‘Hi,’ answered Honor, shortly, glad to have the opportunity to feel irritated with Sophie instead of with her mother.
Robina called from the other side of the kitchen’s central island. ‘I’m just going to run up to the butcher’s for some fresh sausage meat for the sausage rolls. Back in five minutes.’
Sophie’s pink shiny face grew pinker. It couldn’t get any shinier. Her default expression was a grin and she sprinkled her conversation with giggles. ‘I’ll look after you, Honor. Come through. We’ve just got lots of lovely local ladies in for their elevenses, at the moment, and we won’t get busy for another half hour. I’ve got you an apron ready and, look, all the cleaning things are over here – and gloves because some of these cleaners would strip your skin. Robina’s actually very save-the-planet but the kitchen has to be cleaned properly.’ She giggled. ‘Anyway, the job’s easy, especially if you’ve worked as a waitress already. Menus are on the table and when the customers look ready, you take a pad and a pen and you go and ask them what they want – and then you come back to the counter and tell us!’ She gave a tiny snort, like a giggly piglet.
Honor smiled, cautiously. ‘What are “elevenses”?’
Another giggle. ‘Morning snack. Second breakfast. Whatever you want it to be. Anyway,’ said Sophie, suddenly becoming brisk, ‘Kirsty says you have to fill out a form.’ She led Honor out of the kitchen and into an office the size of a cupboard and selected a tatty blue folder from a pile, sorting through until she located a particular form. ‘This is for people who haven’t got a P45, I think.’ She paused, doubtfully, form extended. ‘I’ve never employed a foreigner before. Kirsty usually does all the admin stuff – she’s brilliant at it.’
Honor pushed the form right back, seeing the opportunity to avoid revealing her stupid first name to Sophie and Robina. ‘But I will have this P45 thing you need. I called Lawrence last night and he said that he’d send me my P45 and it would be straightforward for you. I’m not a foreigner because I have a UK passport, which he has already seen, so you don’t have to,’ she added, firmly.
‘So that’s OK then?’ asked Sophie, vaguely. ‘I could ask Kirsty when she comes home from hospital but she’s been so poorly. So …’
‘So we’re all set. I’ll tie on my apron.’
‘Brilliant!’ beamed Sophie. Her interests obviously lay outside of the cupboard/office. Robina returned with her bag of sausage meat, Sophie became busy in the hot little kitchen and Honor was free to wait on the eighteen small tables, six inside and twelve out, where the customers proved to be friendly, probably because it’s difficult to be miserable if you’re eating cake to die for.
The cakes were legendary. Even customers who ordered a sandwich or homemade soup, jacket potatoes or a toastie, almost all succumbed to the sweet stuff as well.
Cakes were Robina’s thing. The business model at the Teapot soon became clear as Robina serenely mixed, iced, filled and baked, and Sophie and Honor darted around her. Pinging sandwich toasters, hissing coffee frothers and bricks of cheese to be grated were not for her.
Luckily, Sophie was an octopus, turning things on, off or over, stirring, chopping, heating and beating, ever pinker and usually beaming.
Honor began to like her.
The coffee shop opened at ten in the morning and closed whenever Robina decided to shut it. Honor was meant to cover the busy time of eleven until four-thirty, five days a week, where most needed. She was getting ready to wind down her first shift when she checked her outside tables and saw that one had been taken over by three teenagers wearing ball caps and hooded sweatshirts.
She had no trouble recognising Frog and his Tadpoles. Snatching up pad and pen, she bustled outside.
‘Hey, you guys,’ she cried, as if she’d never been so delighted to see anyone in her life. ‘And what can I get for you today?’
Frog narrowed his eyes. ‘Hey, Yankee Doodle. We’re waiting.’
‘Uh-huh.’ She nodded. ‘And what can I get for you whilst you’re waiting?’ Then, because he looked puzzled, ‘These seats are for customers. If you’re not buying, you’re not customers.’ She smiled her widest, falsest smile.
Frog did not smile back. ‘Where is he?’
She clicked her pen. ‘Who?’
‘The freak.’
Honor put on an owlish expression.
‘Ru Gordon,’ enunciated slowly.
‘Rufus?’ She cast a furtive glance behind her, lowering her voice. ‘He’s not here, today.’
