Page 74 of A Winter Kiss on Rochester Mews
‘Why ever not?’ Tom popped his head around the Regency arch – Posy’s voice was so loud, they could probably hear her all the way down Rochester Street. ‘She’d better have a good reason. Tomorrow is the last Friday before Christmas!’
‘Snow!’ Posy all but shrieked. ‘There’s heavy snow in Lincolnshire and Verity says that the roads are completely impassable. Nobody can get in or out of the village.’
‘Snow up north is different to snow down south,’ Tom said knowledgeably as he took a customer’s credit card and scanned it on his iPad. ‘It’s much more deep and crisp and even.’
‘I’m on the BBC website right now,’ Posy reported. ‘A yellow warning isn’t anything good, is it? No, it isn’t. It’s very, very bad.’
‘Well, no wonder Very’s snowed in, but we can manage without her,’ Nina said with great confidence but a slightly crazed look in her eyes.
‘But the BBC says that heavy snowfall is also going to blanket the south-east overnight,’ Posy moaned. ‘We’re in the south-east! Why would it snow this close to Christmas? What is it going to do to my profit margins? Especially when I have a baby on the way.’
‘We’re not really the south-east,’ Mattie said as Tom snorted in disbelief. ‘I mean, we are, but we’re London. Central London. They’ll be gritting all the roads and the tube is mostly underground, so that’s going to be running. It’s nothing to worry about.’
‘Are you sure?’ Posy asked her as if Mattie was suddenly the fount of all meteorological knowledge.
‘Pretty sure,’ Mattie decided, even as she felt a spike of panic shoot into her. ‘Though to be on the safe side, I’m going to phone my suppliers and see if they can do a delivery this evening with whatever they’ve got left over.’
‘That’s not the vote of confidence I was looking for,’ Posy grumbled, but Mattie was already speedwalking back to the tearooms and trying to calculate exactly how much butter, eggs and milk she might need if blizzard conditions were on the way.
When Mattie went to bed that night not one single snowflake had fallen, even though she’d watched the weather forecast after the ten o’clock news and they were chucking around phrases like ‘The Big Freeze’ and ‘Eight inches of snow predicted overnight.’
‘I bet it will be a tiny amount of snow and it won’t even settle,’ she’d said to herself as she cleaned her teeth. ‘But it will be just enough snow for all the trains to stop running because it’s the wrong kind of snow.’
But when Mattie woke up that morning, something felt different. She lay there in the dark for a moment trying to think what it was, and then she realised – it was the silence.
She’d grown used to the hum of the city. The distant throb of traffic, the unloading of the early morning deliveries, the particular rattling sound of the dustcart, which always did its rounds as Mattie was waking up.
But this morning, someone had muted the outside world. Already shivering in anticipation, Mattie threw off her duvet and top quilt, swung her legs over the side and groped for her slippers. Wrapping herself in the quilt, she tiptoed to the window, sent up a silent prayer and then pulled back the curtain. For one awful second, she thought she might have gone suddenly blind because she couldn’t see a thing.
Then she used a corner of the quilt to wipe the condensation off the window and she still couldn’t see a thing because all there was to see was white.
Ithadsnowed in the night. And it was still snowing now. These were the blizzard conditions they’d been promised. A complete whiteout. Mattie doubted that there was enough grit in the Greater London area to get the city to work today, never mind getting on with their Christmas shopping.
But still she showered (thanking every available deity that the pipes hadn’t frozen … yet) and dressed and hurried downstairs.
They never left the lights on in the tearooms overnight so the place was in darkness as Mattie came in through the shop. No wonder, when the snow was swirling so heavily about the windows.
She snapped on the lights and went about her morning routine; heating up the oven, switching on Jezebel so she could drink coffee and plan the timings for her bakes. But was there any point baking if no one could get into Central London, never mind the tiny mews, to eat them?
Mattie put the radio on but the news was hardly encouraging. There were no trains running in and out of London. Buses had been abandoned at the foot of steep hills, huge tracts of the underground weren’t working, schools were closed and people were being told not to make any journeys unless they were absolutely necessary.
She definitely wasn’t going to make double her usual quantities of breakfast pastries, as she had been doing. Her phone rang, Sandrine’s picture flashing up on the screen.
‘C’est abominable!I was going to go into town today to finish my Christmas shopping but I can’t even get out of Hackney,’ Sandrine said by way of a greeting. ‘What a country! One bit of snow and everything stops working.’
‘To be fair, it is quite a lot of snow,’ Mattie said, tucking the phone under her ear, as she began to take last night’s laminated dough out of the fridge. Once Sandrine started railing against her adopted country, where she’d happily lived for thirty-five years, she was likely to be some time.
As it was, Mattie had shaped her first batch of croissants and had them in the oven before Sandrine rang off, and Mattie had another call waiting. It was Meena, full of apologies but snowed in on Muswell Hill.
‘None of the buses are running because you can’t get in or out of Muzzy without having to go up or down one of two really steep hills. We’re so high up here, we have our own micro-climate,’ she said before promising to check in a couple of hours later if the bus situation improved.
Two ladies down, Mattie thought, as she started on her pains aux raisins, though she wondered why she was bothering. Were they going to have any customers or, indeed, staff today?
‘It’s been snowing,’ said a voice from the kitchen doorway and Mattie almost dropped her laden baking tray in fright.
‘God, you nearly gave me a heart attack!’ she told Tom. ‘It’s only just eight, what are you doing up so early?’
‘It’s been snowing,’ Tom repeated.
