A timer pinged, distracting her from her introductions, and she began to haul bread rolls out of the oven. ‘Introduce yourselves, the rest of you.’
‘Hi,’ said Geeta with a friendly smile, sitting down near Nile and taking the baby away from him, to his obvious relief.
‘I feel like a springboard,’ he said, ruefully.
‘I’m Bel, Nile’s sister,’ said a woman of about my own age, with curling fair hair and periwinkle-blue eyes. She patted the seat next to her.
‘Come and sit here, between me and Teddy – we’re twins, you might have noticed?’
I nodded, because now I was looking at them they were as alike as a pair of perfectly matched pearls. ‘You both take after Sheila, too.’
‘I know, except we’re about two feet taller, like Dad,’ she agreed. ‘Casper very cleverly takes after both parents – he has Geeta’s wonderful brown eyes and Ted’s fair hair – that’s a really unusual colour combination.’
I didn’t like to ask where Nile got his looks from – these things can be very tricky and he could well be Sheila’s son from a previous relationship – and no one volunteered any information on the subject. Anyway, I was feeling a bit glazed and disorientated by exhaustion and lack of a decent meal by then, so when the familial banter that had ceased when I entered the room began again, I let it wash over and enfold me like a soothing wave.
‘Who’s for mulligatawny soup?’ asked Sheila, dumping a large porcelain casserole dish in the middle of the table and turning for the basket of warm bread rolls.
Until that moment, I hadn’t realized how totally ravenous I was.
The finding of a baby up on the moors and the entirely futile search for the mother proved little more than a seven-day wonder, quickly superseded by sensational news of national importance.
Back at home, relations between Mum and I were soon no more strained than they had been before the events of that night, which neither of us ever referred to again. In fact, by the time Father finally got back, I’m sure she’d developed total amnesia on the subject, which was just as well, since he’d have pounced on any sign of a secret and bullied it out of her.
14
Pot Luck
By the time I’d got outside a big bowl of hot, spicy soup followed by a roast chicken with all the trimmings, I felt back in the land of the living, and began to tune in to the conversation around me. I’d never been in the heart of a big family before – Lola’s was warm and friendly, but she had been an only child.
I found I felt strangely at home, rather than the outsider I really was.
‘Nile’s told us how you were taken in by Mrs Muswell when you bought your café,’ Bel said to me, passing plates of apple pie and thick cream in a blue and white striped jug.
‘She got what she deserved, because only an idiot buys a property without going to look at it first,’ Nile said.
‘It’s not polite to call our guest an idiot,’ pointed out Geeta, giving him a reproving look, before resuming the spooning of gloop into Casper’s mouth. The baby was now in a highchair next to her, with the Labrador seated underneath it, looking up hopefully.
I gave Nile a level stare. ‘I admit that it was a stupid thing to do, but Mrs Muswell fooledyouinto letting her sell your antiques and then pocketing the money, so it’s a case of the pot calling the kettle black, isn’t it?’
‘That’s true,’ said Teddy, grinning.
‘Yes, you tell him,’ Bel encouraged me. ‘He’s got too much into the habit of being the bossy older brother and he needs taking down a peg or two.’
‘I just give out good advice,’ he said, looking surprised. ‘It’s your own fault if none of you ever takes it.’
‘I suspect it’s going to be pointless you even trying to boss Alice about,’ Sheila said, with one of her warm smiles at me. She added, ‘Nile told us you expected to find the café and flat only needing a little updating and that all the furnishings and fitments were to have been included in the price?’
‘Yes, but Mrs Muswell must have come over from Spain and cleared out anything she could sell the very moment I agreed to buy it,’ I told her, then described the state I’d found the place in. ‘I thought about camping in the flat until the rest of my things arrive on Sunday, but there isn’t a stick of furniture. It was totally filthy too, and the gas boiler doesn’t look as if it has been used for half a century.’
‘You need to be so careful with gas,’ Teddy advised me.
‘I know. I’ll get it serviced by the people who’ve been doing the boiler in the basement,’ I agreed. ‘And at least the flat’s now clean as a whistle, because one of the seasonal staff turned up this morning and volunteered to do it instead of the café – she seemed to enjoy the challenge.’
‘Clean or not, you still can’t move in until you have heating, furniture and something to cook on, can you?’ said Geeta practically. ‘Especially in September – it’s so much colder here than where I was brought up.’
‘Where was that?’ I asked, though I thought I could guess from her accent.
‘Bradford,’ she said. ‘My family all think I’m mad, living up here in the back of beyond.’