her.’ He paused, checking his watch. ‘I’ll come back in a couple of hours. We need to finish this conversation.’
‘Fine.’ Clancy wondered whether he was expecting her to think twice in his absence.
She watched him pack the garden tools into the shed and click his fingers to his enormous dog. Every word Aaron had spoken had increased Clancy’s belief that Nelson’s Bar was exactly what she needed. He might as well have said, ‘Here’s a quiet, safe backwater where you can get your head straight. The job’s a doddle for someone with organisational skills.’
Clancy Moss, however temporarily exhausted, thrived on challenges, and the ability to adapt had been bred into her. With engineers for parents, she’d been brought up in Belize, various parts of Africa, Dubai, Hong Kong … sometimes in company compounds or city apartments but also in remote villages. She’d attended company schools, boarding school, local schools and international schools. She’d even, at times, attended Alice’s school, and had loved the feeling of having a settled home with Alice and Aunt Sally while her parents vanished into a part of Africa considered unsuitable for their daughter. Boarding school and its dull routines and restrictions came a poor second to sharing escapades with Alice and being spoiled by her aunt.
Once she’d come to the UK for uni she’d tried to re-create that feeling of belonging. She’d thought she’d found it with Will but now … Now she’d been pushed into the painful break from Will and her colleagues – she wasn’t sure whether it was still logical to call them friends – she needed to regroup.
OK, so, food first. Just to confirm what Aaron had said, she took out her phone. No service. So she’d just drive to Hunstanton and find a supermarket. Then she’d—
‘Yoohoo!’ came a creaky female voice. ‘Do you mind if I come into the garden? Hope not, because I’m in.’ The voice trembled a laugh.
Surprised into rising and facing the direction the voice had come from, Clancy had to grab the back of the bench as her head swam anew. A short, rotund woman with a dandelion clock of white hair and a sweet smile shuffled around the house. ‘Are you are our new Evelyn? I’m Dilys, from number two. I thought I’d say hello.’ By now Dilys was standing in front of Clancy, daisy-strewn wellies peeping from beneath a rose-splashed skirt. Her eyebrows bobbed enquiringly.
‘I’m taking the caretaker’s job, yes.’ It was impossible not to return Dilys’s smile; it was so twinkly and warm. ‘I was just wondering where I could find a supermarket. Or furniture shops. Aaron had to rush off before he could tell me.’ She supposed she was lucky that she had money in the bank but she hadn’t really bargained for the hassle of furnishing the Roundhouse when she decided to launch herself towards Nelson’s Bar.
Dilys’s grey eyes twinkled as she turned and let herself down stiffly onto the bench beside Clancy. ‘Furniture? I expect he’ll just bring the other stuff back. They stored it up at De Silva House – Aaron’s parents’ place – because Evelyn had her own.’
Clancy suppressed a wriggle of hurt that Aaron hadn’t mentioned something that, clearly, would make her life easier. Evidently, he didn’t want her here. So what? She’d been unwanted by people much closer and more important to her than Aaron De Silva. Her ex-fiancé and work colleagues, for example. And with her parents it had always only been fifty-fifty.
She shoved those negative thoughts away with a bright, ‘Was it Alice and Lee’s furniture? I’m Alice’s cousin, Clancy.’
Dilys beamed. ‘Her cousin! How is Alice? I never hear from her.’
‘I think she’s OK,’ Clancy answered carefully. After jilting Lee, Alice had made no bones about preferring to be invisible to anyone at Nelson’s Bar and had wheedled unashamedly to get Clancy to represent Alice’s interest in Roundhouse Row. ‘I’m on the move all the time anyway and you’re so good at stuff. Don’t make me interact with judgy big bro Aaron, puhleeeeease, Clancee.’ Clancy had sighed and said yes. People often said yes to Alice. Maybe it was because she just seemed to expect it, but also it was her pretty smile, the swish of her stylishly cut hair, or the way she had of linking arms as if to demonstrate how much she liked you.
And, wherever Clancy had been in the world, Alice had always sent letters, cards, messages, demands to know where Clancy was and what she was doing, requests for postcards or photos or to know when Clancy was going to come and live with them again. Whatever Alice’s faults, she and Clancy had a bond.
These days it was Alice’s travelling the bond had to survive, rather than Clancy’s. The only time they’d seen each other in the last six years was when Aunt Sally had died suddenly four years ago. Alice had reappeared for the funeral, white-faced and red-eyed over the loss of her mother. Then she’d sold the family home in Warwickshire and vanished again, her travel fund firmly bolstered by her inheritance.
None of this needed to be shared with Clancy’s new neighbour, so she just said, ‘Dilys, could you point me at a supermarket, please? I need supplies.’
Dilys’s face shifted its wrinkles into a delighted grin. ‘Can I show you instead? I don’t drive any more so it’s a boon for me to get a ride into Hunstanton. Tell you what,’ she swept on. ‘How about I trade you lunch? I’ve made vegetable soup and I was just about to have some.’
Warmth stole into Clancy’s heart at such a friendly offer. ‘What a brilliant trade. Thank you.’
She followed her to the next-door cottage, assailed by a deliciously oniony fragrance as Dilys opened the door. ‘Welcome to number two,’ she said. ‘It’s not as big as the Roundhouse but it’s been my home since I’ve been on my own. Take a seat at the table, lovie, and I’ll dish up.’
It seemed only seconds before Clancy was dipping chunks of bread into thick vegetable soup and sipping tea, looking around her. Dilys’s kitchen was full of … stuff. Heaps of fabric and wool teetered, jars of buttons or bowls of beads glowed with colour.
‘I’m a crafter,’ Dilys explained, following Clancy’s gaze. ‘Whatever I see or find I make into something else. It used to drive my poor husband mad. Still, it doesn’t concern him, not now he’s gone.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Clancy said automatically.
‘I still see him of course,’ Dilys continued, slurping up a soup-sodden square of bread.
Clancy paused. ‘Oh?’ She considered herself far too down-to-earth to believe in the supernatural but Dilys sounded so confident that she asked, ‘Where?’
Dilys put down her spoon in her empty bowl with a sigh of satisfaction. ‘In the garden. He lives next door.’ She burst out laughing.
Clancy laughed too, laying down her spoon, though she’d eaten only half her lunch. ‘I thought you meant he was a ghost!’
‘Not him.’ Dilys was still grinning. ‘We can’t share a house but we can’t do without each other completely.’
Finishing the industrial-strength tea and feeling ten times better for food inside her and the hand of friendship Dilys seemed to have no hesitation in extending, Clancy went out to empty her car boot ready for their shopping.
They set off for the supermarket, Dilys exclaiming over the comfort of the car’s leather interior. Clancy was instantly plunged into a host of memories of Will helping her choose the car less than a year ago. It had been a symbol of the success of IsVid and now she was glad she’d chosen to spend the money that way rather than doing something sensible like paying a chunk off the mortgage. Resolutely, she shoved the thought away. ‘I forgot to look how big the freezer at the Roundhouse is.’ She slowed the car as she turned right onto the A149 and immediately came up behind a car towing a caravan.
‘There’s a good, capacious freezer,’ pronounced Dilys. ‘Capacious was the answer to the nine-letter word puzzle in the paper yesterday.’
Clancy tried not to be distracted by the energetic pinging of the phone in her pocket now they’d left the village and, presumably, picked up