Page 40 of The Little Teashop of Lost and Found
‘Very grand: I hope you know what you’re doing.’ One dark eyebrow went up quizzically, in a way I was starting to find familiar.
‘I’ve spent most of my adult life working in cafés and teashops so I knowexactlyhow I want my own to be, and I’m not going to be skimping on the food, that’s for sure.’
‘The opposite of Mrs Muswell, then,’ he said, then added, ‘Just a thought: have you got a handset to plug into the phone landline when it’s reconnected? Only I haven’t noticed one about.’
I stared at him. ‘No – you’re right, there isn’t one. I’d forgotten about that.’
‘I’ve got a spare somewhere. I’ll dig it out and bring it over first thing in the morning,’ he offered.
Then his mobile rang and when he looked down at the number he turned partly away while he answered it, so I assumed it was a girlfriend.
‘No, I can’t come at the moment, Zelda,’ he said in reply to some query. ‘But I’m hoping to pick up a very special piece at a local auction for one of my London clients and, if so, I’ll be down next week to deliver it personally.’
Presumably, this was not what his caller wanted to hear.
‘I’m sorry,’ he added after a minute. ‘I know I haven’t seen you for a while, but I can’t get away before that. You can always email me whatever the problem is if you don’t want to discuss it on the phone. Look, I’ll ring you back later. I’m a bit tied up at the moment.’
He grimaced as he put the phone back in his pocket, but didn’t give me any explanation. ‘Well, I’d better get off,’ he said, back to being Mr Terse, which was just as annoying in its way as Mr Bossy. ‘I’m away to Keswick, in pursuit of a bit of Ming. OrallegedMing, which would mean a wasted journey.’
‘Ming the Merciless,’ I said absently, still wondering about his caller. A man so handsome, even if hewasa bit on the bad-tempered side, must have hordes of women after him and it sounded as if this Zelda was one of them.
‘I didn’t have you down as aFlash Gordonfan,’ he said, looking at me in amusement, and I amended that thought to ‘sometimes bad-tempered but can suddenly turn on a stun-ray of a smile’.
‘My late fiancé … it was his favourite film,’ I explained.
‘Oh, right,’ he said, the smile vanishing as quickly as it had appeared.
Left to myself, I went up to the flat and unpacked my kitchen equipment into the cupboards, then flattened the empty cartons. This time I’d get rid of them because I was determined that I was here to stay.
It was chilly in the flat – having the boiler overhauled so I could switch the radiators on was right at the top of my priority list – so after I’d discovered that most of my curtains were long and narrow, while the flat windows were shallow and wide, then painted test patches on the walls and skirting boards, I gave up and drove myself back to Oldstone.
Nile still hadn’t returned, so I hoped he’d found his Ming and it was all that he had hoped for.
Back in my comfortable room at the farm, I wrote another scene before dinner.
‘My prince is coming to free me and we’ll live happily ever after,’ Beauty said.
‘But it might not be the right happily-ever-after,’ said the mouse. ‘Something’s wrong with this enchantment, or you’d have stayed asleep till your prince had kissed you. This must be a prince from theHere-and-now, while you need one from the Once-upon-a-time. You’d better wait.’
And indeed he was quite right. Where once a forest had flourished, an estate of shabby, rundown houses, with gardens growing crops of rusty cars and old prams, had encircled the bower without the occupants realizing it was there.
Now, as the enchantment faded, it would beckon to them like a jewel in a sea of mud.
Dinner was just me, Bel and Sheila again, which was cosy. I was starting to feel very at home at Oldstone, considering I’d barely been there five minutes.
‘Nile is taking me somewhere tomorrow afternoon to look at second-hand furniture and antiques, but I thought I’d start painting the flat in the morning while I’m waiting for the phone engineer,’ I told them. ‘And maybe I can get hold of someone to come and service the boiler in the flat, because it’s freezing up there without the heating on.’
‘I’ll come and help you paint in the morning for an hour or two,’ Bel offered. ‘But then I’ll come back and work: I’m exhibiting with two other potters at a gallery in York before Christmas, so I’ll have to start stockpiling pieces.’
‘Only if you’ve got time and feel like it,’ I said.
‘I’m putting you in my debt, so you have to help us plan out and convert our little café before spring,’ she said. ‘It’s my cunning plan.’
‘I’d do that anyway,’ I told her.
After dinner, Sheila said she was going to the studio she’d created out of what was once a small Victorian orangery at the back of the house, a concept I would have thought as entirely alien to the surrounding moorland as the carving of a bunch of grapes over the front door.
When she’d gone, followed by her shadow, Honey, Bel told me she’d checked out some local newspapers online that afternoon and had printed out what she’d found.
