Wild Oats by Veronica Henry Page B

and everything feel special.
    Jamie remembered when she was a child. There’d been Easter egg hunts with ingenious clues hidden all over the farm, long cross-country rides with picnics in some magical spot Louisa had discovered, a puppet show for her birthday with fairy-tale puppets Louisa had been sewing all day and all night for weeks. And she carried that magic across all the generations – there’d been pensioners in the surrounding villages who lived for her day on the Meals on Wheels rota, when she’d help them with the crossword, join them in a quick sneaky sherry, listen to their moans and groans without looking as if she wished she was somewhere else. She made them feel as if they mattered for a golden half-hour in their grey, dreary lives.
    She had her faults, of course. She was hopelessly impractical when it came to anything boring. Both Jamie’s parents were. Anything that involved making a decision, or filling out a form, or hitting a deadline, and they were infuriatingly ostrich-like, the pair of them. As she grew older, Jamie often found herself having to chivvy them into confronting day-to-day realities – they seemed to think they had immunity from the mundane. It could be immensely frustrating.
    And Louisa had her dark moments: times when she was distracted; when she would hide herself away and take little interest in her surroundings or other people. Sometimes she would take off somewhere for a few days at a time, declaring that she needed ‘space’.But that was because she was an artist. Eventually, she would emerge from the gloom with a renewed vigour and energy, throwing herself into some new project or social engagement with such enthusiasm that you soon forgot the dark side. It was like the sun appearing from behind a cloud; when you were enjoying its warmth, you couldn’t imagine it ever raining again.
    She’d been such a strong presence that Jamie couldn’t believe even now that she wasn’t going to walk into the room with a plate of cheese straws fresh from the oven, face smudged with flour or paint or earth, depending on what she had been doing, then curl up in her big, old, battered leather chair by the fire, feet bare and her hair in a knot skewered with a paintbrush.
    Instead, bloody Lettice was in that very chair now, unwinding herself from several yards of chiffon scarf and kicking off her stilettos, which were a ridiculous height for a woman of sixty plus. Jamie prayed fiercely that her father wasn’t thinking of marrying the old witch. She’d heard plenty of horror stories about widowers marrying on the rebound…
    In the sanctuary of the drinks cupboard that was tucked away in the corner of the room, Jack counted down four champagne glasses with a trembling hand and put them on a tray, then quickly uncorked a decanter of whisky and poured himself a slug. He hoped he’d hidden it well, but he’d had a terribleshock. Seeing Jamie like that on the path, like a ghost, an apparition… for one moment, a moment both glorious and dreadful, he’d thought it was Louisa. Jamie looked more like her than ever, now her hair had grown and she’d lost so much weight. Jack felt a bit of a fool, then told himself it was a mistake anyone could have made, with her appearing from nowhere like that with no warning.
    And it wasn’t the first time he’d thought he’d seen Louisa. In the first dreadful months after her death, she’d appeared to him many times, usually courtesy of a bottle of his namesake, Jack Daniels. He drank it to blot out her memory, but sometimes she came to him before he’d managed to drink enough to slink into oblivion. She would smile at him through his alcoholic haze, unreachable, untouchable, only disappearing when his consciousness slipped finally away from him in a drunken stupor. There had been nothing for it but to drink harder and faster, to keep her apparition at bay.
    Thank God the boy had appeared like that, and given him something else to think about, or