Welcome To Rosie Hopkins' Sweetshop Of Dreams by Jenny Colgan Page A

least Margaret could do her hair. And sure enough, here came Margaret now, clattering along on her bicycle, her hair tightly lacquered and her bright eyeshadow and dress as tight as modesty allowed, almost disguising the slight cast of her eye. Margaret never mentioned her eye, but hated her front snaggletooth and would often spend the entire evening with her hand positioned directly in front of it. Despite this, she was funny and loyal and daft and Lilian loved her .
    ‘Come on, you,’ said Margaret. ‘Let’s be having you.’
    ‘Well, you look like you’re going to kill them fellas tonight,’ said Lilian’s father, who found Margaret much more the type of straightforward girl he could get a handle on .
    Margaret giggled and squeaked at him and told him to hold his tongue, heating up the rollers by the fire and ordering Lilian to sit still, even when the smell of singed hair was rising up through the little kitchen .
    Lilian tried to sit still, but she couldn’t deny the truth: that since last week, she had thought of little else but Henry Carr. Suddenly, everything she had found irritating about him – the teasing, the cheek, the hanging around the shop – now it had stopped, she found she missed it beyond reason. The idea of him walking out with Ida filled her with horror. Gerda had not, in the end, been sacked, but she had been demoted and was keeping her head low in the village. But tonight, maybe tonight, with her new hair … maybe Henry would look at her again the way he’d looked when they’d patched up Hetty. And this time she would hold his gaze, and toss her lovely black hair, and—
    ‘Darn it,’ said Margaret, who loved American movies to distraction .
    ‘What?’
    ‘Never mind.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘It smells like that farrier fire we had last spring in here, do you remember?’ said her father. ‘Those horses screamed like the very devil.’
    ‘What are you doing ?’ said Lilian, scrambling to her feet and trying to see her whole head in the very small mirror that hung in the hallway .
    Margaret unsuccessfully tried to hide a small ringlet of burned-off curls behind her mauve dress .
    ‘Margaret!’
    ‘I’m sorry!’
    ‘You’ve ruined it!’
    ‘I didn’t mean to!’
    ‘There, there, girls,’ said her dad, laughing heartily, and suddenly, as if on a whim, took out the bottle of Johnson the butcher’s homemade rhubarb wine he kept for special occasions .
    ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s have a glass. Celebrate two lovely girls going out to have a good time.’
    ‘One of them half-bald,’ said Lilian crossly. This was a disaster .
    ‘And no messing about, you understand? If you have to dance with a chap, I want it to be someone nice, local, good family. None of that seasonal Derby mob.’
    The girls blushed bright red, and Margaret let out a haw-haw peal of laughter. A large group of young men were down for the harvest, hence the dance. Margaret giggled, her hand in front of her mouth. Lilian rolled her eyes as if to indicate that all that was beneath her; trying her best not to betray that she did, indeed, have her heart set on finding a nice young man. A very specific one, that was all .
    Her father poured them all a small glass of wine. He knew other fathers worried about their daughters, but if anything he wished he could worry more about Lilian. And with three sons in the war – they’d said Gordon didn’t have to go, could stay and mind the shop, but his headstrong youngest son was having none of it – he had enough to worry about. But he knew it wasn’t easy for her, the one left behind, and the only girl. When the boys came back on leave and told their stories of the big cities and the shows and the lights, he felt sad for Lilian, stuck here with the shop. But what else could they do? A living was a living, even in wartime. Still, she could do with a bit of fun. She wasn’t a daft piece of stuff like Margaret, or a sly little number like Ida Delia Fontayne; Lilian