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. Irene Bagshott 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.
‘Did your mum and dad let you get that?’ bellowed Isaac, the bolder of the pair. ‘Or did you just get it?’
‘She just got it,’ Mark announced tersely. ‘No permission was sought.’ Noah, Isaac’s brother, laughed as if this were the funniest thing he’d ever heard.
‘I’m eighteen,’ Sophie said with a roll of her eyes, glancing at her boyfriend Liam, who merely shrugged in response.
‘D’you like it?’ Isaac asked him.
‘Yeah, it’s all right,’ Liam replied.
‘Wish she’d got one with your name on it?’
‘No, ’course not.’
‘Yeah, ’cause then if you split up, that’d be so embarrassing.’
‘Isaac!’ Tamsin snapped, causing him to totter back and shroud himself, like a toddler might, in the heavy velvet curtain.
Della caught Freda’s eye and grimaced. In fact, she had been pretty dismayed about Sophie having her beautiful creamy skin indelibly inked, but then, what could she have done to prevent it? Seized her daughter’s money or kept her under lock and key? Without prior consultation Sophie had taken herself off to Screaming Skulls, an insalubrious-sounding place in town – since boarded up, disconcertingly – and returned home with her wrist bandaged. The bandage was soon removed to reveal a wobbly line of scabs, which eventually fell away to reveal a daisy-chain design. ‘My God, it looks so sore,’ Della had exclaimed, examining the inflamed, puffy skin.
‘It’s fine,’ Sophie insisted.
‘Are you sure? It looks, I don’t know, kind of angry.’
‘You’d be angry,’ Mark had muttered, ‘if you’d been pierced with a needle thousands of times and pumped full of ink.’
Della glanced around the room, noticing that Terry and Val, Mark’s parents, had just arrived, looking quite terrified as both twins twirled energetically in the curtains while neither Jeff nor Tamsin made a move to stop them.
‘So sorry we’re late,’ Val explained as Della offered them their preferred cups of sweet, weak tea. ‘The car broke down, we’d hardly been going five minutes …’
‘Well, Val had put petrol in,’ Terry admonished her.
‘I thought it was diesel, dear.’
‘But it wasn’t.’
Della tried to placate them with mini tarts and fairy cakes, but no, they both had digestive issues at the moment – ‘I couldn’t stomach a thing,’ Val whimpered – and they looked around Kitty’s living room in awe, as if they had accidentally stumbled into a minor stately home. Everything seemed to intimidate them, Della reflected. In fact, she had long been concerned about her in-laws, now
