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

‘I’m so sorry, Mum,’ cried Sophie, her own tears setting off Della’s. ‘My phone was out of charge. I’d just got in when Dad came home and said Gran had—’ She broke off with a sob.

‘It’s okay,’ Della murmured, hugging her daughter. ‘We knew it was going to happen. And, remember, it’s been tough for Gran for such a long time …’ She turned to Mark. ‘It’s just, I missed it, you know. I was too late.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he insisted. ‘You’ve done what you could. You’ve been amazing … looking after her, sitting with her for hours and hours.’ She caught him throwing Jeff and Roxanne a glance of irritation.

‘I just wish I’d seen her more,’ Sophie said, blotting away tears on the cuff of her faded red sweatshirt. ‘It’s too late now. I should’ve made more effort. I should’ve gone every day …’

‘Sweetheart,’ Della said, ‘you went often enough. Gran knew you loved her. She knew we all did.’ She caught Roxanne’s eye, and a flicker of acknowledgement passed between the sisters.

‘What I feel bad about,’ Jeff announced, looking around their mother’s cluttered kitchen, ‘is the state of this place. How could she have lived like this? We really should have done something about it.’ He cast a derisory glance over the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with ancient cookbooks.

‘Mum liked it this way,’ Della pointed out. ‘You know that. She refused to throw anything away.’

‘But there’s so much stuff!’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s oppressive, so dingy and dark. It can’t have been good for her.’

‘Clutter doesn’t make people ill, Jeff,’ Della countered, trying to soften the defensive edge to her voice. ‘Books don’t cause cancer. It was the way Mum wanted it, we couldn’t just barge in and take over.’

He exhaled loudly and peered at the shelves, running a manicured nail along the books’ spines. Their sheer volume lent Kitty’s kitchen the air of a second-hand bookshop. Perhaps, Della figured, the peeling whitewashed cottage did seem pretty chaotic when you visited so rarely. Like Jeff before her and Roxanne soon after, Della had been eager to escape Burley Bridge, the once-pretty, now rather shabby and beleaguered village which had formed the backdrop to their childhood. She had, too – albeit settling only seventeen miles away in the nearest sizeable town of Heathfield. However, as Kitty had become more dependent, she’d been the one to make frequent visits. To her, Rosemary Cottage with its vast collection of cookbooks and the enormous pine dresser crammed with chipped china knick-knacks, seemed normal.

Roxanne, too, was examining the books. ‘I’d forgotten how many of these she had. What was the point? I don’t ever remember her cooking much.’

‘She did when we were young,’ Della reminded her. ‘Not so much in later years, after Dad left. But, you know, they were important to her and for whatever reason she couldn’t let them go.’

Roxanne smiled, her eerily unlined face looking drawn and pale. ‘I’m sorry you’ve had to deal with all of this, Dell. You know I’d have come up more often if I could. It’s just, I’ve had crazy deadlines lately.’ Although Della knew nothing about the world of glossy fashion magazines – apart from the fact that they featured handbags covered in gold buckles and costing £3,000 – she did know that Roxanne’s came out monthly, suggesting that she wasn’t deluged by ‘crazy deadlines’ all the time.

Yet, while more support would have been appreciated, in some ways it was easier for Della just to get on with things on her own, without Jeff hectoring her and Roxanne fussing and dithering and never quite managing to get anything done. Living the closest to their mother, of course Della had been the one to step in. While Jeff could be patronising – making it plain it was a pity she worked in a shop rather than in the loftier professions of banking or journalism – he couldn’t find fault with the way she had managed their mother’s care. At least, he’d better not, Della thought darkly. Kitty’s doctors’ appointments had been dutifully marked on the wall chart in Della’s kitchen. She had taken to batch-cooking meals for her mother and, as Kitty had come to rely upon her, Della had noticed her prickliness ebbing away.

