Wish Upon a Star

by Trisha Ashley

  ‘Do sit down and I’ll just pop into the kitchen and make tea. My mother’s out with my little girl at the moment, but I expect they’ll be back soon,’ I added.

  Ma had taken Stella up to Winter’s End in the car, because Ottie was back and wanted to check over the leaflet for that joint exhibition they were having in early October.

  While I made the tea and arranged some peanut biscuits that I’d made that morning onto a nice china plate, I was wondering what on earth they were going to say when I went back in, because I’d assumed that by now Adam would have shared with them his view that Stella was not his after all.

  They’d seemed a bit nervous …

  ‘I hope you don’t mind our calling in unannounced, but we wanted to talk to you … and to see the little girl, Stella, if that is possible,’ Mrs Scott explained as I poured tea. ‘We’re feeling very confused … so driving up today was a sudden impulse.’

  I nodded, thinking that it was a very strong impulse to have brought them all the way up from the Cotswolds.

  ‘When Aimee Calthrop first told us about Stella, we thought she might be mistaken,’ Mr Scott put in. ‘But then when Adam contacted you and found out it was true, we were very excited.’

  ‘Of course, poor Adam was terribly upset when you broke up with him before he went back to the Antarctic,’ put in his wife.

  ‘I broke up with Adam?’ I interrupted.

  ‘Yes … I expect you felt very bitter when he signed up for another eighteen months, but when you found out you were pregnant, you really should have told him and us. We’d have helped you and been delighted to hear we had a grandchild.’

  ‘Look, I don’t know what Adam’s been saying, but he’d left me for someone else before I discovered I was pregnant,’ I told them. ‘I didn’t end the relationship just because he had signed another contract for Antarctica. When I found out I was expecting, I rang him up, but he wasn’t interested.’

  They gazed at me, puzzled.

  ‘I don’t think he can have understood,’ Mrs Scott said doubtfully. ‘Surely if you’d said—’

  ‘I told him I was pregnant and he said if I carried on with it I was on my own.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know what to think now,’ Mr Scott said. ‘Perhaps it was all just a misunderstanding? He certainly hoped when he came up here to see you that you’d give him a second chance.’

  ‘Perhaps he did, but he could hardly expect to walk back into my life as if nothing had happened,’ I said. ‘I felt I had to agree to let him meet Stella, though it wasn’t a great success. Aimee hadn’t warned him that she had health issues.’

  ‘Yes, and he is a little difficult over things like that,’ his mother said indulgently. ‘He warned us that there was no point in our meeting Stella and getting attached to her, because she had a very serious heart condition and might not get through her next operation. We felt so worried about the poor little thing.’

  ‘He said that? But the operation in America this autumn has every chance of being a huge success!’

  ‘We do hope so,’ said Mr Scott.

  They exchanged a glance, as if urging each other on, and Mrs Scott said, ‘He called in after he’d seen Stella for the second time and told us he’d discovered that not only were you involved with someone else, but you’d known this man for years, so he didn’t think Stella was his, any more!’

  ‘But we thought you were a very nice girl when we met you and you both seemed very much in love then, so we were sure he was wrong,’ Mr Scott finished.

  ‘He is wrong,’ I said. ‘I am seeing someone else, and yes, I did briefly meet him in London years ago, but it’s only in the last few months that I’ve really got to know him. He’s helping me to raise the money to take Stella to America for her operation.’

  Mr Scott said, ‘I thought he might have got hold of the wrong end of the stick, because that Aimee Calthrop was with him, egging him on, and she’s always seemed to me to be a bit of a mischief maker.’

  ‘Jago, the man I’m seeing, is her ex-fiancé, so she has an axe to grind.’

  ‘Oh … right,’ he said. ‘Modern relationships are very difficult to understand … But did you say you’d been fundraising for the operation Stella needs?’

  ‘Yes, because it’s in America. Everyone locally has been very kind, so I’m sure we’ll have exceeded the target by the end of the summer.’

  ‘If not, you must tell us, my dear, and we will make it up,’ Mr Scott offered.

