Page 9 of Dear Daisy

‘She was going to the hospital though, she won’t have her phone on in there, will she?’ I sighed. ‘Look, Miss . . .’

‘It’s Ms. Ms Charlton,’ and then, softening when I didn’t raise my eyebrows at the Ms bit, ‘Lucy. Look, school policy is not to let children go with anyone other than a named adult.’

‘Can’t I go by myself?’ Scarlet was stroking Light Bulb’s unresisting ears. ‘The big ones do, they walk home by themselves. I could walk home by myself with Winter.’

We adults looked at one another. I could see Lucy trying not to grin and I was fighting my own inclination to snort. ‘If you’re sure,’ Lucy said. ‘And if you make sure that Light Bulb is careful near the road, you wouldn’t want him to get loose in traffic, would you?’

She went up in my estimation again right there, although I still wasn’t sure about the smock. Never mind what Daisy might say about fashion, it made her look pregnant. Unless she was, of course, but even so it was a crime against Vogue. ‘I promise I’ll keep an eye on her. I’m taking her to the Old Mill anyway, so you could always come past on your way home and check she’s safely there.’

‘That’s a good idea,’ and the speed with which she took my suggestion told me I’d been right to suspect that Lucy Charlton had a bit of a ‘thing’ for Alex. But then, who wouldn’t? I mean, I found myself smiling at the thought of his rock-dusted hair, and doing something a bit more basic at the memory of his bare chest, and he wasn’t even my type. ‘I haven’t seen Al . . . I mean, Mr Hill, for a while, I’ll do that. Be careful, Scarlet.’

Scarlet mounted Light Bulb in her usual exaggerated fashion, and we literally trotted off down the road. ‘He’s a bit fresh. He has to spend the day in Mr Moore’s office, but it’s all right because he has a hay net.’

Light Bulb shied dramatically at a rubbish bin as he and Scarlet dashed along the pavement. The mist had cleared with the afternoon and the sun was warm, which was just as well because Scarlet was only wearing a summer dress. Her bare legs were scraped and scrubbed with rashes and the grazes of childhood and were very vulnerable-looking under the pink checked cotton and above the ankle socks that I bet had started the day as white.

‘Shall we get an ice cream?’ I found myself asking, unexpectedly.

‘Ooh, yes!’ Light Bulb performed a dressage manoeuvre and circled back along the pavement towards me. ‘Can we eat them in the park?’

Great Leys has a park? Why? Ninety per cent of it is countryside anyway, what have they done, bunged a set of swings up in a field?

It turned out that that was pretty much exactly what they had done. We sat on a bench and ate Cornettos, while Light Bulb grazed, or at least lay face down on the grass in front of us. Without the bike helmet Scarlet’s hair was curly and had obviously been cut by someone with more enthusiasm than talent — it was slightly lopsided at the back and her fringe looked more like an amateur comb-over — but she seemed entirely unselfconscious as she sat next to me, digging one sandalled toe into the peaty earth.

‘Where do your mummy and daddy live?’ she asked me unexpectedly, staring at two big lads shouting at one another from the swings.

‘My parents split up five years ago. My mother lives in France and my dad went back to America, where he’s from.’ And I still feel the pain of their divorce, although they’ve tried not to bother me with it.

‘So you must get really nice holidays then.’

‘Well, I’ve just spent six months in Paris with my mum, but it didn’t really qualify as a holiday. I was plotting out the new book.’

‘Has your dad taken you to Disney World yet?’ She was licking her ice cream with determination and regarding me from those curiously adult eyes, but without the adult level of prurience that I was used to from personal questioning. She simply wanted the facts, ma’am.

‘I’m a bit old for Disney World, I think, besides he lives in Maine and that’s quite a long way away. I think,’ I added, hastily, since my knowledge of the geography of the United States was a bit shaky, even given my parentage.

‘My mummy and dad split up before I was born. He was called Jamie.’ It was hard to know how Scarlet felt about anything, I realised. Those eyes, unlike her uncle’s, gave nothing away, and besides, I was far more used to reading men than eight-year-old girls. She could have been trying to make me understand how it was to grow up with no parents or she could simply be giving me information. ‘So now Alex and Granny look after me.’

‘So where do you live?’

A frown, as though she had never really thought about it. ‘Where Mummy and I lived before. With Alex.’

‘And where does Alex live?’ This being the information I really wanted. Did he live at home, with his mother, in his old childhood room with an entire adolescence-worth of . . . let me think, he didn’t look the type for girlie-mags . . . Doctor Who merchandise all over the surfaces and a Star Wars duvet cover?

‘At the Old Mill. Up at the top. I’ll show you my bedroom if you like, and Light Bulb’s stable.’ A last chew saw the ice cream gone and she was up and on her feet again.

The park was swarming with children now, all in various stages of disrobing from school uniform, climbing on the wooden frame, draping themselves over the tyre swings, while adults chatted and watched with half an eye. No one approached us, I noticed. None of the children came to talk to Scarlet, not even some of the pinker little girls, with their hair in complicated plaits, who looked around the same age. They were sitting together making daisy chains, while Scarlet had collected Light Bulb from his prone position and was trotting him round and round in a circle. His benevolent expression was already beginning to get on my nerves.

‘We’d better go. I don’t want Ms Charlton to find you’re not at the Old Mill when she gets there, she looks the type to call out the police first and set homework later.’

Scarlet obediently followed me out of the park and along the tree-lined lane that led to the main road and the Old Mill. Great Leys was only about half a mile from end to end, residential streets orbiting the High Street, through which the river ran like a self-conscious tourist attraction, green banked and beducked as it was. The main road which passed through on its way to the industrial north wasn’t even that main, a B road which clipped the eastern end of the town, over the old iron bridge and then away. Even the traffic didn’t want to hang around Great Leys.

Different. Not like London. This would all be cars and buses and yelling; dropped litter and the taste of diesel in the air, grass contained in parks not containing sheep. And shops. And museums and art galleries and railway stations.

I realised I hadn’t driven my car for three days. Hadn’t even checked it was still where I’d left it — parked up near Margaret’s Victorian villa just off the High Street. I shrugged to myself. If anything had happened to it, I’d bet Margaret knew the names of the offenders, their addresses and, probably, their library card numbers.

Scarlet swung in through the archway to the Old Mill, Light Bulb’s wooden stick bobbing about as she cantered up the yard. Off to one side I could see a big lorry disgorging a load of timber and, as we went inside the building, I saw Alex supervising the unloading. The lorry’s engine was running and a hydraulic crane ground its gears as it lifted the wooden beams, so everything was being done with hand signals. He’d taken his shirt off again and was wearing a safety helmet and gloves, which made him look like Mr September in a construction-man pin-up calendar. He’d obviously worked most of the summer with the shirt off, his torso was tanned evenly under the customary cosmetic dusting of stone.

I wondered how old he was. He had the laughter lines and worn hands of someone in their late thirties, but the body of someone much younger; the way his jeans hugged his thighs and the nicely-rounded contours of his buttocks said late twenties. No grey tones in his hair. I supposed I could just ask Scarlet, she’d probably tell me his shoe size and taste in music too without much prompting.

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