They had settled into a comfortable pattern, chatting about nothing much: the weather, their preferred biscuits, an antiques show on TV. The once-formidable Kitty had softened and, for the first time, Della could figure out how to be with her: calm, reassuring – like a mother, really. As a child, Della had always been rather afraid of her mother’s quick temper. However, towards the end of Kitty’s life, Della could tell that her mother liked her at last, or at least appreciated what she did. So did it really matter than the number 43 bus had been too slow today?

‘So,’ Jeff said, pacing around the kitchen, ‘I suppose we’d better get started.’

Della stared up at him. ‘What d’you mean, get started?’

He blinked at her. ‘I mean, figure out what needs to be done. Isn’t that why we’re here?’

‘Jeff,’ Roxanne said sharply, ‘Mum only passed away a few hours ago. Nothing needs to be done—’

‘And we’re here because …’ Della cut in, before tailing off. How could she put it: that it now seemed right for them to have gathered here in the very place where they’d forever complained that there was nothing to do, yet had somehow found infinite ways in which to amuse themselves? Long, lazy summers had seen them roaming through the undulating fields and rather scary woods, summonsed back for tea by Kitty’s shrill calls from the garden. Winters had featured endless games of Monopoly and copious reading by the crackling fire in the living room. Irritatingly, Jeff had had the best collection of books, all neatly ordered and catalogued in the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in his bedroom. It looked – and indeed functioned – like a library. Frequently, Della had been fined twenty-five pence for a late return.

‘Well, I’m glad we came here,’ Sophie said firmly. ‘What’ll happen to this place now, Mum?’

Della grimaced. ‘We’ll sell it, I guess.’

‘I’ll help with that,’ Roxanne cut in quickly, ‘but with the funeral, well … I’m sorry, I just wouldn’t know where to start.’

‘It’s okay,’ Della found herself saying. In fact, she knew precisely what to do, having arranged her father’s a decade ago, when Jeff had been too caught up with his newborn twins to get involved, and Roxanne had been rendered helpless by grief.

Roxanne squeezed her hand. ‘You’re amazing, you know? The way you just … get on with things.’ She swept back her long highlighted hair. ‘I’m sorry, though, I’d better think about getting back. Early start tomorrow, and the weather’s not looking too good tonight.’ A little light rain, was what she meant.

‘Me too,’ Jeff said, ‘but call me, okay, Dell? If there’s anything at all I can help with. It’s going to be a hell of a job, I’ll do whatever I can.’

‘Of course I will,’ Della said unconvincingly. Minutes later Jeff was preparing to head back to his wife, their boys and fancy detached home in Manchester, while Roxanne was itching to return to London, to write about hemline lengths and the ‘silhouette of the season’, whatever that meant.

They hugged, the three of them, despite their differences, as they had never hugged before: the only ones who knew what Kitty was really like. But as he climbed into his gleaming BMW, Jeff cast Della a quick, disapproving look, as if he still suspected she had stopped off for a sly steak bake instead of catching their mother’s last breath.

Chapter Two (#u44dfd2bd-bdc2-53f7-a19b-dc9764fce377)

In fact, it wasn’t a hell of a job for Jeff or Roxanne because, despite their reassurances that they’d be readily available – ‘I’m only a phone call away!’ Roxanne had trilled before zooming away in her convertible – Della had organised everything. There had been a short service at the crematorium, then all back to Rosemary Cottage where the villagers had been invited for tea.

Mark hadn’t involved himself in the preparations. ‘You seemed to be handling everything so well yourself,’ he remarked, when Della mentioned that a little help would have been appreciated. So she was immensely grateful to Freda when it came to sprucing up Kitty’s place in readiness for the surge of guests. Della’s friend since they had fallen into companionable chat while their daughters played together in Heathfield Park – the girls were still virtually inseparable – Freda had literally rolled up her sleeves and got stuck in. Together they had deep-cleaned Kitty’s front room and dotted it with jam jars of late-flowering purple asters from the rampant cottage garden. They had gathered together all the china, sorting the chipped from the unchipped, and made vast quantities of dainty triangular sandwiches and a variety of cakes. (Freda was an excellent baker. Since her marriage broke up – amazingly amicably, Della had thought – she had been supplementing her part-time teacher’s salary by supplying speciality breads to delicatessens all over North Yorkshire.)

