Welcome To Rosie Hopkins' Sweetshop Of Dreams

by Jenny Colgan

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Hetty cryptically. She harrumphed. ‘Well, I wish them luck with that. But – and I know she’s your niece – but. Really. I don’t think so.’

  ‘Why not?’ demanded Rosie, furiously pink, as she set down the tray. The women looked at her.

  ‘Talking to us again, are you?’ said Lilian.

  ‘Oh, you’ll find out,’ said Hetty, just as they heard a car horn honk outside.

  ‘Tell me!’ said Rosie, cutting Lilian’s sandwich into small pieces. Although she always protested about the food, Rosie had noticed, she did tend to scoff the lot when Rosie wasn’t around.

  ‘Well, I shall just wish you good luck,’ said Hetty. ‘I wonder if you can succeed where so many others have failed.’

  ‘Are you going out like that?’ demanded Lilian. ‘You can’t.’

  Rosie was wearing a large cardigan.

  ‘Oh darling, you’ll catch your death.’

  ‘It’s lovely outside! It’s summer!’

  Hetty sighed. ‘You are never going to get the hang of this, are you?’

  ‘And I look nice.’

  Hetty shook her head, then picked up her huge waterproof mackintosh with the flaps that came off the shoulders and made her look like a particularly hefty ruddy-cheeked velociraptor.

  ‘Here, take this. I’ve got the stockman’s in the car.’

  Rosie stared at it. ‘I can’t take that.’

  ‘Course you can,’ said Lilian. ‘It’ll be pouring by eleven. You’ll be drenched through.’

  ‘I need a new coat,’ muttered Rosie to herself.

  ‘Yes, you do,’ said Hetty. ‘But until then, this will be perfectly adequate.’

  ‘No!’ said Rosie, struggling, but resistance was useless. Hetty forced her into the enormous overcoat, which smelled of hay and dog. Rosie caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror above the fireplace. She looked like a murderous fisher man.

  ‘I’m sure I’m …’

  ‘Not a word,’ said Hetty in a regal voice that brooked no argument. Was she, Rosie found herself wondering, actually in charge? Were you legally obliged to do what the lady of the manor said? She’d have to check up on it.

  ‘Off you go now!’

  ‘And tell us everything when you get back!’ pealed Lilian, who was obviously finding all of this hilarious, and the arrival of Rosie clearly some huge entertainment package on a par with Sky Plus.

  Moray stared at the figure emerging from the cottage with that same twitch of amusement around his mouth. Rosie wasn’t sure whether to find it charming or irritating.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, leaning against his Land Rover with his arms folded. He was wearing a well-worn tweed jacket that looked slightly too big for him, a checked shirt and a green tie. ‘I was looking for a new girl. You, it is clear, have been here for generations.’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Rosie. ‘It was Lady Lipton’s fault.’

  ‘That’s her coat?’ said Moray. ‘She is grateful we saved Bran.’

  ‘It’s a loan. Can I take it off and put it in the back?’

  ‘If you like,’ said Moray. ‘But it’s going to hose it down in about forty minutes. You may want to keep it close by.’

  ‘But it smells absolutely horrible.’

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘You are such a country lubber! Of course it does! Look!’

  Rosie picked out a piece of hay from the pocket. Moray glanced at it.

  ‘Oh look,’ he said. ‘A tube ticket.’

  ‘We don’t have tube tickets any more,’ said Rosie loftily.

  ‘Oh yes? Have they stopped charging you for ramming you in like slaughterhouse cattle and making you stick your nose in a stranger’s armpit for two hours a day?’

  Rosie didn’t consider this worthy of a response.

  ‘So, what’s this in aid of?’ she said.

  ‘Well, I thought you might like to ride along,’ said Moray carefully. ‘Show you a bit of the town and so on.’

  ‘So you won’t be needing my professional opinion?’ said Rosie, smiling. ‘What happens round here anyway? Goat bites?’

  Moray raised his eyebrows. ‘Well, let’s get the morning calls out of the way first.’

  They popped in on a heavily pregnant young woman without a car, who demanded to know if Rosie had children. When Rosie said she didn’t, she ignored her.

