Snowfall in Burracombe

Book 7: Burracombe Village

by Lilian Harry

Genres: Sagas

Synopsis

It's December 1953. As the village prepares for the festivities, for many people, a happy Christmas is by no means certain. Recovering from a car-crash, Stella Simmons, the winter wedding that she and her sweetheart had planned seems impossible. Elsewhere in the village, Jackie Tozer is dreaming of America and Hilary Napier, who thought the war had robbed her of her chance of happiness, has to ask herself if she could ever imagine leaving her life at the big house. The darkest time of the year finds everyone asking questions with no easy answer. As snow falls softly on the village, and everyone wishes for peace and joy, Burracombe proves once again that there's always a surprise around the corner. (web)

Release date: September 27, 2012

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 304

Sample

Chapter One

Burracombe, Thursday 3 December 1953

Never, Hilary Napier thought, never in all my life, would I have believed myself capable of this kind of behaviour.

A web of deceit, growing more tangled by the minute; that was what it was. If anyone had told her a few weeks ago . . . a month ago . . . But she’d learned that you could never be sure how other people would behave in certain situations – look at her brother Stephen, with their sister-in-law Marianne. Unless she had seen the evidence with her own eyes, Hilary would never have believed that the Frenchwoman would seduce him – and in the family home, too!

And now it seemed that you couldn’t know much more about yourself. When emotions took you over, really strong, powerful emotions such as those that had so suddenly invaded both her body and her heart, your mind itself and all the beliefs and codes you had grown up with seemed to change. You found yourself doing things you had never dreamed possible. Things like her recent trip to London, for example – and look where that had led. To disaster. Possibly even to tragedy.

The memory of the terrible accident on that December evening was still all too fresh in her mind. Felix Copley, the young vicar of Little Burracombe, over the river, and his fiancée Stella Simmons had gone to Exeter to collect Hilary’s half-French nephew Robert after his attempt to run away from school and return to France. It was on their return journey, on an icy, fogbound road on Dartmoor, that Felix’s little sports car, Mirabelle, had crashed into a herd of wild ponies, leaving Mirabelle wrecked and Stella so badly injured that they had feared for her life.

Hilary still blamed herself for the accident. If she had not gone to London that weekend to be with David . . . if she had been at home to see just how unhappy Rob was, to comfort and help him . . . if she had been there when her father had had his second heart attack . . . if she had been able to go to Exeter herself . . .

But ifs never achieved anything. All she could do now was deal with the situation as it was. And to do that, she needed all her strength.

I need David, too, she thought with a sudden surge of desperation. I need to hear his voice, even if I can’t see him. And he must be wondering what’s happening, after he rescued Rob in London and put him on the train home. I have to ring him.

She waited until her father had gone to bed, and then slipped into his study to use the telephone. Her hand was trembling and her heart thumping as she picked up the receiver and asked the operator for the number. As she heard David’s deep voice, the thumping stopped and her heart leaped instead.

‘David! You’re still there. Is it all right to talk?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve stayed late at the surgery every night, hoping you’d manage to call. Darling, how are you? How’s that poor girl? And young Rob?’

‘I’m all right – nothing wrong with me, after all.’ Nothing that being with you wouldn’t cure, she thought longingly. ‘And there’s been better news about Stella – she’s opened her eyes. Felix was with her, and he’s sure she knew him.’

‘That’s a good sign. And Rob?’

‘Very quiet, but then he always is. I’m afraid he feels terribly guilty, though nobody could say it was his fault. But Father’s agreed that he should go back to France after Christmas and return to his old school. I’m sure it will be better for him. He’s too young to be uprooted from everything he knows and thrown into English public school education. His mother and brother and sister are coming over for Christmas, and I think that’ll be good for him too. And—’

‘But how are you, Hilary?’ he broke in quietly. ‘That’s what I really want to know.’

She felt tears sting her eyes. ‘I told you – I’m all right.’ But her voice cracked a little on the last word and she stopped abruptly. As she took a deep breath, David continued.

‘I don’t think you are, darling. It sounds to me as if you have all the troubles of the world on your shoulders. I wish there were something I could do to help.’

‘Just talking to you helps,’ she whispered. ‘And I don’t really have all the troubles of the world. I’m not the one lying in a hospital bed fighting for my life.’

