Welcome To Rosie Hopkins' Sweetshop Of Dreams (37 page)

‘It’s all right, it’s going to be all right,’ she said, her heart racing. Where was Moray? She clasped Stephen’s freezing fingers between her own. ‘Just hold on.’

His eyes were drooping.

‘How … how did you get down the hill in the dark?’ asked Rosie.

‘Mm?’ said Stephen. ‘Oh. Oh, they left … they left some stupid old thing … stupid really. Stupid.’

At that moment, the door burst open and Moray came in with a large black bag, and the landlord close behind him carrying what looked like a quadruple brandy.

‘There’s no time for that now,’ scolded Rosie.

‘Not for me, for him,’ said Moray.

‘You don’t keep a full medicine cabinet?’

‘
Someone
never sorted it out after the dog thing,’ panted Moray, glancing back into the bar. Hye hadn’t bothered to come through to see what was going on.

Stephen looked around him in confusion. ‘Where’s that shyster doctor gone? Has he been drinking again?’

Rosie knelt down, holding both his hands as Moray scrubbed up at the sink.

‘Listen,’ she said, turning his face so he could see her. She didn’t like his condition, not at all. ‘Moray is going to stitch you up, and the landlord’s called the ambulance. You need a blood transfusion really really quickly. What type are you?’

Stephen couldn’t answer.

‘OK, well, fine, I’ll make sure they bring whatever they
have. But listen. Moray’s going to stitch you now. But I’m afraid there’s no anaesthetic. There’s just …’

Moray was holding up a packet of Nurofen.

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ said Rosie. She took the brandy off the barman. ‘Drink this,’ she said.

Together, they managed to get most of it down his neck, along with a couple of tablets. Then Moray ripped off the last of Stephen’s trouser leg. The wound was a horrible, livid thing against the stark white of his leg.

‘OK,’ said Moray, breathing out.

‘So, Stephen,’ said Rosie, ‘you have to trust me. You have to trust me, OK?’ She turned quickly to Moray. ‘Do you think the tourniquet would hold till the ambulance arrived?’

‘I don’t know when that might be,’ said Moray. ‘So, no.’

Rosie nodded.

‘Just keep looking at me,’ she said, and moved to the side to let Moray work.

Stephen’s eyes didn’t waver from hers for a moment, although they closed, briefly, when the needle went in for the first time.

‘It hurts,’ he breathed, quietly, his grip on Rosie’s hands strengthening.

‘I know,’ said Rosie, as if she were speaking to a child. ‘You’re being very brave.’

‘Oh, Rosie.’

‘I know. I know. You doof, if you hadn’t been such a stubborn arse, you’d have had this done under a lovely local anaesthetic.’

The violet shadows under his eyes gave him a haunted look as he winced.

‘Christ.’

‘I know, I know.’ Rosie glanced at Moray, urging him to work faster, but he was making a careful job of it. He caught her eye.

‘This appears to be our new hobby.’

‘I don’t like it,’ said Rosie. Then she concentrated again on Stephen. Later, he would remember very little of it. Nothing but a tight hold on his hands that did not falter, even when he was gripping them in agony like his life depended on it, and a pair of grey eyes that refused to let him look away.

In reality, stitching Stephen’s leg took just over ten minutes. To everyone in the room it felt like a million years. Stephen fell silent, the only sign he was conscious a tear he could not prevent falling from the corner of his eye. Rosie could not remove her hands from his to wipe it away, but moved their hands together, gently, to brush it from his cheek. Then she tried to focus on their breathing; taking deep breaths, holding them and exhorting Stephen to do the same; to breathe in time with her to relieve the pain; to keep the oxygen moving, until their breath was going in and out at the same time and Rosie, briefly, had the oddest sensation of being unable to tell quite where Stephen ended and she began.

Moray worked away accurately and intently, the only sign of pressure a bead of sweat on his forehead. The landlord brought in another brandy and announced that there was no sign of the ambulance yet, and that everyone was worried. Rosie concentrated on trying to somehow propel herself into Stephen’s body; to keep him with her, stop him nodding off, or his blood pressure dropping too far. She tried to beam
energy into him through her eyes, even though she knew this was ridiculous; willing him away from looking down, or contemplating what was being done to him.

Finally Moray straightened up.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘That’ll hold it. But he needs blood. And he needs to be in hospital now.’ He eyed Stephen harshly. ‘If you’d got over yourself three months ago, we wouldn’t have had all that little drama, would we?’

He went over to the sink and washed his hands, then looked around at the bloodied floor.

‘Sorry, Les,’ he called to the landlord.

‘Oh, I’ve seen worse,’ said Les.

Rosie found she couldn’t put Stephen’s hands down. She was cramped, but barely felt it. It was as if the entire universe had contracted to the dark blue of his eyes, fringed with black; his shallow breathing and the fading tan on his shoulders.

At last, the ambulance siren sounded, and as soon as the medics arrived everything exploded into noisy colour and action.

‘Did you find out his blood group?’ shouted a cross, stout paramedic at Rosie, who flushed, realising she hadn’t discovered even this most basic piece of useful information.

‘O-neg,’ said Stephen suddenly, as if from the bottom of his consciousness. ‘I’m O-neg.’

