Sophie looks up from her mobile phone. ‘Berry picking? I don’t have anything to wear for that. My suitcase is still in the plane.’
‘Don’t worry about that,’ Ellie says as she corrects Becca’s spelling test. ‘I’ll lend you some clothes while you’re here.’ She runs her eyes over Sophie. ‘They won’t be fancy, mind you.’
Sophie glances down as her crumpled velvet skirt and the white silk blouse now webbed with creases and spots of maple syrup from the morning’s pancake breakfast. ‘They kept our suitcases on the plane. I only dress like this for work.’
‘Which I understands you does all the time,’ Florie says as she folds tea towels into the baskets. ‘Sam said.’
‘Sam doesn’t know anything about me.’
‘Oh, right.’ Florie raises an eyebrow. ‘Didn’t mean to hit a nerve there, duck.’
‘Show Sophie your lettering, Becca,’ Ellie says, signing to Becca.
Becca passes a large piece of cardboard covered in crooked green-crayoned letters to Sophie. ‘B-E-C-C-A B-R-Y-N-E,’ she signs as Ellie says the letters.
Sophie looks over at Ellie. ‘What do I do if I want to say something? I don’t know how to sign.’
‘Just face her so she can read your lips.’
Sophie nods. ‘That’s very good, Becca. But isn’t it supposed to be …?’ Sophie frowns as she concentrates on the green letters. ‘Isn’t it supposed to be B-Y-R-N-E?’
Becca rolls her eyes and nods. ‘B-Y-R-N-E,’ she corrects herself.
‘Well done, Sophie.’ Ellie rolls up the cardboard, securing it with an elastic. ‘You’ve been paying attention.’
Sophie slides her phone into the pocket of her velvet jacket, which she’s slung over the back of her chair. ‘Well, the London office has my work there under control, and there’s nothing I can do about the New York interview right now, so, consider me a student of berry picking.’
***
Sophie follows Florie, Ellie and Becca up a rocky path in a pair of Ellie’s jeans, a large striped sweater pilfered from Florie’s closet, and an ancient pair of Adidas trainers, wading through knee-high bushes and over fallen logs as they pass clumps of fat blueberries sprouting from the rocky scree. Every now and then, she stops to take pictures with her small digital camera.
‘What about these ones?’ she asks as they trek by a large clump.
‘Nah, maid. These ones has been picked over,’ Florie calls back to her. ‘There are better up higher. The berries likes the slopes, and there was a forest fire up there a few years ago. It stimulates the berries. There’s lots more up there.’
They stop on a slope near the top of the hill where the mash of grey rocks sprout masses of thick bushes heavy with ripe blueberries. Beyond the tops of the fir trees, the inky blue water of the ocean glimmers in the sun, and down the coast, a red-roofed lighthouse and a tall white house can just be made out on a protruding cliff.
Ellie hands her basket to Sophie. ‘Pick some for me, too, Sophie. I’m going to draw.’
‘I don’t really know what I’m doing.’
Florie waves at Sophie. ‘Come on over here, duck. We’ll shows you how it’s done.’
Sophie joins Florie and Becca beside a carpet of blueberry bushes. Squatting beside a bush, Becca cups a clump of plump berries with her hand. She pries them away from their stalks with her thumb and lets them roll off her palm into her basket.
‘Just do what Becca’s doing, maid,’ Florie says. ‘You’ll knows if they’re ripe if they just falls into your hand. If they resists you, best to leave them be. Your hands are going to get purple. You don’t minds that, do you? They stains like the devil.’
‘That’s all right. I’ll wash them later.’
Florie chuckles as she bends over a blueberry bush. ‘Yes, sure, duck. You do that.’
Sophie wanders over to a clump of berries and tests out Becca’s technique, abandoning it when she finds herself pulling off huge stalks of unripe berries. Sitting on a warm rock, she settles on a one-berry-at-a-time method.
Ellie wanders over, her drawing pad under her arm. She sits on a rock near Sophie and flips open the pad. ‘Do you mind if I draw you?’ she asks, a pencil poised over the paper.
‘Me? Are you sure you wouldn’t rather draw Becca or Florie? I’m pretty slow at this.’
‘Don’t worry about the berries. Those two can pick for England, and I draw them all the time. I’d love to have a drawing of my niece.’
Sophie tucks a strand of hair that has escaped her ponytail behind her ear. ‘I look like a wreck.’
‘You look lovely.’
Sophie smiles. ‘I think you need to put your glasses on, Aunt Ellie.’
Ellie looks down at the turquoise glasses hanging around her neck and slides them onto her nose. She peers at Sophie. ‘Ah, you’re right. My mistake.’
‘Aunt Ellie!’ Sophie says, laughing.
Ellie giggles. ‘I’m teasing, Sophie. Just relax and pick your berries. Ignore me.’
A companionable silence settles over the berry pickers and the artist, overlaid by the buzz of insects and the hammering of a woodpecker deep in the woods. After about half an hour, Sophie stretches and sits beside Ellie on a velvety cushion of green moss. She looks at the drawing, her eyes widening. ‘Oh, you’ve made me look quite nice.’
Ellie laughs. ‘You’re very nice-looking, Sophie. You’ve got your parents’ dark hair, but the blue-grey Burgess eyes. Becca has the same eyes. Winny did too.’
Sophie smiles at Ellie. ‘You have them too. Mum had dark eyes though.’
‘Yes. Like our mother, Winnifred. She was half French. I named Winny after her.’
‘Really? I didn’t know that.’ Sophie sweeps her eyes over the drawing – the confident outlines of her own
