they got back he carried her carefully over the doorstep of their new home. After advice from his mother, Molly had set about painting it cream, with the occasional wall in heritage grey or papered with large, muted flowers. The first year he took her to all the places he had been to as a child. There was a wood that smelt of wild garlic that was threaded through by a fast, brown river, and a garden with blue and pink hydrangeas the size of a child’s head and a low wall against which they had nestled like lost lambs.
The phone rang and Molly came out of her reverie with a start.
‘Hello?’ There was silence at the other end of the line. ‘Hello?’ she said again, but no one answered and she replaced the receiver. She told herself it was a foreign call centre and that a young man with a made-up British name had been prevented from selling insurance by tangled lines or that a hand in a bag had unknowingly activated a cell phone, but she knew it was him. He often phoned in the early evening, as if the fading light was his prompt to check on where she was.
‘Are you alright, Mum?’ asked Max. He sat down next to her on the sofa and put his arms around her neck. She could see her face reflected in the darkened window, as pale and as insubstantial as the ghosts that populated this area of the Fens. One such phantom Fenland farmer was said to regularly return to haunt his land. So precious was the rich black soil, that he ate great chunks of it. His invisible munching left clods disturbed where no tractor had been.
‘I’m fine, darling,’ she said to Max, and pulled him onto her lap. She stroked his head, feeling the shape of it under her hands. After a while he wriggled away from her and lay back on the floor and so she got up and drew the curtains against the dark fields.
Chapter Three
Carrie woke early on the day the shop was due to open. She switched on the light in the still-darkened room, threw off the quilt that covered her bed and put on the Chinese silk dressing gown that hung on the hook on the bedroom door. In a pre-Christmas bid to lose a few pounds to accommodate the feasting to come, Carrie had decided to start each day with a bowl of porridge made with skimmed milk and a few raisins. She was half hearted in her attempts to lose weight and at thirty-seven, felt she was approaching the time when she would in any case have to choose between her bottom and her face. She had a theory that after forty, the skinnier the arse, the more prune-like the face, unless you overdid the surgery and then you just looked weird. Carrie was tall and long legged and had a face that was at its most beautiful when animated. Her brown eyes were spaced a little too far apart, but her mouth was soft and full and her black hair fell straight and smooth across a wide brow. When she talked she often rubbed her hand across her forehead, as if trying to shape her thoughts before they escaped from her.
Carrie sat on the sofa to eat her porridge and contemplated the day ahead. She found that for the first time in three years, she felt something that resembled anticipation – although it was such a long time since she had felt it that she barely recognised it at first, mistaking the small flutterings as her stomach rebelling against the dollops of oats she was sending its way. She had filled Trove with things that were beautiful and had real value, not in monetary terms necessarily, but objects that had been made with care. It was the perfect place to get a present for someone else or to buy yourself a treat when you were feeling down. Carrie hoped that it would become somewhere that people wanted to linger and touch things. She had worked hard to get the balance right between providing a good range of new, quirky objects and old reclaimed things that had a patina and a story. She had also spent weeks travelling around looking at the work of craftspeople and artists. She had found a woman in Northumberland who created the lightest, silkiest scarves out of wool that had been dyed the pinks and burnt oranges seen so often in north-eastern skies. She had also bought several watercolours from a Manchester artist who had barely managed a civil word to her but whose paintings had immense charm. They featured small figures bent absorbed over tasks or walking in old-fashioned formation through dappled woods. Carrie enjoyed the hunt for treasure, particularly if she found it in unexpected places.
She had thought in the first white, dazed months after it had happened, that she would have to move from Cambridge. The town was too small; there was no way to escape the memories. But after a while she welcomed what she had been left. She also understood that she couldn’t move. She needed to stay where she could be found. There was, in any case, something in the gloominess of Cambridge, in the oppression of grey sky and buildings that soothed her. It was a town made for mourning. She was familiar with the open land and the dark earth of the surrounding countryside, where the beauties were subtle ones. They had explored it together as a family; Charlie, head bobbing over Damian’s shoulder and later, running on ahead to blaze the trail through flat fields of corn or along chalky dykes. Now when she saw Charlie’s first wobbling cycle ride across the common, or caught a memory of his face just on the edge of laughter at the top of a swing, she was comforted. She didn’t want to go to a place that he hadn’t marked, just as she couldn’t throw away the tubs of play dough still pitted by his fingers.
After rifling through her wardrobe and leaving piles of discarded clothes on her bed, Carrie eventually decided to wear her favourite pair of just tight enough jeans, black boots with buckles on the ankle and wedge heels and a green vintage jacket with large buttons and a velvet collar. She pinned a diamanté bow-shaped brooch onto her lapel and wrapped three strings of dark green glass beads around her neck. As she left the house, protected from the early morning cold in a huge scarf and beret, she saw a small blonde figure, dressed in a flimsy frock and minuscule cardigan, coming out of the door of the house opposite. This was at least the sixth different woman she had seen emerging from the premises. It was a constant source of wonder to Carrie how her neighbour managed to keep up with his demanding schedule. The blonde figure scuttled off into the half-light, and Carrie got on her bike and headed for town. The build-up of traffic had not yet begun along Mill Road. In another hour or so there would be a line of car windscreens framing pale, Monday faces. A woman with neatly curled hair was unlocking the doors of the Co-op. In the newly refurbished church someone was shifting a font on castors across the laminated floor.
Trove was situated about fifteen minutes’ walk from the centre of Cambridge and was tucked down a side street in a largely residential area of expensive Victorian terraces. It was in the middle of a small row of shops; a delicatessen whose clientele accepted the overpriced olives and mozzarella in exchange for the rakish charm of the owner who wrapped up their loaves of bread in tissue paper with exaggerated reverence, a greengrocer who had a tendency to use organic as his excuse for limp leaves and shrivelled carrots, a betting shop and small Chinese supermarket. Although the street was a little out of the way, it was on the main route into town and the shops benefited from the footfall of local customers.
Jen was there when she arrived, and had already turned on the feather-fringed lamps that were placed strategically around the shop. She had also sprinkled orange and clove oil on the radiators so that the place smelled delicious. She was engrossed in the task of dressing the old wire dummy that stood next to the racks of vintage clothes Carrie had sourced from charity shops, fairs, eBay and her own extensive hoarded wardrobe. With her head buried under the folds of silk, she struggled to pull the narrow-hipped dress down over the wire frame.
‘I didn’t know you were going to get here so early,’ said Carrie, taking off her scarf and gloves.
‘Gnnf … too excited to sleep,’ Jen replied, the words muffled. She emerged from the fabric with her hair mussed and her eyes bright.
Carrie had met Jen at college on the very first day of term. She had been a young eighteen-year-old then with no experience of being away from home, let alone living in London, which seemed terrifyingly large and noisy to her and full of people who talked too fast or who looked at her strangely. She had seldom been to the capital and wasn’t really prepared for the homesickness that engulfed her in the first months. Her mother had despatched her briskly at Coventry station with the words,
