‘Never mind,’ she said to her mother. ‘I’m not that hungry. I’ll just have a cup of tea.’
What she really wanted was coffee, decent coffee made with hand-ground beans and filtered to a rich smoothness, but all her mother could offer was an old jar of instant that had lost any tempting aroma it might once have held through sitting on the window sill for months, possibly years. No one drank coffee here and so this jar was reserved for visitors. After two or three cups of the filthy stuff, Pip had resorted to drinking tea instead.
‘Oh, Pip,’ her mother replied, and in those two words Pip could hear the worry that was so clearly etched into her face. Pip was tired of being the cause of so much heartache, but she couldn’t summon the energy to change that, either.
‘You can’t go to the shop on an empty stomach,’ her mother continued to object. ‘Let me make you some porridge. Or a boiled egg at the very least. . .’ She looked at the charred slice of bread in her hand and then opened her fingers and let it fall into the bin. ‘But there’s no toast for soldiers,’ she added, her mouth twisted into a wry smile.
‘Honestly, Mum,’ Pip said, filling the kettle and setting it to boil on the hot plate. ‘There’s no need. Tea is fine.’
Her mother made a noise somewhere between a tut and a harrumph, but she didn’t push the point.
‘I thought we weren’t calling you Pip any more,’ her father chipped in, and Pip cringed.
‘Have you heard this one, Jez?’ he continued. ‘Our Pip’s only gone and changed her name to Rose. We didn’t know a thing about it until her chap Dominic came to stay. When he called her Rose, I was looking round to see who he was talking to.’
‘It’s just my work name, Dad,’ said Pip, anxious not to get caught up in the discussion around what she called herself yet again. She had tried to get her parents to call her Rose when she first came back to Suffolk. Her mother had made an effort initially, but had given up. Her father, however, seemed tickled by the suggestion and still wouldn’t let it drop.
‘Pip was christened with two names,’ said her mother patiently. ‘It’s up to her which one she chooses to use.’
Pip gave her a grateful smile, but she had already turned away and Pip glimpsed the tail of her hurt look as it crossed her face.
‘Well, I still can’t see what’s wrong with Pip,’ her father muttered under his breath.
Pip thought she could sense Jez staring at her, but she ignored him. She didn’t need him judging her on top of everything else.
The men finished their breakfast, the chairs scraping across the tiled floor as they pushed them away from the table. After one last, noisy slurp of his tea, Jez took his plate and mug and placed them neatly by the sink, ready to be washed. Her father kissed her mother on the cheek and then they were gone to put their boots back on and head out to the fields.
Pip pulled a tea towel from where it was hanging on the Aga and began to dry the dishes her mother had already washed. She stacked them neatly in the cupboards, moving around the kitchen instinctively, although it hadn’t been her home for a third of her life. It was disheartening how easily she’d slipped back into life on the farm. She’d spent ten years trying to escape the place, had grabbed hold of her dreams and turned them into reality, and yet now she was right back where she’d started, helping out in a charity shop and having her breakfast burned by her mother.
Her mother was busy decanting eggs from a bucket into cardboard egg boxes. The family had always sold what they couldn’t eat by way of an honesty box at the end of the farm track, and as a child, taking the little key down to the road, opening the coin box and emptying its contents into her waiting hands had been a highlight of Pip’s week. Sometimes she had been allowed to keep a coin or two to buy sweets or a comic from the corner shop. More than once her friends had encouraged her to syphon off a little of the egg money for themselves, assuring her that her parents would ‘never know’， but Pip had always refused. Partly, she liked to think, this was to do with the inherent integrity that had steered her towards a career in the law. Truthfully, however, she could never be sure that her mother wouldn’t know exactly how much should be in the box and catch her stealing. A fear of being caught and causing disappointment was the greatest deterrent of all.
‘Will Dominic be coming this weekend?’ her mother asked, without looking up from her task.
The question was lightly posed, but Pip could hear a thread of tension in her voice.