by Debbie Young
26 The Comfort of Cake
Fortified by Joshua’s tea and sympathy, I resolved to visit Kitty after all.
I approached the Manor House with more confidence this time. It was fast becoming part of my territory. The tulips in the tubs standing sentry either side of the front door had opened up since my first visit, revealing petals the colour of Sicilian lemons. They reminded me of my aunt’s travels to Dutch bulb fields and Mediterranean citrus groves.
Heartened by the thought of Auntie May and her affection for Kitty and Bunny, I raised the door knocker and gave several sharp raps. A moment later, the door was flung wide with such energy and enthusiasm that I could hardly believe it was Kitty on the other side. She flashed a huge, warm smile that I’d never seen on her before. It made her look like a different person.
“Hello, Sophie,” she beamed. “That’s good timing. I’ve just been enjoying some cakes fresh from the oven. Will you join me?”
I couldn’t help but smile in return. “Thank you, I’d love to. You’re looking very well, by the way.”
She beamed. “The restorative power of unbroken sleep. I’ve been running on empty for years. I didn’t realise the effects of sleep deprivation until Hector recommended a book about sleep. He’s very good, your Hector. I slept like the dead last night, knowing I wouldn’t have to keep getting up and down for Mother. I feel like a new mother whose baby’s just slept through the night for the first time.”
The transformation was certainly remarkable. Not only did she look happier, healthier and younger, she was also speaking much more coherently. I resolved to start getting in some early nights myself, without Hector.
As we padded through to the kitchen, I noticed the bundles of newspapers that had lined the corridor had disappeared. She waved a hand as we passed the radiator, against which now lay a series of cardboard boxes lined with old blankets, each holding at least one sleeping cat.
“As you can see, I’ve been having a declutter while Mother’s not here to prevent me doing it. Goodness knows what she wanted with all those papers, but she’ll have to live without them now. I’ve got so much time on my hands without Mother to look after, and Billy said I should make the most of it and do something useful. He’s been helping me. He set up all those boxes. They’ll help keep the wretched cats out from under my feet.”
The kitchen was also transformed, the surfaces clean and fragrant with pine disinfectant, and the windows were spotless. Even the table was clear, bar a wire mesh cooling rack. A batch of chocolate brownies formed a neat three-by-four array of military neatness, apart from one that Kitty had already eaten. They looked irresistible.
Kitty filled the kettle from the cold tap and set it to boil, then fetched what looked like her best china from a glass-fronted display cabinet at the far end of the room and a jug of milk from the fridge.
“I haven’t baked for ages,” she said cheerfully, putting a paper doily on a large plate and arranging the brownies to radiate out from the centre like petals.
“It looks like you’re good at it.” I wanted to encourage her, not least because it seemed to be making her so happy. I wondered whether we could find room for some of her baking at the shop without upsetting Mrs Wetherley, our usual supplier. No doubt Kitty would welcome the little income it might bring her, and having an outside interest would do her good.
“I can’t get over how well you’re looking. What a transformation. Not that you didn’t look lovely before, of course.”
Fortunately she didn’t mind my backhanded compliment and held up the plate to offer me a brownie.
“I believe sleep deprivation is used as a form of torture in some countries,” I said, having read the blurb on the sleep book in the shop.
I bit into my cake. It was as delicious as it looked.
“Very effective it would be, too,” she said, her mouth full of her second brownie. “Trouble is, Mother sleeps badly and needs help with everything these days, so if she wakes in the night needing the loo, she wakes me too. Her sleeping pills help her a little, but not much.”
I watched Kitty fill my teacup with a steady hand.
“What a good thing you don’t take sleeping pills, so you always hear when she needs you.”
She grimaced. “I can’t say I haven’t been tempted, but there’s a strong disincentive. If I don’t get up to help her in the night, I pay for it in the morning with extra laundry duties. It’s only since she’s been in hospital that I’ve had time to read the book about sleep. Now I’ve discovered all sorts of ways to improve her quality of sleep, as well as mine. Sleep hygiene, they call it. Funny sort of term, don’t you think?”
“A hot bath before bed makes me sleep better.”
“That’s one of the recommendations, funnily enough. What sort of bubble bath do you like?”
This intimacy was growing quickly now. I felt we were regressing to teenagers. Any minute now, we’d be styling each other’s hair and painting our toenails.
“Rose, or anything else floral,” I replied.
I finished the last bite of my brownie and remembered my mission.
“By the way, Kitty, I hope you weren’t upset by me and Paul arguing on your doorstep just now. I didn’t mean to get into a row with him.”
She waved a hand dismissively. “No-one ever does. He’s just like that. Stuart’s the same. Argumentative buggers, the pair of them. Mother says they take after their father. In everything except looks, of course.” She indicated her face. “We all take after Mother in appearance. There are seven of us, you know. She had ten children by three fathers. Three by her first husband have died already. I was my father’s only child.” She beamed again. “He doted on me, which of course wound the rest of them up no end.”
I could imagine. “I’ve met Paul and Stuart. What about the other seven? I heard they’d all moved away.”
