A week later Claire was setting up her stall in the playing field outside the school. The sun was shining for once, and Alex Kincaid, the head teacher, had decided the grass was dry enough for the fair to be held outside.
Claire had spent a lot of time, probably too much, deciding how she wanted the stall to look. In the end she’d bought some old-fashioned glass jars and metal scoops online and filled them with a selection of sweets from the post office: jelly beans, humbugs, licorice whips, gummy worms. She’d also bought some red and white striped papers bags and brought her mother’s expensive brass kitchen scales to weigh the filled bags, fifty pence for twenty-five grams of candy. She’d even gotten herself a matching red and white striped apron, and had embroidered Sweets from the Village Shop on the front. Sewing was one thing she’d always been able to do.
Now that she was here with all of her crazy kit she felt a little ridiculous. No one else had gone to nearly as much effort as she had.
“This all looks absolutely fantastic,” Lucy exclaimed as she came up to Claire’s stall. “Like an old-fashioned sweet shop. Amazing.”
“Well, that was the look I was going for.” Claire smiled self-consciously as she glanced around at the various people manning the other stalls. No one had anything remotely like a costume on. “I feel a bit over-the-top though.”
“Nonsense, you can’t be OTT for this.” Lucy leaned forward conspiratorially. “I asked Alex wear an Easter bonnet, complete with ribbons and bows.”
“You did not.” Claire had seen the stern teacher from a distance, and she couldn’t imagine him in any such getup, even if he was dating Lucy.
“Well, I asked,” Lucy replied with a grin. “He refused, though.”
Claire looked down at her candy-striped apron. “No one had to ask me.”
“You look great,” Lucy said firmly. “The kids will love it.” Her eyes sparkled with kindly mischief as she added, “I’m pleased Dan came around to the idea.”
“I was surprised he did, to be honest.”
“Maybe he’s taken a shine to you.”
Ridiculously, Claire blushed. “Maybe,” she agreed, and Lucy grinned. Claire could imagine what she was thinking; Lucy Bagshaw seemed exactly the kind of person who delighted in playing matchmaker. And the idea of her and Dan together like that was utterly ludicrous. “I’d just like to be his friend, Lucy,” she said. “So don’t get any ideas.”
“Me? Get ideas?” Lucy batted her eyelashes in exaggerated innocence. “Why on earth would you think that?”
“Oh, I don’t know, because I can see the hearts in your eyes?” Claire teased before dropping the banter. “Seriously.” The thought of Dan overhearing any part of this conversation made her inwardly cringe. She did not even want to imagine the kind of scathing smackdown he was capable of in that scenario.
“Okay, okay, I promise,” Lucy said. “But as I said before, he has had a hard time of it. He needs someone who—”
“Trust me, I am not that someone,” Claire cut her off. She was curious about Dan Trenton’s past, but she didn’t want to hear about it from Lucy Bagshaw. She wanted Dan to tell her himself, and maybe, just maybe, one day he would.
“I’d better go check the face-painting stall,” Lucy said with a glance over her shoulder. The children were coming towards the field from the school, a bobbing sea of checked pinafores and gray flannel. “Apparently they always go there first, although your sweet stall might give face painting a run for its money.” She hurried off, and Claire tugged on her apron and then stood up straighter, trying not to feel intimidated by the several hundred waist-high people surging towards the field.
Within minutes she was besieged by pupils, all who seemed quite taken by the idea of filling the striped bags with a variety of sweets and then thrusting grubby fifty-pence pieces towards her. She saw the boy who had tried to nick sweets from the post office saunter towards her stall, hands held up innocently when she gave him a knowing look. It would be pretty difficult to sneak a sweet from one of the high jars Claire was keeping well out of the children’s way.
“It looks like you need help,” a red-haired teacher remarked. “Oy, you lot. Step back.” She came around the table to Claire’s side and reached for a metal scoop. “How about I scoop sweets while you take the money?”
“Bless you,” Claire answered with deep gratitude, and within a few minutes they had developed a natural rhythm of workingtogether, and the line of children snaking towards the middle of the field began to shorten.
“I’m Diana Rigby,” the woman said in between scoops. “I teach Year Three.”
“Claire West, and I work in the post office shop.”
“You’re new to the village?”
“Sort of.” Claire handed fifty-pence change to a girl with plaits and a pinafore before turning back to Diana. “I grew up here. I went to the village school myself, actually, about twenty years ago.”
“But you’ve been away,” Diana surmised. “Oy! Jacob Peterson! Keep your hands to yourself!”
Claire glanced back to see a lanky boy in Year Six jam his hands into the pockets of his trousers. Next to him a girl with plaits was looking annoyed as she retied the ribbon on one end.
“Rob Telford used to yank my plaits,” Claire recalled. “Or so he told me when I saw him at the pub. I don’t actually remember it.”
“Rob seems the type to get into trouble as a lad, although he’s on the straight and narrow now.”
“Is he?”