The Tadpoles looked at Frog. Frog stuffed his hands into his pockets. Grey clouds were gathering out to sea. ‘We came to see what happened last night,’ he said.
Honor shrugged, plain stupid on the outside, boiling fury inside. ‘You lost me.’
‘With the freak and the cops.’
‘Why do you call him the freak? Oh.’ She looked around again. ‘Oh, I get it! That’s what happened, with that tourist, right? He just freaked out? Wow.’ She shook her head gravely, noting, with satisfaction, the grins on the faces of Frog and the Tadpoles fading to frowns. Hamming it up, she hissed, ‘You didn’t hear it from me but he’s still at the police station. Rufus said it was self-defence but, y’know.’
A pause for effect, then she hurried back into the tearoom and watched through the window as the three boys gazed at each other and made what the fuck? faces.
Content with her first foray into reinventing Ru as a badass, she danced into the kitchen and reached around to untie her apron. Robina looked up from sliding a heavy fruitcake into a green-and-white tin. ‘We’re stopping serving, now, so I thought that, as you’re working out so well you could stay another hour and help us with the clean down.’ She made it sound like a treat that Honor had earned by merit.
It turned out that ‘help us with the clean down’ actually meant ‘help Sophie with the clean down’, while Robina slid sponge cakes destined to become tomorrow’s gateaux out of the oven and on to cooling racks, carrying them tenderly off to spend the night on a marble shelf in an adjoining pantry, safe from blasting bleach sprays.
Honor helped wash counters and polish stainless steel so that it didn’t dry streaky, joining in when Sophie sang James Taylor songs as she worked. Her dad had just about every track that James Taylor had recorded.
‘Time for a treat for the workers!’ Robina sailed back into the kitchen and frothed up three mugs of coffee, then sandwiched together coffee cake with leftover chocolate frosting, spread some over the top, sprinkled the frosting with chopped nuts – blithely undoing much of the clean down – and led Sophie and Honor outside to one of the as-yet-to-be-sanitised green-painted tables.
Sophie seemed quite unfazed by having her kitchen mucked up in pursuit of a jolly calorific break. Robina obviously wasn’t a routine kind of woman. At this rate, Honor would finish at nearer six than four-thirty. But, anyway. Having served delectable cake to other people for most of the day, she really did feel that she deserved a piece. Her waistline would forgive her, especially when she re-established her planned routine of running and dancing.
Following their lead, she propped her feet on the rungs of the table and tipped her chair just enough to relieve the pressure from the base of the spine, as the last few customers finished up at other tables, people strolled the street and the traffic built up.
‘There he is!’ Robina burst out, just as Honor took her first bite of the beautifully moist coffee cake, the chocolate frosting melting like music on her tongue.
Sophie snorted. ‘Oh, Robina!’ Her brows curled crossly. ‘You’re really sad, sometimes, Robbie. A sad old bat.’
Honor paused mid-bite, astounded that Sophie could, apparently, be something other than sycophantically approving of Robina.
Robina’s expression was tragic, her eyes welling real tears. ‘Isn’t he gorgeous? Look at those eyes. Look at that body! Isn’t it knicker-wetting? I love him, I love him, I love him.’
Bewildered, Honor followed Robina’s gaze. It was fixed on one of the cre
am-and-red buses that rolled down The Butts several times a day in the direction of Marine Drive. On the bus side was an advertisement for men’s cologne from le Dur, a two-deck-high black-and-white image of a man whose dark stubble defined a cleft chin and hollow cheeks, his naked torso sculpted and spare, his stretchy, sketchy cotton trunks clinging.
‘I love him,’ Robina whispered.
Chapter Eleven
‘Holy shit!’ Honor inhaled half her cake.
Hacking and coughing through a suffocation of crumbs, she blinked streaming eyes to gaze at about fifteen feet of smouldering Martyn Mayfair as the image moved slowly down the street. ‘Martyn’s a model?’
‘Don’t we all know it?’ sniffed Sophie, patting Honor between the shoulder blades with enough force to suggest she was mad about something.
‘I sure didn’t!’ She looked over to Robina. ‘And you, um …?’
Robina, eyes still glued to the bus, was hugging herself and rocking. ‘I’m in love with him. And he rips my guts out on a regular basis because he hardly seems to know that I exist.’
