Living in the Past

by Jane Lovering

  All this business with the spoons, and her certainty that someone had been in the house while we were both out … Was this the early sign of something going awry in a mind that had always been sharper than my best knives? What was I going to do if she got worse? It was the question that always circled at the back of my brain, which ate into any pleasure I ever took in anything. What happens next? Is there a ‘next’ for me, or is this it?

  What actually happened next, it appeared, was ‘nothing much’. Six weeks passed, summer arrived, and with it came the coach parties, the school trips and the carloads of visitors all arriving to tour Monkpark Hall, walk around the gardens, dabble their toes in the river which ran along the edge of the grounds, and hopefully to overindulge on our home-baked muffins, cupcakes and the fresh fruit juices that we made up to order. Edmund Evershott made no more reference to closing the cafe, just threw meaningful little glances around every time he came in. They were enough to make keep me polishing the chrome and titivating the displays, stopping just short of standing in the doorway and trying to force cakes on unwilling passers-by, and I wondered if he knew about my life and circumstances, the effect that his threat had on me, or whether he was just a major control freak trying to get extra hours of work out of Jules and I for no extra pay. Well, me, really. Jules hadn’t given something for nothing since our school prom, and even thinking that made me feel like a bitch.

  So, there we were, baking and serving and all Business as Usual.

  ‘I’ll have a … strawberry and banana smoothie.’

  I smiled and tried not to mutter ‘please …’ behind my teeth as I bustled to get the fruit out of the fridge and into the blender, squeezing past Julia who was pouring boiling water into teapots. She looked up suddenly and did a wide-eyed stare, then jerked her head at me.

  ‘The boss is in.’

  I set the blender going and, undercover of getting a muffin out from the display case, I looked quickly across the tearoom. The far doors were thrown wide open to the sun and breeze, little tufted seed heads kept drifting in from the distant flower beds, and just outside I could see Josh bringing one of the birds down for the afternoon display in the walled garden. Behind the door stood Edmund, iPad in hand and a slight frown pulling his glasses towards the end of his nose.

  ‘Right. This is worrying.’ I trayed up the smoothie, added a straw and slid it along to the cash register.

  ‘Why? Look how busy we are, Ames … if he wants to change all this and get rid of the cafe, he’d better have a damn good reason.’

  Bane flew from Josh’s glove, spiralled up, and then came in, in a low dive through the watching audience, slicing the sunlight with sudden wings to the sound of applause. I could hear Josh, through his radio mike, explaining that Bane was a Lanner falcon, talking about birds of prey in general, while she hopped on the glove again. He seemed to look a little bit smarter today and I wondered if tidying Josh up was one of Edmund’s projects – we’d already heard from staff about some of the ‘improvement plans’ being put into place, and it seemed that getting Josh out of his rumpled shirts and baggy shorts had been high on the agenda. Today he was wearing black jeans and a charcoal grey shirt, against which Bane’s barred feathers looked like a sketch of light and shade.

  ‘Can I put my PIN in now, or what?’ Smoothie-woman asked me irritably, jerking my gaze back into the cafe. ‘Only you really should be a little bit faster at this, you know. Are you new, or just simple?’

  I smiled a little bit wider and recited ‘customer service, the customer is always right, keep smiling’ like a mantra, as I tapped her card through the machine, resisting the urge to splash strawberry juice over her cashmere top with everything I had.

  ‘Hmm,’ she blew down her nose at me as I handed back the card, my smile growing wider by the second, ‘they really shouldn’t let fat girls work in cafes. It gives such a bad impression of the place.’

  ‘Have a nice day.’ I passed her over the tray. ‘And I hope Bane eats your nose off the second you step outside,’ I finished, once she was well out of earshot. Sometimes I was convinced customers only said things like that to get a reaction, and then a possible free meal as reparation for staff telling them exactly how rude they’d been to their faces. But then, I’d always been good at keeping what I really felt hidden. Trained by Gran from an early age that losing my temper was a waste of time, I’d learned to sublimate any retaliatory urges so well that I’d only said, ‘Oh, bum’, when the bike had sustained its second puncture this month, even though it meant starting for work half an hour early, and having to rush back so I was home as Gran got in from the day centre, hot and sweaty and wishing the Edwardians had learned the value of ventilated costumes.

