Читать книгу The Little B & B at Cove End - Linda Mitchelmore - Страница 9

The house was quiet now that both Mae and Rosie had gone and Cara was glad of something to do. She went into the hall, picked up the flyer for the art festival and rang the number.

‘Hello, Cara Howard here,’ she said quickly, the second it was answered. She felt nervous, stepping into the unknown as a landlady. Ought she not have rung on a Sunday and waited until the morning? Oh well, it was done now. She’d taken the first step towards her new venture – well, the second if you counted her handmade B&B sign – and there was no going back now. ‘I live at Cove End. I’m interested in offering accommodation to people coming to the art festival. Am I speaking to the right person?’ She knew her words were tumbling out like water over a weir, but that’s what nervousness did for you.

‘You are,’ a friendly voice said. ‘I’m Laura Pearse. What sort of accommodation do you have?’

Cara wondered if she knew anyone called Laura Pearse, but she didn’t think so.

‘Two doubles and a single. One en suite. All with basins. Two with sea views. Oh, and a breakfast room that would be exclusively for guests’ use.’

‘Lovely. Perfect actually. I’ll just take your details. I’ll have to get back to you nearer the date. Oh, hang on a minute. Actually I’ve had a couple of enquiries already from people thinking I’m the Information Bureau taking general bookings, and I’m not. One couple and a single male, wanting B&B accommodation in a few days’ time. Would you be up for that?’

‘I would,’ Cara said with a confidence she didn’t feel because she’d have a lot to do to get all the rooms ready.

‘Great. I’ve still got their details so I’ll get back to you and tell them they can give you a ring. Landline and mobile numbers. Okay with that?’

‘Fine,’ Cara said.

It had been as easy as that. The potential guests had got back to her within half an hour and Cara had booked them in. Three guests in three days’ time. She was well on the way now!

She put the radio on low so as to have another voice in the house. She went upstairs, then down again, peering into all the rooms trying to see them with a stranger’s eye. Cove End had five bedrooms – two en suite, and there were two other bathrooms. Three of the bedrooms had sea views and the other two looked out over fields. There were three reception rooms – one of which Cara had always used as a breakfast room because it faced east and got the morning sun. She thought she could squeeze a couple of small tables with chairs in there and the guests could use that rather than the formal dining room that Cara rarely used because the table in there seated at least eight. Even when Mark had been alive it had rarely been used because Cara always thought it felt too stilted to be eating there, and so cold somehow. The kitchen was large, with room for a table and chairs and a small couch. There was also a downstairs cloakroom. Cara’s head was suddenly full of plans for her new venture. She’d need more tables and chairs for the breakfast room. And possibly some side tables and an easy chair or two for the bedrooms for guests. There was a homes section in one of the charity shops in Totnes that sold furniture cheaply. She’d ask Rosie to drive her over.

‘How much will two tables and some second-hand easy chairs, and a couple of cans of paint eat into my meagre savings?’ Cara said out loud, then clapped a hand across her face.

She was talking to herself now. A sure sign of madness. Or desperate loneliness. But at least she had the house. And she was going to make it earn its keep. One of Mark’s perks as a bank manager had been a ridiculously low mortgage rate. When they’d first married, Mark had accepted every transfer posting he’d been given. They’d lived in just about every town in Devon that had a bank, and in each one they’d upgraded their properties. For one terrible moment after Mark had died, Cara had wondered if he’d embezzled money from the bank. The police had been one step ahead of her, of course, and had got into the hard drive of his computers – home and work. The extent of Mark’s gambling – telephone number amounts – had stunned Cara. The WPC who had been assigned to her after the accident had been very kind and understanding.

‘I knew he gambled,’ Cara had said. ‘I tried my best to get him to stop, but …’ Cara shrugged as if to show how hopeless it had been begging with him, arguing with him, threatening him to face up to his addiction.

‘You couldn’t?’ the WPC said.

‘No. Perhaps he thought he was doing it for the times he did win and he bought a new car, or changed the TV for one with a bigger screen or something, bought our daughter a whole load of new clothes – things to give us a better life.’

‘You are in no way to blame,’ she’d told Cara gently.

