The Bookshop on Rosemary Lane: The feel-good read perfect for those long winter nights

‘Did you win?’

‘Did I what?’

‘Did you win? I mean, it is a competitive sport, isn’t it?’

He peered at her as if she were asking a silly question. ‘Yes, it is, but that’s not really the point, Dell.’

So what is the point? she wanted to ask, knowing she was being prickly as she waited for him to mention Heathfield course being closed. But he said nothing. She watched as he pulled off his shoes, and when he wandered through to the living room she repositioned his clubs so they weren’t propped up against her precious books.

Irritation niggled away at her as she made a pot of tea, then carried it through to the living room and curled up in an armchair. Of course, the simplest course of action would have been to ask, ‘Mark, where did you play today?’ But she had never questioned him about his whereabouts, never endured a moment’s suspicion of where he might be. And it felt all wrong to quiz him now.

There would be a simple explanation, she decided, and she would find a way of asking him without sounding accusatory. She would ask, she fully intended to – but she needed to choose her moment, which clearly, with Mark already snoring softly on the sofa, wasn’t now.

Chapter Seven (#ulink_3d6ed7b9-52d1-55aa-a969-f204916f3ed9)

Della couldn’t sleep. This had been happening a lot lately: dozing briefly, then waking up simmering hot, her chest slick with sweat, hence sleeping naked these days. This time, though, it was clear to her that it wasn’t just due to her internal thermostat going haywire, but the thing, still swirling around in her mind at 2.17 a.m.: Mark’s whole day and evening at a golf course that was damn well closed.

She turned in bed and glanced at the back of his head as he slept. In all the years they’d been together, he had barely had a broken night’s sleep. She envied this, resented it, even: the way men’s bodies just carried on doing their thing so efficiently without so much as a single hot flush. It wasn’t that she wished a temperature, or even mild discomfort, on him. It just seemed unfair that, after pregnancy and childbirth along came facial sproutings, a thickening waist and irrational mood swings (‘I am not being irrational!’ she told herself, silently). Not his fault, of course. He’d got lucky when it came to ageing, too. ‘Are you planning to age any time soon?’ Nicola Crowther had asked Roxanne during their mother’s funeral tea. She might as well have asked Mark the same question.

Some men became rather pouchy as the years rolled by: a cosy, unthreatening look which, as an enthusiastic eater herself, Della certainly had no problem with. But that hadn’t happened to Mark. While he no longer had the long, lithe frame of the young man she had fallen in love with, he was in extremely good shape, nicely toned with the kind of body that still looked good in the Levis he favoured when gardening or lounging around the house.

The thing is, she decided now, staring up at the ceiling rose in the shadowy room, he exercised. Every Saturday, after bringing her coffee, he was off. The question was, what sort of exercise was he participating in exactly? Oh, what a ridiculous thought. The course was closed and now Della’s imagination was running riot. That was the trouble with lying awake in the small hours: there was a tendency to churn things over and over, to let minor concerns blow up out of all proportion.

She was careful not to wake Mark as she slipped quietly out of bed, pulled on her dressing gown and padded downstairs. In the hallway now, she clicked on the light and crouched down to examine the cookbooks. She plucked out Microwave Cakes, remembering begging her mother to let her make one, and what a joyless thing it was too: a turd in a cup. ‘Told you so,’ Kitty had said with a shake of her head (right up until the end, she had regarded her microwave with deep suspicion, still labelling it ‘newfangled’).

Della scanned the numerous piles and wondered if perhaps she should try to whittle down the collection just a little. There were fat, meaty tomes devoted entirely to roasts and offal, which she was confident she would never use. Della opened The Boiled Beef Bible, certain that she caught a whiff of testosterone as she flicked through the pages. She picked up an outsized book entitled Entertaining With Flair. Della remembered her parents’ dinner parties, before her father upped and offed with Jane Ribble from the insurance company where he worked: the house filled with tipsy laughter, and cigarette smoke filtering up to her little bedroom in the eaves. She missed those parties, even though she had never actually been invited to them – or perhaps it was her calm, quiet father she had really yearned for. Contact with him was sporadic after the split. Della got the impression that he was too wrapped up with Jane to pay much attention to the family he’d left, and although he always remembered his children’s birthdays, soon a fiver began to replace presents, until eventually it would just be a card.

Della flicked through slim specialist books on olives, lemons – even salt. There were lavishly photographed volumes devoted to cooking with butter and cream: saturated fat virtually oozed from the pages. She could sense her arteries furring just by looking at the pictures. No one seemed to shun dairy or gluten in those days. The only intolerances Della could remember her mother having was when she or Roxanne took a biscuit without asking. Jeff was allowed to help himself to whatever he wanted.

