Page 6 of The Little Teashop of Lost and Found
The slam of the door behind me shut off the steady stream of screaming invective from Tanya who had, as Dan would have been the first to acknowledge, a mouth on her.
I finally turned off the narrow, rutted lane on to the track that led towards the Oldstone, a stark finger of rock on a hill, its weathered sides carved with ancient symbols.
It was a natural outcrop on a small plateau, though a small circle of standing stones had once been erected around it, their purpose long forgotten and their fallen remains now serving only as seats for tired ramblers.
Since a popular hiking trail passed nearby, it had its share of visitors from late spring to early autumn. But so early in the year, with the stiff frost still scrunching up the grass under my wheels as I came to a stop, it was left to the sheep and the occasional bird.
4
Packing Up
When the big oak front door was safely closed and locked behind me, I leaned against it for a moment with my eyes shut, trying to remember how to breathe normally.
And when I finally opened them, I saw the place with new eyes: no longer as my home, just one more temporary resting place on the rootless journey that was my life.
The house was furnished in an eclectic mix of Victorian mahogany furniture Dan had inherited from his parents and a few quirky modern pieces and junk shop finds we’d bought together. Most of my personal possessions were either in the kitchen, or the small boxroom I used for my writing and illustrating, but a few treasures were dotted about the rest of the house: the portrait of me painted by my father, a box made of shells, a small Venetian mirror, a good rug in colours muted by age that I’d once impulse-bought in an auction in Cornwall …
I fetched down a stack of cardboard cartons from the attic that were still marked in my own hand from the move up to Scotland: kitchen equipment, books, clothes, bedding, art materials …
The doorbell rang later, but I didn’t answer it in case it was Tanya Carter. But whoever it was persisted, so I put my head into the hall to listen. It fell suddenly silent, then the letter box clattered and the familiar voice of the café manageress called, ‘Alice, are you there? It’s me, Jen.’
She looked relieved when I opened the door.
‘Thank goodness – I could see all the lights on, so when you didn’t answer I was starting to get worried.’
‘I thought you might be that woman,’ I said, not able to bring myself to call her Dan’s wife. ‘What happened to her?’
‘Well, I think she was bruised by the table, but she was screaming blue murder when she got up, so we knew she was OK, really,’ she said, following me into the kitchen and looking at a half-packed box into which I was stashing my favourite utensils. ‘There’s nothing wrong with her lungs, that’s for sure.’
‘Do you know who she is?’ I asked, wrapping up a glass lemon squeezer and then putting it inside the blue-glazed interior of a Mason Cash mixing bowl, along with a kitchen timer shaped like a hen and a few other small items.
‘Yes, I overheard what she was saying – in fact, half the people in the café did, because she’s a bit shrill, isn’t she? She threatened to report you for assault, but we told her she’d only got what was coming to her … and then Col said she’d need witnesses and he was sure no one there had seen a thing. Most of the customers were locals or Dan’s friends.’
‘That must have cheered her up,’ I said, my hands automatically continuing with the wrapping and packing.
‘She quietened down when she realized she wasn’t getting any sympathy and went away, but she said she’d be back as soon as she’d sorted things out with the solicitor.’
‘So … she’s not intending to go to the funeral tomorrow?’ I asked, wrapping newspaper round my set of good kitchen knives and putting them in the box, one at a time.
‘No, I don’t think even she had the brass for that. She said she was off back down south, she’d forgotten how freezing cold it was up here and how much she’d hated living in Scotland. And …’
She paused, clearly uncertain how to put what she wanted to say. ‘Alice, we’re all really sorry about what’s happened. We know Dan loved you and how good you were for him, grounding him and making the café so popular.’
‘He wasn’t grounded enough to get a divorce,’ I said, slightly bitterly.
‘You know Dan – he would havemeantto, he was just so laid-back he never got round to it.’
‘Well, it’s too late now,’ I said. ‘I’ll be packed and gone, right after the funeral.’
‘But shouldn’t you speak to the solicitor first? Surely you’re entitled to something, after all the work you’ve put in on the house and the café?’
‘The solicitor just rangme, to warn me that Tanya Carter might appear – and shewillget everything. He suggested I check Dan’s papers again, in case there’s another will, but what’s the point when I know very well he won’t even have given it a thought.’
‘I’d double-check anyway,’ she said, ‘and surely you don’t have to pack up and go straight away?’
‘Perhaps not, but I can’t bear to be here any more, and the sooner I find a new job and somewhere to live, the better. You can carry on managing the café, meanwhile, can’t you? It’s a good business, so when she gets probate and puts it up for sale, someone will snap it up and, if they’ve got any sense, you and the other staff with it.’
‘I can keep it going, but it won’t be the same. No one can bake the way you can, for a start. One climber said the thought of your syrup sponge pudding and custard had kept him going through a snowstorm on Everest.’
