Page 2 of Secrets at the Little Music Shop

‘Well thanks for that image. Your point, I think, was that Saskia isn’t exactly short of a few quid.’

‘Yes. Yes, that was it. And she ate our last HobNob? Hang on a minute, nursing mother here, aren’t I entitled to any privileges? Look, I’m going to put Harry in his cot for a sleep and get on and do some cards. I’ve got a few orders to fill before next week so I’d better make a start now while it’s quiet.’

‘Are you sure you wouldn’t rather go to bed for a bit?’ Harry, bless his little babygros, wasn’t exactly the calm, relaxed baby Rosie had somehow been led to believe she’d have, despite all the whale-song CDs and the hours of pregnancy-yoga, during which she’d looked more and more like an egg on a stick. Since his arrival she’d acquired shadows under her eyes and a pale, stretched look as though she was co-existing in several universes at once.

‘Nah, I’d better get on. I’ll catch a snooze later.’

‘Have you thought any more about . . . maybe . . .’ It sounded incoherent but Rosie knew what I meant.

‘I can bring Harry up on my own perfectly well, just as long as Saskia doesn’t decide she wants to turn him into a baby-skin coat or sausages or something.’

Harry’s father was something Rosie never talked about. She’d not had a boyfriend for at least a year, or, obviously she had, for the duration of copulation if nothing else, but she refused to say anything about him. My money was on Jason, but then my money was on Jason for everything from funding terrorism to dropping litter. Despite this, I harboured a kind of hope that he was the father. He was well-off, good-looking and wouldn’t necessarily mean Harry was doomed to being several nails short of a shelf unit; Rosie was quite bright enough to make up that particular deficiency.

‘Well, if you’re sure . . . I’d better get back to the marketing drawing board. Again. “Cosmopolitan” huh! I dread to think what she’s going to turn that lovely little shop into! Should have seen it coming, I guess, she’s always wanted to be El Supremo of York City Centre.’

‘Wouldn’t she have to be black?’

I stared at Rosie for a moment then my synapses managed to switch to new-mother mode of thinking. ‘That’s the Supremes, dear. Look, I’m going into York, trolling round the jewellery shops for another outlet. Do you need anything?’

‘New body? One where all the bits that are meant to go in, go in and don’t flap around in the breeze?’

‘I’ll buy you some big pants.’

Rosie looked down at herself. ‘Can you get them neck-to-ankle?’

‘You’re not that bad. Anyway, you had a ten-pound baby less than two months ago, it’ll take time for it all to go back to where it was.’

‘Yeah.’ Rosie sounded tired and I suddenly had a brilliant idea.

‘How about if I take Harry with me?’

She came over all protective, wrapping her body over Harry’s slumbering form. ‘Why?’

‘Distraction. I mean, last time I went round with my stuff, everyone was so dismissive. If I’ve got a pram and a baby, people might at least feel sorry for me.’

‘So you want my baby just so you can have a crack at the pity vote? Jemima, that is very immoral.’

‘You could get on with your cards. And probably fit in a snooze.’

I watched her eyelids droop as though even the promise of sleep was enough. ‘All right. There’s a couple of bottles of expressed milk in the fridge, in case he wakes up.’

‘But you just stuffed him.’

Rosie gave me a Look, which expressed the gulf between mothers and non-mothers. ‘Just in Case. That’s my motto.’

‘I thought your motto was Biscuits, Bustiers and Orlando Bloom?’

‘Yeah.’ She sighed. ‘Then I had a baby.’

Chapter Two

York has numerous streets and alleyways which fold in upon themselves to fill a small area with an almost limitless number of retail opportunities, like a kind of fractal purchasing reality. However, I soon discovered (a) that most of the shops, despite looking exclusive and designer from the outside, actually stocked depressing shades of the same eco-friendly woodwork and mass-produced earrings and (b) that you can’t push a pram over cobbles. Cobblestones might be picturesque but they take a toll on childhood constitutions, and Harry looked a bit wan as his head rolled around on the mattress for the third or fourth time. He was beginning to grouse tetchily. I peered down at his matinée-jacketed form. He was wearing a pale crocheted effort over a green babygro that Rosie liked because she thought it made him look cute; I actually thought it made him look like a string bag of sprouts but, hey, he’s not my baby.

‘One more, Harry. Promise. Then we can go home.’

I lied, of course, because he was eight weeks old and couldn’t hold it against me. Much good it did me. I might just as well have quit after the ‘one more’, no-one was keen and most of the shops were so narrow that I had to push in and back out, risking taking most of the stock with me. Leaning over the pram, spreading my portfolio over Harry’s head, didn’t really give the opportunities for selling either. The answer was always, ‘Sorry, they’re beautiful, but a bit expensive,’ until eventually I had tried every jewellery stockist in the central York area.

Harry had begun to complain seriously now. I shushed him by pushing the pram energetically to and fro, making his rabbit mobile oscillate dangerously, while I perched on the edge of the fountains outside the art gallery and wondered what to do. I mean this was York! City of horse-drawn carriage rides and medieval stone work. If I couldn’t sell hand-crafted belt buckles here then I might as well go back to France. Where I hadn’t exactly taken the Continent by storm either, but at least my failures had had an edge of Gallic glamour. Or Italy; I could go to Italy again, where I’d discovered the population possessed a whole range of elegantly dismissive shrugs when faced with a belt buckle in the shape of the Venetian Bridge of Sighs. If the jewellery didn’t start selling I could write a book, ‘How to tell you’re being given the brush-off in ten European languages’ — hang on a minute. Wasn’t that another little alleyway there, between those two sandwich shops?

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