Now, at nearly 3 a.m., Della sat cross-legged on the polished floorboards of the hall, reading about tender stews for the elderly and infirm, and being transported back to a world of chopping and stirring in her mother’s kitchen, a place that always felt comforting and right. She pored over elaborate picnic menus and remembered the Burley Bridge kids all congregating by the river where they built a fire and cooked sausages. She studied cocktail recipes – almost able to taste a stolen sip of her mother’s G&T – and sensed herself hurtling rapidly towards type-2 diabetes whilst immersed in Sugarcraft Delights. From its pages fell a small sheet of thin blue paper, folded over several times. Della opened it carefully and studied it. Typed on a manual typewriter, it read:

The Recipe Sharing Society

Meeting held 16 August, 1971

Della frowned. She would only have been six then, and couldn’t remember her mother being a member of any sort of society. Kitty had never been the ‘joining in’ sort. She read on.

Members present:

Barbara Jackson

Kitty Cartwright

Monica Jones

Celia Fassett

Moira Wallbank

Dorothy Nixon

And that was it, plus a typed note at the foot of the memo: ‘Recipes Are For Sharing’. There were no minutes of what had been discussed at the meeting, no matters arising or action points to be followed up. And, apart from her mother’s, none of these names were familiar to Della, suggesting that the society wasn’t based in Burley Bridge. Even as a child she had known pretty much everyone in the village, at least by name. She studied the list, trying to dredge up some long-ago memory of these women being mentioned, intrigued by the possibility of Kitty having had a circle of women friends whom she had kept strictly separate, gathering together only for meetings. Or maybe – and this was perhaps the most likely explanation – Kitty had attended one meeting and decided it wasn’t her thing?

Della turned the piece of paper over, hoping for more information. It was blank, apart from a faint pencil-written note she had to squint to read: Such a delightful evening, Kitty, yours affectionately, R.

R? She checked the typed names again: no R there. She folded up the piece of paper and slipped it back into Sugarcraft Delights, then eased the book into its pile.

Not remotely tired now, Della flicked through other books for notes hidden inside, but found nothing. Checking all of them would take days and, in any case, she didn’t really know what she expected to find. She gathered herself up and examined Mark’s golf clubs. Like the putter upstairs, these wore little black leather hats too. One by one, she removed them and inspected their heads. A couple were flecked with dried mud, suggesting … what exactly? That somehow she had changed from being a woman who went about her business in a reasonably cheery manner to the type who crept downstairs in the night to examine her husband’s sports equipment? She shuddered and made her way to the living room where she perched on the sofa and flipped open her laptop. It was wrong, of course; downright stupid even. Della knew, as she Googled Heathfield Golf Club, that she had tipped into paranoia and should be in the kitchen right now, making a mug of chamomile tea before heading straight back to bed.

The website looked as if it had been designed by a ten year old. Maybe Jeff was right and Sophie should consider website design, at least as a lucrative sideline. The colours jarred and the text – light blue on a sage green background – was barely legible. Still, she clicked on the news page and stared at a photo of the golf course dotted with small dark mounds.

Course Closed Due To Mole Invasion read the headline. As our members may be aware, Heathfield Golf Course has suffered an influx of tunnelling moles, which has caused considerable damage to the greens …

She frowned. Of course, a few moles burrowing about didn’t mean that the clubhouse was closed. Mark could still have met Peter and Ivan and Rory, or any of the others he’d mentioned in passing occasionally. Apparently, Peter had been the one to invite Mark to join the club in the first place, when he’d come to have his feet seen to and it had transpired that Mark had dabbled a little as a teenager. Della had thought it quite sweet, two middle-aged men chatting about golf while Mark treated Peter’s crumbling toenail with his laser machine. But the whole place had looked shut and, even if the clubhouse were still serving drinks, would Mark really have whiled away his entire Saturday there? She couldn’t imagine many worse ways to spend a day.

Perhaps he’d been studying the moles?

Della turned at the sound of footsteps in the hallway. She heard Mark stumble, then curse, ‘Christ, these damn books!’

‘Are you okay?’ she called through.

‘Yeah, fine. Nearly broke my neck, that’s all, tripped over that bloody margarine book … can’t we put them somewhere else?’

‘Like where?’ she asked vaguely.

‘I don’t know. Like a storage facility or something.’ He stomped through to the living room. ‘Anyway, why are you up at this time of night?’

‘Oh, I couldn’t sleep, that’s all.’

His face softened as he sat beside her on the sofa. ‘Something worrying you?’

‘No, not really.’ He lifted her laptop from her, rested it on his own lap and flipped it open. Heathfield Golf Club appeared.

‘The golf club?’ Della’s heart quickened as he blinked at her. ‘Why were you looking at this?’

‘I was just, er, curious,’ she murmured.

Mark gave her a bewildered look. ‘Thinking of joining, are you?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘Because there is a ladies’ section, you know, although I’m not sure it’d be your sort of thing …’

‘Oh, I don’t know about that, with it being such a slow, sedate game and me not being built for speed.’ She broke off, aware of Mark gawping at her.

‘What are you on about?’

‘Anyway, I can’t imagine belonging to anything that has a ladies’ section …’