  They wanted to know details of Stella’s condition and the operation, which I told them, and also about how successful Dr Beems had been with it, even though the programme was still experimental.

  Then the kitchen door slammed and Stella herself trotted in, calling excitedly, ‘Mummy, Ottie gave me a stick of rock from Cornwall with words all the way through it!’ Then she spotted the visitors and stopped dead, putting her thumb in her mouth.

  ‘I have a nice surprise for you,’ I said, picking her up and giving her a cuddle, though due to the half-sucked stick of rock I soon slightly regretted that. ‘Your other grandma and grandpa have come to meet you.’

  ‘Oh, she’s the image of Adam at the same age!’ cried Mrs Scott. ‘What a darling!’

  ‘Is she?’ I asked, surprised, because she’d never looked remotely like him so far as I could see, but very much took after the Almond side of the family. I supposed Mrs Scott had just seen what she truly wanted to.

  ‘This is Grandma Scott,’ I told Stella.

  ‘Do call me Granny, darling,’ she said. ‘And this is Grandpa Ralph. We’re so happy to meet you, Stella – and we’ve brought you some presents to make up for all the birthdays and Christmases we’ve missed.’

  I’d wondered what was in the big Hamleys bag Mr Scott had carried in with him.

  Stella revived now that the first surprise was over. She scrambled down and went across to stare at them. I braced myself.

  ‘You’re quite old, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ Mr Scott said.

  ‘That’s all right, I like old people,’ Stella assured them, and then cut to the chase. ‘Are my presents in the bag?’

  They’d brought her a musical jewellery box with a fairy inside who danced, and Stella explained her theory about fairies being small angels, which seemed to fascinate them. In fact, Stella herself seemed to fascinate them and I warmed to them, just as she was doing. There was a huge floor jigsaw of zoo animals in the bag, too, which she got out and started to assemble on the rug.

  ‘Where’s Grandma?’ I asked her.

  Stella looked up. ‘She said it looked like you had visitors, Mummy, and she couldn’t be bothered so she was going up to the studio.’

  ‘We hope we can meet your mother another time,’ Mrs Scott said to me. ‘I don’t think we will be back again before you go to America, though, because it was rather a long drive here – and in fact, I suppose we ought to be setting off home again.’

  ‘You’ll always be welcome,’ I assured them.

  ‘Well, Stella,’ Mrs Scott said, putting her hand on Stella’s silky curls and stroking them, ‘when you come back from America, we’ll send you a very special Christmas present, so perhaps Mummy will help you write to Santa later on and tell him what you’d like?’

  ‘Her list already runs to about three pages,’ I said.

  ‘But I got some things for my birthday, so I can cross those off,’ Stella said. She paused from assembling her jigsaw for long enough to say goodbye to the Scotts, then we left her to it while I showed them out.

  ‘I feel everything will go well in America,’ Mrs Scott said, squeezing my hands in her two little bony bird claws. ‘I love Adam, but I’m not so blinded by that not to see that he hasn’t behaved quite as well as he should have. I’m so sorry, my dear.’

  ‘It isn’t your fault,’ I assured her, wondering how such nice parents had managed to produce a son like Adam.

  ‘I’m sure when he’s had time to think things over and Stella’s we
ll again, he’ll see sense,’ Mr Scott said.

  I didn’t reply to that, because what use was a father who couldn’t cope with his own child’s pain?

  ‘But we would like to keep in touch with you and write to Stella,’ Mr Scott said.

  ‘Yes, and then perhaps you could both come down to us for a holiday in spring, when Stella is well enough: that would be something for us to look forward to. We’d love to see as much of Stella as we can, as she grows up,’ said his wife.

  ‘Of course … if all goes well,’ I added involuntarily.

  ‘It will. In fact, I’m so confident that we will go right home and set up a university fund for her,’ Mr Scott declared.

  ‘That’s very kind of you, especially since Adam hasn’t even accepted that she’s his daughter and I’m certainly not doing a DNA test to prove it.’

  ‘You don’t need to: we are quite sure Stella is our grandchild.’

