Page 7 of Could It Be Magic?
Nick pretended to look hurt. ‘I’m offended that you’ve forgotten. Don’t you remember the lengths Mrs Rossiter went to drill the script into us? The poor woman’s hair turned white by the end of it, I seem to recall.’
‘I don’t think we were that bad,’ Thea replied. ‘I think she was just too busy to dye it before the end of term!’ She paused, and then teasingly added, ‘And I bet you can’t remember what part I played, anyway.’
‘Of course I can! I’ll always remember you with one of Lorelai’s tea towels strapped to your head with a dressing gown cord, cuddling that fluffy lamb. You and Tristan made quite the pair of shepherds, although I can’t remember which of you had the line.’
‘He did,’ Thea replied. ‘He always was the bigger drama queen out of the two of us.’
‘And Tris, not here to defend himself!’ Nick was smirking now, before his expression fell. ‘Oh God, Thea, wasn’t that the first Christmas after your parents…’ he trailed off, clearly feeling as though he’d made a misstep in the conversation.
When Thea and Tristan were five years old, their parents had been killed in a car accident near what had been the Lower Brambleton Observatory. They had been raised by Lorelai at Nightshade Cottage, just down the hill from the observatory. The tragedy had rocked the family and the wider village of Lower Brambleton, and still, over thirty years on, it lived in the memories of the residents.
Thea gave him a reassuring smile. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘Tris and I enjoyed the distraction of things like the school plays after we lost Mum and Dad. It wasn’t as if the pain stopped, but it gave us other things to think about for short bursts of time. And Gran was in the audience that year, cheering us both on in the way that only she could.’ She looked at him. ‘And you didn’t answer my question. Which half of the stable door were you?’
‘The better half,’ Nick said dryly. ‘The other boy fell over and nearly took me with him.’
‘That’s right, I’d completely forgotten about that! Talk about a scene – or scenery – stealer! I wonder what happened to him?’
‘Became a carpenter, from what I’ve heard.’ Nick’s tone was so deadpan that Thea couldn’t be sure if he was joking or not.
‘Well,’ Thea said, glancing at the clock behind the counter. ‘Are you ready to get started? I’m all yours for the next couple of hours, if you think that’ll be enough time.’
‘Should be more than enough to show you the basics,’ Nick replied. ‘And anything else you need to know, you can just ask me or Dad as we go along.’
‘Thanks. I really do appreciate the chance to earn a bit more money before Christmas, and I’ll try to do my best for you.’
‘You’re welcome. In fact, you’re doing me a favour, too, so it’s all worked out quite well.’ Nick turned and reached for an apron that was hanging up on a brass hook behind the counter. ‘I’ve got you one of your own, and although I haven’t had time to get your name put on it, Mum made you a badge to pin on.’
‘Thanks.’ Thea took the apron and swiftly tied it around her waist. ‘Well, where do we start?’
And as Nick started to take her through the operation of the till, and where the price lists were for the loose produce, as well as how to operate the scales, Thea quickly caught on. It felt good to be out of her cosy comfort zone of the classroom and learning a new set of skills, or, at least, refreshing some she’d not used in a long while. Retail might not be where she thought she’d end up at this point in her life, but it certainly beat some of the alternatives, not least worrying even more about paying the bills.
‘So, the film crew are coming in tomorrow morning to set up and do some exterior shots and decide where the interior cameras are going to go. Are you all right with them being around while you’re working?’
Thea hesitated. It would be her first ‘real’ day on the job, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about being caught on TV learning the ropes. But then, Nick had warned her about the film crew when he’d suggested the job to her, so she didn’t feel as though she could really say no. ‘I’m sure it’ll be fine,’ she said cautiously. ‘But if there’s any way I can be out the back, or doing things just out of the eye of the cameras, I think I’d feel more comfortable.’