  Then they went to see Anton Swinley, who had hurt his back in a lorry-driving accident six years before and since then had made it his life’s ambition to become Britain’s fattest man. He had fallen well short of that, but he still had various medical conditions, not least a skin fungus that was a lot easier to cope with when two people were attending to it.

  Moray looked at Rosie, a tad guiltily.

  ‘I’ve brought you lunch for later,’ he said.

  Rosie looked back at him. ‘I hope it’s not pork scratchings,’ she said quietly, but readily put the rubber gloves on.

  ‘Ooh,’ Anton was saying, in a wheezy voice. Next to his bed was a large respirator that helped him sleep. ‘You’re going to reopen that sweetshop! I really love Lilian’s sweetshop. Chocolate caramels … fudge squares.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Rosie, scrubbing away. She didn’t at all mind the unpleasant jobs – they were part of life. Bodies were bodies, and someone had to do it. She did, though, slightly mind the hunky doctor, who’d started at the bottom end, having to see her in such unromantic circumstances. She wasn’t looking for a man. Obviously not, she had a perfectly lovely man waiting at home. A perfectly lovely man, she tried to ignore a voice in her head saying, who seemed to have been out on the piss till all hours ever since she left and who’d started crashing at his mum’s. A perfectly lovely man who’d been very happy to move in with her so they could share an otherwise ungettable mortgage, while seemingly using it as a base from which to go out with his mates and … The man she loved, she told herself. The man she loved, in the flat she loved, in the city she loved, where her future lay, firmly laid out ahead of her.

  On the other hand, it would be nice to know, whatever Lilian and Hetty appeared to think, that a man might perceive her as an attractive woman, as someone you might want to take out on a date. When she’d seen Moray, tall, handsome, humorous, leaning on his car that morning, her heart, however much she tried to deny it, had skipped. Just a tiny bit. Just a tiny bit to show there was a flicker of life in her yet. Just because she was taken, she told herself, didn’t mean she was dead.

  Plus, also, it hardly mattered. It seemed more than likely that if you fancied someone, you wouldn’t take them on a first date to scrub down a morbidly obese man’s fungal skin folds. Yes. Pretty improbable. She’d been out of the game for a while now, but it was unlikely to have changed that much. So. Nothing to worry about at all. She should try to stop sneaking peeks at his eyes, to see if they really were that amazing mix of blue and green.

  ‘Doesn’t your health visitor have a word with you about how many sweets you can eat?’ Rosie asked.

  Anton and Anton’s wife, a surprisingly petite woman, both shook their heads. The fact that she was petite was slightly less surprising than that he had a wife at all, thought Rosie. Maybe the man shortage was even worse than she’d realised.

  ‘A health what?’ said Anton.

  ‘Someone who could maybe discuss the effects of your, ahem, lifestyle choices on your health,’ said Rosie.

  Anton and his wife looked at one another for a second.

  ‘Well,’ said the wife tentatively, ‘we watch those fat TV shows, don’t we?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Anton, nodding his head, which was oddly elongated by all the bulbous chins underneath it. ‘Yeah, we do. All of them.’

  ‘But you don’t think to do any of the things they say?’ said Rosie.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Anton.

  ‘Yes,’ said his wife. ‘We’re going to fill in the forms. They come and give you a haircut and all sorts of things.’

  ‘Well,’ said Rosie, ‘even if you don’t actu
ally appear on the shows, I’m sure there’s plenty of useful tips you could take from them.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll get on the show,’ said Anton proudly. ‘I had four bacon butties this morning. Four! That should do it.’

  Rosie shot a look at Moray, whose face betrayed nothing.

  ‘But if you followed what they say about fruit and vegetables and exercise, you wouldn’t need to go on the show! You could move around much more easily instead!’

  Anton looked confused, then glanced at his wife and back at Rosie again.

  ‘Are you going to have those violet creams when you reopen your shop?’

  Rosie looked surprised. ‘I hadn’t thought of it. Do you think there’s much call? Violet creams are a bit out of fashion these days.’

  ‘Not with me,’ said Anton. ‘I love my creams, don’t I, love?’

  His wife beamed proudly.

  ‘Violet are the best, but I’m not that fussy really. Coffee. Raspberry.’

  ‘I bet you do well at Christmas,’ said Rosie. ‘Loads of people hate them.’

