Читать книгу A Winter Kiss on Rochester Mews - Annie Darling - Страница 8

The very next evening, the last they all had free until after Christmas, Verity moved out, Posy moved her books out and Tom and Mattie moved in.

The logistics were not ideal. In fact, the logistics were a nightmare. Mattie had come home from work yesterday and worked long into the night packing up all her worldly possessions while mainlining black coffee.

Then she’d squeezed a day’s baking into a morning so that after the lunchtime rush, she could hightail it back to Hackney to finish her packing.

Meanwhile, to mark the auspicious occasion, Happy Ever After and the tearooms closed their doors at 3 p.m. so that the Afternoon of Moving Many Things could get underway. ‘It won’t take long to shift a few boxes of books,’ Posy had said blithely but Posy had lied.

Despite quite a few fraught text messages about timings, when Mattie turned up at four in her mother’s car, Posy’s books were still being carried out at the same time that Verity and Johnny were trying to get her blue velvet armchair down the narrow stairs without breaking it.

There wasn’t much room to park in the mews, what with two vans being there already. Mattie was just about to reverse out when there was a furious hooting behind her and she was hemmed in by yet another van. She could just make out Tom’s face in her rear-view mirror as he gestured frantically at her.

She was tempted to gesture back with her middle finger. ‘Ugh, he has zero chill.’

Her brother Guy, who’d come to help, immediately swivelled around then squawked when Mattie dug him in the ribs. ‘I know someone else who has zero chill,’ he complained. ‘I just wanted to see if he was cute.’

‘Well, I saved you the bother,’ Mattie said, inching the nippy little Nissan forward so she could park in the far corner of the mews, next to the derelict row of abandoned shops, which Sebastian kept talking about redeveloping. ‘You’ve already met Tom so you should know that he’s not cute. He’s the anti-cute and I have plenty of chill, thank you very much.’

Guy exchanged a look with Mattie’s friend, Pippa, who’d also come along to help. ‘If you say so.’

‘Come on,’ Pippa admonished. ‘I’ve told you this three times already, but it takes teamwork to make the dream work.’

Mattie tried not to roll her eyes. Pippa worked for Sebastian (it was how Mattie had come to hear of the then-vacant tearooms, and how Pippa had wangled a couple of hours off) as a special projects manager, which meant she had great organisational skills and was a big fan of a stirring pep talk stuffed full of inspirational quotes.

‘I do say so,’ Mattie said because she was chilled and also because she would rather die than let Guy have the last word. Besides, she could bicker with Guy, her older brother by all of two minutes, without so much as breaking a sweat. In fact she could do all sorts of things with minimum fuss. She could multi-task the lunchtime rush, a special last-minute order for a birthday cake and wrangling Jezebel because Cuthbert had slipped out for five minutes, without getting pink in the face or swearing or mucking up a customer’s order for a macchiato with almond milk and no foam. There were only two men who brought out the unchill in her and Tom was one of them, which didn’t make him special, it just made him really, really annoying.

The three of them got out of the car at the same time that Tom descended from his van, which was now blocking the entrance to the mews, because he might have a PhD but he had no common sense.

In honour of the Afternoon of Moving Many Things and the need for manual labour, Tom had ditched his bow-tie and cardigan and was wearing a moth-eaten jumper over his shirt in a very unattractive fawn colour. And he hadn’t come alone … he’d brought some people with him. Unlike their tweedy BFF, Tom’s friends (were they really his friends, though?) favoured tight jeans and tight, plunging T-shirts revealing lots of muscled he-vage. They all seemed to have tribal armband tattoos and a lot of product in their hair. More product than any hair really needed. Mattie didn’t want to stare but Guy was already striding over.

‘Tom!’ Guy and Tom had met several times before at various Happy Ever After events, including the opening of the tearooms. Now they shook hands and Guy grinned because he was having no truck with the blood of thine enemy etc. and also he could never resist trying to get one up on Mattie. ‘Shall we help Very and Posy move stuff out so we can move in sometime before midnight?’