But Cara did blame herself because a bank manager’s salary should have been more than enough to send Mae on school trips and she, Cara, ought to have challenged him about his gambling long before she had.

‘These trips aren’t supervised enough,’ Mark had said once when Rosie had offered to pay for Mae to go on a trip to Amsterdam. ‘I’m not allowing my daughter to roam about some foreign city at night, un-chaperoned, while their teachers are in a bar somewhere drinking their heads off, whoever might be paying for it.’

And Cara had given in. But what do you do when you love someone as much as Cara had loved Mark? He’d been a good husband in other ways – a fantastic lover for a start. And on Cara’s birthday there had always been another painting, or some other present that Mark knew Cara would love.

Now Cara knew different. Mark preferred to risk money that should have been spent on Mae in the hope of making more. And with that knowledge, her love for him had dimmed. And the original paintings had only been an investment, hadn’t they? Mark had said as much, wanting her to sell a painting he’d bought for one of her birthdays once he realised the artist was on the up and her painting was making four times the amount he’d paid for it.

It was the car full of paintings, now smashed, and burned, beyond saving, in the back-seat area that had alerted the police to the fact that this was not just another sad, speed-induced accident. Mae had been at school and Cara, unable to bear seeing Mark leave, had walked down the hill to the harbour as he loaded his car with his clothes, his favourite CDs and his computer. She hadn’t known he would be taking the paintings.

When she’d got back, she’d almost stopped breathing when she saw all the darker patches on the walls where her beloved paintings had been.

A knock at the front door jolted Cara back to the present, and glad in a way that it had. She raced down the hall, making a mental note to get the polisher out and give the parquet a thorough going over very soon. She could see the silhouettes of two people – a man and a woman at a guess – through the stained glass.

‘Have you got a double room?’ the woman asked the second Cara opened the door. ‘Two nights?’

‘Oh,’ Cara said. She hadn’t been expecting guests so soon. ‘Well …’

She had two nights with no bookings before the people she’d just spoken to arrived. A whole host of butterflies was doing a dance in her stomach – this was all happening so fast. What had been just the germ of an idea was being made a reality.

‘Have you?’ the man said. ‘It does say B&B on your sign. And vacancies.’

‘Yes, I know it does,’ Cara said. ‘But it was a try-out with the sign, and really I’m not quite ready for guests. I was just about to put the polisher over the parquet.’ She opened the door wider so that the middle-aged couple could see the tatty state of the hall floor and her still-denuded walls. ‘I’m in the middle of redecorating,’ she lied.

‘Well, it looks clean enough to me,’ the woman said, ‘so can we come in? We’ve tried the pub but they don’t do rooms, and that place called…what was it, the Lookout?… is fully booked, and the Information Office is closed. I know I sound desperate and really we would be so …’

Cara took a deep breath. She hadn’t really prepared herself for how it might feel to have strangers in her home. But she had to start her fledgling business some time. She hoped Mae wouldn’t be too shocked – or cross – to find strangers in the house already when she got back from her date with Josh.

‘A double,’ the man said, as though to remind Cara of what she’d been asked.

‘Yes, I’ve got a double room,’ she said. ‘Do come in, if you don’t mind the fact the walls are less than perfect. My paintings are in storage while I redecorate …’

‘A bit of faded wall won’t bother us, will it, Eddie?’ the woman said.

Cara did a mental inventory of the linen cupboard. The best was an Egyptian cotton duvet cover and matching sheets and pillowcases, which was on her own bed – a luxurious treat to herself, a bit of spoiling now that Mark was gone. But the lilac floral was clean and aired and would have to do. No matching towels, but she couldn’t worry about that now.

‘I’ll get a room ready for you as quick as I can.’ She opened the door wider and ushered them in. ‘I’m Cara, by the way.’

She proffered her hand first to the woman, and then the man.

‘Pam and Eddie Hine,’ the woman said. ‘Pleased to meet you, and I mean really pleased. We thought we were going to have to sleep in the car, didn’t we, Ed?’

‘Yes, love,’ Eddie said, looking fondly at Pam as a flush reddened the side of his neck.

