‘Absolutely not,’ Darren confirmed. I heard them kiss and my heart squeezed for them.

With promises to keep in touch, we ended the call and before long I was in bed. The window was open and a faint breeze blew in, tickling my face, and with it came the strains of a barn owl hooting a mournful lullaby in the distance. I lay in the middle of my big double bed, my hand resting on my stomach, and Evie’s words echoed round and round in my head.

When you’ve got love, everything else will work itself out.

I exhaled wistfully; I only wished that applied to me too …

Chapter 22

The weather turned that night; the temperature dropped a few degrees and for the next few days the hills and valleys of Derbyshire were treated to some soft summer rain. But on Friday morning the blue skies returned and from eight o’clock, as the day warmed up, there was a hazy view across the vineyard and the ground steamed gently in the sunshine. It was now ten and almost time to leave for the hospital. Jensen was on his way but heavy traffic on the motorway meant he was running late, so to keep busy, I was doing a quick inspection of the grapes with Pippa. Starsky had trotted down with us but was now dozing under the bench.

‘Hopefully we’ve seen the back of that rain,’ said Pippa.

She was wearing a long hippy-style skirt, which dragged through the long grass that had grown down the centre of two rows of Pinot Noir vines. She reminded me of a modern-day Jane Austen heroine with her wide sunhat, coppery hair and freckles.

‘Hopefully,’ I agreed. ‘It’s like a jungle along here.’

It had been too wet to get the mower up here all week and the grass was bushy and dense.

Pippa sighed wistfully. ‘It would have been Ted’s birthday next week and he used to say that a sunny six weeks from then until the end of September was the best birthday present he could ever get.’

‘You still really miss him, don’t you?’

‘Terribly,’ she admitted, turning away from me so I couldn’t see her face. ‘I was painfully shy when I was young. Still am amongst strangers, really, I suppose. I had no social confidence at all when I met Ted. All I knew was books, the only friends I had were characters from books, I worked in the library where I felt at home and my only hobby was – you’ve guessed it – reading. It was Ted who introduced me to a world outside of books. And now I have friends who live in the real world. I’m still shy, and always will be, but there’s more to me than my encyclopaedic knowledge of the classics these days.’