‘Fair enough,’ Nick replied. ‘I suspect they’ll just want lots of shots of pretty looking stuff in the shop anyway, and since Annabelle “volunteered” me to be the main talking head, and Dad’s rather fond of showing off to the camera, you probably won’t need to be in front of shot. Are you all right with being shown in the background?’
‘Sure,’ Thea said. ‘I’m more than happy to be a non-speaking extra.’
‘Much like you were in the Christmas play?’ Nick teased. ‘Maybe I should have asked Tristan to do a few hours here, instead!’
Thea laughed. ‘He’d be constantly asking the director for his motivation in every scene, he’s such a perfectionist!’ Thea adored her twin brother, but Tristan was a stickler for things to be just right, and she wasn’t above teasing him about it, and laughing about him with their friends.
‘Best stick with you, then,’ Nick said softly. When he smiled at her, Thea felt something start to fizz in her stomach. He really did have a lovely smile. She’d begun to notice things about him recently, but had put it down to feeling a bit lonely. Who lusted after their friends after all this time, anyway? She’d never really wanted to examine how she felt about him – past experiences with Ed had made her very risk averse, and Nick had been in and out of relationships himself, but she knew, from what Annabelle had mentioned the last time they’d spoken, that Nick hadn’t been with anyone seriously for quite a while. And she hadn’t had anyone, serious or otherwise, for even longer than that.
‘Yeah,’ she said, slightly nervously, trying to push those thoughts to one side and concentrate on the job at hand. ‘Best stick with me.’
6
Thea, to her frustration, didn’t sleep well on Wednesday night. It felt daft to be quite so nervous about starting a temporary, part-time job, but she couldn’t help it. She might have joked about Tristan being a perfectionist, but she had a bit of a streak of it herself, and she didn’t want to let Nick down. What if she really couldn’t hack being behind the shop counter again? She was a bit worried that she really was an old dog, about to learn, well, if not exactly new, then long-forgotten tricks. And would working full time for the next few weeks just knacker her out before Christmas, so that she wouldn’t have the energy to make the festive period as lovely as she wanted to for Cora and Dylan?
In the cold light of day, these worries felt ridiculous: plenty of parents worked full-time jobs, or more than one job, and they managed somehow. She was always at her best when she was busy, and it wasn’t as though the children were babies any more. It was a short-term situation, and she’d deal with it, as she had dealt with everything life had thrown her way over the years. Resilience was in her DNA, after the loss she’d suffered as a young child, and she’d been coping with things ever since.
That didn’t mean it wasn’t hard, though. She often wondered what it would have been like if her parents had been alive to meet their grandchildren. She hoped they’d have been close. Lorelai was a wonderful great-grandmother to Cora and Dylan, but there was no escaping the fact that she was getting older and wouldn’t be around forever. Thea was grateful for every day they had together, and all the time she’d spent with Lorelai as she’d grown up. The thought that she and Tristan might have ended up away from Lower Brambleton, or worse, split up to go to different families and different lives, still filled her with a retrospective horror. All things considered, they’d both been very lucky that Lorelai had been there to take care of them, but that didn’t mean she didn’t wonder what things might have been like had her parents not been taken so suddenly and dreadfully.
Restless and lacking the ability to get back to sleep, at 5 a.m. she shrugged on a pair of jogging bottoms, a sweatshirt, thick socks and her fleece-lined parka jacket. Pushing her feet into her wellies, since the ground underfoot had been soggy for weeks, she slipped out of the front door and onto Orion Close. Cora and Dylan, still fast asleep upstairs, wouldn’t miss her for a few minutes.
The Observatory Field housing development had been built on the site of its namesake, the Lower Brambleton Observatory, after the site of special astronomical interest had closed and fallen into disrepair some years ago. The site had been in Thea’s family, jointly inherited by Lorelai and her brother, Phillip, after their father had died but had only recently been demolished and redeveloped. Tristan had overseen the development for Flowerdew Homes, a company that had promised a sustainable and sympathetic development of houses to help to bring new life to the ever-sleepier hamlet of Lower Brambleton.
