Page 5 of A Winter Kiss on Rochester Mews
‘Good points, Mattie, but I’m still neutral,’ Posy said with a disapproving look. ‘Do you want to see the kitchen before we get to the room? And take your hand away from the door, Tom. I’m not having you go in there and try to bags it and claim that bagsying it is legally binding, like you did that time when The Midnight Bell only had one bowl of cheesy chips left.’
‘That was one time!’ But he stepped away from the door of Verity’s room and continued down the hall towards the kitchen, pausing in front of a strange bell-and-lever contraption fixed to the wall so he could give it a fond pat. ‘God bless you, Lady Agatha.’
The first owner of the bookshop had been one Lady Agatha Drysdale, who’d been gifted the business by her parents to distract her from her suffragette activities, with only limited success: Lady Ag was as passionate about women’s suffrage as she was about books.
‘It’s a butler’s bell that Lady Agatha installed so she could summon her employees up from the shop,’ Posy explained, giving it a fond pat herself. ‘Apparently, the wiring disintegrated some time in the seventies, which was a real shame. It would have been great to be able to do some summoning when Sam and I lived here.’
Posy and her younger brother Sam had lived above the shop almost all their lives. Lavinia, Lady Agatha’s daughter who’d by then inherited the shop and sounded as though she had been the most splendid woman, had employed Posy’s father to manage the bookshop and her mother to run the tearooms, but they’d died in a car accident some ten years before. Lavinia had continued to let Posy and Sam live above the shop, and when she died, she’d left both shop and flat to Posy. It also seemed as if she’d left Sebastian, her wildly dashing yet incredibly obnoxious grandson, to Posy too, for they were now married and expecting, and living in Lavinia’s house on the other side of Bloomsbury.
‘Though of course, you could have just summoned by text message,’ Mattie said, then she wished that she hadn’t because it sounded as if she was pouring cold water on Lady Agatha, when she wasn’t, she was just being practical. She also didn’t feel as if it were her place to give the butler’s bell a fond pat, so instead she dipped her head as she passed on her way to the kitchen.
‘It’s awfully small,’ Tom said, as they took in the old-fashioned kitchen cabinets painted a sunny primrose yellow with blue trim and grey Formica worktop. The kitchen wasn’t as small as the kitchen in the tearooms – there was even room for a small table, two chairs and a fridge-freezer – and Mattie wasn’t going to let Tom undermine her.
‘It’s a beautiful kitchen and anyway, size has absolutely nothing to do with it. I once made a triple-layer cake on a camping stove.’ So there, she wanted to add and stick her tongue out at Tom, but she resisted, though it took every ounce of strength that she had.
‘So, the room,’ Posy prompted, hands settling where her stomach used to be so she could rub soothing circles on her bump, which she did whenever she was agitated. ‘It used to be my room. It’s a nice size and the windows look out onto the mews.’
She squeezed past Mattie and Tom back the way she came, so she could open the door on a room.Theroom. The most perfect room. It was comfy and cosy but large enough for a double bed, a wardrobe, a chest of drawers and, of course, several bookcases. There were two picture windows and on this bright but chilly day, the weak winter sun streamed in.
‘It’s lovely,’ Mattie said in all sincerity.
‘I’ll take it,’ Tom said in a peremptory fashion, as if he dared Mattie to disagree, in which case he was doomed to disappointment. ‘I have worked in the shop longer than even Verity and Nina, yet they were still given first dibs on the rooms, which was very unfair, even though I never brought it up at the time.’ He tapped his chest. ‘That wounded me, Posy.’
‘Oh dear.’ Posy pulled a face. ‘It’s just that Verity is the manager and I just assumed that it would be less awkward to have Verity and Nina take the flat, on account of them being, like, ladies. Two ladies.’
‘When you assume, you make an ass out of you and me,’ Tom said gravely.
Mattie saw her chance and seized it with both hands. ‘Don’t call Posy an ass,’ she gasped in shocked tones. ‘And her pregnant, too! You know, it would be awkward, wouldn’t it, for Tom to share with Nina, Nina being a lady, but I’m a lady too, so that would be absolutely not awkward.’
‘Nina is my dear, dear friend,’ Tom said, his eyes flashing behind his glasses though his dear, dear friend Nina had once confided to Mattie that she suspected that Tom didn’t evenneedglasses and just wore them to make himself look even more like a tweedy nerd than he already did. ‘Also, it’s the twenty-first century, and if you won’t let me share a flat with a woman, then, I don’t want to, but I would have a very good case to take to a sexual discrimination trial.’
‘Yeah, nice try,’ Mattie blustered, because she could feel the flat slipping through her fingers.
Tom nodded. ‘Maybe even the European Court of Human Rights. It’s your decision, Posy.’
‘It’s not my decision,’ Posy said, backing out of the room. ‘I’m not making any decisions that are likely to cause my blood pressure to rise. I’m stressed out enough about all this Christmas stuff. You’ll have to decide between yourselves, like the sensible, grown-up, adult people that I know you both can be.’
Mattie hated to beg, but just because she hated something wasn’t a good enough reason not to.
‘No Posy, please, please, let me have the room. I have to be here by seven thirty, eight at the very latest. I get up at six every morning. Six o’clock! Then I have evening prep, which means I’m not home much before nine, so I have no social life and I’m living with my mother, and please, Tom. Come on, don’t be a dick about this.’
‘I’m not being a dick,’ Tom said, though he was totally being a dick as far as Mattie was concerned. ‘And my current living conditions are also far from ideal,’ he added stiffly, then pressed his lips together as Mattie and Posy waited expectantly.
‘Far from ideal, you say?’ Posy prodded, stepping back into the room, her eyes gleaming at the prospect of finally learning something, anything, about Tom’s private life.
‘Yes,’ Tom said evenly. ‘That’s what I said. You don’t need to know my personal business.’
‘Oh,’ Mattie said, making her eyes especially wide. ‘Oh. How odd!’
‘What’s odd?’ Posy asked, lowering herself onto Verity’s rather lovely blue velvet reading chair with some difficulty.
‘Well, it’s just that Tom doesn’t want everyone knowing his personal business and yet he wants to move into the flat above the shop.’ Mattie tried her best to look sorrowful, as if she’d just been told that her favourite French cooking chocolate was no longer available in the UK. ‘I’m sorry, Tom, but I don’t see how you’re going to maintain that work-life balance that’s so important to you if you take the room.’
‘I will, because unlike the rest of you, I’m perfectly capable of compartmentalising and also fixing a padlock to my bedroom door,’ Tom said in stern tones.
Posy snorted. ‘Yeah, right. I’ve asked you to perform several minor acts of household repair in the past, and you couldn’t do any of them.’
‘Couldn’t or wouldn’t,’ Tom said, and Posy looked furious, but then she remembered that she was being neutral and sank back in the chair.
