Читать книгу A Winter Kiss on Rochester Mews - Annie Darling - Страница 9

Thankfully, when Mattie woke up at seven thirty the next morning, which pretty much constituted a long lie-in, Tom was nowhere to be seen.

Last night had been awkward enough; both of them confined to their rooms apart from the mortifying ten seconds when Mattie had tried to get into the bathroom, only to find it already occupied.

‘Go away!’ Tom had shouted rather than politely requesting that Mattie come back in a short while.

As it was, she’d left it for a good half an hour before she plucked up the courage to venture into the bathroom, terrified of what horrors might be lurking. But there were none. Just Tom’s electric toothbrush (which seemed very cutting edge for Tom) and a few of his toiletries: shampoo, hair pomade, some fancy gloop that called itself a skin elasticiser rather than moisturiser. It struck Mattie, as she massaged her own moisturiser into her face then cleaned her teeth, that she hadn’t given a moment’s thought to how intimate it was to share a flat with someone.

Mattie had shared flats before. At university, she’d lived in a four-bedroom house with seven other girls, which had been chaotic and messy, but mostly fun. And of course, when she’d lived in Paris, she’d shared a tiny attic garret with … well, that hadn’t ended up being fun, for reasons that had nothing to do with the actual living together.

But sharing a flat with Tom, wondering if he could hear her brushing her teeth, felt intensely intimate. Mattie made a solemn vow that she’d never leave her room unless she was fully dressed or had her dressing gown tightly belted over her pyjamas. Not that she thought that Tom would be overcome with lust at the sight of her – Tom wasn’t the lustful sort at all – but she could picture his lip curling and he’d mutter something sarcastic under his breath. And the idea that she might bump into Tom wearing nothing but some very old-fashioned underpants, like those baggy shorts that men wore in old black-and-white films, had her choking on her toothpaste.

This Thursday morning Tom was still tucked up in bed and if he was snoring, then Mattie couldn’t hear him through his bedroom door.

And for all the awkwardness and the intimacy that had been thrust upon them, that thirty-second commute down the stairs and through the shop was worth it. Mattie unlocked the front door of the tearooms just in time to surprise Kendra, who ran a dairy in East London.

‘What are you doing here?’ Kendra said, as she hefted in the crate of milk instead of leaving it outside, as she usually did. ‘You must have been up almost as early as me.’

‘Actually, I’ve only been up half an hour,’ Mattie said a little apologetically. ‘Moved in above the shop, haven’t I?’

‘All right for some! How’s that working out for you?’ Kendra asked a little enviously.

‘Not without its challenges, but also kind of life-changing,’ Mattie decided as she checked the cartons of eggs to make sure that none of them were broken.

Kendra left, the glass bottles on her milk float rattling as she carefully manoeuvred over the cobblestones, and then Mattie was alone. It was her favourite part of the day in her favourite place; early morning in her little kitchen at the back of the tearooms.

Mattie looked at her hideaway with a pleasure that was still undimmed after eighteen months of running the tearooms. The kitchen walls had beautiful Art Nouveau tiles, dating back to when the bookshop had first opened in 1912, in the suffragette colours of purple, green and white. They were partly obscured now by the shelves and hanging rails Mattie had installed so she could store her pots and pans, whisks and wooden spoons. Jars and tins of dry ingredients and little glass bottles of spices, essences and flavourings sat on the scant wooden worktop, where she whipped up cakes and cookies, tarts and turnovers, breads and bakes. The oven where all this magic happened was the only new piece of kit and had cost the same as a small hatchback.

Along the opposite wall was an old-fashioned butler’s sink and tiled drainer, a tall, very skinny fridge and a door that led out into the back yard where there was an ancient privy for the hardiest and bravest of paying customers, especially on a chill winter’s day like today.

You couldn’t create culinary delights in a kitchen so miniscule without being very organised and very tidy, which Mattie was. ‘A place for everything and everything in its place,’ she said at least a dozen times a day when a dirty cup and saucer were left unattended for longer than thirty seconds. Or when Cuthbert left the milk out instead of putting it back in the fridge under the counter, because he was busy serenading a customer with a rousing chorus of ‘They Drink an Awful Lot of Coffee in Brazil’.

