CHAPTER FOUR
On the bus home, I couldn’t stop thinking about Loli refusing to let me help her.
I might not even be a match, of course, but if I was...
There had to be a way to convince her that donating a kidney wasn’t going to impact on my own health. Of course, there was always going to be a tiny chance that it might. But it was a risk I was willing to take to see the grandmother who meant everything to me back on her feet and full of life again. Because the way things were going, it could be years before she was offered a kidney through the NHS donor scheme.
But trying to persuade her was wearing me down. We’d got to the stage where even if I so much as hinted at the subject, I’d see the barriers go up and she’d immediately shut down the conversation.
What the hell could I do?
I was going to end up losing her because of her exasperating stubbornness and her refusal to accept that my way could mean a happy ending for both of us...
I glanced out of the window and my heart gave a jolt of shock. I’d been lost in my own private nightmare, thinking about Loli, and I hadn’t even noticed that we’d arrived in Sunnybrook a few minutes ago. The bus was now speeding out of the village, next stop the Brambleberry Manor estate! I’d have to walk back, a trek of about four miles in this searing August heat, unless I could persuade the driver to let me off...
Spotting that the traffic lights up ahead at the junction were turning to red, I got up and hurried to the front of the bus, and thankfully, the kindly driver allowed me to disembark there. But I was so busy turning round to wave and thank him, I somehow misjudged the step down and landed awkwardly on the grass verge.
It was about a half-mile walk back to the village. But when I set off, a sharp pain shot through my ankle, making me gasp. I must have twisted it when I got off the bus.
I hobbled over to a nearby fence and leaned against it, a surge of emotion rising up and blurring my vision as I gazed across a field full of barley. It wasn’t just my throbbing ankle. It was everything. Being sacked by Marguerite, having yet another clash with Loli over the kidney donation, somehow managing to miss my stop – and now this... having to make it back home on a dodgy ankle!
Perhaps I could call a taxi? But I dismissed that straight away. How to irritate a taxi driver in one easy move – ask him to take me half a mile along the road! I’d just have to walk, and then when I got home, I’d apply the bag-of-frozen-peas method to hopefully take the swelling down.
‘Right. Let’s go,’ I told myself encouragingly. ‘You can do this.’
Woof!
Surprised, I spun round – and to my astonishment, I spotted a little dog running through the barley field. It jumped through the fence and stood there a few yards away on the grass verge, panting at me.
I glanced around, expecting the owner to appear, but there wasn’t a soul in sight.
‘Oh, are you lost?’ He had lots of curly, treacle-coloured fur and dark button eyes, and he looked for all the world like he was smiling at me, although I knew it was just the heat making him pant like that. But he certainly didn’t look unfriendly, so I approached him, limping over and sitting down on the grass so that he wouldn’t feel threatened, as he snuffled in the vegetation around me. ‘Hi, there, little one. Where’s your hooman, then?’ I glanced around me again, across the fields. ‘A gorgeous teddy bear scamp like you must belong to someone .’
He came closer and allowed me to stroke his head. Then he rolled onto his back and panted up at me, asking for a tummy rub. So I obliged, stroking his little belly and murmuring that he was such a good boy, while wondering what on earth I was supposed to do now. He didn’t have a collar or an identity tag. Had he been microchipped? Only a vet would know that.
I got up and started to limp along the verge, hoping he would follow me. If I could get him back to the house in Sunnybrook, I could contact the local animal rescue centre and find out what I needed to do to help reunite him with his owner.
Maybe he didn’t have an owner, though. The lack of a tag was worrying. Perhaps he was a stray? He did look a little scruffy. His coat was slightly matted in places, his brown eyes peering out of shaggy fur that could definitely do with a trim, and I felt a pang of affection for the little lost creature.
‘I’m going to call you Barley,’ I told him. ‘Just until I find out your real name.’
‘Barley’ looked up at me and barked, as if he understood. Then he ran ahead of me along the verge, snuffling curiously all the way. I quickened my step, ignoring the pain in my ankle, afraid I might lose him. But every time I thought he was about to run off, he stopped and looked back, as if he was checking I was still there and waiting for me to catch up.
Rooting around in my bag, I found an apple I’d taken to work that morning and I took a bite out of it then bent down and offered it to Barley on the palm of my hand. He wolfed it down eagerly, so I took more bites out of the apple for him, knowing I needed to avoid giving him any core or pips, which were poisonous to dogs.
We’d had two dogs, Loli and I, so I knew all about them and I adored them. The first pet we rescued was a cheeky ten-year-old Border Terrier called Gus. Then came a beautiful beagle called Lucy, who’d been dropped at the shelter by her owners because they could no longer afford to feed her. She was eleven by the time we adopted her and we made sure her final years were full of care and comfort. We were both devastated when we lost her. We’d talked about getting another rescue, but then Loli’s condition had deteriorated so we’d abandoned the idea.