Well, well, well, Cara thought. I’ll bet my last £223.26 that these two aren’t married, despite making a good display of being newlyweds. She glanced at Pam’s wedding finger where a wide gold band shone brightly in the lights from the hall. And that look, and that flush of Eddie’s, brought a lump to Cara’s throat that was threatening to choke her. She saw herself trapped, in limbo, between fifteen-year-old Mae’s calf-love for Josh, and Eddie and Pam at the other end of the spectrum.

And her own love for Mark stripped bare, sucked from her by his gambling.

‘Will you want the full English breakfast?’ Cara croaked.

‘Lovely,’ Pam said. ‘We don’t usually have a fried breakfast when we’re at home, do we, Ed?’

‘No, love,’ Eddie said. ‘But we’re not at home now, are we?’

‘No, we’re not,’ Pam giggled, which made Cara’s oneness more painful, and she felt herself invisible, a not-really-wanted witness to their coupledom.

‘Right,’ Cara said, battling to look like a real B&B hostess, ‘I’ll show you where the sitting room is and then I’ll make you a cup of tea while I get your room ready. The downstairs cloakroom is over there,’ she went on, pointing, and metaphorically crossing her fingers it was as squeaky clean as it usually was. ‘After that, I’ll need to pop to the shop to get the wherewithal for a cooked breakfast because, as I said, I wasn’t expecting guests so soon.’

At least the sitting room was nicely appointed. Mark hadn’t had room to take the flat screen TV or what was left of the silver that had been Cara’s grandmother’s, although Mark had already squirreled a fair bit of that out of the house and sold it, much to Cara’s annoyance at the time.

‘You do that, Cara,’ Pam said as Cara ushered them into the sitting room and urged them to make themselves comfortable. ‘We’ll be as happy in pigs in muck here while we wait.’

‘I’ll make you a cup of tea. Then ten minutes to sort your room, another fifteen or so while I pop to the shops and…’

‘Don’t panic, Cara,’ Pam interrupted, laying a gentle hand on Cara’s arm. ‘We’ll be just fine while you pop out or our names aren’t Pam and Eddie Hine.’

‘Lovely in here it is, Ed,’ Cara heard Pam say as she walked towards the door that led into the hall. ‘Quality. Lovely curtains and everything. Comfy cushions. Very high end, designer.’

A warm glow spread across Cara’s shoulders. She’d made those curtains. And the cushion covers. Rosie was always telling her she should take up sewing and make a business of it … well, maybe if the B&B business didn’t take off, she would. She left Pam and Eddie Hine cooing over her lovely sitting room and went to make the tea.

Cara ran along Higher Street praying she’d catch the corner shop before it closed for the night. The sky was beginning to darken, that lovely indigo shade shot through with fuchsia pink that Cara loved, and which usually meant that tomorrow would be a fine day. She speeded up as she saw Meg Smythson walk towards the door of her shop, as though she was about to lock up. But Meg had seen Cara and held the door open for her to go in.

‘Well, fancy,’ Meg said. ‘I had your Mae in here earlier. Lovely girl, your Mae. Where does she get those dresses she wears?’

Mae had been to the shop? Cara wondered what for, and what she might have bought, not that she had a lot to buy anything with, but the bank was paying Cara a small widow’s pension, even though it wasn’t stretching very far and Cara liked to give Mae a bit of pocket money.

‘Charity shops,’ Cara said. ‘And a stall in Totnes Market. And she’s had some of it for ages, waiting to grow into it.’

‘Well, she looks stunning in them,’ Meg said. ‘And is going to be more beautiful still once she’s finished her growing. With that Josh Maynard, she was.’

Cara didn’t like the way Meg had put the word ‘that’ in front of Josh’s name, as though he was something best left in the gutter.

‘I know. She’s going out with him.’

‘Bit of a disappointment to his dad is that Josh,’ Meg said. ‘Wanted university for his son, he did, but all that was in Josh’s head was surfing and earning money and he was having none of it. Never going to get rich gardening, is he?’

Cara suddenly felt defensive of Josh. She didn’t like his character being ripped to shreds by Meg, any more than she’d liked it when Mae had been dismissive of Rosie.

‘Monty Don seems to do very well from gardening on TV,’ Cara said. She had a ‘bit of a thing’ for Monty Don as she imagined many viewers did.