‘Right.’ Honor wiped her eyes. She could have told Robina that Martyn certainly did know that Robina existed – but, classic stalker avoidance, he was ignoring her. Refusing to engage. Refusing to feed her obsession.
She felt sorry for Robina but, wow. For his picture to be fifteen-feet high on a bus, Martyn must be ‘someone’. Possibly he dealt with unwanted attention all the time. Images of his near-naked body were in the street for any crazy lady to drool over. Holy freakin’ Joe. When he’d mentioned Twitter and Facebook he probably meant that people could ‘like’ his pages and join as ‘fans’.
Slowly, her image of Martyn broke and reformed. It wasn’t that he didn’t have much work.
He just didn’t have to work much.
She cringed when she remembered trying to tip him ten pounds for shopping for her groceries. Zoë had just sent him off on the errand like he was her little brother. Not a male model, with his picture on the side of a bus.
Him from the buses. That’s what Rufus had called him.
We’ve been shooting on Brighton beach. Shooting photos, dur-brain!
One of the Mayfairs doesn’t hide very much. Honor had brushed Peggy’s schoolgirl giggling aside as incomprehensible English humour but now … well, those tight trunks weren’t hiding much of Martyn Mayfair.
The bus trundled off to pick up passengers in Saltdean and Rottingdean. ‘And you’re in love with him,’ Honor repeated, blankly.
‘It’s not a hanging offence.’ Robina seemed to be recovering, picking up her cake fork and plate, though her doe eyes were still red-rimmed. ‘Neither of us are married or members of the clergy. We could get relationshippy.’
Honor tore her eyes away from the corner where the bus had turned out of sight towards Brighton – right outside Martyn’s home, in fact. She tried to make herself sound not-shocked. ‘No, you’re right. There’s no law against being in love.’ And, then, feebly, ‘Maybe one day he’ll feel, uh, relationshippy, too.’
‘Huh! Never.’ Sophie’s pinkness had drawn in to two angry patches high up on her cheekbones.
Robina glared, her eyes dark. ‘He might.’
‘Pigs might fly. Just give him up, Robbie. Relationshippy – you’ve always laughed at being relationshippy! You used to shout at Tucker for getting “all relationshippy” on you.’
Scowling, Robina folded her arms. ‘Me and Tucker were relationshippy.’
Sophie made a rude noise. ‘He might have been, poor sod, but you, not really.’ And then, as if regretting her bluntness, she flung down her plate and threw her arms around her friend. ‘Robbie, you know that there’s no chance. He’s years younger and he tries never to talk to you. Give up, darling. Give up. It’s not going to happen.’
Dolefully, Robina began to sniff again. ‘He used to be my friend.’
Sophie’s voice sank. ‘Well … he stopped by the Teapot for coffee, sometimes.’
‘Decaff,’ Robina nodded. ‘He doesn’t eat much cake or drink lots of caffeine. He has to take care of his body and his skin because it’s his living. His face is his fortune.’ She gave a watery giggle. ‘Not just his face–’
‘But he doesn’t stop by any more, Robbie, does he?’ asked Sophie, gently. ‘Like, never.’
They finished the clean down quietly, even Robina spraying and wiping until the sweetness of cakes in the air was overcome by bleach and damp cloths.
Energetically applying elbow grease to the sinks, Sophie was obviously intent on springing Robina from her black mood. ‘It’ll be lovely to have Kirsty home tomorrow, Robbie, won’t it?’
‘Yes.’ Robina didn’t look up.
Sophie turned to Honor. ‘Her sister will bring her, because we couldn’t fetch her until evening.’
Honor polished the coffee frother. ‘Is she coming out of the hospital and right back to work?’
‘No! She won’t be back at work yet.’ Sophie rinsed her steaming cloth. ‘She’ll go straight to bed, I expect. Whatever the virus is, it made her really ill. The doctors said she could come out if she rested.’
‘So she’s coming here because she’s still too sick to go home?’
Robina began blasting hot water into the mop bucket, the metal kind with a mechanism on top to squeeze the mop. ‘She lives upstairs with me and Ru. Sophie, too.’ The mop bucket clanged as Robina let it down on the floor. Dark hair was springing out all around her bandana that, today, was embroidered with the yin and the yang. ‘When Tucker died he left the Teapot and the flat to me. Then Soph and Kirst moved in.’ Robina splashed her mop into the bucket. ‘Tucker was a good guy. But he was in a car crash.’
