Page 23 of A Winter Kiss on Rochester Mews
‘And the tearooms,’ she said, entering Mattie’s domain with a boxful of Christmas decorations and a determined expression. ‘Seeing as I’m not allowed to go full festive throttle in the shop, I thought I could really go to Tinsel Town in here.’
‘Oh, did you?’ Mattie tried to keep the challenge out of her voice. The key to dealing with Nina was to be vague. Not commit to any one thing, then deny it all at a later date. It only worked approximately thirty per cent of the time.
‘Yes, yes I did,’ Nina said, her eyes shining with a missionary-like zeal. ‘Now what I was thinking – don’t make that face, Mattie, like you just caught your finger in the door, hear me out – was that the tearooms could be, wait for it …’
‘If my dodgy ticker doesn’t kill me first, then the suspense definitely will,’ Cuthbert whispered for Mattie’s benefit, and she had to school her features into something impassive so she wouldn’t laugh.
‘… a reindeer refuelling station. Like, refuelling because you serve food and drinks, yeah?’
‘Interesting,’ Mattie said calmly, while her heart beat out a frantic rhythm. ‘Very interesting.’
‘I thought you could rewrite your whole menu with a reindeer theme. I mean, you’ve got Donner, Blitzen, Prancer, Dancer … there are more.’ Nina snapped her fingers. ‘Oh, it’s on the tip of my tongue.’ She waggled her tongue piercing, which always made Mattie feel a little sick.
‘Rudolph?’ Cuthbert offered as he sprinkled chocolate powder onto a freshly made cappuccino, using the Christmas-tree stencil that he’d bought of his own volition. Not even discussing it with Mattie first. He’d also brought in an ancient ghetto blaster and had been treating Mattie and the tearoom customers to a heavy rotation of Christmas hits on tape. Mattie hadn’t had the heart to tell him that she was going to scream if she heard Boney M sing ‘Mary’s Boy Child’ one more bleeding time.
‘Well, you’ve certainly given us something to ponder,’ Mattie said, smiling at a customer who’d come up to pay.
‘I think there’s another reindeer besides Rudolph,’ Nina said, looking around the tearooms, then looking down at her iPad. ‘Of course, you’ll have to take out a couple of tables.’
Mattie and Cuthbert shared an agonised look – it turned out that even Cuthbert’s love of Christmas had its limits. ‘I’m not sure that’s a great idea,’ Cuthbert ventured.
‘Well, how else are we going to have room for three life-sized reindeer?’ Nina replied, although Mattie had been hoping that Nina had forgotten all about her plans for life-sized reindeer. ‘Stop looking at me like that, Mattie. I said life-sized, I didn’t say full-sized. One of them will be a little baby reindeer, then a mummy and daddy reindeer. It will be adorable! But the guy at the Christmas fittings place said we have to pick them up by six today, so we need to decide where they’re going to go. Could we get rid of the two window tables?’
The time for being vague was gone. ‘No, we absolutely can’t,’ Mattie said as firmly as she’d ever said anything. ‘Even taking out one table would lose me five hundred pounds a week. Unless you’re planning to reimburse me?’
‘Five hundred quid? But I bet people come in and nurse a coffee for an hour, so I don’t see how you get five hundred quid a week,’ Nina argued, then she looked around the tearooms again. It was four on a Thursday afternoon and every seat at every table was taken. No one was eking out a cup of tea for as long as they could. Mattie would have been offended if they had – it would have meant they’d come up to the counter to order and been able to resist the tempting display of cakes, pastries and savouries. The people on the table in the corner alone had started with savouries and were now onto their second cake apiece, and they’d only been seated for half an hour.
‘Also, three life-sized reindeer? An absolute Health and Safety hazard,’ Mattie said in the same firm voice.
‘Two reindeer?’
‘No reindeer,’ Mattie countered.
Nina tipped her head back and groaned. ‘You’re meant to agree to one reindeer.’
‘All right then, one reindeer,’ Mattie said magnanimously and Nina brightened.
‘Really?’
Mattie nodded. ‘A very tiny reindeer, no bigger than this.’ She indicated five centimetres with a finger and thumb. ‘It can sit on top of the display case on the counter. Isn’t that great? Everyone’s happy! Are you happy, Cuthbert?’
‘Deliriously!’ Cuthbert shouted over the hiss of Jezebel as he deftly dealt with half a dozen coffee orders with all the skill of a maestro conducting an orchestra. ‘Though I have to say that a baby-sized reindeer would have been cute,’ he mused and Mattie made a mental note to remind Cuthbert that they were a united front. ‘Though some small child would be sure to climb up on it, fall off, split their head open, go into a coma and then die,’ he added with some relish. ‘And then we’d get sued.’
‘Exactly,’ Mattie said but Nina was having none of it.
‘I’m getting Posy,’ she said and five minutes later, she returned with a very long-suffering Posy, who immediately sat down on a just-vacated chair.
‘Everything hurts,’ she said by way of a greeting. If the Department of Health wanted to do something to combat the rise in teen pregnancy, they could just get Posy Morland-Thorndyke to tour the nation’s schools and list all her pregnancy-related ailments. ‘Nina’s explained everything to me and I’ve said that there is no way that you’re having three life-sized reindeer in here. Not even one!’
That was unexpected but very welcome news. ‘Hallelujah!’ Mattie put her hands in the prayer position. ‘Look, I know our Christmas decorations are a bit scant …’
‘They’re practically non-existent,’ Nina pointed out, because the tearooms’ Christmas decorations currently consisted of a forlorn piece of tinsel Blu-Tacked to the front of the counter by Cuthbert when Mattie had been in the kitchen and the Santa hat that Cuthbert insisted on wearing.
‘I’m happy to have some tasteful decorations in the pink and silver you’ve used in the shop, but they have to be flameproof and I’m not having anythingonthe counter where we serve food,’ Mattie said. ‘But tasteful is the key word here.’
‘I’m the very definition of tasteful,’ Nina declared, when only that morning, she’d admitted that she didn’t know where tacky ended and tasteful began. ‘But yes, I will do some very basic, very boring Christmas decorations in here even though you people are always stifling my creativity.’
‘More importantly, my new Christmas items are going down a storm so we can shoot them and stick them on the shop Instagram. Look! I’ve even drawn a couple of sprigs of holly on the blackboard,’ Mattie continued, gesturing at the menu blackboard on the wall behind the counter. She wasn’t negative abouteverything. She didn’t mind a brief journey on the Christmas train, especially if it increased her profit margins too.