  ‘Lips and teeth,’ Julia muttered undercover of bringing a trayful of dirty crockery back, ‘here comes Mister Gorgeous.’ She’d affected a nonchalance that was belied by the way she swung her hips, noticeable even through her calf-length black dress with its high collar and fitted sleeves. In Julia’s case, the way the aprons tied behind us enhanced her back view, while they made me look more like a badly organised parcel. ‘Hello, can I help you?’

  ‘Miss Knowles, Miss Neville.’

  Maybe this is it. Maybe this is where he comes out and says what he’s been building up to for the last month and a half. Feeling queasy, I tucked myself carefully behind Julia and tried to look busy; I didn’t like anything I said or did to be noticed. I’d been born to be a backroom girl, why else would nature have given me this sturdily rotund frame? I let Julia be the ‘face’ of the business, while I was the brains of the outfit – the whole Edwardian theme had been my idea, to fit in with the era of the last remodelling of the house, and, despite dooming us to summers of chafing and itching, it worked well. Meanwhile Julia got paid to pout and smile whilst looking like one of those pert maids who seduced the master of the house, and I did the planning and accounts, looking like a funerary urn in an apron.

  ‘An orange crush, please, if I may.’

  Julia thrust bits of herself out so far that she nearly toppled into the Raspberry Crunch and drew the juice from the cooler. Black serge was not the most flattering of fabrics but she managed to make it look sexy and alluring, particularly when she wiped down the nozzle of the machine lovingly, as though imagining Edmund in swimwear whilst doing it. I set the ice to grind and muttered to her over our shoulders under the noise of the ice-crusher.

  ‘You’d better ask him to pay.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we let him have it on the house?’

  I looked at Edmund through the fuzzy mist that the ice machine threw up. His face was pale and narrow, giving him a sort of ‘shuffled together’ look, as though his features were furniture in an overcrowded room. ‘We don’t want to set a precedent. For all we know he’s got an orange juice habit that could bankrupt us,’ I whispered.

  Julia gave me a sideways look. ‘Really? Seriously, Ames? An orange juice habit? That’s as racy as you can come up with, not snorting coke off naked women or designer drugs that make you dance all night then have crazy sex on the roof of a bus?’

  ‘That is because …’ I hissed at her, putting the ice on for another crushing. ‘… we sell orange juice and we don’t sell drugs.’ Then, thinking of Julia’s somewhat feral brothers, ‘Please tell me we don’t sell drugs …’

  At which point, of course, the crusher cut out, leaving my words ringing into the air between our new boss and me. Edmund frowned.

  ‘Three pounds fifty for the orange crush, Mister Evershott, please,’ I said, a bit faintly, but keeping my eyes on his drink in case he might possibly have thought I was charging him for just standing around looking manly.

  ‘Quite right too.’ He handed me the correct change, carefully counted out from a zip-compartmentalised wallet. ‘No favouritism here, ladies.’ He looked around the cafe, gave a small sniff and a sigh which made my heart drum against m
y ribcage again. I couldn’t see where his evident dissatisfaction was coming from. The cafe was full, the baking was all fresh and I hadn’t thrown smoothies down the front of the very rude woman. Short of introducing waitress service – which we hadn’t got the staff for – there weren’t any improvements we could make.

  Then Edmund beckoned to us, so we bent in closer. Here it comes, I thought, and the smell of the buttercream icing made me feel sick; my vision swam for a second. Here is where he ends it all for me. Edmund cleared his throat. ‘By the way, I wonder … could I recruit you two and your very fine catering skills for a little … private party?’

  At first I was flooded with relief. My liberty bodice sank a couple of inches as I relaxed, but then I saw Edmund’s slightly furtive expression. Great. This is where he turns out to be hosting orgies for the entire estate, I thought, then, after a brief moment during which I mentally assessed the membership of the estate in question and their suitability for orgies of any kind, two rounds of ham sandwiches and a couple of oatmeal cookies should do it, then. But at least he hasn’t mentioned closing the cafe down. My insides relaxed a little bit more. Maybe he’s forgotten about that. ‘I’ll let Julia discuss that with you.’