  ‘I know,’ said Anton. ‘It’s my party trick.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘I can tell you which Revel is which … without even touching them!’

  ‘Wow,’ said Rosie. ‘Maybe we could get you down to the shop to do that!’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Anton.

  ‘No, I’m serious … if you manage to get yourself together and walk down, we’ll have a display event and people can bet against you. It’ll be great.’

  Anton’s eyes lit up.

  ‘That would be great. I could hustle them a bit, just to get them started. Mix up a peanut and a raisin.’

  ‘Which is a rube’s error,’ said Rosie seriously.

  ‘Right …’

  Moray harrumphed and, as they finished up, handed over large bottles of emollients with instructions to Anton’s wife on how to apply them.

  ‘This is the only cream I want you anywhere near,’ he said, pointedly. ‘Is it worth giving you this for the bath?’ He was looking critically at a big white bottle of bath salts. The woman shook her head.

  ‘Me in a bath?’ said Anton. ‘They’d never get me out again! We’d need to call the fire brigade!’

  He and his wife started to chuckle. They were still giggling as Moray and Rosie left the house, which did indeed smell of bacon.

  Moray took the hilltop road. ‘So we see one patient who’s eating himself to death and you suggest he eats more?’

  ‘I did not, in fact, suggest anything of the sort,’ said Rosie. ‘I dangled a carrot … OK, a carrot made of icing, but none theless. I have tempted him with something that involves getting out of the house. And getting out of the house is the first step in this. Trust me. I’ve worked on bariatrics. I’ve cleaned stuff out of crevices I thought was starting a new civilisation.’

  Moray shot her a look.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Maybe you can occasionally be useful when I’m not digging you out of ditches.’

  That didn’t sound much like a date, Rosie thought. Useful wasn’t a word you used about a date. It was a word you used about a stapler. No. Good. Best to put the whole thing behind her.

  ‘It’s hard,’ said Moray. ‘I can’t yell at Anton. We are the whole support team out here, but we’re not the police. It’s not illegal to overeat.’

  ‘That’s what we used to say when they brought in the same drug addicts four times a week,’ said Rosie. ‘Of course, drugs are illegal, but the same principle applies. Do what you can, keep moving on. Patch and dispatch.’

  ‘Are you sure you want to open a sweetshop?’ said Moray. ‘Because you still sound a lot like a nurse to me.’

  ‘Do you know how many people turn up at sweetshops covered in blood?’asked Rosie pleasantly.

  ‘Almost none?’ ventured Moray.

  ‘Almost none. With a small subsection of skinned knees. Anyway, I’m not opening up a sweetshop. I’m selling a sweetshop. Very different.’

  ‘And then you’re going back to all the drug addicts and the tube tickets and the mess and the people, are you?’

  ‘London’s a wonderful town.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  As they rose higher and higher the Land Rover clung to the road, effortlessly cresting the switchbacks and steep gradients. Now the clouds had cleared away, Rosie could take a proper look around at where she’d ended up. At the very top of the crags, Moray stopped suddenly. The road was deserted. Rosie could see for miles to her right and behind her; on her left was the top of the hill.

  ‘Spot of lunch?’ asked Moray, and they both got out of the car.

  There was no denying it: it was stunning up here. Obviously there were people down there, working and ploughing and shouting at Jake and so on – but up here, the grey sky was broken with weak beams of sun; shadow and light passing through the valleys and over the softly rolling moors, all divvied up by ancient stone walls so it looked like a gently shaded eiderdown, with the oranges and greens and browns merging into one another.

  Sheep were dotted around, but all Rosie could hear was the caw of a circling bird; in fact, she felt as if she were seeing the landscape the way a bird would see it, without human concerns. Except for over in the far corner, tucked under the next set of hills, like a beautiful woman wearing a plain white T-shirt out of politeness, not to dazzle the rest of us, was a magnificent mansion. It stood four-square, with a tower on each corner and all manner of twiddly bits around its millions of windows, as if just waiting for Mr Darcy to roll up. It was extraordinary.