Barley devoured the apple as we walked, with the eagerness of a dog that was genuinely hungry, and my heart squeezed with sadness as I watched him. But then a lorry rumbled past and Barley took fright, scampering off down a rough track that led to the river. Not wanting to lose him, I hurried after him, half-stumbling down the steep, bushy incline. To my dismay, when I reached the bottom and the riverside path, I’d completely lost sight of Barley.
As I hurried along, with the river on my right, I was continually scanning the bushes on my left, hoping for a sight of him. But Barley had vanished.
At last, I sank down on a riverside bench, ankle throbbing, feeling exhausted and emotionally wrung-out.
I’d felt a funny kind of kinship with that little dog. We were both lost in our different ways and I’d wanted to save him. But I’d failed. Just like I’d failed in my job... and just like I’d failed to convince Loli that accepting my kidney could be her best chance at getting her life back. She probably knew that, of course. Her reason for refusing was because she didn’t want to endanger my life. But there had to be a way of making her see that as far as I was concerned, it was worth the tiny risk just to have her back on her feet and relishing life the way she always used to.
It was four years since Loli began to have problems sleeping. She always seemed tired and when we took a holiday in the beautiful Lake District – a favourite place of ours to go hiking – I knew something must be wrong when she had no energy to climb her favourite peak, Cat Bells. We’d walked around Keswick the previous day and her feet and ankles had swelled alarmingly that evening. When we got home, the swelling didn’t go down, but Loli kept dismissing it as ‘just an age thing’. But I was worried. I knew fatigue and swollen ankles could be symptoms of disease, and sure enough, when I finally managed to get her to a doctor, we were given the shocking news.
Loli’s remaining kidney was starting to fail, just like Mum’s had a decade earlier. History was repeating itself in the most heart-breaking manner ever.
Was I going to lose Loli to the same disease as my lovely mum?
A tear trickled down my cheek and I fumbled in the pocket of my hoodie, hoping to find a paper hanky.
Instead, my hand felt something cold and hard. The little blue notebook.
Pulling it out, I gazed at what was written on the cover through blurry eyes.
Millicent Edgeworth’s Book of Puddings, Lower Haycroft, 1938
The ink was faded, the writing beautifully neat... ‘copperplate’ was probably how it would be described these days, and I thought I could detect faint lines in pencil beneath the words, probably drawn with a ruler. Each recipe was recorded in that same hand, the letters slanted and looped in perfect straight lines. Millicent Edgeworth had clearly been a good student at school, back in the early 1900s!
I flicked through, looking at the pudding recipes, then I turned back to the cover. And for the first time, I noticed the slightly lighter script that had been scrawled along the top. Written in pencil, it had naturally faded more than the ink with the passage of time. It was a child’s handwriting.
Peering closer, I read it out loud.
This book belongs to Susan Edgeworth, aged six. But not Peter, he’s too litel to make pudings.
I smiled.
The brother and sister seemed to leap off the page, right into my imagination. Susan, who liked to help her mum in the kitchen, especially when she was making puddings, and being the oldest, felt it her duty to keep her little brother, Peter, in his place!
The first recipe in the notebook was for that good old traditional pudding with its name that made everyone chuckle these days: Spotted Dick.
Millicent Edgeworth had made a note in tiny handwriting at the top of the page: Made Spotted Dick as the 19 th October is a very special day – Susan’s fifth birthday. Spotted Dick is her favourite pudding and she insisted on helping, carrying in her little stool so that she could reach up to the bench and help me add the currants.
I sat back, remembering Mum bringing the cookery book home from the second-hand shop and how excited she was to find this little blue notebook, concealed between its pages. We’d made that first recipe together one Sunday, Mum and I, and Loli had come over for lunch.
I closed the little notebook and held it to my heart. Finding it that morning had brought back memories of Mum, some of which I’d quite forgotten. It was as if it was meant to be... that I’d find the notebook and feel comforted, almost as if Mum was there with me, helping me through one of the worst times in my life...
It was a few years ago that Loli had had her business idea. She’d retired from her job as a self-employed accountant but had started to regret her decision. She was the type of person who thrived on being busy all the time, and while she was enjoying being able to spend more time in the kitchen, cooking and baking, it wasn’t enough. That was when she had the idea to start selling her puddings at the farmer’s market, and I was happy to join her in the venture.
The business was small but surprisingly successful, although the financial rewards weren’t huge. But Loli had loved it, and even when she’d fallen ill, she’d still try and help me as much as she could, before I’d order her to put her feet up and take a rest.
Spotted Dick, the first recipe recorded by Millicent Edgeworth, had turned out to be one of our best-sellers.