‘Thank God for that,’ he said sincerely. ‘All the same, you’re bearing a lot. And you’ve got Christmas to plan as well. Did you say Rob’s whole family are coming over?’

‘Some of them. His two grandmothers are staying in France and his aunt will stay to look after them. And I’m sure the patisserie will be too busy to spare Marianne for long. I don’t suppose they’ll be here more than a few days.’

‘There’ll be a lot for you to do, even so.’

‘Mrs Ellis will be here – our housekeeper and cook. We’ll share most of it, although of course she does have her own family to think of as well. If only Stephen would come too.’

‘Your brother? He’s still not agreed, then?’

‘No. I really don’t think he will. It’s – oh, it’s all so complicated.’ Her voice wavered again as she said, ‘It’s so good to hear you, David.’

‘It’s good to hear you too. But it’s not enough.’ His voice deepened again. ‘I want to be in the same room with you. I want to be able to see you – touch you. Hilary, this being apart isn’t good. We’re going to have to do something about it.’

Hilary was silent. She was fighting the tears now, longing to be back with him in the hotel room in London, or walking round the Serpentine – anywhere, just as long as they were together. But he was in Derbyshire, and she was here in Devon, and hundreds of miles lay between them.

And not just hundreds of miles. The real distance was far greater than that.

‘There’s nothing we can do,’ she said shakily. ‘We shouldn’t even be talking like this.’

‘We have to talk, Hilary. We have to talk seriously.’

‘But there’s nothing more to say,’ she wailed. ‘Please, David – there’s nothing we can do. We ought to stop. Now. This very minute.’

There was a moment of silence. Then he said, very quietly, ‘We can’t do that. You know we can’t.’

Hilary leaned her head against the receiver, feeling hopeless. ‘I know.’

‘I want to see you again.’

‘David . . .’

‘Soon.’

‘Not before Christmas,’ she whispered. ‘It’s impossible. You know it is.’

‘Afterwards, then. As soon as you’ve got rid of all your visitors.’

She sighed, longing to say yes. ‘I can’t make any plans now. Please, David – you know how difficult it is. It must be as bad for you as for me.’

‘Not quite as bad,’ he said bleakly. ‘I don’t have a family clamouring around me. Only Sybil, giving parties and dragging me to others, just for the look of it.’

‘After Christmas,’ she said, with a sudden flash of insight as to how his life must be, with a wife who cared nothing for him but only for her position in the community. David had told her so much about the life they led that Hilary had never once doubted him. ‘After Christmas, as soon as we can.’

‘But we’ll talk again before that,’ he said with sudden urgency. ‘We must talk. I can’t get through without hearing your voice.’

‘Whenever we can manage it,’ she promised. ‘But it won’t be easy. I can’t always talk privately.’

‘Write as well, then. We’ll both write.’

‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘We’ll write.’ She heard a footstep on the stairs and her heart jumped. ‘I’ll have to go now – Father’s coming. Good night.’

‘Hilary . . .’ he said, anguished. ‘Oh, my darling . . . Good night. Good night, my sweet.’

‘Good night,’ she whispered, and then, on no more than a breath, ‘Good night . . . my love.’

The door opened just as she replaced the receiver. She looked up at her father’s face and felt her cheeks flame, but his eyes were searching the room and he didn’t seem to notice her expression. He moved about, lifting up papers and replacing them in a fretful fashion.

‘Left my reading glasses down here somewhere. Wanted to read for a while. Have you moved them?’

‘No,’ she said, struggling to regain her composure. ‘I don’t think they’re in here at all, Father. Didn’t you have them in the dining room when we were having dinner?’

‘Hmm? Oh – well, perhaps I did. I’ll go and look. No – you stay there,’ as she began to rise to her feet. ‘They’re probably on the sideboard. What are you doing in here anyway? Working on those papers?’ She opened her mouth to reply, but he was halfway out of the door and turned back before she could speak. ‘Leave them for now, girl. Let Travis have a look at them in the morning. You’ve got enough on your plate – don’t want you cracking up as well.’

Hilary sat quite still. She watched as he closed the door behind him and listened as he went into the dining room and then came out. He opened the door, said, ‘Found them!’ and closed it again. She heard him go up the stairs, and once more she leaned her head on her hand and drew in a deep, shuddering breath.

Oh, David, she thought, David. Whatever is going to happen to us?