‘It’s three years, now,’ Sophie explained, sadly, collecting the cloths and dropping them into a smaller bucket of bleach and cold water. She brightened. ‘But when me and Kirsty moved into the flat, we took Tucker’s place in the tearoom. So we all work together and live together.’
Honor smiled, wondering if Ru ever felt swamped by oestrogen. ‘Wow. You and Tucker really were … relationshippy,’ Honor tried out the word self-consciously, ‘if he left you the Teapot, Robina.’
‘It’s a bloody big responsibility,’ she grumbled, setting to with the mop as if she could clean the Teapot off the face of the earth if she rubbed hard enough. ‘A business is worse than a small child. It always needs attention.’
Sophie gazed at her friend reproachfully, her hair beginning to escape its net. ‘I think it was fabulous of Tucker to leave it to you. You’ve got no mortgage and me and Kirsty pay rent to you, on top of the profit that the tearoom makes.’
‘But there’s always plenty to pay out and it’s a pain when I want to go away.’ Robina stabbed the mop in the steaming water then trod on the gizmo that squeezed the water out. ‘I’ve missed the Isle of Wight Festival, Download and Glastonbury, this summer–’
‘Isle of Wight and Download festivals are on at the same time so you couldn’t have gone to both, anyway.’ Sophie dug her hands into her apron pocket as if digging in her heels.
‘–and,’ flared Robina obstinately, ‘I’m missing Latitude right this minute!’ She threw the mop on the floor, ripped off her apron and stamped out of the front door, leaving the ‘closed’ sign swinging behind her.
Sophie made a face. ‘I don’t think she’ll get to the Global Gathering, either,’ she whispered, as if Robina might be lurking in earshot. ‘Because Kirsty usually keeps the Teapot open while we’re away – Kirsty doesn’t “do” festivals, so she’s quite happy to stay here. But the Global Gathering’s only two weeks from now.’
‘You’re talking about music festivals, right?’
Sophie picked up the mop, rinsed it and gave it a squeeze. ‘That’s right. Kirsty isn’t going to be well enough.’
‘And you can’t stay behind, to look after the shop?’
Sophie propped the mop in the corner and hung up Robina’s apron. ‘Robina and me go together,’ she said, firmly. ‘And Little Ru
, of course, but he often goes all sulky, so he’s no company.’
Honor pulled off her own apron. ‘Was Robina fixated on Martyn Mayfair when Tucker was alive?’
Sophie shook her head, freeing more of her hair to dance around her head. ‘Oh no, she and Tucker were cool. Robina was happier with him than with anyone and he took care of her and loved her. She didn’t get hooked on Martyn Mayfair until after Tucker died. Then she developed a bit of a crush on him.’
Thinking back to Robina’s storm of grief on seeing Martyn’s picture on the bus, Honor murmured, ‘Some crush.’
When Honor finally stepped outside, the traffic had eased and the gulls were exchanging heartbroken cries. It was much later than she’d expected to finish work and she could smell something delicious. Despite the coffee cake, her stomach rumbled as she looked around to identify the source.
And there it was, right across the street, a glowing blue Fish ’n Chips sign flashing in a window running with condensation. Her mouth watered. English chips had always been a huge favourite with her and Jess and Zach. Somehow tastier than American fries – although soggier, also – fish ’n chips couldn’t be good for her but, right that instant, they were what she wanted most in the world. In moments she’d joined the patient queue that curled around the steamy interior where great fat fryers sizzled and a hot cabinet of golden battered fish and round crinkly pies sat above.
She ordered her fish and chips ‘open’ and watched the frying guy shake salt and vinegar over them, then set off to walk home, eating as she went. Very English. Especially the vinegar. Frankly? That was weird. But when in England, one should do as the English do.
She broke off a steaming hot battered morsel of fish and popped it in her mouth, hollowing her cheeks and puffing to try to make it cool enough to chew, glancing in shop windows and thinking how freaky Robina was about Martyn. And his picture sliding past Honor’s astonished eyes on the side of that bus – wow. That had been something.
Nearing the Starboard Walk shops she glanced up at Martyn Mayfair’s front door planted in the flint wall high above the street, with its access stairway, like a fire escape, cutting diagonally across the building to where the cars parked to the side of and behind the shops.
Love & Freedom Page 9