As well as her usual bakes, which tended towards English classics with a French twist like her famous citron drizzle cake, Mattie also had both a sweet and a savoury daily special. Today, it was a cinder toffee and apple layer cake and individual stilton and leek tarts. With a quick glance at the right page in her handwritten recipe book to check quantities, Mattie started amassing the ingredients she needed.

By the time Cuthbert arrived at ten to nine, all the breakfast pastries were out of the oven and arranged on their cake stands and trays on the counter. And by the time Posy and Verity arrived to open up Happy Ever After just before ten, the tearooms had been open for almost an hour. Half the tables were filled with customers lingering over a cup of coffee and a flaky buttery croissant, with others dashing out with a coffee to go (fifty pence cheaper if they brought their own cup) and something delicious in a paper bag.

At ten past ten, even though Happy Ever After opened at ten, Tom arrived with his breakfast panini purchased off the premises at the Italian café round the corner and his own mug, which proclaimed ‘Academics Do It In A Mortarboard’, so he could take advantage of free, freshly brewed coffee.

Mattie had never said anything about the actual blooming liberty of Tom expecting free coffee when he never once purchased anything from the tearooms, and after nearly eighteen months, it was too late to bring it up. That didn’t stop her seething every time he did it, though.

And considering that they were now roomies, it wouldn’t have killed Tom to say, ‘Good morning,’ rather than a sour, ‘You might try and be a bit quieter first thing and not slam the door on your way out.’

‘I’ll be sure to remember that,’ Mattie snapped, snatching Tom’s mug of coffee from Cuthbert and slamming that down too. ‘Anything you might like to purchase while you’re here?’

Tom held up the bag that contained his sodding panini. ‘No, I’m good. Thanks for the coffee, Cuthbert.’

Cuthbert, traitor that he was, touched his hand to his head in salute. ‘Always a pleasure, young sir.’

‘It’s not a pleasure,’ Mattie muttered as Tom wended his way through her actual paying customers and slipped through the double doors that led to the shop. ‘Never has been and never will be.’

‘You’ll end up with an ulcer with that kind of attitude,’ Cuthbert said as he worked through the next set of orders. In the past, Mattie wouldn’t have tolerated that level of backchat from her baristas, but then, Cuthbert was older than anyone else she’d interviewed by several decades and she’d been brought up to respect her elders. Cuthbert Lewis was seventy-two and had worked for the Post Office all his life until he’d retired two years ago. He’d spent two weeks being retired, decided that he didn’t like it very much and had retrained as a barista. His granddaughter Little Sophie, who worked in the tearooms on Saturdays, had told him that Mattie had a job going, and the rest was history.

Now, come rain, come shine, come whatever inclement weather you could throw at him, Cuthbert turned up for work, always immaculately dressed in suit and tie, and charmed both the coffee machine and customers alike with his grace, mischievous twinkle and old-fashioned good manners. Although Mattie did wish that he wouldn’t keep saying that operating Jezebel to her optimum potential was like bringing a beautiful woman who’d had her heart broken back to life, she still regularly thanked whatever deity (and Little Sophie) had brought Cuthbert into her life. Apart from when he was singing the praises of her arch nemesis.

‘Young Tom is a perfect gentleman. He has a lovely smile. Lovely manners too.’

‘I’ve never seen evidence of either,’ Mattie said with a sniff, disappearing into the kitchen to prepare her lunchtime bakes, which always included a speciality jumbo sausage roll. This week she was trialling a pork belly and apple confit sausage roll.

Mattie was disturbed in her apple prep by the arrival of Posy, who brought her own stool with her: she was obviously planning to stay a while.

‘I can’t be on my feet for longer than a minute,’ she said by way of a greeting.

‘Swollen ankles still bothering you?’ Mattie asked, attacking a mountain of peeled apples with one of her favourite knives.

