Page 7 of Love Letters on Hazel Lane

It was a while since a man had seen her in this state of undress.

‘What time is it?’ Jo mumbled, rubbing her eyes.

‘Quarter past ten,’ he said.

‘Already? I don’t normally sleep this late.’

‘Could you sign here please?’

As she tried to write her name on the postman’s little electronic pad with her fingertip, she wondered who the strange-shaped parcel could be from. She hadn’t ordered anything online. Her birthday wasn’t coming up. But there was nothing like an unexpected delivery to liven up an otherwise dull Saturday morning.

‘Oh,’ she said as he handed her the package. ‘It’s not for me.’

‘It’s for three doors down, but everyone else is out.’

She had crawled out of bed and was standing on the doorstep in her one and only dressing gown that was, quite frankly, too short and skimpy for anyone but a lover to see her wearing. And the parcel wasn’t even for her.

She left it on the floor in the lounge, made a cup of instant coffee and flicked on the radio. A chat show. Perfect. The illusion of company on this weekend morning. Some expert was talking about loneliness. Being lonely was, apparently, worse for your health than smoking. It raised your levels of cortisol – good Scrabble word, 10 points – and too much cortisol wasn’t good.

Great. Her single status was not only making her downright miserable; it was also causing her more harm than a packet of Marlboros. She flicked the radio back off; she didn’t need to know this.

She logged into WordPals, played – and lost – a game against a woman in Ontario and then opened Buzzz. No new messages.

She finished her coffee. It was almost eleven o’clock on a Saturday morning. She was in a new town in a lovely area that she’d barely explored yet, but here she was, still sitting in her PJs, staring at a screen, playing word games.

Joining Hebbleswick Library had been practically the first thing Jo had done when she’d moved here. She’d loved libraries since she was a child. Libraries didn’t require you to ‘join in’; well, obviously you had to join if you wanted to borrow books, but you didn’t have to participate in anything. You could tuck yourself away in a corner, lose yourself amongst the shelves and disappear into other worlds of mysterious kingdoms hidden inside wardrobes.

She decided she would visit the library now and while away an hour or two. She dressed quickly, and – armed with her card, two romance novels that she’d recently finished and an old crust for the ducks on the canal – set off down the hill towards the town centre.

The small town of Hebbleswick appeared to have tucked itself into a narrow valley where there wasn’t room for a town at all. Three, sometimes four storeys of terraced houses, built of Yorkshire stone, zigzagged their way up the hillside, giving rise to a peculiar West Yorkshire phenomenon known as underdwellings and overdwellings: the houses on one street were built on top of those on the street below.

Jo’s house was an underdwelling – with a lounge and tiny kitchen on its ground floor, its bathroom and one bedroom on the floor above. And above that was an entire other house. She never saw her upstairs neighbour; the entrance to their house was on the street above hers, on the opposite side of the building. Her house was a little dark and poky, but it did have a magnificent view over the valley. There hadn’t been many rental properties available. Jo had been torn between this one, and a more modern flat, but the flat had little character, no view and it wasn’t on Hazel Lane.

Hazel Lane.

Jo liked the word ‘hazel’. It had a certain ring to it and would score a whopping 17 points in Scrabble.

Hebbleswick had a town hall, three pubs and a parish church called St Cuthbert’s. It was popular with commuters thanks to its good rail links – well, rail links anyway – to both Leeds and Manchester, and with tourists thanks to its quirkiness, country walks on the doorstep and locally brewed real ale.

Almost every other shop was an art studio. You could buy several types of lentil – all organic, of course – and herbal remedies that could cure everything from indigestion to impotence. Also on offer were hand-made soaps, hand-crafted chocolates and hand-knitted sweaters made from the finest alpaca wool, but you’d be hard-pushed to find a can of Heinz baked beans should you want one.

Jo had wondered at first if she was a bit too – well, ordinary – to live in a place like Hebbleswick. When Gemma had announced that she was leaving Manchester, Jo had realised she’d have to move herself; she couldn’t afford to rent their two-bedroom flat on her own and didn’t fancy sharing with a stranger. She needed a change, a fresh start. Initially she’d intended to move to Essendale, attracted by the fact it had a board game café; she’d be sure to find like-minded souls there who’d be up for a game of Scrabble. But when she’d visited the café, there wasn’t a Scrabble board in sight; the only letter tiles had been iced gingerbread biscuits. Jo had eaten a Q and decided that maybe Essendale wasn’t the place for her after all.

Feeling more than a little despondent, she had wandered along the canal and soon found herself in the neighbouring town of Hebbleswick. She’d looked round a few shops, marvelling at how anyone could spend a fiver on a single bar of soap, and trying on a funky – 15 points – beanie made out of recycled plastic bottles. She’d been on her way to the station when something had caught her eye in the window of the hospice shop: a rather unusual dress. She’d peered through the window; the fabric had been printed to look like a Scrabble board.

The dress was too small, way too small – Jo could see that. But she’d wanted a closer look, so had ventured into the shop.

To her surprise and delight, the dress had been pinned to fit the mannequin and was a bigger size than it had first appeared. So of course, she’d tried it on and discovered that it was a near-perfect fit. It was a sign surely, Jo had thought, staring at herself in the changing room mirror. A sign that this was the town where she should settle, where she’d ‘find her tribe’ as Gemma always said.

(So far, she hadn’t found anyone. Not a single friend. But still. Early days and all that.)

She had taken the dress up to the till to pay for it, relishing the fact that these days she could spend her money how she wanted. If she chose to buy a dress that she’d probably never wear, there was no-one to stop her. She’d been almost gleeful as she handed over a twenty-pound note, waving away the change that the shop assistant offered. Well, it was for a good cause.

Jo smiled to herself now as she walked along the canal, remembering how fate, the Universe or whatever you wanted to call it, had led her to live in Hebbleswick. She knew that many people might think it was silly superstition to decide to move somewhere because of a dress. And maybe it was. Maybe the perfect dress for her being in the shop window on the very day she happened to walk by had just been a coincidence, but Jo wasn’t ready to give up on her signs just yet. She needed them. She needed them because she didn’t trust herself to make decisions without them.

She’d made bad decisions in the past – well, one spectacularly bad decision. She’d married Si.

After that, she hadn’t needed to make many decisions at all, because Si had made them all for her. And so Jo’s confidence in her own ability to make choices for herself had slowly but surely been eroded, and now she liked her signs. They were like a comfort blanket somehow, a reassurance that she was doing the right thing.