‘I was just going to suggest the same thing,’ Tom said, which Mattie sorely doubted. ‘After all, the light’s already fading. It’ll be dark soon.’

‘I’ll make coffee,’ Mattie decided, because what with Guy and Pippa, who was already consulting the spreadsheet she’d put together to achieve a favourable and time-effective outcome to moving all of Mattie’s goods and chattels, and Tom and his three … helpers, nobody needed her to heft heavy boxes. Also, Mattie couldn’t risk injuring her whisking hand.

‘I’d rather have a tea,’ Posy called out from one of the benches in the middle of the mews where she was best situated to supervise things. She was wearing a huge puffa coat and had a travel blanket tucked around her, though for a late-November afternoon, it was actually quite temperate.

‘Why do you need tea? Are you cold? You should have said!’ Sebastian Thorndyke was at his wife’s side in an instant. ‘I did say there was no need for you to come, Morland.’

‘And I said that I wasn’t going to give you an opportunity to cart my treasured collection of Chalet School books to the nearest charity shop,’ Posy replied. ‘And I don’t want tea because I’m cold, I want tea because I’m thirsty.’

Sebastian dropped to his knees in front of his wife, uncaring that he was wearing a suit that probably cost more than Mattie earned in a month before tax. ‘Are you dehydrated? Are your kidneys hurting? Is the baby pressing on your kidneys?’

Posy patted his hand fondly. ‘I can be thirsty just because it’s about an hour since my last cup of tea.’

‘I’ll go and put the kettle on,’ Mattie said and though she found Sebastian quite overbearing, he did dote on Posy and seemed to make her ridiculously happy. He also wasn’t even dressed remotely appropriately for the occasion. ‘I wouldn’t have thought a suit would be practical if you’re lugging boxes of books about.’

Sebastian’s haughty face looked even haughtier. ‘I don’t lug,’ he said, as if Mattie had accused him of a little light breaking and entering. ‘I pay people to lug. In this case, Sam and his young friend, the unfortunately named Pants.’

Right on cue, Sam and Pants emerged from the shop laden down with a big box each.

‘They have a free lesson last thing on Wednesdays, so it’s all worked out rather well. You’re doing a great job, boys,’ Posy called out encouragingly and Mattie hurried over to the tearooms to provide refreshment for the labouring masses.

By the time the last box of books was carried out, she’d made a second round of tea and a quick batch of chocolate chip and hazelnut cookies, which she brought out as Verity left the flat for one final time with her most prized possession. In a special carrier, mewling unhappily, was Strumpet, her immense British blue short-hair cat. He might be going to live in five-bedroom splendour in Canonbury with a massive back garden, but that couldn’t even begin to compete with living round the corner from a fish and chip shop and a Swedish deli with its own smokehouse for curing salmon.

‘You’re an ingrate, Strumpo,’ Verity said, as she struggled under the weight and heft of her enormous feline. Her boyfriend Johnny hurried over to relieve her of her precious burden.

‘I’m sure he’ll settle in once we get back to mine.’ He paused. ‘Not mine. Ours. When we get back to our house.’

Generally, it could be quite hard to read Verity unless she was going through the petty cash receipts, in which case it was clear that she was very stressed indeed and it was best to leave her well alone. But now she smiled up at Johnny, with his ridiculously chiselled good looks like he spent his spare time modelling for Burberry.

‘Not our house,’ she corrected him. ‘Our home.’

It was all very lovely and heart-warming, Mattie thought, but her heart refused to be warmed. It stayed just where it was, beating out a steady rhythm, which in itself was miraculous, considering all the traumas she had endured.

‘I hate to spoil the moment,’ Pippa said bluntly, because there was only so long that Verity and Johnny could stand there making googly eyes at each other while everyone else was on a clock. ‘But according to my spreadsheet, you two should have been out of here twenty-seven minutes ago.’

Of course, by this point Tom and his friends had all disappeared, leaving their van blocking the entrance to the mews, so Verity and Johnny and Posy and Sebastian couldn’t get out. After several texts from Posy, he eventually reappeared with his little posse, all of them clutching breakfast paninis from the Italian café round the corner, even though it was now gone five on a Wednesday. Mattie clenched her fists.