‘Honestly, Mattie, I’m happy about the baby, really I am, but being pregnant sucks,’ Posy said with great feeling. ‘I wouldn’t recommend it.’

‘I’m not planning on getting pregnant anytime soon,’ Mattie said with a shudder, because when other girls had played ‘Mother’ she’d pretended that she was running her own Michelin-starred kitchen. ‘I know that you feel lousy, but you look very well on it.’

It was true. Posy had always been pretty, but now her pink-and-white complexion had a rosy glow, her hair shone and had picked up an auburn tint and OK, yeah, her ankles did look quite swollen but she had a very pleasingly round bump.

‘I don’t, but it’s sweet of you to say I do,’ Posy said. ‘I was up half the night worrying about the Christmas brainstorm. I really want to wait until Nina gets back, but she won’t reply when I email to ask her for an ETA.’

‘That’s not like Nina,’ Mattie noted with a frown, because usually Nina was so welded to her phone that she responded to messages within the minute. ‘I hope something hasn’t happened to her.’

‘No, she’s definitely still alive because she is sending me all sorts of other emails. For instance, how I feel about having life-sized reindeer in the shop,’ Posy said unhappily.

That definitely warranted putting down her paring knife. ‘Live reindeer in the shop?’

‘Not live. Life-size. Though either way, I don’t think it’s a very good idea,’ Posy said unhappily. She sighed and then her expression changed from harassed to something more speculative, if the narrowing of her eyes was anything to go by. ‘So, Tom, then. I was very surprised when he showed up with those lads yesterday afternoon. Tom has friends, who knew?’

‘Well, I suppose he had to have at least one friend,’ Mattie said uncharitably. ‘Some poor unfortunate who didn’t know any better.’

‘But there were three of them. Three!’ Posy said wonderingly. ‘Did they say where they knew Tom from? How long they’d been friends? Are they academics too? I mean, they didn’t look like academics.’

‘Well, Tom isn’t an academic. He works in a bookshop,’ Mattie said as she threw the now-cubed apples into the big pan on the hob.

‘But he was an academic,’ Posy said and she wasn’t going to let this go. She was twitching with curiosity, so Mattie took pity on her and told her about the Banter Boys: they’d been quite nice, actually.

‘Really? I thought you’d have shut them down in five seconds flat.’

‘I don’t shut down every man I meet.’

‘Most men. So, you and Tom living together …’

‘Are you going somewhere with this?’ Mattie asked, turning to Posy, knife in her hand. ‘Because Tom and I … in fact, there is no Tom and I. There is me having to share living space with Tom under sufferance, and neither of us is happy about it, and his friends insisted that he give up the big room, so he’s much more unhappy about it than I am.’

‘But if in the course of living with Tom, sorry, living in the same space as Tom, you were to find out some personal details about him, you will let me know, won’t you?’ Posy’s eyes were gleaming with the prospect of finally having any nugget of information that might explain the enigma of Tom, her colleague of five years about whom she knew nothing.

‘Posy, just listen to yourself! I’m not Tom’s biggest fan, but you know as well as I do that there are rules about sharing living space with someone, and I’m not about to go rifling through Tom’s underwear drawer or steaming open his post,’ Mattie exclaimed as she grated nutmeg into her pork and apple mix. ‘I, and you, have to respect his privacy.’

‘Of course, of course,’ Posy said quickly. ‘Absolutely, but if you were to find out something, even if it seems quite mundane, like where he was living before, or if he has parents, then it would be perfectly all right to share that with a friend.’

‘It would be information that was in the public domain, as it were,’ Verity pointed out when she came calling to discuss the Christmas decoration budget for shop and tearooms, which turned out to be just a flimsy excuse. As was her not-at-all casual enquiry as to whether Mattie had chanced upon a stray pair of socks that Verity couldn’t find. What Verity really wanted, like Posy before her, was intel on Tom. ‘And if you don’t have intel at the moment, you can still gather intel in the general course of day-to-day living with him. And then you could share that intel with me.’