‘And a tree with coloured lights outside,’ Rose Nethercott said firmly as she stood on the green outside the Bell Inn, looking up at the sign. ‘It’s easy enough to run a wire out from one of the sockets, and it’ll make the village look a real picture. We want to give poor young Stella Simmons a proper welcome when she comes home from that hospital.’

Her husband, Bernie, and Dottie Friend looked at each other doubtfully. Bernie said, ‘I don’t know it’s as easy as you think, Rose. Electricity can be a bit risky outside. Suppose it gets wet. It’s bound to rain sometime over Christmas.’

Dottie’s concerns were different. ‘I don’t know as Stella will be home in time to see it anyway. She only opened her eyes for a minute or two, from what Maddy told me, and the doctors themselves don’t know what damage has been done. ’Tis only just over two weeks to Christmas – I can’t see her being let out in that time, not the way she’s been.’

‘Yes, but it’s another twelve days after that until the decorations come down,’ Rose argued. ‘That’s near enough a month. Surely to goodness she’ll be out in that time. Why, the wedding’s fixed for the ninth of January – they won’t want to put that off. And I tell you what – we’ll keep the tree up till then anyway.’

Dottie pursed her lips. After a moment or two she said, ‘That’s asking for bad luck, that is. I don’t reckon Stella and Felix need any more of that. They’ll be glad enough for her to come home, never mind whether there’s Christmas decorations up or not.’

There was a short, awkward silence. Then Bernie cleared his throat and said, ‘I’ll see if I can get some waterproof lights like they use round the shops in Tavvi. I reckon I could get young Bob Pettifer to run a proper cable out and we’ll make a show anyway, for the village. Us might even get Jessie Friend to put some up round the shop. The place needs a bit of cheering up, with all that’s been going on.’

‘You’m right there,’ Dottie agreed soberly. She turned to Rose. ‘I didn’t mean to say ’twasn’t a good idea – just that I didn’t reckon young Stella would be out of hospital that quick. But you never know – they can do wonderful things these days in hospitals, and maybe now she’ve started to take a bit of notice she’ll buck up in no time. It might not be anywhere near as bad as it looked at first.’

‘That’s right,’ Rose said, smiling at her. She and Bernie had been worried about their friend and barmaid ever since the village had heard about the accident. Stella had been living at Dottie’s cottage since she had first come to Burracombe to teach in the village school, and the two had become more like mother and daughter than landlady and lodger; even more so when it had been discovered that Stella’s younger sister, Maddy, had actually been fostered by Dottie during the war. The news that Stella had been badly injured when her fiancé Felix’s car had run into a herd of ponies on the Princetown road had hit Dottie very hard; although, being Dottie, she had responded immediately by sorting out Stella’s favourite nightdress to take to the hospital, putting a casserole in the oven to simmer gently until it might be needed, even making sandwiches and baking cakes to sustain Felix and the others while they waited for news. If she had given way at all to her own fear and distress, Rose thought she had probably done it when nobody else could see.

Rose turned to lead the way back inside the inn. She and Bernie had already festooned the ancient beams with paper chains and hung up some glistening gold foil globes and bells that they’d bought in Woolworth’s in Tavistock the previous week, and with the big log fire burning in the inglenook, the pub looked cheery and welcoming. A Christmas tree outside would lure people in, Rose thought, and set the tone for the whole festive period.

‘Not that Burracombe folk need a Christmas tree to lure them in,’ Bernie commented when she told him this. ‘The ale does that. But you’m right, my dear, it do look proper seasonal and jolly. The hard part will be getting ’em to leave, I reckon.’

Christmas preparations were going on all over the village. Most people didn’t put their own decorations up until the week before Christmas, but there were already a few trees set in front windows, their coloured lights twinkling, and Jean and Jessie Friend had got paper chains all over the ceiling of their shop. George Sweet had several Christmas cakes in his window, mostly iced with snow scenes, and Bert Foster, the butcher, was taking orders for turkeys, which would be supplied by a big turkey farm near Okehampton. Alice Tozer, who kept her own geese, had fattened up quite a few and would soon be busy plucking them ready to be collected or sent out to her customers, and a lot of the village people kept chickens and had already decided which ones would grace their tables on Christmas Day.