  ‘If he was serious about settling down, you may well get some more grandchildren before long,’ I pointed out.

  ‘But Stella would always be our precious first-born one … and actually, we both thought he and the Calthrop girl were hitting it off quite well,’ she said. ‘Though she’s not really a girl, she’s the same age he is, so I don’t know that there’d be any more grandchildren if they got together.’

  ‘You know, I think they’d be the perfect match, apart from that,’ I said. ‘They have such a lot in common.’

  And when later I told Ma, she said they’d be a perfect couple, because they wouldn’t spoil two families.

  She was only mildly interested in the sudden advent of the Scotts into our lives, but said they sounded sensible and it certainly wasn’t in her nature to be jealous of a new grandmother on the scene.

  When Stella grows up, I think she’ll be glad that she knew her other grandparents, but though I explained that they’re Daddy Penguin’s mummy and daddy, I’m not sure she believed me.

  Chapter 37: Nuts

  These peanut butter and chocolate cups are quick and easy to make. You can either put the mixture straight into small foil sweet cases to set, or use to fill ready-made dark chocolate shells.

  Cally Weston: ‘Tea & Cake’

  Raffy was summoned to Pinker’s End, where Miss Honey presented him with a thousand pounds for the Stella’s Stars fund and told him that we should use it for any extras that would make our trip to the States more comfortable. It was so kind of her that I was very touched.

  Raffy also reported that she hadn’t been well, which would explain why Jago and I haven’t been asked there for a while, but she was now full of beans and had said she hoped to see us at Pinker’s End again before too long.

  I wrote to her to thank her for the donation and in return received an old postcard of Blackpool pier. At least, I assumed it was from Miss Honey, because although the card was addressed and stamped, she’d forgotten to write a message.

  Tim Wesley and his staff must have moved mountains up at Hemlock Mill, because the reconstructed Honey’s shop and the next-door gift shop were ready to open by the end of August. He explained to Jago that it was because Miss Honey was keen to see it and they thought the original official opening day at half-term would be a bit late in the year for her to brave the weather.

  But in any case, when you’re a hundred and two, the sooner the better. It was arranged that she would perform the official opening ceremony on the Saturday of the Bank Holiday weekend. Jago and I thought we’d take Stella to watch.

  Meanwhile, we tried to ignore the faint dark cloud on the horizon that was the operation and enjoy the gentle, peaceful summer days. Stella’s health seemed to be on an even keel again, so that we made it to a couple of the playgroup sessions, had days out to her favourite places, spent time with Celia and Will in Southport, and even went out to the riding stables, Stirrups, to visit the old donkey and Butterball.

  In the evenings, Jago and I have now added scouring the internet sites for free furniture to our old hobbies of trying out new recipes and watching films. We’ve found all kinds of things, including a lovely old dining table and a mismatched assortment of chairs to go with it, which he commissioned Celia to cover in the same William Morris fabric as the curtains so they all sort of go together.

  By the time Jago finally moved into Honey’s he’d almost filled the outbuilding loaned to him by the Snowballs, and it took him several trips in the van, helped by David, to transfer it all across. Two battered and ancient leather sofas wouldn’t fit in the van at all, so they had to carry them from the pub to the shop in the late evening, one at a time, though Jago said since they had big brass castors, they managed to push them up the road for part of the way even if they had, according to Mrs Snowball, squealed fit to raise the dead.

  Mrs Scott has written two or three times to Stella by now, in tiny lettering inside cards with old-fashioned fairy pictures on the front, which Stella found enchanting. They were little chatty notes, saying how much her new granny and grandpa enjoyed meeting her and how they hoped she and her mummy would come to stay for a little holiday next year, when she was all better.

  There was no word from, or about, Adam.

  Stella seemed fine for the Bank Holiday weekend and it was a lovely day for the opening of the restored and recreated Honey’s shop at the mill.

  Miss Honey arrived in her wheelchair encased in a kind of sheepskin body muff that would have had me expiring with the heat, and all you could really see of her was her face topped by a red turban hat with a Scottish Celtic circle brooch pinned to it.