Her face fell. “Yes, I never see any of them now. Some of them I never got to know in the first place, as they’d grown up and left home before I was old enough to remember much about them. Three of them are already dead.”
“So awful when a child dies before their parents. That goes against nature.”
She fixed me with a curious stare. “Do you have children, Sophie?”
I shook my head. “I’m only twenty-five. Twenty-six next month.”
She raised her eyebrows. “If you’d started when my mother did, you would have a nine-year-old by now. Too late for me, though. I’ve let my mother down by not providing any grandchildren. She loves babies. Her grandchildren are all adults now.” She reached across the table to squeeze my hand. “Don’t you leave it too late, will you?”
I said nothing, and we sat in silence for a moment.
“Do you have brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews?” she asked.
“I’m afraid not.”
“Poor you. They’re not all bad, you know, siblings. I just wish I was closer to mine. Mother rather screwed things up for me. Edith next door told me Mother didn’t handle her transition from husband to husband well.”
So Joshua’s late wife Edith had been Bunny’s friend too.
“Edith said Mother always made such a fuss of her latest husband that the children from the previous marriage resented their father’s successor.” She shrugged. “But she’d have been silly not to prefer the living one over the dead. She favoured the new husband’s children too.” She refilled our teacups and pressed me to take a second brownie. “So on balance, I’m rather glad she stopped when she got to me.”
She gave a wry smile. Catching up with her sleep, even for only a few days, had softened her complexion. On her, the distinctive long face and aquiline nose of her brothers would once have been extremely pretty.
“Still, when you have such a big family, you can’t all expect to get on like a house on fire, can you?” She pointed to the cake plate. “Maybe I should give them some of these next time they visit. Then they might stop by more often.”
The thought of Paul and St
uart being won over by a plate of home-made cakes struck me as comical, and when I began to giggle, Kitty did too.
“We’ll all be equal in the end,” said Kitty, topping up the teapot and spilling a little from the spout on her way back from the kettle. “Ashes to ashes. Tealeaves to dust. At the end of the day, you can’t take it with you.”
“What, cake?”
We both found my reply so extraordinarily funny that our convulsive giggles brought Billy in from the back garden, stamping loose soil off his Wellingtons on to the doormat.
“What’s got into you two?”
Kitty calmed down enough to fetch another cup and pour him some tea.
“Oh, this and that. Families. Life. Death. Wills.”
The word wills brought me to my senses, or at least nudged me in their general direction.
“Wills?” Billy came to join us at the table. This time there was no need to tip a cat off a chair before sitting down. “What, like where there’s a will there’s a way?”
Kitty gave the top of Billy’s head a playful slap as she set a teacup in front of him. “No, you dunce, like Mother’s will. I know she’s got one, but I’ve never seen it. She never asked me to sign it.”
Billy stirred three teaspoons of sugar into his tea.
“That probably just means you’re a beneficiary. You can’t be a witness to a will if you stand to gain by it.”
“Really? You think she’ll leave me the house? Or at least some money? I’m not so sure after all I put her through in my younger days.” She sobered up a little.
I thought another joke might cheer her up. “She didn’t ask me to sign it either, so she must be leaving something to me too.”
As Kitty and I folded up into giggles again, Billy remained stern.
“I don’t know what you’re so amused about, Kitty Carter. For all you know, she could be leaving everything to the cats’ home.”
With that cold water cast upon our mirth, we quietened down a little. Then Kitty took a big gulp of tea and brightened. “Oh well, who cares. If she leaves it all to the cats’ home, I’ll just opt for that old Indian custom, suttee. Like Mrs Aouda in Around the World in Eighty Days. You know about her, don’t you, Sophie? Your aunt wrote a famous book about suttee, campaigning against it. I’ll just throw myself on Mother’s funeral pyre. I always have liked a nice toasty bonfire.”
Kitty and I creased up in laughter at the thought, while Billy picked up the phone and called Hector to come and take me home.
“But I only live two doors away,” I objected as Hector took my arm to lead me out of Kitty’s kitchen. “You’ve got a bad memory.”
“Thank you, Billy.” Hector’s voice was stern. “Kitty.”
“Kitty’s been telling me all about that lovely sleep book—” I began, but forgot what I was going to say.
Billy winked at Hector. “She’s all yours, boy.”
As Hector led me down the passage to the front door, Kitty was trying to stuff the remaining brownies into a cake tin, while Billy wrestled as many as he could from her and put them in the bin.
“Whatever you do, Bill, don’t put them out for the birds,” Hector called over his shoulder as he closed the front door behind us.
27 Council of War
My eyes still closed, despite the sunshine streaming in through the bedroom curtains, I reached one arm across the duvet to check for any signs of life. Yes, Hector had stayed the night again, but Blossom was nowhere to be seen. The door was closed. He must have shut the poor little thing out of the bedroom for the night. I opened my mouth to protest, then put my hands to my temple.
“Do you know, I think there was something funny about Kitty’s brownies?”
“You don’t say.” He reached over to stroke my cheek, and I opened my eyes just as he sat up and swung his legs on to the floor. “You mean you’ve guessed her secret herbal ingredient? And I’m not talking about catnip.” But there his sympathy ended. “Come on, look lively, or you’ll be late for work.”
