Bridie turned around and caught the young woman turning in her chair to look at them.
Oliver said, ‘I’ve enjoyed catching up. It rather takes me back.’
Bridie smiled. ‘It does me.’ She said, ‘Come to my dad’s retirement party.’ It was selfish of her, but now her fiancé wasn’t on the scene, she’d feel the odd one out without a plus one, eventhough it would just be family there. She ignored the voice in her head saying that she’d be giving her parents the wrong idea.
‘Your mum has already invited me.’
‘Oh, yes, you told me.’
‘But I much prefer the invitation from you.’ Oliver said, ‘I didn’t want to wait until the party, though, to see you again.’
Bridie looked at the café. ‘Well, I know where you are at the weekend.’
Oliver grinned. ‘I pop in and have a coffee here on a Saturday too. Say, around eleven?’
‘All right,’ Bridie said smiling.
‘It’s a date then.’ He quickly rephrased. ‘I meant …’
Bridie grinned. ‘I’ll see you Saturday.’
She watched Oliver rejoin the young woman and was just about to leave when she remembered the rolls. Bridie narrowed her eyes, wondering if she should still buy them, and decided she would. But she wouldn’t mention Oliver when she took them home. She wanted to see how long it took for her mum to ask if she had happened to bump into him.
Walking up to the counter, she waited in the queue, watching Oliver attentively chatting to the young woman seated in her chair. She suddenly felt a pang. That had been her and Julian once, sitting in coffee bars in London, with eyes only for each other. And now all that was gone.
She looked at Oliver and thought that it wasn’t fair if she met him on Saturdays. It was lovely catching up, and reminiscing about the old theatre, but all that was in the past. Perhaps Oliver had a chance with the woman he was talking to. She didn’t want to get in the way. Just because her life was messed up, she didn’t want to mess up her friend’s lives too.
By the time she left the shop with the rolls, she was feeling more miserable than ever. Oliver had a life here, friends of his own, and a potential girlfriend. Bridie didn’t want to get in theway of all that. ‘This isn’t my life,’ she said to herself as she walked out of the door, casting a glance back at Oliver and the young woman, who were still deep in conversation. Bridie had already decided she wouldn’t be turning up there next Saturday morning – but she knew who would be. She eyed the young woman one last time.
Chapter 14
Bridie didn’t feel like returning home to her parents straight away. She wandered through the town thinking about buying her dad a retirement present instead. She was going to look for some party decorations to decorate the house too, but she presumed her mum and sister had that covered, and besides, they probably wouldn’t like the sort of thing she’d buy.
She glanced at the carrier bag with her dad’s new pup’s treats and toys. She thought of the new puppy and wondered how she was going to top that retirement present.He will love anything I buy him because I am his daughter,she thought. It brought a smile to her lips, although she still had no clue what to get.
She wandered along the high street and stopped by a familiar sign. It was still there, the old sign sayingCobblers Yardwith an arrow pointing down a narrow alleyway between two shops. Blink and you’d miss it, Bridie thought, stopping at the sign and looking down the darkened alleyway. A teenage memory resurfaced of the three of them – herself, Oliver and Jack – running down that alleyway, whooping and laughing, their laughter bouncing off the walls and echoing back to them.
She hesitated. What if Cobblers Yard wasn’t how she remembered? There was a bookshop run by a friendly mancalled Henry, and a flower shop. Bridie thought it would be a nice idea to take her mum a bunch of flowers and her dad a book to read now he had free time on his hands although it was Sunday, and she doubted the shops would be open. But she was getting ahead of herself. Would the bookshop and the flower shop – she recalled its name, The Potting Shed – still be there? Or the antiques shop run by a man called Joseph?
Despite visiting her parents from time to time, she’d only ventured out of the village occasionally and her visits to Aldeburgh had been rare. In all the years she’d been away in London since leaving home, she had not ventured into the yard.
She was hesitating because she wanted to remember the cobbled yard with its old-fashioned Dickensian store fronts as it had once been – with its thriving little shops. There was even a charity shop she remembered, run by two widowed sisters. She recalled that they’d seemed very old even back then. She doubted they’d still be there. In fact, she imagined most of the shops would be closed, even boarded up, the atmosphere in the little cobbled yard not at all how she remembered it.
Bridie was about to pass by the lane, wanting to keep Cobblers Yard as it was in her teenage memories, when she remembered Reggie’s umbrella. It had been kind of him to lend it to her when she’d bumped into him outside the old theatre. She had been surprised by such a kind gesture, although she still had a feeling he wasn’t being wholly altruistic and that he’d wanted an excuse to chat to her again.
Bridie opened her bag and retrieved the umbrella that she’d shaken out and folded away. She couldn’t just pass by and not look in on Reggie and return his umbrella. At least she knew there was still one shop open in the yard, even if all the others had folded because of the lack of passing trade. It sounded as though Reggie’s shop had stayed afloat because he didn’t just rely on the shop customers. He supplied musical instrumentsto the local high school and repaired them, as well as tuning pianos. Still, if all the other shops had gone, it must be lonely sitting all day in his shop. It was little wonder he was keen for her to visit.
Bridie took a breath, and her memories, and walked down the lane, almost dreading what she was going to find. Most often it just seemed that everything changed – and not for the better. At least it wasn’t raining, but the sun hadn’t broken through the clouds, so it was a damp, grey afternoon.
She wrapped her scarf more tightly around her and adjusted her bobble hat. If the start of January was anything to go by, they might be in for snow. It reminded her of a handful of snowy Christmases when she was growing up in Pettistree. They had been a rarity. There had been two years when they’d had heavy snowfall in the new year. The village and the surrounding countryside had looked so pretty. Despite her longing from a very young age to live in London, on those snowy days holed up in her parents’ cottage, looking out at the picture-postcard scene through her bedroom window, she hadn’t been able to think of a place she’d rather be.
A moment later, she emerged into Cobblers Yard and stopped, stunned. ‘No way!’ she said, her eyes taking in the yard for the first time in years. There were fairy lights she didn’t remember strung from the old streetlamp in the centre of the cobbled yard and adorning each shop front. They were lit, the soft lights along with the streetlamp casting the yard in a soft, welcoming glow.
She dropped her gaze from the fairy lights to the shop fronts. She really couldn’t believe her eyes. There were no closed-up, empty or boarded-up shops at all. Although it was Sunday, and the shops were closed, she could just imagine the yard buzzing with people during opening hours. She caught sight of two old ladies in the charity shop rearranging the window display while the shop was closed. Surely Mabel and Marjorie weren’t stillworking there? Bridie always liked a good browse around a charity shop. Her salary had never been huge, but she still loved designer clothes, and often they were only a possibility if she bought second-hand.
Although she would have loved to revisit the charity shop in Cobblers Yard – one of her favourite haunts when she was a teenager – if the two widowed sisters were still there, she hadn’t forgotten their reputation as the town’s gossips. They were definitely two to avoid just then. She imagined that if they didn’t already know why she was back, they soon would.Well, they’re not going to hear it from me,thought Bridie.
She looked over at the flower shop. That hadn’t changed, at least from the outside. However, the old antiques shop had gone, and in its place was an art and craft shop. Next door, was a shop that had once been vacant.