‘These are amazing,’ one of them said and then they all doffed imaginary caps.

‘Top marks to the professor!’

Mattie had no one to roll her eyes at because Pippa was glued to her spreadsheet and Guy had abandoned her for the delights of Rochester Street. Despite numerous texts, he eventually turned up twenty minutes later, once Mattie had carefully manoeuvred the car as close to the entrance of Happy Ever After as she could get, and after telling Tom in no uncertain terms to stop trying to box her in with his rent-a-van.

It very quickly became apparent that you couldn’t have six people going up and down the narrow stairs, ferrying boxes and bin liners and laundry bags and suitcases, without bottlenecks and chaos. Pippa decided that Mattie should stay in the flat and have her stuff brought to her, and Mattie agreed profusely.

‘That sounds like an excuse to get out of all the fetching and carrying,’ Guy grumbled.

‘If you stop whinging, I’ll make you both dinner when you’ve finished fetching and carrying,’ Mattie said tartly, which sped him on his way.

That still left all three of Tom’s helpers getting in the way, giving her curious looks as if they’d never seen a real live woman before. Maybe they hadn’t. Who was to know what Tom and his friends got up to?

‘Are they your people?’ Mattie asked Guy when he brought up the holdall with all her bathroom paraphernalia in it.

Guy raised one impeccable eyebrow in horror. ‘With those T-shirts? God, no, they are nothing to do with us. Your gaydar is worse than useless.’

By now, one of Tom’s friends was lingering in the kitchen where Mattie was unpacking a box of cooking utensils: it seemed that Verity had taken pretty much every last teaspoon with her.

Said friend was small and wiry and quite incapable of standing still, bouncing on the soles of his boxy trainers.

‘I’m Phil or the Archbishop of Banterbury,’ he said at last, holding out his hand.

Mattie shook the hand. ‘I think I’ll stick with Phil,’ she said. ‘I’m Matilda. Mattie.’

‘A beautiful name for a beautiful lady,’ Phil said and they heard a pointed cough from the hall.

‘Don’t even bother,’ said Tom as he passed the doorway with a couple of tweedy suits over his arm. ‘She’s not interested and she’s way out of your league.’

Mattie blinked. Was that Tom paying her an actual compliment? Surely not! Phil nodded in agreement. ‘True that,’ he said gallantly.

Over the course of the next fifteen minutes, Tom’s other two friends introduced themselves. By their given names: Daquon and Mikey; and their respective preferred names: The Bantmeister and Bantdaddy.

‘And what do you call Tom?’ Mattie asked Daquon as he wiped down the little bookcase in the kitchen so she could arrange her cookbooks on it. All three of them had cracked on to her, but she was quite capable of batting them away and they were also very helpful. ‘Bants-R-Us?’

‘Haha! Tom has no banter. He’s like a banter-free zone. The banter stops when it gets within fifty metres of him.’ Daquon slapped his thighs at the very notion of Tom having good banter. ‘These days we call him The Professor, on account of all the book-learning.’

‘Right …’ Mattie filed this piece of information away for later use. ‘And where do you know Tom from?’

‘Funny you should ask that, because The Professor you see before you today is very different from …’

‘Shut up! Seriously, stop making sounds come out of your mouth.’ Tom was in the kitchen doorway again. He’d even taken his glasses off, all the better to polish them furiously and glare, although Mattie wasn’t sure if the glare was for her or The Bantmeister. Most likely, it was meant for both of them. ‘We talked about this.’

‘You talked about it,’ Daquon muttered.

‘Didn’t stop talking about it all the way here,’ said Mikey, coming up behind Tom. ‘But what we didn’t talk about is why you have the big room and the lovely lady here is stuck in a tiny cupboard like Harry Potter when he was living at the Dursleys’.’

‘Mattie and I have already discussed that,’ Tom said, and if he kept polishing his glasses with such vigour, there was every possibility that they might shatter.

