Page 1 of Dear Daisy

Chapter One

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‘Northern stone, being harder — like the locals, some would say — lends itself less readily to the flourishes and overblown decorations found further south. Nevertheless, the Churchill family somehow managed to find a stonemason capable of producing something more appropriate to the pages of an illustrated manuscript for their daughter Beatrice. Deceased at the age of 29, there is a local rumour that she died giving birth to an illegitimate child, and that the somewhat over-decorative nature of her stone was her father’s attempt to distract attention from this unpalatable fact. Whatever the circumstances of her death, familial affection is obvious in every deep-cut line.’ — BOOK OF THE DEAD 2

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It’s not every epitaph that can carry off the ‘explosion in an eyebrow factory’ look, but, as I moved the ivy which made the age-angled gravestone look like a drunk in a bad toupee, a host of earwigs scuttled across the surface and, when I looked through the camera viewfinder, Beatrice Churchill (1747–1776) was giving infestation her best shot.

‘What are you doing?’

I jumped and turned around. There’s not usually much of an audience in a graveyard, or, if there is, I don’t want to think about it, but, standing behind me and half-hidden by more ivy, was a little girl.

‘I’m taking photographs of this grave,’ I said, slightly unnecessarily I felt, given that I’d been crouched in front of the stone with a camera and there were a limited number of other things I could have been up to in the circumstances and in broad daylight.

The girl came a little further into the sun. She looked, to my inexperienced eye, to be about eight, blonde messy hair with a cycle helmet crushed down onto it, the splash of freckles that said she probably spent a lot of time out of doors, and one hand holding a hobby horse with a red corduroy head and an expression of good-natured stupidity stitched onto his face. ‘Why?’

I turned away and took another shot, now that the earwigs had reconvened somewhere other than all across the sandstone. ‘I’m writing a book. I write books about graves. Haven’t you been told not to talk to strange people?’

The little girl came further out from under the ivy. I could see now that, along with the cycle helmet, she was wearing a striped jumper, leggings and a pair of wellington boots. The hobby horse continued to wear his inane grin.

‘You aren’t strange. You’re called Miss Winter Gregory and you’re renting Grandma’s little cottage in the High Street.’ She dramatically threw one knee in the air as though she was having some kind of fit, dragged the stick horse to a bush and pushed his plastic reins over it, and I realised that she’d been dismounting from an imaginary, and quite large, pony. ‘I’m Scarlet, and this is Light Bulb. He’s part thoroughbred.’

I stared at the broom handle, fabric and vacant embroidered smile. ‘Light Bulb is an unusual name,’ was all I could think of to say, doing that peculiar half-crouch that people who aren’t used to children do when trying to make up their minds whether to bend down to talk to them or not. Children had never really featured much in my life and, at thirty, I hadn’t quite made up my mind how I felt about them.

‘So is Winter,’ Scarlet replied, sensibly enough, I suppose.

I went back to trying to get an un-entomological shot of Beatrice’s stone and hoped that Scarlet would take the hint and go away. Like I said, I didn’t know much about children, otherwise I would have realised that, in the land of the village-bound child, a newcomer is conversational gold.

‘I like your scrunchie. And . . .’ a pause, as though she was giving my usual outfit of jeans and T-shirt a once-over, in search of something at least vaguely complimentary to say, ‘your boots.’

I glanced down at my strictly practical Converse trainers. ‘Are you supposed to be here on your own? Isn’t someone . . .’ I glanced around, and saw a resounding lack of responsible adults, ‘looking after you?’

‘Only Alex,’ the little girl said, with an insouciance that seemed to say that ‘Alex’ was so regularly neglectful of her that she’d already learned to cook, pay the bills and do basic DIY. ‘It’s all right. He’s working on the Old Mill across the road over there,’ a toss of blonde fringe towards the building site beside the river. ‘And he knows that Light Bulb sometimes runs away with me.’ This time the head-toss went in the direction of the hobby horse, propped blamelessly against the overgrown yew. ‘Alex is my uncle and he helps look after Light Bulb and I live with him. Alex, I mean, but I live with Light Bulb too, but I’m not allowed to sleep in his stable because Alex says it’s unhygenous.’

Oh boy. It’s like Sesame Street meets This Is Your Life. ‘Uh huh,’ I tried to grunt in a conversation-stopping way, swivelling around to get Beatrice Churchill and her interesting engraving in a shot to show this corner of the churchyard, triangulated by a wall slumped around it like bored shoulders and overgrown with feathers of grass and cow parsley. Some unkempt trees shaded it and hung their lowest branches over the grave markers.

‘You’ve got wiggly hair,’ observed the child, and I finally laid down the camera.

‘Look, Scarlet. I’m trying to get this picture done so that I can go back and struggle with the next bit of my book. Please, can you just let me get on?’ I hadn’t meant to sound so abrupt; the words came out cropped by annoyance and snipped into sharp edges by my desire for solitude. There was silence from behind me, and when I turned around to check that she’d got the message, she was standing very still with one thumb in her mouth and the other hand twisting a piece of hair that stuck out from under the bike helmet. She looked small and hurt and I felt like the biggest pile of pooh on the planet. ‘Sorry, sorry, I’m just . . . Look, why don’t you come and hold this ivy back for me so I can take a proper picture?’

The thumb came out with an audible ‘pop’, and her mouth stretched into a grin as she ran over and dragged the leaves away from the stone with an enthusiasm that would have any botanist gritting his teeth. ‘Like this?’

‘Fabulous.’ For the look of the thing I took some more pictures. I’d already really got more than enough of Beatrice, whose lettering wasn’t that interesting, but I wanted to give Scarlet something to take that ‘lost’ look from her eyes.

After that, she ran from stone to stone, yanking at undergrowth and overhanging branches with shouts of ‘do this one now!’, leaping the snaggled upthrusts of broken grave-kerbs with an almost elemental enthusiasm. She hugged marble angels and whirled around a granite obelisk as though engaged in some kind of morbid country dance, finally flinging herself down alongside a new-looking pale stone which hadn’t had the chance to grow more than a border of ivy and a slight lichen-tan. ‘You have to do this one too!’

I looked sideways at the marker, its clean white lines sharp against the green backdrop, like a lost tooth embedded in an apple. ‘No. I’m writing about pre-nineteenth century headstones, this one is far too recent.’ My glance slid away from where she sprawled and found the comforting endurance of Beatrice again. ‘It’s not interesting enough.’

The silence came over the little girl again but this time the thumb stayed away from her mouth; instead her fingers bunched and grasped at the fabric of her leggings. Her easy slouch pulled tight into a curved defence. ‘This is Mummy,’ she said, ‘and she’s very, very interesting and you are horrible.’

Ah. The bitter smell of torn ivy was suddenly very pungent in the still air.

Nothing in my previous experience had given me any hints as to how to manage this situation, so I was more delighted than I should have been when a large man came crashing out of the yew-and-conifer undergrowth. The fact he had no shirt on, a light shading of brick dust being all that covered his well-muscled upper torso, didn’t hurt either. He had dark hair lightened by powdered stone, and an expression of dusty annoyance. On seeing me he froze into immobility, as though being seen by a human turned him to stone, like a troll.

‘Alex!’ Scarlet scrambled to her feet. ‘This is Winter who’s in Grandma’s cottage, but she won’t take a picture of Mummy!’

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