Page 63 of A Winter Kiss on Rochester Mews
‘Appalling,’ Tom said good-naturedly, taking the plate. ‘I don’t know why I honour this establishment with my custom. I hope Cuthbert’s got my coffee ready.’
And he was gone with a cheery wave, which caused Posy to stare at him in some consternation before extricating her bleeping phone from the back pocket of her maternity jeans with some difficulty. ‘Mattie and Tom? Who’d have thought it?’ she muttered.
‘Mid-morning bun break is a bit early today, isn’t it? Let’s go and have a look for something to turn that frown upside down,’ Mattie said, hoping to distract Posy away from any more disturbing thoughts about her and Tom. But Posy’s attention was on her iPhone where the Met Office and the BBC and the weather app had all sent simultaneous weather alerts predicting heavy snow for later in the week – what would this do to their footfall?
‘We have to take a lot of money over Christmas to make up for the times in the year when we take much less,’ she fretted, as she followed Mattie out of the kitchen and into the tearooms. ‘Also, I’ve eaten every cake that you do several times over and now I’m craving something else and I don’t even know what it is.’ Mattie was sympathetic but Posy had pushed to the front of the sizeable queue without even an ‘Excuse me.’
‘When my Cynthia was pregnant with our Shane, the poor woman had such a taste for cheese on toast that she had it for breakfast, lunch and dinner,’ Cuthbert helpfully reported.
Posy pondered. ‘No, I don’t want cheese on toast. I want something else and I want it not to snow and I want to feel like I’m not gestating a pair of elephant babies. I just want to feel like me again, you know?’
Mattie had never been pregnant but she knew quite a lot about not feeling like herself. In the two years she was with Steven, she tried hard to mould herself into the kind of woman he wanted because he seemed to have so many objections to the woman she actually was. And in the two years since she’d left Steven, she’d moulded herself into the woman she thought she should be: one who didn’t need love because she wasn’t worthy of love.
Now, Mattie was starting to wonder if maybe, just maybe she was as deserving of love as the old Mattie had been. The one who’d loved Paris and Christmas and cupcakes …
‘I do know what you mean,’ she told Posy slowly. ‘Not the bit about gestating elephants, but it can be very easy to lose sight of yourself. To only see yourself as other people see you.’
‘Wow! That’s very deep,’ Posy said as Cuthbert gently harrumphed.
‘Young ladies, this is all very philosophical but you’re coming between these good people and their hot beverages,’ he said, and Mattie and Posy both looked round to see that the queue hadn’t got any shorter. On the contrary, it had grown much longer and was full of people staring daggers at them.
Later, in a tiny lull when nothing needed to go into or come out of an oven and Meena and Geoffrey were doing sterling work in the upstairs kitchen, Mattie thought once more of the old Mattie and the new Posy, who seemed utterly miserable at the moment. Not to mention stressed. Posy shouldn’t be so stressed when she was so very pregnant and there had to be something that Mattie could do to make her less stressed. To put a smile on her face.
Mattie stared around the tiny kitchen. At the purple and green tiles that never failed to lift her spirits and make her think of Lady Agatha, then sing a couple of lines of ‘Sister Suffragette’ fromMary Poppins. At her jars and bottles and tins full of ingredients and her pots and pans; all ready for her to make magic, or at least some delicious and highly calorific treats, with her own hands.
And actually, making Posy happy was easy. She hadn’t made them in two years, but Mattie didn’t need to look at a recipe; she simply began pulling down jars to get the ingredients she needed. There had been a time when she made them once, twice, three times a week and, as soon as she started measuring out her dry ingredients, a sort of culinary muscle memory kicked in.
Ninety minutes later, including a wait for them to cool down before she could decorate them and an absolutely frantic half hour in the tearooms, Mattie tracked Posy down to the back office where she presented her with a laden cake stand.
‘Twelve gingerbread cupcakes with cinnamon frosting,’ Mattie said, putting down her precious cargo with a little flourish. ‘For you, because I’m very fond of you and also very worried about you.’
Posy, who was very red of face as if she’d been crying, looked at the cupcakes then at Mattie, who was wearing a smile like a game-show hostess standing in front of the star prize, then back again.
And then, inevitably, she burst into tears.
‘Are they happy tears?’ Mattie asked aghast. ‘Please say they’re happy tears.’
‘I can’t even tell at this point,’ Posy sobbed. ‘But this is the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me.’
‘Not strictly true.’ Tom stuck his head around the door. ‘When you were living upstairs, I once had to rescue you from the attentions of the world’s smallest spider. She’d been standing on the kitchen table for half an hour apparently,’ he added to Mattie.
‘That spider washuge,’ Posy hiccupped, holding a tentative hand out towards the nearest cupcake as if she was afraid it was just an illusion. ‘How did you know that Ineeda cupcake?’
Mattie shrugged modestly. ‘It was just a hunch.’
‘I thought you said that cupcakes were a patriarchal plot to suppress female power,’ Tom recalled.
‘Posy’s need was greater than the patriarchy’s need to keep women down,’ Mattie said vaguely as she watched Posy take her first bite of the first cupcake that Mattie had made in two years.
‘Oh!’ Posy sighed around a mouthful of moist gingerbread and delicately flavoured cinnamon buttercream. Then Posy’s eyes closed as she experienced a moment of sheer bliss when woman and cupcake became one. ‘Oh!’
‘Good?’ Mattie asked a little anxiously.
‘Very good. Very, very good,’ Posy said, holding up her hand for silence so she could take another massive bite.
‘Could I get in on the cupcake action?’ Tom asked, leaning his whole torso around the office door. Posy snatched the plate out of reach.
‘Mine,’ she snapped. ‘Mattie made them for me and they taste so good that for fifteen seconds there I even managed to forget that I was pregnant so no, I’m not sharing.’