In the school, where Stella would have been overseeing the making of Christmas cards and paper chains to hang in the classroom, Miss Kemp had let the children make get-well cards for their young teacher instead. As for the Nativity Play, which Stella had just begun to rehearse with the younger children, the headmistress was in a quandary as to whether it should go ahead. The children looked forward to it so much, but on the other hand, they were all so upset about their teacher that it seemed callous to carry on as if nothing had happened.

‘I think we have to do it,’ Basil Harvey, the Burracombe vicar, advised when she consulted him. ‘It does the children no good to brood about Stella, and when she’s feeling better she’ll want to know all that they’ve been doing. How can we tell her we cancelled the Nativity Play?’

‘No, of course we can’t.’ Miss Kemp’s eyes met his and she knew that they were both aware that Stella might not get better, although neither would voice the thought. ‘I’ll call the first rehearsal this afternoon.’ She sighed. ‘It’s just that there’s so much to do in these last weeks before Christmas, and Stella took so much on her own shoulders. It being her last term before getting married, she wanted it to be the best she could make it.’

‘You need help,’ Basil told her. As a governor of the village school, it was one of his duties to see that the teaching was carried out as it should be, and although it was by no means Miss Kemp’s fault, the situation now was far from desirable. ‘If only we could get someone in to help you.’

‘I don’t think there’s any chance of that, so near Christmas. I did wonder if there might be a parent or two who could give a hand, but I don’t think we’ve any in the village who have experience of teaching.’

‘Are you sure about that? I have a feeling Mrs Warren told me once that she’d trained as a teacher.’

‘Mrs Warren?’ Miss Kemp echoed. ‘Oh, I don’t think so! She doesn’t seem at all the type.’

‘No?’ To Basil’s mind, although he would not have dreamed of saying so to Miss Kemp, Joyce Warren seemed exactly one type of teacher – organising to the point of being bossy, and certainly not likely to tolerate bad behaviour from the children. Even the Crocker twins might stand in awe of her. ‘She has run the village amateur dramatic society quite successfully in the past,’ he pointed out. ‘If she were just to take over the Nativity Play . . .’

Miss Kemp thought about it and nodded rather reluctantly, not relishing the dominating presence of the solicitor’s wife in her school. ‘She did help quite a lot with the excerpt we put on from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But I don’t suppose she’d have the time . . .’

‘Why not ask her?’ he enquired, and pulled the last rug from under her feet by adding, ‘I’ll do it on my way home, if you like. You really do need the help, Miss Kemp.’

‘Very well,’ she agreed with a small sigh, and smiled as she caught the twinkle in his eye. ‘You’re quite right. I mustn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.’

‘Not that you don’t need other help as well,’ he went on firmly, ‘and I’ve another suggestion to make. One that you might find more to your taste. I think you already knew that my wife taught, many years ago.’

‘Yes, of course. We’ve had many a chat about it. But you’re not suggesting . . .’

‘I certainly am. In fact, Grace suggested it herself. She’s willing to come along for two or three afternoons a week until the end of term. What a good thing we’ve got Stella’s replacement coming in January, when she was going to leave us anyway.’ He paused. ‘Although I can’t really think that she’ll be well enough for the wedding. In fact . . .’ He hesitated, and the headmistress put his thought into her own words.

‘Someone ought to be thinking about whether to cancel it – or at least postpone it. There’s so much already arranged – the guests, the reception in Tavistock, the service itself. But how can we suggest that to poor Felix? How can anyone tell him that Stella may never recover enough to be his wife?’

Chapter Two

Even knowing that one of your dearest friends was lying in a hospital bed hovering between life and death didn’t stop Christmas preparations going ahead, Dottie Friend reflected as she slid a tray of mince pies into the oven that afternoon.

It was one of those things that came around with the seasons, and even if you felt no more like doing it than flying to the moon, you still went through the motions – finding the box of decorations, seeing if the fairy lights still worked, getting Jacob Prout to bring along the little tree you always stood in the window, making a cake and pudding and these mince pies. It was as if you were wound up and couldn’t stop. And dear knows who’s going to eat them, she thought, getting a dishcloth to wipe flour from the pastry board she’d put on the scrubbed wooden table, because I don’t suppose Maddy will want them, and even Felix has lost his appetite now – and no wonder, poor young man, sitting hour after hour in that hospital ward beside his sweetheart, and wondering if her life was slipping away before his very eyes.