‘Another world, that, TV,’ Meg countered, her voice dripping with disdain. ‘Hardly Larracombe, is it? A bit of lawn-mowing for the Thrupps at Barley Mead, and a quick strim around the edge of the graves up at St Peter’s.’

Cara’s blood seemed to chill in her veins at that last remark – Mark was buried in the graveyard at St Peter’s. She hadn’t been there for a while to lay flowers or just to stand there and talk to him, tell him how sorry she was for everything that had happened between them. She wondered if Mae had. She could ask, of course, but Mae thought questions like that were an intrusion so Cara tended to hold back. But right now Cara didn’t really have the time or the inclination to be getting into any sort of philosophical argument with Meg about gardening and TV and she could only think that life wasn’t too exciting amongst the pre-packaged potatoes and the newspapers and the bars of Cadbury Milk, and that when Meg did manage to get an audience she liked to share an opinion or two.

‘Have you ever asked Josh if he wants to be rich?’ Cara asked. ‘Or if, perhaps, he’s happy working the soil, growing things?’

Meg Smythson bridled.

‘Well, all I’m saying is,’ Meg said, leaning closer towards Cara as though someone might overhear her even though there was no one else in her shop, ‘I know I’m telling tales out of school, and that Josh can charm the birds from the trees, but it was alcohol he was buying.’

‘And is legally able to do so,’ Cara said. ‘He’s over eighteen.’

‘Ah yes,’ Meg said. ‘I know that.’ She tapped the side of her nose. ‘And he assured me it was for his parents’ consumption, if you know what I mean.’

Cara knew. Meg Smythson was implying that Mae would be given a share of the wine and none of it would be going back to the rectory.

‘Eggs,’ Cara said. ‘I’d like half a dozen large eggs if you’ve got them. And a packet of best back bacon. Sausages – chipolatas if you have them. Oh, and a thick sliced loaf. Please.’

There were, Cara knew, a couple of tomatoes in the salad box of the fridge that had gone a bit soft but which would be perfect to go with a fried breakfast, and there was an unopened jar of marmalade in the cupboard, won at Mae’s school winter fair, and neither of them liked marmalade, so that would have to do.

‘And a dozen or so mushrooms,’ Cara added, as she spied a basket on the counter with milky-white button mushrooms in it.

‘Got guests, have you?’ Meg said, taking a packet of bacon from the fridge and handing it to Cara. ‘I saw the sign. You’ve had the council people in, hygiene and that, I expect?’

‘Er, yes. Of course,’ Cara said, hoping Meg wouldn’t realise the word ‘yes’ wasn’t the answer to both questions. How had she completely overlooked the possibility that she might have to be registered to take in B&B guests and have her kitchen and bathrooms passed for hygiene?

Well, that’s what widowhood did to you, wasn’t it? It deprived you of rational thinking for a while at least. And widowhood, mixed with the terrible guilt that Mark wouldn’t have died had she not asked him to leave, was threatening to overwhelm her now. She made a show of examining a tin of chicken curry on the shelf beside her, just for something to do – so she wouldn’t have to look Meg Smythson in the eye and run the risk that Meg would know she was lying.

‘Good,’ Meg said. ‘Because if you haven’t had the hygiene people in before guests arrive, then they take a very dim view of the whole thing. A very dim view.’

Meg reached for the mushrooms to weigh them out. She sniffed, giving her head a shake and her shoulders a shudder as if envisaging the dire consequences for Cara if she’d failed to register with the council.

‘And they take a very dim view of underage drinking around here as well,’ Meg finished. ‘No matter it might be the vicar’s son what offered that drink.’

Oh dear, Cara thought, Meg Smythson didn’t like me stopping her telling tales about Josh and Mae, did she?

‘And that’ll be four pounds and ninety-seven pence,’ Meg said. ‘Shocking the price of things today, isn’t it? Money goes nowhere, does it? And I expect with you being a widow now it’s even …’

‘Here’s the money,’ Cara said, certain that there had been knowing in Meg’s voice and it was a crowing sort of knowing rather than a sympathetic one. She couldn’t get out of the shop fast enough.

And if anyone from the council should turn up in the morning, she’d tell them that the Hines were personal friends and that she wasn’t charging them. There, stuff that in your pipe and smoke it, Meg Smythson!