‘Isn’t there a commandment about that?’ Mattie asked. She sprinkled flaked almonds on her cherry frangipane loaf cakes that she was just about to put in the oven, because it was now after lunch and soon the afternoon tea crowd and the four o’clock energy slumpers would be in, wanting something sweet to get them through the rest of the day.

The reminder of Verity’s father’s calling worked like a charm, as ever. She huffed a little, said, ‘Well, if those socks do turn up, I’d like them back, please,’ then flounced back to her office.

After Mattie turned the tearoom sign to ‘Closed’ that evening, the machinations of her colleagues made her hesitate as she moved towards the stairs up to the flat. That flat that she shared with Tom. The flat where she would now have to spend the evening with Tom. What had seemed so straightforward was now giving her pause for thought, so it came as a huge relief when Tom came thundering down the stairs.

‘I’m going out,’ he said shortly. ‘And when I do get in, I’ll be quiet in much the same way that I hope you’ll be quiet tomorrow morning.’

Mattie wasn’t sure she’d ever known such sweet relief tempered with spitting indignation. ‘It’s not my fault that you’re obviously such a light sleeper,’ she said, but Tom was already gone, slamming the shop door behind him and leaving Mattie home alone.

After that, she wasn’t even a little bit tempted to rifle through Tom’s belongings. He hadn’t made good his threat to put a padlock on his bedroom door – she’d be mortally offended if he had – but there was no way that Mattie was going to invade his territory. She liked to think that she had a strong moral code, even though life had taught her that very few people shared her sense of ethics. Anyway, the thought of Tom returning the favour and going into her bedroom when she wasn’t there, made her go hot and cold.

Not that Mattie had anything to hide, but it was her space, her stuff. The idea that Tom or anyone might look through her underwear drawer was bad enough, but there were some things that were far more personal than underwear.

Like her little collection of Paris snowglobes: the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the Moulin Rouge windmill, all trapped in a winter wonderland under glass. They were neatly packed away in a box that had once stored the most delicious sablés au beurre, because Mattie could hardly bear to look at them.

Or her framed graduation certificate from L’Institut de Patisserie and the framed graduation snap of Mattie and her classmates, all of them in chef’s whites and toques, smiling happily, while Mattie stood off to the side, her lips compressed thinly, a haunted look in her eyes. That was packed away too, along with all the other painful reminders of her other life, her Parisian life; the very idea that Tom would pick through them with a sarcastic inner monologue cut Mattie to the core.

She was sure that Tom didn’t have the same souvenirs of heartbreak – she wasn’t even sure that Tom had a heart to break – but if he did, then it would be just as agonising for him to have someone go through them with careless fingers.

So she wasn’t even tempted to gather intel. Not even a little bit.

But as she had the whole building to herself for once, Mattie gave in to the temptation to wander around the empty shop. Usually the little series of anterooms on each side of the main shop were places Mattie passed through to get to the office to speak to Verity or for one of Posy’s dreaded brainstorms, like the imminent Christmas showdown where they’d discuss the possibility of life-sized reindeer for hours. In fact, the anterooms on the right, on the opposite side of the shop to the tearooms, were uncharted territory.

At night, lit softly by the spots above the counter, Happy Ever After was full of shadows and ghosts. But they were kindly ghosts and the empty shop had a peaceful feeling. The main room had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on either side with an old-fashioned rolling ladder, and in the centre were three sagging sofas in varying stages of decay grouped around a display table. On the table was a selection of books: everything from Jilly Cooper’s Riders to Pride and Prejudice, as well as ten or twelve other titles, ranging from familiar classics to books that Mattie had never heard of. There were also velvety-smooth, pale-pink roses in a chipped glass vase and a black-and-white photograph of a young man and woman standing behind the counter of the shop decades earlier. The woman was gazing up at the man with an adoring smile on her face and he was gazing down at her with tenderness in a way that Mattie could never imagine. But then, according to everyone who’d known them, Lavinia, the former owner of the shop, and her husband, Peregrine, had had eyes only for each other.