Dottie put away her tins of flour and sugar, and took the butter back to the outside meat safe in the back porch, where it was kept cool with cheese and meat or fish. There was a shepherd’s pie in there, made yesterday but not eaten because nobody had the heart, and she took it back indoors with her. It had better be eaten now, she thought, even if she had to give half to her cat, Alfred. He’d be pleased enough and it would last him two days.

She sat for a few minutes in her rocking chair by the range, holding her hands out absently to the fire and thinking about Stella and the horrific road accident that had landed her in hospital in Plymouth. It had been no one’s fault, by all accounts, and Felix and the young French boy, Robert Aucoin – or Napier, as the Squire would like him to be known – had been scarcely hurt at all. It was Stella who had borne the brunt of it and Dottie, along with a terrified Maddy, had gone to the hospital as soon as they’d heard the news, with Joe Tozer and his son Russ, who had hired a car to go about in while they were over here from America. Hilary Napier had gone too, but as soon as Robert had been discharged, she’d taken him back to the Barton, where, to make matters even worse, the Squire had had another turn with his heart. It seemed as if Fate was determined to throw everything it could find at them, just to see how much they could stand.

Well, if Dottie had learned anything through her life, it was that if you were the right sort of person, you’d stand up to anything at all. She was pretty sure Felix could, although it would hit him very hard if anything worse happened to Stella, and Hilary too was made of tough stuff. But Maddy . . . Dottie was not so sure about Maddy. She’d lost so many people in her short life – her parents, her baby brother and, less than a year ago, her own fiancé, Sammy – and she was still only twenty-three years old. She’d just begun, falteringly, to get over that, but if she lost her sister as well, Dottie was afraid she’d collapse completely. She was such a fragile little thing, and she’d tried so hard.

Russell Tozer had taken Maddy to the hospital again an hour or so ago. Dottie doubted they’d be allowed to see Stella, or if they were it would be for only a few minutes, but Maddy was fretful and anxious all the time she wasn’t there, and Russ had agreed to take her this morning and again in the evening. Dottie would go this afternoon on the train and stay for about half an hour. It was as much to comfort Felix as to see Stella that they were keeping up this rota. He needed someone with him, and the poor man wasn’t going to be able to continue to stay all the time anyway – he had his parishioners in Little Burracombe to think of, over the river, and all the preparations for his first Christmas as vicar. How he would have the heart for it all, Dottie couldn’t begin to imagine, but she’d grown very fond of Felix while he’d been curate in Burracombe and begun to court Stella, and she knew that there was a hidden strength beneath his often rather flippant exterior.

And them supposed to be getting married in a month’s time! she thought now, opening the oven door. The pies had turned a rich golden brown, and she took them out and set the tray on a folded teacloth on the kitchen table to let them cool a little before she turned them out on to the wire rack. Well, there would be no wedding that soon, that was certain. There was a long way to travel before Stella Simmons would be able to walk down the aisle on Frank Budd’s arm, to be given in marriage to Felix Copley.

A knock sounded on the back door, and she turned to see Val Ferris come in, with her baby Christopher in her arms. She smiled at Dottie, but her eyes were red, and Dottie felt her own throat ache at the sight of the young woman’s distress. The whole village is at sixes and sevens over this, she thought, and no wonder.

‘Sit you down, Val,’ she said, clearing one of the kitchen chairs of that day’s Tavistock Gazette. ‘And how be little Christopher, then?’ She parted his shawl and looked down at the tiny face. ‘My stars, he’m growing into a fine young man.’

Val smiled a little wearily. ‘He certainly has a fine pair of lungs. Kept us awake half the night again. Mum thinks it’s hunger – she says I ought to start putting him on to a few solids. Three months, or twelve pounds in weight, they say, so I’m going to get him weighed at the chemist’s shop in Tavistock and get a packet of Farex.’

‘Can’t do no harm,’ Dottie agreed. ‘He’ll soon tell you if he don’t like it. Mind you, they all spits it out to start with. It’s because their tongues don’t curl the right way, so I’ve been told. Got used to sucking, see.’

‘I didn’t know that. It makes sense, though. But I really came in to see if there was any news of Stella.’

Dottie shook her head. ‘None since this morning. I suppose us must consider it good news – at least the poor maid seems to be in her senses. But it’s early days to know more. I’m going in myself this afternoon, so when I come back I’ll pop in and let you know.’ She moved the kettle on the range and fetched the big brown teapot. ‘You’ll have a cup of tea while you’re here, won’t you? And one of my mince pies – I’ve just this minute taken them out of the oven.’

