Knit One Pearl One Read Online Free PDF Page A

sounds very Italian when she’s babbling, and she goes in for a fair bit of Italian-style tutting, often accompanied by a slight shrug of the shoulders. And she calls me Mamma, but then so did the boys and we didn’t have an Italian au pair then. Or even the remotest hint of an au pair. Nick didn’t like the idea of anyone else in the house; he liked to come home and completely switch off. Sometimes he just slept, and hardly spoke to us at all. Which I also used to think was somehow my fault.
    “See you later. Have a lovely day, sweetheart.”
    Great. Finally, I can start work. It’s ten past ten and I’ve been up for hours. This working-mother lark is such a treat.
    “I’m going up to the office, Elsie, and I’ll check the website orders.”
    “Right you are, dear.”
    I think I’ll make a list. That’s always calming. I’ll drink my tea and make a list. And then I need to sort out the window displays. I took out most of the Christmas things last week, but I still want to add in a few more hot-water-bottle covers, and the new tea cozies. And I should probably start thinking about a new display for February, with a Valentine’s Day theme again; it worked really well last year, and I’ve still got the strings of pink heart-shaped fairy lights in the stockroom. The café window display is fairly simple, with knitted tea cozies and teapots, and knitted cakes on the antique glass cake stands I found in Venice, and the blue willow pattern one I found in a junk shop; with fairy lights and frosted glass sundae dishes, it all looks very pretty. Gran and Betty loved knitting the scoops of ice cream for the dishes, in dark chocolate and raspberry, with a few pale pom-poms in vanilla and caramel, and mint. So all I need to do is update it, adding in knitted mince pies and holly leaves at Christmastime, or more knitted cakes. Gran found a pretty cup and saucer in the jumble sale at the Lifeboats last week, so I want to put that in too.
    Which reminds me, I must ask Gran if she can babysit on Monday, so I can go to the bloody PTA meeting with Connie. I’ll ask her if she’s decided about her cruise as well; she’s been looking at brochures again with Reg, and there are some lovely looking ones that go round the Caribbean, but she says she doesn’t want to be that far away, in case I need her. So I need to persuade her it’ll be fine.
    Right. List. Ring Gran. Get more details on the bloody bus thing. We’ll need to set up one of those telephone charts for the mornings when the light sea mist is more of a torrential downpour and walking to school would involve lots of soaked children arriving sopping wet and chilled to the bone. I should ring Mr. Prewitt too, and make sure he’s got everything he needs for the shop accounts; he’s been impressed with the impact of the café; our profits were up nearly 500 percent for the last quarter, even after I gave Connie and Mark their share, which sounds great until you know how low it was to start with.
    I want to check with him about the insurance too; ever since the fire I’ve been fairly obsessive about it. Thank God our policy was up-to-date, or I would never have been able to afford to buy Mrs. Davis out. Even though her florist business wasn’t earning much, and the prices round here are still pretty low, it was a fair chunk of money, and being right next door might have made some people double the price. But she was so nice about it, and kept trying to lower it because her electrics started the fire in the first place. I sorted it out with Graham and Tina in the end, and he talked to his brothers. We saved a bit by not using an agent. But I thought I’d still need to take out a business loan, and I don’t think the bloody banks are that keen on wool shops run by single parents with three kids. Although they seem perfectly fine with multimillion-pound gambles run by the kind of men who you’d pay serious money not to sit next to at dinner parties. Not that I go to