Page 10 of A Winter Kiss on Rochester Mews
‘I am,’ Mattie said, though all the evidence suggested otherwise. ‘He’s not very nice to me.’
‘It’s the chicken and egg, really. Who wasn’t nice to whom first?’ Guy stared at Mattie without blinking. Pippa tilted her head and looked at Mattie too, as if she was disappointed in her, so Mattie felt forced to put down her grater with a beleaguered air and flounce out of the kitchen to knock gently on the door of Tom’s room.
‘Do you want dinner?’ she called out, while silently praying that he’d say no. ‘I can easily make enough for four.’
There was silence and Mattie wondered if Tom had been crushed between the wall and his huge kingsize bed. ‘I’m all right,’ he called back finally. ‘I had a very late breakfast panini.’
‘Yeah, of course you did,’ Mattie muttered under her breath, going back into the kitchen so she could stand there with her hands on her hips and demand, ‘Happy now?’
‘Deliriously,’ Guy drawled back. ‘I’d be even happier if I didn’t have to drive Ma’s car back so I could have another glass of wine.’
Although she begged them to stay, Guy and Pippa left as soon as they’d cleared the last smear of apple and blackberry crumble from their bowls. After she’d locked the shop door behind them, she very slowly and very unwillingly retraced her steps back to the flat.
Tom was in the kitchen with a tin of baked beans and a loaf of sliced white. ‘I was just making dinner,’ he said defensively as if Mattie had asked him what the hell he thought he was doing. Then he opened the tin of baked beans in a very passive-aggressive manner, sighing and shaking his head and generally acting as if both tin opener and tin had done him wrong.
‘Well, you know where I am if you need me,’ Mattie said, exiting the kitchen as fast as she could. But just before she shut the door of the room that they’d fought so bitterly about, she heard Tom say to himself in withering tones, ‘What on earth would I needyoufor?’
Thankfully, when Mattie woke up at seven thirty the next morning, which pretty much constituted a long lie-in, Tom was nowhere to be seen.
Last night had been awkward enough; both of them confined to their rooms apart from the mortifying ten seconds when Mattie had tried to get into the bathroom, only to find it already occupied.
‘Go away!’ Tom had shouted rather than politely requesting that Mattie come back in a short while.
As it was, she’d left it for a good half an hour before she plucked up the courage to venture into the bathroom, terrified of what horrors might be lurking. But there were none. Just Tom’s electric toothbrush (which seemed very cutting edge for Tom) and a few of his toiletries: shampoo, hair pomade, some fancy gloop that called itself a skin elasticiser rather than moisturiser. It struck Mattie, as she massaged her own moisturiser into her face then cleaned her teeth, that she hadn’t given a moment’s thought to how intimate it was to share a flat with someone.
Mattie had shared flats before. At university, she’d lived in a four-bedroom house with seven other girls, which had been chaotic and messy, but mostly fun. And of course, when she’d lived in Paris, she’d shared a tiny attic garret with … well, that hadn’t ended up being fun, for reasons that had nothing to do with the actual living together.
But sharing a flat with Tom, wondering if he could hear her brushing her teeth, felt intensely intimate. Mattie made a solemn vow that she’d never leave her room unless she was fully dressed or had her dressing gown tightly belted over her pyjamas. Not that she thought that Tom would be overcome with lust at the sight of her – Tom wasn’t the lustful sort at all – but she could picture his lip curling and he’d mutter something sarcastic under his breath. And the idea that she might bump into Tom wearing nothing but some very old-fashioned underpants, like those baggy shorts that men wore in old black-and-white films, had her choking on her toothpaste.
This Thursday morning Tom was still tucked up in bed and if he was snoring, then Mattie couldn’t hear him through his bedroom door.
And for all the awkwardness and the intimacy that had been thrust upon them, that thirty-second commute down the stairs and through the shop was worth it. Mattie unlocked the front door of the tearooms just in time to surprise Kendra, who ran a dairy in East London.
‘What are you doing here?’ Kendra said, as she hefted in the crate of milk instead of leaving it outside, as she usually did. ‘You must have been up almost as early as me.’
‘Actually, I’ve only been up half an hour,’ Mattie said a little apologetically. ‘Moved in above the shop, haven’t I?’
‘All right for some! How’s that working out for you?’ Kendra asked a little enviously.
‘Not without its challenges, but also kind of life-changing,’ Mattie decided as she checked the cartons of eggs to make sure that none of them were broken.
Kendra left, the glass bottles on her milk float rattling as she carefully manoeuvred over the cobblestones, and then Mattie was alone. It was her favourite part of the day in her favourite place; early morning in her little kitchen at the back of the tearooms.
Mattie looked at her hideaway with a pleasure that was still undimmed after eighteen months of running the tearooms. The kitchen walls had beautiful Art Nouveau tiles, dating back to when the bookshop had first opened in 1912, in the suffragette colours of purple, green and white. They were partly obscured now by the shelves and hanging rails Mattie had installed so she could store her pots and pans, whisks and wooden spoons. Jars and tins of dry ingredients and little glass bottles of spices, essences and flavourings sat on the scant wooden worktop, where she whipped up cakes and cookies, tarts and turnovers, breads and bakes. The oven where all this magic happened was the only new piece of kit and had cost the same as a small hatchback.
Along the opposite wall was an old-fashioned butler’s sink and tiled drainer, a tall, very skinny fridge and a door that led out into the back yard where there was an ancient privy for the hardiest and bravest of paying customers, especially on a chill winter’s day like today.
You couldn’t create culinary delights in a kitchen so miniscule without being very organised and very tidy, which Mattie was. ‘A place for everything and everything in its place,’ she said at least a dozen times a day when a dirty cup and saucer were left unattended for longer than thirty seconds. Or when Cuthbert left the milk out instead of putting it back in the fridge under the counter, because he was busy serenading a customer with a rousing chorus of ‘They Drink an Awful Lot of Coffee in Brazil’.
As well as her usual bakes, which tended towards English classics with a French twist like her famous citron drizzle cake, Mattie also had both a sweet and a savoury daily special. Today, it was a cinder toffee and apple layer cake and individual stilton and leek tarts. With a quick glance at the right page in her handwritten recipe book to check quantities, Mattie started amassing the ingredients she needed.
By the time Cuthbert arrived at ten to nine, all the breakfast pastries were out of the oven and arranged on their cake stands and trays on the counter. And by the time Posy and Verity arrived to open up Happy Ever After just before ten, the tearooms had been open for almost an hour. Half the tables were filled with customers lingering over a cup of coffee and a flaky buttery croissant, with others dashing out with a coffee to go (fifty pence cheaper if they brought their own cup) and something delicious in a paper bag.
At ten past ten, even though Happy Ever After opened at ten, Tom arrived with his breakfast panini purchased off the premises at the Italian café round the corner and his own mug, which proclaimed ‘Academics Do It In A Mortarboard’, so he could take advantage of free, freshly brewed coffee.
Mattie had never said anything about the actual blooming liberty of Tom expecting free coffee when he never once purchased anything from the tearooms, and after nearly eighteen months, it was too late to bring it up. That didn’t stop her seething every time he did it, though.
And considering that they were now roomies, it wouldn’t have killed Tom to say, ‘Good morning,’ rather than a sour, ‘You might try and be a bit quieter first thing and not slam the door on your way out.’
