Page 1 of The Little Teashop of Lost and Found
Prologue
West Yorkshire
Liz
2 March 1978
There had been no signs to warn me of the imminent catastrophe about to overtake me, or if there had been, I was oblivious to them. When everything kicked off that night, I felt as if I’d been catapulted straight into a horror movie, and a gross one at that – or the nightmare from hell.
Fear and confusion were quickly followed by realization, panic, shock and revulsion, for who’d have thought a birth involved so much goriness? Certainly not me, even though, ironically enough, my sights had refocused on gaining an Oxford place to read medicine the very moment my brief first love affair the previous summer had come to an end.
But then, that wasn’t because I felt any kind of vocation to heal the sick, the halt and the lame, it was simply part of my plan to mould myself so much in Father’s image that he forgot I wasn’t actually his biological child at all.
As these thoughts jostled chaotically together in my normally clear, cool and analytical mind, my eyes met Mum’s over the small, misshapen, skinned-rabbit of a thing that lay weakly mewling on the bed between us and I expect the expression on her ashen, stunned face mirrored my own.
Her mouth moved silently once or twice, as if it had forgotten how to shape words. Then finally she whispered, ‘Liz, your father must never find out!’
She always was entirely mistress of the bleeding obvious.
1
Once Upon a Fairy Tale
Alice
Autumn 1995
I grew up knowing I was adopted, so it was never a shocking revelation, merely one of the things that defined me, like having curly copper-bright hair, distinctive dark eyebrows, a fine silvery scar above my upper lip and pale green eyes (like boiled gooseberries, according to Mum, though Dad said they were mermaid’s eyes, the colour of sea-washed green glass).
As a little girl I’d sit for hours painting with Dad in his garden studio, while his deep, gentle voice wrapped me in a soft-spun fairy tale, in which my desperate young birth mother had been forced to abandon her poorly, premature little baby, hoping that someone like Mum and Dad would come along and adopt her.
Or likeDad, at any rate, since eventually I came to see that Nessa (she’d insisted I call her that rather than Mummy, practically the moment I could string a sentence together) had had no maternal yearnings; she’d just been paying lip-service to his longing for a family, smug in the knowledge that she couldn’t physically carry a child even if she had wanted to.
‘A bad fairy had put a spell on baby Alice, but when the nice doctors had made her lip all better, everyone agreed she was the prettiest princess in the whole of Yorkshire,’ he’d finish his story, smiling at me over his canvas.
‘And they put the wicked fairy in a metal cage and everyone threw rotten tomatoes at her,’ I’d suggest – or even worse punishments, for some old fairy-tale books given to me by my paternal grandmother, including one strangely but wonderfully illustrated by Arthur Rackham, had had a great influence on my imagination. We lived near Granny Rose in Knaresborough until moving to a village just outside Shrewsbury when I was eight, and I can still remember her reading to me the long, long poem by Edith Sitwell about Sleeping Beauty, once she’d tucked me up in bed. I’d slowly drift off on a sea of musical, beautiful words about malevolent fairies and enchantments.
Other favourites of Granny’s includedThe Water-BabiesandAlice’s Adventures in Wonderland– the latter a favourite of mine, too, since the heroine had the same name. I begged for her lovely old copies after she died and Dad made sure I got them, even though Nessa was hellbent on having a clearance firm empty the whole house. She was a minimalist sort of person … except when it came to her own clothes, jewellery and shoes.
Our house was a tale of two parts, with most of the creatively chaotic clutter in Dad’s studio, which might have been stables once upon a time – until he married a wicked witch disguised as a flamboyantly beautiful ex-opera singer and she banished him there.
Anyway, you can see why I have a tendency to turn everything that happens in my life into a dark-edged fairy tale – I can’t help it!
‘They threw stinky rotten eggs at the wicked fairy, too,’ I’d once added firmly to the familiar story.
‘Well, perhaps, but only until she said she was sorry and then they let her out,’ Dad had amended, kind-hearted as always.
Over the years we embroidered the story with increasingly ridiculous flourishes at every retelling, but it had served its purpose, for I grew up knowing that I’d been abandoned in the village of Haworth in Yorkshire and adopted, and the filament-fine silvery scar was all that remained to show I’d been born with a harelip.
Of course, later I realized Dad had had no way of knowing whether my birth mother was young or not and also, once I became quite obsessedwith the Brontë family and Haworth, I knew that it was extremely unlikely that she’d tiptoed up to the steps of the Parsonage in the middle of the night and laid me there, in the expectation that he and Nessa would shortly swing by and scoop me up. I mean, it was a museum by then, so it would have been closed, and also, adoption didn’t quite work like that. (I’m still surprised they let Nessa on to the register. I can only think that her opera training kicked in and she hadn’t been able to resist throwing herself into the role of eager prospective mother.)
But while Nessa might make extravagant expressions of affection towards me only when her London friends were visiting (one of whom once cattily let fall the information that she hadn’t hadthatbrilliant a voice even before the operation on her vocal cords that ended her career), I’d knownreallove from Granny and Dad.
And I also had Lola, my best friend, and her lovely parents, who owned a nearby smallholding, growing herbs commercially. There we helped look after the hens and goats, ran wild in the fields and learned to bake in the long, cool, quarry-tiled kitchen. All my life, baking – even the scent of cinnamon and dried fruit – would have the power to transport me back immediately to those happy days and transfuse me with warmth and comfort.
So it was an idyllic childhood on the whole, though once the rebellious teenage hormones kicked in I began to clash more and more with Nessa.
Still, the finer details of my distant past didn’t seem to matter … until Dad suddenly died from a massive heart attack when I was nearly eighteen and my safe, secure world collapsed around me like a house of cards.