There was one other item on the table, a notice printed on fancy card:

In loving memory of Lavinia Thorndyke, a bookseller to her bones. On this table is a selection of Lavinia’s favourite books; the ones that brought her the greatest joy, that were like old friends. We hope that you may find the same joy, the same friendship.

‘If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading at all.’ – Oscar Wilde

Though she kept it on the downlow (mainly because she’d never hear the end of it), Mattie’s preferred books were cookery books. She’d tried once to explain to Posy that when she curled up in bed with How To Eat A Peach by Diana Henry or Nigel Slater’s Kitchen Diaries or even her treasured copy of her own grandmother’s handwritten recipe book, she was as transported as Posy was with one of the Regency romances that she could bolt through in an afternoon.

Mattie loved to imagine all those recipes, all those meals that she’d yet to eat; loved how they inspired her, were a springboard to creating new dishes of her own. With a cookery book open in front of her, Mattie had travelled the world. She’d visited Italy with Elizabeth David, India with Madhur Jaffrey and the Middle East with Yotam Ottolenghi. She’d found comfort in the recipes of Delia Smith and Julia Child, which echoed the food of her childhood, whether it was the English cakes and biscuits and puddings of her father’s mother or the more fancy éclairs, flans and financiers of her French mother’s mother.

But now, with the empty shop at her disposal and more free time than she knew what to do with, on the second night in her new abode, Mattie found herself drifting to the boxes of books in the back office behind the shop counter.

These books weren’t for sale but were proofs, or advance copies, sent out by publishers to booksellers and reviewers. The staff were allowed to take anything that they fancied, which Cuthbert had really leaned into, taking armfuls of sassy office romances home to his beloved Cynthia.

‘Even read a couple myself,’ he’d confessed to Mattie, his eyebrows waggling. ‘Gave me quite a few new ideas, let me tell you.’

Mattie didn’t need any new ideas and she certainly didn’t want any romance in her life, much less to read about it, but that night she felt as if she’d read all her cookery books a thousand times over and, nestling on top of one of the boxes was a novel called Passion and Patisserie at the Little Parisian Café.

‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ she muttered, picking it up and, half an hour later, she was tucked up in her bed reading about the heroine Lucy’s adventures as she opened what was actually a boulangerie rather than a café and resisted the charms of a hunky French pastry chef called Pierre because she was wedded to her career.

Though Mattie didn’t think much of the recipe for macarons in chapter two, she was nevertheless enjoying Lucy’s exploits when she heard a noise outside.

Although the mews felt as if it was its own little oasis of calm away from all the hustle and bustle, it was still in the centre of London. It wasn’t even eleven o’clock, so on Rochester Street, No Plaice Like Home would only have just finished serving, and The Midnight Bell and the fancy new bar in what used to be the undertakers would still be open. So there was no need for Mattie to stiffen just because she’d heard a noise outside.

After all, she used to live in Hackney, where she’d often been woken up by sirens or a police helicopter overhead. But this was a different kind of sound; a frantic squalling, like an animal in distress. And was that … was that a rattling of the electronic gate that Posy and Sebastian had installed at the entrance to the mews? It was left open all day but Tom would have closed it when he went out earlier and you needed a code to get through. Was someone trying to break in?

Mattie cowered for a second and then she remembered that she was made of much sterner stuff than that. She got out of bed and padded over to the window so she could open it and peer out into the darkened courtyard below.

‘Is anyone there?’ she called, but if someone were trying to break in, then they’d hardly reply with a ‘Yoo hoo! Over here!’

Instead, the squalling noise got louder. Was it foxes having sex? Even in the centre of town, there were plenty of foxes who’d take their chances for the rich pickings outside restaurants and shops, or for discarded and half-eaten fast food. Mattie had once seen a rat on Rochester Street, bold as brass, proudly carrying a chicken drumstick in its mouth.

The gates rattled again, and the squalling got even louder.

The best thing to do was to go back to bed, maybe put in some earplugs and … wait to be murdered in her sleep.