‘Well, I think we’ve done a pretty decent job here,’ she murmured above the hubbub of the living room.

‘We have,’ Della agreed. ‘Thanks so much. Honestly, I don’t know what I’d have done without you.’

‘Oh, don’t be silly. I couldn’t just sit back and do nothing while you grafted away.’

Della smiled gratefully, catching snatches of Mark’s and Jeff’s rather awkward conversation about their working lives. While Mark was capable of appearing intrigued by Jeff’s corporate world, her brother clearly found it difficult even to feign interest in Mark’s podiatry practice. ‘So, um, how is the world of feet?’ he boomed.

‘Oh, you know, rich and varied.’ Mark rubbed at the side of his nose.

‘Anything new occurring? Anything I should be looking out for?’ Jeff chortled, and both men stared down at his black lace-up shoes.

‘You tend to know when things are going wrong,’ Mark observed, trying to sip from his wine glass before realising it was empty.

‘But I thought it was all about prevention these days?’ Jeff turned to his sister. ‘You know all about this, don’t you, Rox? In magazine land?’

‘Not about foot problems, no,’ she remarked dryly.

Jeff laughed again, possibly forgetting that this was their mother’s funeral gathering and perhaps he shouldn’t be quite so jovial. ‘Tell you what, Mark, you’ve got people like Rox to thank for all the cash you rake in.’

‘How’s that, Jeff?’ Roxanne asked with a frown.

‘Oh, come on, encouraging women to wear crippling heels that crush their feet and misshape their toes. Some of them look like – I don’t know – Roman sandals with enormous platform soles! You see girls out in Manchester, hobbling around on a Saturday night …’

Della stopped tuning in. She offered sandwiches to the haberdashery sisters, as they were known in the village – Pattie and Christine ran a curiously old-fashioned store for anyone who needed an emergency zip or a spool of elastic – then continued her rounds with a tray of mini savoury tarts. ‘Such a lovely idea to have tea here,’ remarked Irene, who ran the general store-cum-post office and whose fluffy hair bore a curiously peachy hue. ‘Kitty would have loved it, everyone gathered in her home to celebrate her life.’

‘Yes, I know she would.’ Della smiled. In fact, she wasn’t entirely sure about that. Kitty had had an aversion to neighbours popping in, especially those who insisted on being helpful. IreneBagshott dropped by with a chicken and leek pie, she’d exclaimed, just a few months ago. What on earth would I want a pie for? And she’d glared at the golden pastry lid as if suspecting that roadkill lay beneath. Today, though, the atmosphere was convivial, partly because Burley Bridge was that kind of place – a real, working village, where people actually cared about one another – and also, Della suspected with a twinge of guilt, because Kitty wasn’t here.

‘Such a terrible loss for you,’ remarked Morna, a retired lollipop lady who lived in the next cottage down the lane, ‘but what a full life she had.’

‘Mum was in a good place, towards the end,’ Della added. ‘She was well looked after. The hospice staff couldn’t have been more kind.’

‘I’m glad. Such spirit, she had.’

‘A real character,’ added Len, who ran the local garage. ‘One thing about your mother, Della, she knew what she wanted in life.’ And so they went on: about how strong-minded she was, such a one-off. Ian the butcher agreed that ‘things won’t be the same around here without Kitty’ – omitting to mention that she had once accused him of short-changing her for a rolled pork joint.

Della looked around the room. Pattie and Christine, who had run their shop together for forty-odd years, were clearly a couple of G&Ts down, while Tamsin, Jeff’s nervy-looking wife, was admonishing their ten-year-old twins for repeatedly interrogating Sophie about her newly acquired wrist tattoo.