long boring meanderings. It made her really twitchy. As much as she would have preferred to be sitting in her own home right now, she was happy she didn’t have to endure Nan’s reminiscences about her youth, or her unsubtle hints that Suze should be doing something better with her time. And she disapproved of the hours she spent on the telephone to Batty (she disapproved of his name too), so it was better that she sat here in this café, where she could talk to Batty for as long as she liked.
She’d acquired eleven more followers on Instagram that morning. The post she’d put up the evening before, showing off the five little diamanté hoops she’d put in her ear, had clearly been a winner. She’d got five thousand likes and lots of comments. She’d make sure the shop where she’d bought them saw it, because they gave her a discount. Now she was writing an article for Red Magazine about how the hoop earring was a classic that never died. Dress it up, dress it down, it was always chic. Easy article. She could do it off the top of her head, with a few references to celebrities, which she could quickly find online.
Suze enjoyed her job, even though it was shallow and unchallenging. But what was wrong with that if it made her happy? She loved fashion and beautiful things and writing about them was simple. There was very little effort required, which suited her, because she was intrinsically lazy. She liked the comfortable feeling of doing something familiar and knowing she was doing it well. She would have liked to have been a model, but although her face was pretty and photogenic, she hadn’t had the figure for it. She was short and pear-shaped like her mother. She knew she had great hair and big almond-shaped eyes, the colour of topaz, with long black lashes, and she knew she had sex appeal and charisma too. Men fancied her and since her schooldays girls had always copied her. All the ingredients for a successful influencer, she figured. She just needed more followers. Like, many more; a few hundred thousand. But Rome wasn’t built in a day and she’d only decided to do this eighteen months ago. The thing with social media was that you had to post all the time and the pictures had to be curated to make people want what you had. The truth was that none of them would want to live in a small cottage in an insignificant village in the middle of nowhere with Dennis and Marigold and Nan – and now Daisy too. But that was the good thing about social media, you only showed people what you wanted them to see.
She allowed her gaze to stray out of the window where it lingered, lost in the half-distance, somnolent and unfocused. It was in that moment of nothingness that Daisy’s suggestion about writing a book popped into her mind. Suze rather fancied herself as a novelist. She could even see her imaginary book in the shop window. Yet before her fantasy carried her away, she reminded herself that she couldn’t think of a single thing to write about. Not a thing. She sighed and turned her eyes back to the computer screen where her article about hoop earrings was nearly finished. No point dreaming about being a famous novelist when she didn’t even have an idea.
The following Saturday Marigold drove into town with Suze and Daisy to do some Christmas shopping. It was drizzling. A thick layer of cloud hung low over the wet rooftops and chimney stacks and bedraggled seagulls squawked crossly as they bickered over the odd crusts they found in the bins. The place was busy. It seemed everyone had decided to do their shopping today. The pavements were glistening and full of rushing feet. Marigold thought the lights looked pretty, shining like gumdrops in all the shop windows. She smiled as she remembered the sweets she’d enjoyed as a child. She hadn’t thought of gumdrops in sixty years!
They decided to split and regroup at midday, by the car, as they wanted to buy presents for each other. Marigold wandered up the street, past the town hall and the Bear Hotel, and browsed in the shop windows. Eventually, she bought a sweater for Nan and a scarf for Dennis. She enjoyed the festive feel of the town. There was a giant Christmas tree in the square, a gift