Permanent Rose by Hilary McKay

Author:Hilary McKay [McKay, Hilary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781444903461
Publisher: Hachette Children
Published: 2011-05-05T00:00:00+00:00

The letters were all from Eve, and Eve had not changed.

Darling Linda,

I am writing this in my shed…

Darling Linda,

You are so lucky, no fireflies here! I have been making charcoal in the oven ON PURPOSE this time! With willow sticks. Caddy loved it. There are little black handprints all over the house . .

Darling Linda,

Thank you, thank you, thank you. Don’t tell Bill…

‘There is nothing in these diaries, Saffy,’ said Sarah soberly. ‘Not a word. They are too early. The last one ends months before you were born.’

‘How many months?’

‘Nearly a year. And anyway, they are not chatty diaries…Well, the first one starts off chatty, but they get less and less like that, just appointments and birthday reminders, stuff like that. No names. Doodles…There are more of those than anything. Look!’

The doodles were tiny sketches. A leaf. A star. A glimpse of a building, a face.

‘She was good at faces,’ said Sarah. ‘Look, there’s Eve and Bill!’

‘Perhaps she was homesick,’ said Saffron, and from the address book this seemed to be more than likely. Nearly all the addresses that Saffron’s mother had bothered to write out properly were English ones. It was a mess, like Caddy’s address book, full of crossed-out names and telephone numbers.

‘Yesterday Rose asked Caddy if Michael was in her address book,’ Saffron told Sarah, as she turned the pages, ‘and Caddy said of course he wasn’t. She only wrote in the people she thought she might possibly forget…Do you think my mother thought she might possibly forget my father?’

‘No.’

‘Neither do I,’ said Saffron, and all at once she scooped everything up, letters and notebooks together, and pushed them back in the box.

‘Whoever my rotten father was,’ she said angrily, ‘he didn’t care about me.’

Sarah let her do it, scoop them in all crumpled, wedge on the lid with a smack, push the box petulantly away and sit with her face buried in her knees.

‘Come on, Saffy!’ she said at last. ‘Hearts of stone!’

‘Oh shut up!’ snapped Saffron.

‘Who wants a rich Venetian papa, anyway? How pretentious!’

‘I didn’t want a rich Venetian anyone! I just wanted to know who my father was.’

‘I know,’ said Sarah. ‘It’s tough. Tough, but not unbearable.’

‘What do you know about unbearable?’

‘Ho,’ said Sarah, pleased. ‘What do I know about unbearable? Guess what? I would swap having a father for fully functional legs!’

‘You wouldn’t!’

‘Some days I would.’

‘Your father is lovely!’

‘Yes he is. So are your legs. It’s a pity we can’t share. Some days one of us could have the legs, and other days the father…Only we’d probably fight.’

‘You do talk some rubbish,’ said Saffron, smiling a bit.

‘I know. And speaking of rubbish, we have to make another birthday cake. Can I count on your support?’

‘What, today?’

‘Yes. Birthday tomorrow.’

‘Oh please not, Sarah! It’s much too hot to begin cooking again!’

‘I know. It’s just a bad day. If your mother ever knew who your father was she either tried to forget, or ate the evidence. My cake exploded in front of that horrible David. Caddy is falling apart at the thought of marrying Michael.

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