  Rosie realised that the landscape she was looking at, although it felt entirely natural, was in fact manmade – a lake just there, where it could be seen from the house; an orchard of fruit trees and acres and acres of land that no doubt belonged to whoever lived in that pile, or had lived, once upon a time. It had been designed by men, which didn’t make it any less beautiful. It was like something out of a fairy tale.

  Sitting down on a boulder, Rosie felt all the stresses of the morning, and her new, temporary, awkward life that her partner had seemingly no interest in, slowly melt away. Silently, Moray held out a bottle of water and a package of waxed paper. Inside was thick white crusty bread, filled with rare cold roast beef, a smear of mustard and a twist of black pepper, with sliced and salted tomatoes on the side.

  ‘I picked it up in town,’ he murmured.

  Rosie thanked him, bit into a sandwich and stared out at the view. Suddenly, she felt calm; she’d found peace and quiet and a place to rest the heart. It was lovely. She was not going to let anyone else bring her down. She took a photo on her phone and tried to send it to Gerard. No signal. Of course not. Rosie found she was pleased.

  ‘This is gorgeous.’

  ‘Well, say what you like about Phyllis, she does make a good sandwich,’ said Moray.

  ‘No, I mean, this … all this.’

  Rosie indicated the brown and green and gold of the world beneath her feet and pointed to the mansion. ‘Is that … is that Hetty’s place?’

  ‘Do you mean Lady Lipton?’ said Moray, sounding amused.

  ‘Uhm, yes. I probably will go back to calling her that now I’ve seen it. How could you live there? There’s like a million rooms. You’d never get your wireless to stretch, for starters.’

  Moray smiled. ‘I think she only lives in a little bit of it. Rents the rest out for weddings and film shoots and so on. She opens it up from time to time, especially the gardens. She has to, I think. It must cost a fortune to run. She’s probably skinter than you.’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s possible,’ said Rosie, heaving a sigh.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. I just … I just need to get it together to sell the shop. Quickly.’

  ‘Well, that’ll be good, won’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Rosie. ‘Yes it will.’ She looked at the big house again. ‘Wow. Is it just her?’

  There was a long pause.

  Then Moray changed the subject. ‘I wond
er, can I ask you something of a favour? My next patient.’

  ‘Aha,’ said Rosie, brushing down her thighs. ‘Man, that was an excellent sandwich.’

  ‘Mmm,’ said Moray. For the first time, his effortless confidence seemed to wobble a bit and he looked slightly unsure of himself.

  ‘Are you trying to bribe me with sandwiches?’ said Rosie.

  ‘Mmm,’ said Moray. ‘My next patient. He’s proving a little … intractable.’

  ‘I don’t know what that means,’ said Rosie. ‘Has he got a gun?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Moray, then looked worried, as if this possibility had never occurred to him. ‘I hope not. God. No. No, definitely not.’

  ‘Uh-oh,’ said Rosie.

  ‘He’s just … he keeps refusing treatment. And all three of us from the surgery have been up there and he hasn’t really wanted to see any of us. And we’re just irritating him now. So I wondered if … possibly … a fresh face might clear the way a bit.’

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’

  Moray looked about to hand over a thick file of notes, then stopped himself.

  ‘Well, I can’t give you these,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ said Rosie. ‘Just tell me.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Moray, ‘why don’t you tell me what you think? Once you’re inside, just tell him we’re going to take a look at it, then call me.’

  ‘There’s no mobile phone signal up here,’ said Rosie.

  ‘No, call me. “MORAY!” You know.’

  Rosie swallowed. ‘I’m not sure about this. Is he violent?’

  ‘No!’ said Moray. ‘No, no, nothing like that. I’m sure. No. No. And you’re very brave, I saw that with Bran.’

  ‘Am I in more or less danger of being bitten?’

  ‘It’s just five minutes,’ said Moray. ‘Till I can get through the door.’

  ‘Or I get shot.’

  Moray looked at her. ‘I promise, I wouldn’t ask if we weren’t … a bit desperate.’

  They got back in the car.

  Just over the crest of the hill, where the sun disappeared and the temperature in the car seemed instantly to drop several degrees, was a tiny lane. Who on earth would build a house up here? Rosie wondered. She’d noticed the farmhouses tended to be down in the valleys, to protect them from the harsh winds that blew through the region in the long winter months. The patient was obviously someone who did not like his neighbours.