The Christmas Surprise by Jenny Colgan Page A

mother’s back kitchen, which was neither.
    ‘So you don’t want your family there? Or don’t you have many friends?’
    Rosie swallowed.
    ‘Um, is that … I mean, you’re already inviting people from the village, aren’t you?’
    Lady Lipton looked over the top of the reading glasses she despised, and discarded around the village at regular intervals.
    ‘The
village
? No, of course not.’
    ‘Oh, okay. More, then.’
    Lady Lipton had sniffed and said that was all very well, but where were they going to get staff for the event? They couldn’t invite Mrs Laird – her loyal daily – when she’d be needed in the kitchen. Stephen said hotly that not only was he inviting Mrs Laird but she’d be sitting at the top table with him, seeing as she wasjust about the only person who’d ever been kind to him as a child, and Lady Lipton had rolled her eyes and said it seemed a bit rich to talk about unkindness when they were going to move into one of her houses. After that, they made their excuses and left, before they’d even agreed on a date.
    ‘Oh dear,’ said Rosie, as Mr Dog barked a cheerful goodbye to all his pure-bred cousins he’d had to leave behind in the courtyard at the back of the house.
    ‘Oh I don’t know,’ said Stephen. ‘I thought that went all right.’
    They looked at each other and Rosie smiled, reluctantly.
    ‘You know there’s no rush,’ said Stephen, as they drove a little further up the hill and parked at Peak House to take a look at it. The early evening sunlight illuminated its stern windows; it was a chilly house, but a beautiful one too. As usual, it was unlocked. Rosie thought again about the fact that her period, once more, had come exactly on time. She might dream of a lovely miracle, but as Dr Chang had warned her, there wouldn’t be a miracle. Just a choice.
    They had wandered through Peak House hand in hand. The ceilings were high, and the floors original oak and parquet.
    ‘You could make this place really nice,’ said Stephen doubtfully.
    ‘With a mere jillion dollars,’ smiled Rosie, and they had kissed one another and stolen upstairs to the bed where they had spent the first, extraordinary few months of their courtship, mostly without leaving it, and as the evening sun poured through the dirty windows overlooking the crags and the astonishing valley on the other side of the house, they both felt better, if only for a while.
    Rosie hadn’t mentioned the wedding again.

    Tina went off to pick up the children and finalise the stationery patterns, even though the wedding wasn’t going to be till Christmas, seven months away, when the farming work was quieter. She was clearly enjoying being prepared. As she left, she leaned over to give her friend a kiss on the cheek.
    ‘I’m sorry for babbling on,’ she said.
    Rosie shook her head.
    ‘No,’ she said truthfully. ‘I like it.’

    The shop bell tinged. Edison’s mother Hester didn’t often come into the sweetshop. She was opposed to sugar on the whole, and was what Rosie’s mother would have called a ‘knit your own yoga’ type. Sometimes it wound Rosie up – particularly when she made Edisonwear hand-made clothes and denied him television, plastic toys and basically the chance to fit in with his peer group. But other times she admired the entire ethos. Hester and her university lecturer husband were living it, not just talking about it: they lived out in the middle of nowhere without an internet connection, grew their own vegetables and made their own clothes. Terrible, terrible clothes, but the spirit was there.
    Edison was allowed to pop in to the shop from time to time because Rosie basically provided free babysitting, as Edison had latched on to her when she had moved there, and she liked him. But today it was Hester who came in, carrying Marie, now five months, who was as round and flaxen and rosy of cheek as Edison was pale and thin. Rosie swallowed heavily.
    ‘Hello!’ she said, trying to look anywhere