  Wow, that was business-like of you, I thought. I could at least have said something about prices or asked him when it was going to be … but no, I chickened out and passed him straight to Jules, who, if the expression on her face and the wiggle on her Edwardian bum was anything to go by, was milking the situation for all it was worth. And now he was no doubt wondering just what the hell use I was to Monkpark. Probably assessing me as ‘neither use nor ornament’ as one of Gran’s sayings would have it. I rang the money into the till so viciously that the receipt roll started disgorging itself and I had to take the whole thing to pieces, and then serve all the customers who’d built up while I was failing to be assertive at Edmund.

  ‘I might have to do some late work sometime,’ I said to my grandmother as she straightened the curtains that evening. ‘Mister Evershott wants Julia and I to cater for some do he’s having next week.’

  ‘You can’t cook.’ She tweaked the hem again, although it already looked perfectly straight to me. ‘Why is he asking you?’

  ‘I don’t know, Gran, perhaps he thinks I could stand around being decorative,’ I snapped and then blinked slowly, trying to clear the words from my memory, as if my eyelids could work like Etch A Sketch erasers. ‘I mean, we have to keep in his good books because …’ Don’t worry her, don’t give her any reason to start one of her ‘frets’. ‘… because he’s our new boss.’

  Gran snorted. ‘Place has never been the same since Lady Hawton gave it to those Trust people.’ She followed me through to the kitchen. ‘In my day people knew their place. None of this “keeping in good books” rubbish, you did your job and you never stepped over the line, downstairs was downstairs and upstairs was upstairs and … have you been having someone in here?’

  Boiling water, up to where the spout starts … ‘What? No, of course I haven’t, I’ve been at work all day.’

  ‘There’s too much water in that pot, tea’ll be like widdle, and I’m sure someone’s been in this tray, look at the spoons! You been having some man in here while I’m at my club?’

  We kept the fiction between us, running like a story that no one else would ever understand. Gran went to a ‘club’ during the day, for company while I was at work; I couldn’t cook but did ‘little jobs’ around the cafe because the lease of our house only applied while an occupant worked at Monkpark Hall. In her head, she ran the house and allowed me to live there only because I had nowhere else to go. Reality was too bitter for either of us to chew on.

  ‘No, Gran, I haven’t had anyone here.’ I sighed and emptied the teapot down the sink. Once she’d got it in her head that the pot was overfilled, she’d never drink the tea. ‘Besides, who would I have?’

  Oh, I knew everyone who worked at the Hall, obviously. Most of us lived in the village, apart from the ones who drove in every day from town, and a lot of us had grown up together – there wasn’t much alternative employment around here, and because of having to work at the Hall to live in the cottages that remained as yet ungentrified and unholiday-letted. Which meant that anyone of my age was known to be either married, gay or unsuitable through reasons of rampant sexism, racism or very odd attitudes to things. Like artichokes and, in one fairly extreme case, sheep.

  Gran snorted again. ‘Well, someone’s been messing these spoons about.’

  I looked over her shoulder. As far as I could tell, the spoons were lying exactly as they had this morning, neatly aligned and slotted into one another in the tray on the worktop, and I felt that cold grip of horror closing its fist again. What happens next?

  ‘Look, I’ll make another pot of tea, you go and sit down. I’ll put Pointless on for you, shall I?’ I recorded it every day, carefully setting it to play so that Gran could avoid watching the news. She had what I considered an irrational hatred of all news programmes, but then again, she also hated valences, John Cleese and any food with garlic in, so it wasn’t worth arguing.

  ‘You’ll fill the teapot properly this time?’

  ‘Yes, Gran.’

  She smiled. It was a chilly sort of smile, a smile that’s had all the empathy leached out of it from years of hard living and heartbreak, but it was the smiles that kept me going, like stepping stones in a river of angst. ‘You’re a good lass, Amy.’ Her hand was as cold as her smile, but the thought was there, as she patted my arm. ‘We muddle along all right between us, don’t we?’

  I gave her a quick passing hug. Any more and she would have brushed me off, accused me of ‘being soft’. ‘We do, Gran. We do.’ And then I went to boil the kettle and fill the teapot and worry about Edmund’s intentions until acid rose up my throat.

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