Glancing back at the notebook, I saw that her next recipe was for Plum Charlotte, which sounded delicious. I knew that during the war years, imports of food, including fruit, had stalled dramatically and people had to make do with what they had available. So they’d used the apples, plums, rhubarb and blackberries that were growing in their gardens or plucked from the hedgerows.
My eye caught Millicent’s note at the top, written in the same tiny handwriting.
The first line gave me a jolt of horror.
My Sidney had his call-up papers today. Ma and Pa came for tea and I made Sidney’s favourite pudding, Plum Charlotte. We tried to be merry but I slept little, worrying about all that lies ahead for our little family in this terrible time of war.
I read her words in a daze. How would it have felt, knowing your husband was going off to fight in the war? Not knowing if he’d be coming back to you...
I hadn’t read Millicent’s tiny little notes before every recipe, or if I had, I’d forgotten them in all that followed with Mum’s illness. But I was now realising that along with the recipes, the book held a kind of brief diary – a snapshot of the world at that time, from the point of view of a housewife struggling to cope with uncertain times for her family. Millicent had lived in the days of ‘stiff upper lips’ and being practical and ‘getting on with things’ when you were faced with hard times. Had it given Millicent comfort to write in her pudding recipe book about the emotions she was feeling?
I found myself reading quickly through the notes she’d written above every single recipe. The notes were brief but touching. It was strange knowing that she and the people she was writing about had lived almost a century ago, and yet they felt exactly the same emotions as we did now. All the little joys along with the fear and the despair. I really wanted to know if there had been a happy ending for Millicent and her little family...
Next there was a recipe for old-fashioned Jam Roly-Poly, which Millicent had taken next-door to share with neighbours Amelia and Tommy, and their son, Bobby. . .
Invited for lunch next-door. Susan decided to make Jam Roly-Poly for the occasion (so she did, with just a little bit of help from Mummy as her obliging assistant!) She looked like a proper little chef, head held so proudly as she carried her pudding next-door. And of course Amelia and Tommy made such a great fuss of Susan’s wonderful cookery skills!
Feel so lucky to have my best friend living next-door. Amelia has been such a comfort since we got Sidney’s news. I hoped we would have Christmas together as a family, but it turns out Sidney must leave for war two days before Christmas Eve. Amelia’s Tommy is exempt from the fighting because he owns the bakery in the village. I’m thrilled for them and little Bobby, but I’m sick at heart for Susan and Peter.
I smiled through lunch but Sidney knew I was upset. When we got home, he hugged me tightly and made me give him a smile, and he told me I had to ‘keep the home fires burning’ until he got back – like that song they used to sing during the Great War. We listened to a comedy on the wireless later which cheered me up no end, especially when Sidney started doing his marvellous Winston Churchill voice!
The next entry was short and heart-breaking.
We made plum pudding and celebrated the festive season a week early for Sidney.
That was all Millicent wrote, before noting down in her usual fine detail, the ingredients and the method for what we now called Christmas pudding.
The entry after that must have been written after Sidney departed for war:
Christmas was strange. Peter loved his toy train and Sidney had made Susan a doll’s house and some furniture for it out of some old wooden crates. (He’d been working for months in secret in his shed.) She was very happy indeed. But being jolly for the children was hard.
Susan insisted we should make Peter’s favourite pudding for Christmas Day. I think she was feeling guilty for having played with his train and making a wheel fall off. (Peter cried but thankfully, I was able to fix it back on!) We made Apple Charlotte, using cookers from the old tree in the garden, which we’d stored away. Ma and Pa joined us and when it got dark, we had a sing-song around the piano by candlelight which was rather jolly.
The next note was written above a recipe for Syrup Sponge and Custard and was really very alarming.
The house two doors along was bombed during the night! We were all in the shelter so no one was hurt but all the children were crying. Amelia stumbled over some rubble on her way back to the house and cut her leg quite badly. Tommy had gone ahead, carrying Bobby, who was asleep, so Susan, Peter and I helped Amelia back to the house. She was limping and I said she should call the doctor but she said she didn’t want to waste his time when so many others were probably in a far worse state than she was. She smiled and said I was too much of a worrier and that Tommy would clean it up and bandage it for her.
Went to see her this morning and she was confined to the couch – Tommy’s orders! I could see poor Amelia needed bucking up, so Susan and I made her favourite syrup sponge and custard and took it round to her. The children played together and when Tommy came home from work, he chased them around the house wearing a bear mask and made them all squeal with delight. My two were still in great spirits when we got home and it was quite a job getting them settled for bed...
‘Good bench, this.’ I was so deep in thought – thinking of Millicent trying to make Christmas a good one with the shadow of war hanging over them – that I jumped, literally, at a voice close by.
I looked up and a tall man with tawny hair, fringe flopping over his eyes, was smiling down at me.
The flash of recognition hit us both at exactly the same time.
‘It’s you!’ He smiled. ‘Been in any good lifts lately?’