A gurney was brought in through the back door of the pub; someone set up a drip, someone else checked the wound area. There was a lot of yelling and noise and the ambulance lights lit up the quiet street, attracting large numbers of curious onlookers. The entire pub was out on the road. In the back room, the stout paramedic turned to Rosie.

‘OK, you can go now, duck,’ she said. At first Rosie didn’t realise. Then she worked out that her left and Stephen’s right hand were still intertwined. Stephen looked at her.

‘Can you come with me?’

Rosie suddenly remembered that she was in a pub, that she was meant to be here with her boyfriend whom she hadn’t seen for four weeks; that the hospital was an hour away over the dales and she didn’t even have her wallet. All of those things dissipated in a millisecond.

‘Of course,’ she found herself saying, as the pub door banged open again. There stood Lady Lipton.

Chapter Fourteen

Marshmallows

9 sheets leaf gelatine

16 oz white sugar

1 tbsp liquid glucose

7 fl oz water

2 large egg whites

1 tsp vanilla extract

icing sugar

cornflour

Lightly oil a shallow baking tray, about 12 × 9 inches, and dust it with sieved icing sugar and cornflour.

Soak the gelatine in 5 fl oz cold water.

Put the sugar, glucose and water into a heavy-based pan. Bring to the boil and continue cooking for about 12–15 minutes until the mixture reaches 260ºF on a sugar thermometer. This is very hot indeed. Please do not be an idiot about this; these are only marshmallows and not worth risking hospital. I do not recommend allowing children to help in the cooking of marshmallows, only the eating.

When the syrup is up to temperature, carefully slide in the softened gelatine sheets and their soaking water. Pour the syrup into a metal jug.

Whisk the egg whites until stiff, pouring in the hot syrup from the jug. The mixture will become shiny and start to thicken. Add the vanilla extract and continue whisking for about 5–10 minutes, until the mixture is stiff and thick enough to hold its shape on the whisk.

Pour the mix into the tin. Level off, and leave for two hours.

Dust the work surface with icing sugar and cornflour. Loosen the marshmallow around the sides of the tray and turn it out on to the dusted surface. Cut into squares and roll in the sugar and cornflour. Leave to dry a little on a wire rack.

1943

‘Down by the Salley Gardens,’ Lilian was humming repetitively to herself in her bedroom, finishing up the accounts for the shop. She found the singing distracted her. Since that awful night in the woods, she had decided to put everything behind her. Gordon had gone back to his regiment; Margaret, after begging her to come to Derby with her for the last time, had gone back to her life with her jug-eared young man. He’d managed barely a word in their three days’ leave, which was all Margaret needed to know to be sure they’d be together for ever
apparently, and she’d already booked the church. She’d asked Lilian to be her bridesmaid. Lilian couldn’t think of anything she’d less like to do. She’d said yes, of course. But to stand within a consecrated space and hear about one person’s true love and commitment to another would taste like ashes, she knew
.

She had thrown herself into the shop, was teaching herself double-entry bookkeeping as a way of taking some of the burden from her father. Gordon had signalled that after the war – if there was ever to be such a time; Lilian doubted it – he was never coming back to Lipton; now he’d seen a bit of the world, he wanted to make his way in it, which was fair enough, Lilian supposed. Terence was so far away it made the mind boggle even to think of it, and wrote neat, tight little letters that didn’t need censoring. And her Neddy was never coming home again. So she could shoulder the burden. She would have to. She realised, even at seventeen years old, this was how it was going to be. Carefully, day by day, swallowed tear by swallowed tear, she built a carapace over her heart. When the banns went up for Ida Delia and Henry, she smiled politely at everyone gossiping about it and maintained her composure. When she heard on the grapevine that Henry had received his call-up papers, she simply nodded, even though inside she was riven. There was a bit of her that thought, that pleaded, that hoped, that everything was going to be all right. That he would realise the error of his ways at the last minute
.

In her deepest, darkest moments, late at night, tossing in a damp bed, her mind in circles, she even thought the worst of thoughts: perhaps the baby was someone else’s. Perhaps the baby would not survive and he would be free
.

It was this last, most unspeakably dreadful thought, to wish harm on an unborn innocent, that shocked her to the core; that made her more determined than ever to display no hysterics; to do no begging
,
no pleading, no complaining about her lot in life. She clearly wasn’t worthy. For her superior manners before and her evil thoughts now, she didn’t deserve Henry Carr, and however much she might long for him, it wasn’t going to change a thing. She told herself that. It was not a consolation
.

And now he had his papers. It felt as if, somehow, while she could still see him there was still hope. He didn’t come into the sweetshop, of course, he avoided her as assiduously as she avoided him, but she had seen him – at church, in a high collar, standing next to his in-laws to be, who were, town gossip had it, every bit as horrified by their daughter’s farm labourer choice as Lilian had predicted. Or being tugged up and down the high street by Ida Delia, wearing a too-large dress and pretending to all and sundry that there was nothing in there and they were madly in love, that was all. Ida Delia, thought Lilian spitefully, was probably glad when his call-up papers came. It gave a little veracity to why they were getting married in such a hurry
.