Ann Hood - The Knitting Circle - The uplifting and heartwarming novel you need to read this year

ANN HOOD

HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers in 2008

This ebook edition published by HarperCollins Publishers in 2017

Copyright © Ann Hood 2008

Cover layout design © debbieclementdesign.com2017

Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

Ann Hood asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9781847560100

Ebook Edition © September 2008 ISBN: 9780007281848

Version: 2017-08-30

For knitters

For friends

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Part One: Casting On

Chapter One: Mary

Chapter Two: The Knitting Circle

Part Two: K2, P2

Chapter Three: Scarlet

Chapter Four: The Knitting Circle

Part Three: Knit Two Together (K2Tog)

Chapter Five: Lulu

Chapter Six: The Knitting Circle

Part Four: Socks

Chapter Seven: Ellen

Chapter Eight: The Knitting Circle

Part Five: A Good Knitter

Chapter Nine: Harriet

Chapter Ten: The Knitting Circle

Part Six: Sit And Knit

Chapter Eleven: Alice

Chapter Twelve: The Knitting Circle

Part Seven: Mothers And Children

Chapter Thirteen: Beth

Chapter Fourteen: The Knitting Circle

Part Eight: Knitting

Chapter Fifteen: Roger

Chapter Sixteen: The Knitting Circle

Part Nine: Common Suffering

Chapter Seventeen: Mamie

Chapter Eighteen: The Knitting Circle

Part Ten: Casting Off

Chapter Nineteen: Mary

Chapter Twenty: The Knitting Circle

Acknowledgments

The Knitting Circle

About the Author

About the Publisher

Daughter, I have a story to tell you. I have wanted to tell it to you for a very long time. But unlike Babar or Eloise or any of the other stories that you loved to hear, this one is not funny. This one is not clever. It is simply true. It is my story, yet I do not have the words to tell it. Instead, I pick up my needles and I knit. Every stitch is a letter. A row spells out “I love you.” I knit “I love you” into everything I make. Like a prayer, or a wish, I send it out to you, hoping you can hear me. Hoping, daughter, that the story I am knitting reaches you somehow. Hoping, that my love reaches you somehow.

PART ONE

To knit, you have to have the stitches on one needle. ‘Casting on’ is the term for making the foundation row of stitches. Once you have cast on, you are ready to knit . —NANCY J. THOMAS AND ILANA RABINOWITZ, A Passion for Knitting

1

Mary showed up empty-handed.

“I don’t have anything with me,” she said, and she opened her arms to indicate their emptiness.

The woman standing before her was called Big Alice, but there was nothing big about her. She stood five feet tall, with a tiny waist, short silver hair, and gray eyes the color of a sky right before a storm. Big Alice had her slight body wedged between the worn wooden door to the shop and Mary herself.

“This isn’t really my kind of thing,” Mary said apologetically.

The woman nodded. “I know,” she said, stepping back so that the door swung open wide. “I can’t tell you how many people have stood right where you’re standing and said that exact thing.” Her voice was soft, British.

“Well,” Mary said, because she didn’t know what else to say.

She never did know what to say these days, or what to do. This was in September, five months after her daughter Stella had died. That stunned disbelief had ebbed slightly, but the horrible noises in her head had grown. They were hospital noises, doctors’ voices, and Stella’s own five-year-old voice saying Mama . Sometimes Mary imagined she really heard her daughter calling out to her and her heart would squeeze tight on itself.

“Come on in,” Big Alice said.

Mary followed her into the shop. Alice wore a gray tweed skirt, a white oxford shirt, a gold cardigan, and pearls. Although the top half of her looked like a schoolmarm, she had crazy-colored striped socks on her feet and pink chenille bedroom slippers with red rhinestone cherries across the tops.

“I’ve got the gout,” Big Alice explained, lifting one slippered foot. Then she added, “I guess you know I’m Alice.”

“Yes,” Mary said.

Like everything else, Mary could easily have forgotten the woman’s name. She’d written it on one of the hundreds of Post-its scattered around the house like confetti after a party. But, like all of the phone numbers and dates and directions, the paper with Alice written on it was gone. Outside the store, however, a wooden sign read Big Alice’s Sit and Knit , and when Mary saw it she had remembered: Alice.

Mary stopped and got her bearings. These days this was always necessary, even in familiar places. In her own kitchen she would stop what she was doing and look around, take stock. Oh, she would say to herself, noting that the television was off instead of tuned to Sagwa, the Chinese Cat ; the bowl Stella had made at Claytime with its carefully painted and placed polka dots was empty of the sliced cucumbers or mound of blueberries it used to hold; the cutout hearts with crayoned I love you ’s and the construction-paper kite with its pink ribbon tail drooped. Oh, Mary would say, realizing all over again that this was how her kitchen—her life—looked now. Empty and sad.

The shop was small, with creaky wooden floors and baskets and shelves brimming over with yarn. It smelled like sweaters and cedar and Alice’s own citrus scent. There were three rooms: this small one, the room beyond with the cash register and a well-worn couch slipcovered in a pink and red floral pattern, and another larger room with more yarn and a few chairs.

The yarn was beautiful. Mary saw this immediately and touched some as she followed Alice into the next room, letting her fingertips linger a bit over the skeins.

“So,” Alice was saying, “we’ll start you on a scarf.” She held up a finished scarf. Cobalt blue with pale blue tassels. “You like this one?”

“I guess so,” Mary said.

“You don’t like it? You’re frowning.”

“I do. It’s fine. It’s just, I can’t make it. I’m not good with my hands. I flunked home ec. Really, I did.”

Alice turned toward the wall and pulled down some wooden knitting needles.