‘I reckon she’s feeding us up,’ said Edward, pleased Ellen had no real plans to leave Little Grindle. He admired and understood her ambition, but he certainly didn’t want her to go away. He had, at the back of his mind, plans for his own life that might well include Nell Arnold.

CHAPTER FIVE

‘WE’RE ALL SET for summer, I see,’ said Philip, casting a disgruntled look through the kitchen window at the rain teeming down. ‘It’ll be like this for weeks now, you mark my words.’

‘You don’t know that, Dad,’ Ellen said. ‘It was that hot yesterday it felt like midsummer. Could be as quick to change again.’

‘I doubt it,’ said Gina, recklessly imitating her father’s voice and pulling a long face. ‘Cheer up, Dad, we might all be dead by July.’

‘Gina, shut up.’

‘Gina—’

‘You’re not too old to feel the back of my hand,’ threatened Philip as Ellen and Dora tried to shush her. They all knew that, Gina most of all. He took a step towards her with his arm raised and she stepped quickly out of reach, the smile gone from her face immediately.

‘Sorry, Dad,’ she muttered, then quickly said, ‘I think I’ll take Coco for a run around the outbuildings; save us both getting wet.’ She watched ribbons of rain cascading down the windows.

‘You’d better ask Mrs Stellion,’ Dora suggested to her. ‘She might want her dog to have a proper walk, rain or no rain.’

‘He won’t shrink in the wet, Gina,’ said Ellen.

‘No, but I might. Perhaps we’ll even play inside and not go out at all,’ Gina mused.

‘Well, I think it’s time you got yourself a proper job, like our Nell, and stopped “playing” with puppies,’ said Philip. ‘Just ’cos you got the sack from the farm doesn’t mean you can’t make a fresh start. After all, you got the sack from the shop but it didn’t stop you working again. You need to make the effort, Gina, if you even know what that means. Playing with puppies’ll get you nowhere in life.’

Like you’ve got somewhere, you mean? Gina intended to go an awful lot further in her life than the farm at the end of the lane. Her job at the village shop had been a short-lived disaster. Gina still maintained publicly that it wasn’t her fault the money in the till didn’t match the receipts.

‘You got the sack from the farm?’ asked Dora. ‘You never said.’ She, too, recalled the unpleasantness at the village shop. For a while she’d been reluctant to go there, which had been awkward, though the Fowlers were good people and hadn’t blamed her for the incident at all.