‘We didn’t really discuss it.’ Mattie sighed. ‘He made me toss a coin and then he was very smug about the outcome.’

‘Rude!’ decided Mikey, with a shake of his head. ‘You should let the girl have the biggest room on account of the fact that she’ll have loads of girly stuff to put in it.’

‘Handbags and shoes and pretty dresses,’ said Phil dreamily because now he was at the kitchen doorway too. ‘Probably Matilda really needs an extra room just for her shoes.’

‘She doesn’t have that many shoes,’ piped up Guy, who was passing. ‘Just several pairs of very ratty Converse.’

Fortunately, everyone ignored his contribution. ‘Mattie should have the bigger room. It’s just, like, basic good manners,’ Phil said, bouncing on his feet again and working his jaw furiously. ‘It’s not like you even need a double bed.’

‘Yeah! Like, who’s going to want to pull your ugly mug?’

There were hoots of laughter and Tom’s face was clenched so tight that it looked as if he had lockjaw. Mattie even felt a little bit sorry for him.

‘It’s all right,’ she said and she sighed again. She knew that she looked quite forlorn in the dungarees and jumper that she’d worn for moving day, because her perennially chic mother had complained about her appearance before she left Hackney. ‘Ma cherie, you look like Little Orphan Annie.’

‘Fine! She can have the larger room,’ Tom snapped. ‘Though I do need a double bed and I don’t see how my one is going to fit in the smaller room.’

‘Oh, it should do,’ Mattie assured him sweetly. ‘Mine does. Pity that there’s not much room for anything else in there besides the bed, but you can’t have that much stuff, can you? Being a man and everything.’

Tom did have lots of stuff. Or rather, he had boxes and boxes of books – he couldn’t possibly have read them all, Mattie decided, as the contents of the two rooms were transferred, with Tom glowering silently in the background. Why would anyone surround themselves with books all day, then come home to yet more books?

Still, there was plenty of room on the shelves in the living room for Tom’s library and she even offered to help him unpack, but he shooed her away with a tight ‘I can manage perfectly well by myself, thank you.’

Tom was the only person that Mattie had ever met who could make ‘Thank you’ sound like ‘Get out and never darken my doorstep again.’

So she got out and finished hanging up her quite sparse collection of clothes in the wardrobe in her new room. Unlike the other ladies that the Banter Boys knew, Mattie travelled light. All her clothes and shoes had fitted comfortably in one suitcase. And she didn’t even possess a single solitary handbag – just a leather-strapped backpack that had seen much better days – because all her money went on kitchen equipment and fancy ingredients and the odd cookbook. Whereas Tom had so many tweedy suits and jumpers and probably a trunkful of bow-ties and ties in contrasting colours. Mattie realised that she was actually feeling quite guilty again …

Maybe they could put the bigger room on a six-month-rota basis, she decided as Phil, Daquon and Mikey took their leave, each of them lining up to kiss her hand, look deep into her eyes and express the desire to see her again very soon.

‘It’s weird, but normally that kind of chat from men makes me want to rip them a new one,’ she remarked to Guy and Pippa as she set about making them dinner. ‘But those boys are so obviously harmless that I didn’t really mind.’

‘Do you still hate all men?’ asked Guy. It had been a little while since they’d last had a catch-up.

‘Mattie is taking time out from relationships to work on herself,’ Pippa said loyally. She knew exactly why Mattie had good reason to hate all men. Or one man in particular. ‘Not that Mattie needs to do a lot of work on herself, but I think we can all benefit from an opportunity for personal growth.’

‘Thanks, Pips. And I don’t hate all men, Guy.’ Mattie considered her brother’s question as she grated extra-mature cheddar for the twice-baked cheese soufflés she was going to serve with a warm salad. ‘I don’t hate you and anyway, I haven’t met all the men in the world yet, have I? There must be four or five that aren’t hateful.’

‘Do you hate Tom?’ Guy asked in a whisper. ‘You’re certainly not very nice to him.’

‘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 need you for?’