Mr Hapgood- I never could call him Gerald- found a buyer. I went into the shop one day to find him smiling secretly and saying he had a surprise for me, which turned out to be an envelope with a hundred and seventy pounds in it. He had got an even better price for the clock than he had hoped, and how about coming through to the back for a cup of tea and a bit of a cuddle ‘to celebrate’. The ‘to celebrate’ bit seemed unnecessary because that was what happened almost every time I went anyway. Only the arrival of a customer would put him off, and there weren’t many of those at the end of weekday afternoons. Anyway, it wasn’t disappointment with the amount that upset me that day, or even with what Mr Hapgood immediately started doing (he was tending to skip the preliminaries by this time), it was the empty space where the clock had been standing all those months. Suddenly it wasn’t there. Of course it was silly of me to be upset and surprised. I knew it was being sold and now I had the money in my satchel, so how could I expect the clock itself to be there? But I burst into tears. Because it suddenly seemed as if it were Father himself who had gone, rather than his clock. It felt as if I were just understanding it for the first time, that Father really had gone, as if one minute I had been helping him to sit up, supporting his head while he swallowed his tablets, and the next he had suddenly been wrenched away, leaving me with his water glass in my hand staring at a dent in the pillow, the empty blankets and a bedside table cleared of his spectacles and book of crosswords. At this point, you realise, he had been dead for over six months. Why was I so slow on the uptake? I don’t know. But the empty space on the floor at the back of Mr Hapgood’s shop was suddenly the most desolate place on earth. I stood and howled. Every single part of me ached because I wanted to see Father’s face again, and talk to him and hear his voice, and that empty space was telling me that I never, ever would.
Mr Hapgood got rather flustered and said I was sixteen after all and he hadn’t forced me. When I could speak I said no, it’s not that. He was clearly very relieved. Then he said he knew what the matter was, and I was to dry my eyes. What a silly girl I was being, to think that just because the clock was sold he wouldn’t want to see me any more. I wasn’t to think that. In fact, the last thing he wanted was for my visits to stop. I promised to keep popping in. And I did. The space where the clock had been soon filled up with other stuff but in any case, for ever afterwards I always ignored that spot.
Not long after that, Mr Hapgood sprang another surprise. This time there was no secret smiling and ‘celebrating’. Instead he sat me down and told me very solemnly that sometimes people have to do one thing when they might want to do another, that some things are just not meant to be, and that people have to accept disappointment and make the best of things. Well, this wasn’t exactly news, but he talked as if I hadn’t thought of it, and as if he were being terribly brave. I had an idea he was thinking I was being terribly brave too, but in fact I was thinking how young he sounded. That’s odd, I suppose, that I thought him young, but by then I think I was abnormally old. Anyway, all his ‘making the best of things’ didn’t seem to have much to do with me. The thing was, he said, he was getting married. He had been engaged for so long that he sometimes even forgot that he was, and I should forgive him if he hadn’t mentioned his fiancйe. They had been engaged for eight years, but what with his mother, and the flat above the shop being too small for all of them, he had stopped thinking they would ever actually tie the knot. Now finally, they’d managed to make a down payment on one of the new houses that were going up at Rectory Fields. They were getting a semi-detached with lounge and dining alcove, kitchen, three bedrooms, bathroom, he said, counting them off on his fingers. Lovely indoor toilet. But meanwhile, there was no reason for me to stop coming to see him. We could go on being very special friends. It was just that he respected me too much not to tell me the truth. I was The One, but the age difference, and a promise is a promise, and Veronica wanted kiddies. But he wanted me to keep coming to see him. I said all right, then. Congratulations, I said.
Michael and Jean had been picking strawberries for days, since the middle of June. First they had eaten them just as they came, warm off the plants, or with cream and sugar. Black pepper had been tried. Then they had had strawberry ice cream. Then strawberry shortcake, and a strawberry mousse. By the time bottles of strawberry vinegar were maturing in the larder Michael and Steph were begging for mercy. With the fruit that was left, Jean announced at breakfast on the last day of June, she would make jam.
They waited until the afternoon, after the sun had been on the strawberry patch all day, and together they picked the last of the crop. Under a canopy, Charlie in a white brimmed hat and white cotton clothes lay drowsy in a nest of white blankets at the end of the strawberry beds, presiding over the pickers like a large and rather viceregal fruit fairy, kicking arms and legs as smooth and golden as butter. His serious eyes, when they were not inspecting his hands to see if they had pulled anything more surprising than a trapeze of saliva from his mouth, would follow birds and insects, and from time to time he would chatter in reply to the others’ voices or to the sound of far-off buzzing- Michael had set wasp traps a good distance away from him. Every few minutes he or one of the others would rise from the picking and sink down onto the rug nearby to chatter back to him and put on more of his sun cream, or tickle him under the chin or touch his cheek with a stained hand, to make sure he was not getting too hot.
After a time Steph stood up, groaning, and licked her fingers clean of strawberry gore. Clutching her lower back, she sauntered back to the house and returned with a tray with bottles of water and glasses, and a bowl and spoon. They plonked themselves down while Steph, sitting next to Charlie, mashed up two strawberries in the bowl with the back of the spoon and then, to Jean’s slight horror, added a few drops of breast milk.
‘Steph, are you sure, I mean is one supposed to…?’ She looked round at Michael for support, but he was simply gazing at Steph with that look on his face, the one of soft but total absorption that so often came over it when he watched her with Charlie.
Steph smiled as the resulting pink paste disappeared into Charlie’s mouth. After a second’s astonished smacking of his lips and widening of his eyes, he opened his mouth for more. Within four mouthfuls he was laughing and turning the stuff over in his mouth. Everyone applauded. It was his first taste of anything besides milk, and because they had watched it together the event was, it went without saying, theirs alone, a private joy; nothing whatsoever to do with Sally.
They went back to the picking. The strawberries mounted up in a large plastic bowl that Jean had brought from the laundry room. It was the end of the season. Most of the whole strawberries had lost their gloss and grown dull and deviant-looking; this was the riff-raff, the small, the reticent, late-forming and grudging fruit, and it was already almost too late. Some of the berries were so ripe that as they were picked they burst in the fingers and landed in the bowl as wet, scented rags. The warm heap of exposed flesh in the bowl would, within a very few hours, begin to mist over with a blue-green bloom of mould.
Even though they discarded the rotten fruit and all the stunted berries that were almost white on one side, the quantity was almost threatening. Jean began to re-calculate the amount of sugar she would need. But there would have been even more strawberries, Michael said, if he had known more about them back in April.
‘In April,’ he told them when they had nearly finished, ‘you’ve got to nip off the first blossom, it encourages more fruit. I read it in one of the gardening books, only,’ he said, heaving the bowl of strawberries from the ground up onto his hip, ‘not until May.’