To her relief, Erica sounded pleased to hear from her.
‘I was going to phone you but I just got so busy,’ she said. ‘Did you enjoy today? I thought it went really well and your students seemed to enjoy it.’
‘Did you?’ Cathy asked.
Erica laughed. ‘Of course I did! Tansy did too.’
‘That’s good,’ Cathy said, though according to what Iris, Dora and Cathy herself had seen, Tansy hadn’t looked very much like she was enjoying being alive, let alone anything about the class. ‘I thought… well, I suppose Tansy felt it a bit – being there with such a lot of older people.’
‘A little bit, but I don’t think it bothered her all that much. She’s usually just happy to be out of the house for a while.’
There was no tone in Erica’s voice that suggested anything other than a relaxed attitude to her niece, which was completely at odds with what Iris had said earlier. Cathy wasn’t going to push a conversation about it if Erica didn’t want to have one, but she couldn’t deny that she was curious.
‘Did her mum enjoy the cake?’ Cathy asked.
‘Oh, Tansy hasn’t been home yet – she’s still here with me and Malc,’ Erica said. ‘I think she’s planning on staying over but she hasn’t said either way yet.’
‘Right…’
‘So you’re going to carry on with the classes?’ Erica asked.
‘Yes. Did you think I wouldn’t?’
‘Not in a bad way – I just know you were a bit anxious about it beforehand.’
Cathy laughed. ‘I’m still anxious about it. I don’t think that will ever stop, but I did enjoy it, and it was nice to see that everyone else seemed to get a lot out of it too.’
‘Oh, they did!’ Erica agreed. ‘Especially me and Tans. I can’t wait for the next one.’
‘Will Tansy come again?’
‘It depends whether she’s with me or if she’s at college that day. She isn’t there every day – she has some gaps in her timetable where there are no lessons and that usually includes Friday.’
‘Doesn’t she meet up with her friends and things?’
‘The thing about Tans is she doesn’t suffer fools gladly and I think that makes it hard for her to keep friends. You know what most teenagers are like – it’s all boyfriend dramas and selfies. She hates all that and she’s not afraid to tell anyone when she thinks they’re being stupid.’
‘Oh,’ Cathy said. ‘So she doesn’t have friends?’
‘I’m sure she has, but I don’t know that it’s a wide circle.’
There was a pause.
‘It’s good to see her voluntarily going out and doing something other than being hunched over her phone actually,’ Erica said into the gap. ‘It drives Malc mad; he thinks she ought to be at her own house anyway so they just wind each other up.’
‘Well, she’s always welcome if she wants to come back,’ Cathy said, feeling terribly guilty about the fact that she was really hoping Tansy would decide not to bother next week.
Overnight it had snowed. It was a little early in the season, and Cathy hadn’t checked the weather forecast before she’d gone to bed, so it had come as a surprise when she’d opened the curtains to get ready for work to see the street outside buried beneath a glinting, sugary blanket. It looked pretty – like a Christmas card – another bittersweet reminder that Christmas was fast approaching; a Christmas that Cathy would more than likely be spending alone. She supposed she’d get invites from relatives to have lunch with them, but that would only make her feel worse, because sitting there, she’d recall that she and her mum had never been invited, and that she was only there this year because she was alone. Whichever way she chose to spend the season, it was going to be painful.
Shaking her melancholy, she turned her thoughts to the day ahead. At least she’d be at French for Flowers today and work days were always good days. And as it had stopped snowing now and the winter sun was throwing kind rays across the snowy landscape, it might be a good day to take the longer walk into work to make the most of it. That meant walking the canal path, past the old textile factory that had since been turned into an industrial museum where crowds of bored schoolchildren were regularly ferried in and out to learn about a past that most of them probably didn’t care about and could never imagine. Cathy liked the museum though. She’d taken her mum around it once. Hardly an adventure to the other side of the world, but Miriam had loved it and had talked about it for days afterwards. Cathy had been meaning to take her again – not straight away, because what would have been the point of that? She’d been waiting for some suitable exhibition or event that her mum would enjoy, that would make her visit different from the last one…
Of course that hadn’t happened. Miriam had died before the perfect event had come round.
Cathy wrapped herself up and headed out in plenty of time to get to the town centre via the canal. The frosted air curled away from her as she walked in the bright sunlight, like the clouds of a Van Gogh painting. Fresh snow creaked under her boots, stretching ahead on the path, pristine and glistening and just begging for footprints. A field of new snow was like the first page of a new notebook – it left you itching to make your mark so you could say to the world: look, I’m here. Cathy had never been able to resist either – perhaps because she didn’t often feel she’d made much of a mark on the world in any other respect.
As she contemplated this in the vaguest of ways, she was suddenly aware of panting behind her. She whipped round to see a shaggy-looking Alsatian bounding towards her.
‘Hello, handsome,’ she said with a smile. The dog looked up at her for a moment, as if to acknowledge the compliment, before circling back the way it had come and heading towards a man on the path. Cathy hadn’t noticed him before, so he must have been striding at quite a pace to be there now. But he was tall, she noted, though still too far away to be able to tell much else about him, so she supposed he probably would walk quite fast.
She watched for a moment as the dog raced up and down the path, kicking up snow as it went, clearly delighted at the way it filled the air and snapping playfully at the clumps as they came back down. She could hear the low chuckle of the owner, but then blushed as he looked right at her.
Had she been staring? Maybe, but now she felt like a toddler caught with their hand in the sweetie box. She faced forward again and quickened her step.
But before she’d gone six feet, the dog was back, and this time it decided to try to make friends, coming right up to Cathy and sniffing at her.
‘Guin!’ the man shouted.
Cathy turned again to see him racing up the path now.
‘Guin!’ he repeated. ‘Leave the poor lady alone!’
‘Oh, it’s alright,’ Cathy said. ‘He’s not bothering me… It’s a he?’
‘Yes,’ the man said. He’d stopped running now and was striding the last few feet to try to retrieve his dog, who didn’t seem to want retrieving and had already hared off again, down the path ahead of them. ‘I sometimes wonder who’s taking who for a walk when we’re out.’