  The wheelchair was trundled directly from the van down a ramp and straight through the arch into the courtyard, where Tim and various Trust members and local dignitaries, including Hebe Winter, awaited her.

  There was a good crowd there to watch her cut the ribbon, too.

  ‘God Bless the good ship Honey and all who sail in her,’ she announced clearly, grinning, and there was a ripple of laughter and then applause.

  She was taken inside to view the new shop and emerged some time later from the other end of the building via the gift shop, clutching a bunch of yellow roses, which she waved at Florrie Snowball, who was standing near us with Jenny.

  ‘Is that you, young Florrie?’ she called, having herself propelled in our direction.

  ‘Not dead yet then, Queenie?’ replied Mrs Snowball, and then they both cackled with laughter as though this was a joke of high order.

  ‘I’m glad you’re not dead,’ Stella told her, and then Miss Honey insisted we all go and have tea with her in the eco-centre before she was, as she put it, incarcerated at Pinker’s End again.

  Bank Holiday Monday was Ivo Hawksley’s Shakespeare reading up at Winter’s End, but we thought yesterday had been excitement enough for Stella, so we left her with Ma and went on our own.

  David and Sarah, and Celia and Will had also said they were going, and Miss Winter had certainly made the most of the publicity leading up to it because there was a crowd of people heading up there.

  It was a warm day with a heavy, sultry sky that threatened a thunderstorm later. Ivo performed from the lowest of the three terraces behind the house, which was very appropriate because the Shakespeare garden and the wall incised with quotations from the Bard were both on that level. His audience were grouped on the terraces above and it made quite a natural auditorium.

  He performed three pieces, at first funny, then sad and moving, his beautiful voice carrying clearly up to the highest point without him seeming to raise it, which I suspect will give Hebe Winter ideas about having whole performances of Shakespeare there in future.

  We were all so gripped and mesmerised that when he’d finished, there was a short silence and then a thunder of applause and cheering. He was persuaded to do an encore and, appropriately, given the gathering storm clouds, it was a piece from The Tempest.

  But luckily the weather must have read the stage directions, for it held off until we were almost home again afterwards, when the rain starte
d to splash down in big, hard drops that exploded onto the car windscreen.

  ‘Good timing,’ Jago said. ‘And the gardens need it, after this dry spell. I’m glad it didn’t start while Ivo was still reading, though – great, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, amazing. The theatre’s the only thing I’ve really missed since I had Stella … and do you know, I was thinking earlier that despite all the worry over her health, I’ve had more fun since moving to Sticklepond than I’ve ever had in my entire life before!’

  ‘Me too, and I feel more a part of your family than I ever did my own. Now they’re in New Zealand, I think they forget I exist most of the time,’ he added ruefully.

  ‘Ma says you don’t bother her and she doesn’t mind whether you’re there or not.’

  ‘Maybe she’d like to adopt me?’ he suggested, which I thought showed just how brotherly a light he saw me in.

  Unfortunately, that was not how I was increasingly coming to think of him.

  I should have seen that storm after the spell of lovely weather as an omen, for on the following Thursday morning Stella slept so late that in the end I had to wake her up and I could see at once that she was heavy-eyed and running a slight temperature.

  Luckily her hospital appointment was an early one, because by the time we got there she was burning up and tearful, and I wasn’t surprised when they decided to admit her overnight, so they could give her antibiotics intravenously, the quickest way of getting them into her system.

  This did not go down well with Stella. It was hard being a mother and having to watch doctors do something that will hurt your child, even if the result was for the best. The last time she had an operation she wasn’t really old enough to understand what was happening and that was bad enough …

  Once she was settled in bed with Bun tucked up beside her, I rang Ma to tell her what was happening.

  ‘They don’t know what’s causing the temperature yet, but they’ve taken some blood for tests and they’re giving her antibiotics intravenously in the hope it will stop any infection taking hold. They’ll see if that’s had any effect tomorrow and hopefully it will do the trick. If not, they’ll probably send her across to Alder Hey …’