I groaned. “Oh no, is it a weekday? I think I’ve got food poisoning.”
He said nothing but ran lightly down the stairs. Hearing the comforting sound of the kettle being filled for breakfast, I went down to join him, at a rather slower pace.
“Still, at least the experience wasn’t wasted,” I said, trying to sound cheerier than I felt as he handed me a slice of buttered toast.
“Wasted is the word.” Hector was doing his best to look disapproving but not making a very good job of it.
“I found out that Kitty has no idea who will inherit from Bunny. She thinks she might be left destitute. Which is sad, but she’s putting a remarkably brave face on it.”
I was glad to have diverted Hector from my embarrassment.
“So who does she think might be in the running?”
I shrugged. “She seemed a bit vague about the whole thing. I think Bunny gets some kind of satisfaction out of keeping them all guessing. But it’s backfired, because they all seem at odds with each other, and with Bunny too.”
“Maybe they’ll all assassinate each other in a race to inherit.” He held his teaspoon in the air to presage a declaration. “And then there were nine.”
“Six, actually,” I said through a mouthful of the best toast I had ever tasted. “Three are already dead.”
“He looks officious,” said Hector as we left my cottage for work.
We stopped half way down the path, and I followed Hector’s gaze. A suited man was just getting out of an unmarked white van outside the Manor House.
“It’s hard not to look officious when you’re carrying a clipboard, but he looks the type who’d seem officious in his pyjamas.”
We lingered by my front gate watching the man pat Bunny’s gatepost as if testing its strength, before pulling out a tape measure to check the height of the tiny step from pavement to path.
“Maybe he’s an estate agent valuing the house for sale,” said Hector. “He seems very thorough.”
“You don’t think he’s one of Paul’s men starting work on the place already? Talk about jumping the gun!”
Another man in a suit emerged from the driver’s side of the van, wielding a large camera with a fancy lens.
“Perhaps we should ask?” I said. “Or at least check their credentials? They could be tricksters, about to swindle Kitty out of lots of money for tarmacking her drive or replacing a missing roof tile.”
“They certainly don’t look like Paul’s men. I’ve seen them in action at The Bluebird. A couple of his workers were leaving the pub after work yesterday, and I’ve never seen anyone wearing so many copies of the same logo in my life. Even their tools were branded, and his vans are liveried too. I know publicity is helpful for winning new business, but his is completely over the top.”
I chewed my lip. “Maybe he’s making a point about his surname, having been traumatised by his mother’s speedy remarriage when he was a little boy, without giving him time to grieve for his late father. Her abandoning his surname might feel like a betrayal – a partial abandonment of himself.”
“You’ve been spending too much time in our psychology section, Sophie.” Hector, as ever, had a more practical interpretation of events. “He might just be worried about people pinching his stuff. Or about his staff misbehaving behind his back. If they’re all wearing company t-shirts, they’ll never get away with any mischief. Perhaps I should do the same for my shop staff.” He patted my bottom to move me along and turned in the direction of the strangers. “Come on, there’s only one way to find out.”
Refusing to be herded like cattle, I stayed where I was and let him address the strangers without me.
“As a friend of the householder, might I ask what you’re doing here?” he said to the officious looking man.
“You can ask,” replied the man, writing something on his clipboard.
“Council inspectors,” said the driver, coming to join them.
“Inspecting what, exactly?”
; The two strangers exchanged glances. “There’s a limit to what I can tell you. What exactly is your relationship to the householder here?”
“I’m the owner’s great-nephew,” said Hector, so stoutly that even I almost believed him.
“Then I can advise you we have been despatched to check the suitability of her property prior to her discharge from hospital.”
“Will you be going inside?”
“Of course.”
“Have you made an appointment?”
“With Mrs Carter?”
“With her daughter Kitty, who is also her carer.”
“We were told she lived alone.”
“Then you were told wrong. Who by?”
“By her daughter.” The man looked at his clipboard. “A Mrs Lot.”
“I don’t think so.”
The council inspector shrugged. Meanwhile, his colleague produced some kind of laser device with which he appeared to check the gradient of the slope from front gate to porch.
“Well, now you know who we are, you’re welcome to discuss any further problems or queries with the hospital.”
“Thank you, I shall.”
Hector turned abruptly and marched back to my gate. I could tell from his brisk walk that he was not best pleased. I hastened my pace to keep up with him.
“That Mrs Lot is nothing but trouble,” he said. “I’m going to phone the council when we get to the shop and grass her up as a fraud.”
“Don’t forget you also claimed to be Bunny’s relative,” I reminded him, and he frowned.
When we reached the bookshop, Hector immediately became immersed in a meeting with a visiting rep from a travel guide company eager to install a branded display unit, so I decided to phone the hospital myself.
“And you are?” asked the nurse pleasantly.
“Mrs Carter’s great-nephew’s other half.” I spoke quickly before my nerve could fail me. I don’t know what it was about this case that was turning us all into serial liars. Fortunately, the nurse seemed to be the one that Hector had chatted up the previous Sunday.