I laughed. ‘No. But my boss pushed every one of my buttons today. Or should I say my ex -boss.’
‘Ouch.’ He frowned in sympathy. ‘Do you mind if I...?’ He indicated the seat.
‘Not at all.’
‘Sorry about the job. Where was it?’ he asked, sitting down.
‘The wedding boutique in the village?’ I shrugged. ‘It would never have worked out, though. I’m actually quite pleased I don’t have to go back there.’
He nodded slowly. ‘It’s a good spot this for gathering your thoughts.’ He looked out over the river, which was in full spate after the recent heavy rain. ‘I often wander down here and sit on this bench if I need to work something out in my head.’
‘Being beside water can be very therapeutic.’
‘Exactly.’ He settled back on the bench and folded his arms, stretching his long legs out.
I glanced at his dark suit and white shirt. ‘Where are you headed?’
‘London. Job interview. I’m a bit early for the train.’ He turned, and I remembered the way his eyes crinkled attractively at the corners when he smiled. A funny little tingle ran along my spine.
I swallowed. ‘I... thought you seemed a bit too smart to be out for a walk in the country.’
‘I was visiting my aunt when I saw you earlier. She’s just had a tonsillectomy. Then I had to rush home and get suited and booted for this interview.’
I looked at his gleaming black shoes. ‘What’s the job?’
‘Marketing assistant for a media company based in London. It’s my dream to run my own marketing business one day, so this could be a great learning experience.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘ If I get it, of course.’
‘I hope you do,’ I said politely, trying to ignore the way my heart was skipping along merrily in response to the delicious musky-lemony scent of him. ‘Did you study marketing at uni?’
He nodded. ‘Just finished in June there. I’ve been searching for jobs ever since but this will be my first interview.’
‘Great. I hope it goes well.’
‘Thanks.’ He smiled. ‘I’ve managed to get some temporary work through a friend in the meantime. Until I can find a full-time post.’ He shifted on the bench, turning slightly towards me. ‘I’m Jensen, by the way.’
‘Annalise.’ We shook hands sideways rather awkwardly and laughed, and I saw that his eyes weren’t just dark brown. They had these incredible flecks of gold in them.
I tore my gaze away and we looked out over the river for a while in silence. Then he said, ‘So will you look for another job?’
‘Yes.’ I grinned at him. ‘But definitely not in a wedding boutique.’
‘What would you like to do, given the choice?’
‘Well, I started a course in catering. But... well, I had to drop out.’
‘Oh. Why?’
‘It’s my grandmother. She’s very ill and in hospital.’
‘That’s who you were visiting earlier?’
I nodded. ‘She desperately needs a new kidney. I’ve offered to get tested, to see if I could be a donor, but she’s refusing to allow it.’
‘Oh.’ He looked bemused, as if he wasn’t sure what to say, and I didn’t blame him. It was a lot of information to take in all at once from a total stranger! Why had I even said it? It was the sort of thing you shared with your best friend, not some guy you just met on a bench.
To make him feel easier, I took a breath and smiled. ‘But really... really I’m here because of a very cute little dog. I followed him down here from the main road but he managed to escape.’
He frowned. ‘No owner in sight?’
‘Nope. None at all. I called him Barley because he suddenly appeared out of a field.’
‘Nice name. Wonder if he’s the farmer’s dog? No name tag?’
‘Nothing. Not even a collar. He must have either wandered away from home and got lost or...’ I shrugged, not even wanting to imagine the Barley as a stray.
He nodded. ‘I love dogs. I think I might even love them more than humans.’
‘You mean hoomans.’
‘Hoomans. Yes, of course.’ He smiled at my joke, and I knew he must be a genuine dog lover. ‘My family had a golden retriever. Eric. He was my best friend when I was growing up.’
I liked the way his eyes lit up, talking about his pet. It made me warm to him even more. I smiled. ‘I’ll bet he was such a good boy.’
‘Oh, he was.’ His eyes did that crinkling thing again. ‘I’d rescue another dog in a flash if it wasn’t for the fact that I live alone in a flat with no garden, and obviously I’ll be out at work every day.’
I nodded. ‘It wouldn’t be fair on the dog.’
‘Sadly, it wouldn’t. So... is your gran on the list for a kidney donor?’
‘She is. But it might take forever for her to rise to the top of the pile.’ And by that time, it might be too late.
‘Maybe she’ll change her mind... about you donating.’
I sighed. ‘I hope so. But Loli’s very stubborn once she’s made up her mind about something.’
‘Loli.’ He murmured the name as if he was trying it out.
I grinned. ‘It was all I could manage to say when I was two years old, and somehow it stuck.’
A splashing noise pulled my gaze towards the water. Further up, I could see something – an object – being carried along on the surface, bobbing up and down, although at first, I didn’t make the connection.
When I did, I lurched to my feet in a panic.
Barley?