‘They look lovely.’ Dottie gave her a plate and Val took a pie and bit into it. ‘Nobody makes mince pies like you do, Dottie, only don’t let Mum hear you say that. It’s my first this Christmas.’

‘You ought to make a wish, then,’ Dottie said, and picked one up for herself. ‘I will, too. And I don’t reckon it will be hard to guess what either of us wishes for.’

‘No,’ Val said soberly, ‘it won’t.’

Their eyes met over the golden crusts, and although for luck neither spoke her wish aloud, each could read it in the other’s face. Like the rest of Burracombe that day, they were wishing that Stella Simmons would get well; that she would recover from her injuries and, at some time in the not too distant future, walk up the aisle to marry Felix Copley and live happily ever after.

If only, Val thought sadly as Dottie made the tea and poured it out. If only life could be like that.

‘Stephen – please,’ Hilary Napier said into the phone. ‘Please come home for Christmas. I need you here. We all do.’

She could feel her brother’s reluctance over the miles that lay between Burracombe, on the western edge of Dartmoor, and the RAF station in Hampshire where he was doing his National Service. She gripped the receiver a little more tightly and added, aware of the beseeching note in her voice: ‘Please don’t say no.’

She heard his sigh. ‘You know what the problem is, Hil. If Marianne’s going to be there . . .’

‘Steve, you can’t let that stop you! What happened between you and Marianne – that’s in the past. We’ve got other things to consider now. There’s Dad – you know he’s had another heart attack—’

‘I did come to see him,’ he cut in quickly.

‘For one night, yes.’

‘It was all I could get leave for.’

‘And we understood that. But he wants you home for longer than one night. He wants you home for Christmas. And so do I.’ She took another breath. ‘There’s Rob, too. He’s been through a difficult time. He needs a friend.’

‘He’ll have his mother. And his brother and sister – what are their names again?’

‘Philippe and Ginette. Yes, they’ll be here and of course he’ll want to spend time with them. But he’s feeling very alone just at present, and he feels responsible for the accident. He needs someone like you – one of us – who’ll give him some reassurance and not blame him. A man.’

‘How is Stella?’ he asked. ‘The last time we spoke, you said she’d recovered consciousness.’

‘Yes, she came round yesterday, when Felix was with her. But she’s not out of the woods yet, not by a long way. She’s not talking at all, and she seems to be in a lot of pain when she is awake. Apart from some broken bones – her leg and a couple of ribs, I think – they still don’t know how much harm was done.’ Hilary thought again of the bitterly cold winter’s night when Felix’s sports car had run into the group of ponies on the Princetown road. ‘They think there may be some damage to her spine – she may be paralysed and never walk again,’ she went on a little shakily. ‘Poor Felix is distraught. He wants to be with her all the time, but he’s still having to cope with all the Christmas preparations in the church at Little Burracombe. He’s got people there to help him, of course, and I’ve been doing as much as I can here, but – oh, Stephen, this is no good. We can’t talk properly on the phone. We need you here. I need you. Dad needs you. And Rob . . . He’s so upset, and I just haven’t got time to give him the attention he needs.’

‘What about Travis?’ Stephen asked, but she could sense a wavering in his tone. ‘He gets on with him, doesn’t he? And Jennifer. Didn’t you say he’s been going to see them at the estate manager’s house?’

‘Wood Cottage, they’re calling it. Yes, and it does him good to go there, but they’re not family, are they? And Travis is very busy just now, with the shoot and everything. We just seem to have so much on our plates at the moment.’

‘Yes,’ he said with a sigh. ‘Yes, I can see that.’ He paused, and she waited, hardly daring to breathe. ‘All right, Hilary, I’ll come. I’ll keep out of Marianne’s way as much as possible, and I’ll do whatever I can for Rob, and I’ll try not to annoy Dad too much, and I’ll bring in holly and fetch whatever you need, and be a willing slave all round.’ He paused. ‘There’s one person you haven’t mentioned.’

‘Maddy,’ Hilary said, nodding although she knew he couldn’t see her. ‘Well, of course, she’s terribly upset. She and Stella were separated for so long, and when she thought Stella might not live, she was just beside herself. But she seems to be coping quite well now, all things considered.’ She paused in her own turn, debating