother’s never-ending list of chores a constant frustration, but the hours she spent amongst the trees or on the water more than made up for it. However, as she grew older, her focus began to shift from the forest towards more sophisticated things. She started to notice how the village girls smirked at the scabs on her knees, prompting her to regret her insistence on wearing scruffy short-trousers, however practical they might be. For the first time, she felt a prickle of shame when the boys ignored her at the harvest dance, clustering around the prettier girls while she sat alone beside the lemonade table, no longer interested in joining the younger children having fun in the hay bales.
To her irritation, she couldn’t stop her eyes from drifting over to one particular boy, Jonathan Townsend, who stood several inches above the others, with broad shoulders, thick, dark hair and eyes the perfect green of an oak leaf. When she stammered hello after bumping into him outside the bakery, he looked down on her skinny four feet eleven inches with a look of such pity that she turned and fled, getting a scolding from her mother when she arrived back at the house without the bread she’d been sent to fetch.
She sobbed into her pillow that night, not least because she’d had to stay at home and bake the missing bread herself as penance, meaning she couldn’t accompany Edgar and Michael to their cricket match, where she knew full well that Jonathan would be the star bowler. And things only got worse.
The week she turned thirteen, as if the challenge of being stuck in a body that refused to grow in any of the directions she wanted it to, alongside brothers who insisted on still calling her Baby V, weren’t enough, a giant spot erupted on her nose, Jonathan proposed to her cousin, and Neville Chamberlain declared war on Germany.
She’d been imagining her teenage years as a carefree whirl of dances, pony shows and picnics. Instead, while she still had to keep up the dull things such as school and piano practice, now she also had to help her mother dig for victory, chop old curtains into dresses and transform rations into a decent meal. But that was nothing compared to saying goodbye to her brothers. When they were replaced by four Lumber Jills, working in the forest for the Women’s Timber Corps – including the noisiest, messiest, scariest one of them sharing her bedroom – try as she might, Verity found it difficult some days not to feel a tiny bit sorry for herself.
