2008 - Recipes for Cherubs

by Babs Horton

  As soon as breakfast had been served there would be even more work to do. Gladys, the cook, would be up to her eyes in the kitchen. There was luncheon to prepare and after that she would be making potted shrimps, scones and cakes ready for afternoon teas.

  Ella must check that the chambermaids had cleaned the bedrooms; the newly starched sheets must be properly turned back, fresh flowers arranged in vases on the side tables. The windows had to be opened to air the rooms and fires laid in case of a sudden chill in the evenings.

  That was the thing the guests loved about Shrimp’s, the old-fashioned hospitality, the fact that nothing was ever too much trouble.

  There were several new guests arriving tonight for the summer ball and she must let Halloran know what time their train was arriving. She rummaged in her pocket for the guest list, but where had she put it?

  Ella climbed slowly down the attic stairs and paused on the landing to pick up a discarded patent leather shoe. She saw a mouse scurrying into the airing cupboard. There seemed to be a plague of them this summer. She must remind Halloran to put out some more traps; the little devils must be getting in through the cellar again. She didn’t want her guests upset by mice.

  Ella made her way through into Alice’s room and gazed around. The fire was already laid and Alice’s book lay on the chair just as she had left it. She stood for a moment looking at a painting on the wall, a very good copy of that Italian fellow’s famous masterpiece, Woman and Child.

  It used to hang in the old nursery in Kilvenny Castle when she and Alice were children, and Alice had insisted on bringing it up here to Shrimp’s when they moved. Alice had loved that painting and used to blow kisses to the woman each night before she went to sleep. Ella put up her hand and touched the woman’s cheek, then turned away hastily.

  She climbed stiffly down the main staircase and paused midway, looking down into the hall. The grandfather clock had wound down for the second time this week. Whatever was the matter with Alice? She must have words with her because it was one of her jobs to wind the clocks. The guests liked to hear the old grandfather clock marking out their hours of leisure.

  She wandered into the dining room to check that everything was ready, and rut-tutted with irritation. The silver cruets hadn’t been polished to her satisfaction and in a pot, mustard had congealed to a sticky blob. That wouldn’t do at all. The standards at Shrimp’s had to be impeccable: attention to detail and thoroughness were what they were known for.

  In the hallway she stood in front of the gilt mirror and frowned. What was going on here? The mirror needed a damned good clean – why, she could write her name in the grime. She would not tolerate this kind of sloppiness and she would give Alice the sharp edge of her tongue when she caught up with her: she was too slipshod about her chores these days. Where in God’s name was Alice this morning? She had been most odd of late, disappearing for hours on end.

  Ella looked at her reflection in the tarnished mirror. One day soon she really must venture down to the village and get her hair cut; it was far too long for this hot weather. She turned away from the mirror and looked with dismay at the enormous pile of post on the doormat. She picked up a letter whose handwriting looked a little familiar, then tossed it back on to the pile. There was no time for reading the post now. She checked her wristwatch. Goodness, look at the time. She must make sure that the kitchen staff were getting on with the breakfast. Then, when all was as it should be, she would sound the gong and another busy day would begin at Shrimp’s Hotel.

  3

  Sister Matilde hurried through the crowds on Paddington station clutching the hand of a young girl. As they ran, the nun’s grey habit swirled in the draught and her face grew red, beads of perspiration forming at the point where her wimple met her creased forehead. She was too old to be chasing up and down railway platforms but she was always given this job at the end of every term because she was the only one of the convent sisters who had the confidence to drive the battered old Austin through London. London traffic held no fears for Sister Matilde; in another life she’d driven in Paris and Naples and had nerves of steel.

  She’d made two separate trips already today, had seen seven girls off on their trains and now she was running late. She had to get this last child safely off, and then if time were on her side she might get to see the art exhibition at the Royal Academy and still make it back to the convent in time for Benediction.

  An announcement drew nun and girl to a sudden halt.

  “We regret to announce that the four-fifteen train to Swansea is ten minutes late.”

  “Damn. Here am I working myself up into a lather and the train is delayed,” said Sister Matilde.

  Catrin Grieve looked up at her and smiled shyly. Sister Matilde was her favourite of all the nuns at school. There were lots of rumours about Sister Matilde, that she had been a professor or maybe it was an artist before she had become a nun. The older girls said she’d had a failed romance with a duke and that’s why she’d taken the veil and come to St Agnes’s. She was very clever, could speak French and Italian, play the piano and the organ, and knew everything in the world about art and books. And yet she was forgetful, too. She could never remember anyone’s name for more than five minutes, so she was likely to call you anything. She was also a little bit mad. On the last day of term, when she was supposed to be playing the school out to ‘God Save the Pope’ she’d played ‘Paddy McGinty’s Goat’ by accident. It was hilarious. All the nuns twittered with horror and the girls hugged themselves, desperate not to laugh. Sometimes clever people were like that because their brains overheated and that made them do peculiar things.

  “Do you have the piece of paper with the telephone number of the place where you’re staying, Cynthia?”

  “I’m Catrin, Sister, not Cynthia, and yes, it’s in my purse.” she replied for the tenth time since they had left school.

  Sister Matilde looked down at the girl, reached out to push a stray curl under the brim of her boater.

  Cynthia, Celia, whatever her name was, had lost such a lot of weight during the last term that there was hardly anything left of her. There was something not right at all with this child. She used to be such a lively, bonny girl, full of vim and vigour, but she’d lost her sparkle of late. And as for that dope-brained mother of hers, she could do with her face slapping. It was bad enough that the girl had no father; the least the mother could do was be around for her in the holidays. And yet she’d telephoned a few days back, saying that Catrin would be going to stay with some old aunts for the whole summer holiday.

  Old aunts indeed. The girl needed to be with her mother. Girls of this age needed to fight with their mothers, lock horns, sulk and then make up again. It was part of growing up, for God’s sake. It was shameful the way some parents acted towards their children. It was one thing to choose a boarding-school education but quite another to try and offload them in the holidays when there was no need. No need at all in this case, because there didn’t seem to be any shortage of money. Hadn’t Sister Lucy said that they lived in a grand house in one of those elegant London squares? Too much money and not enough sense, probably. The mother hadn’t even had the decency to visit Catrin and explain the new arrangements for the holidays; she’d just sent a taxicab to deliver the train tickets and a suitcase full of expensive clothes which, according to Sister Lucy, were all two sizes too big.

  As far as Sister Matilde was concerned, the woman was a well-to-do floozy. One of those hair-brained women out dancing until all hours of the night and throwing cocktails down her silly neck. Or else gallivanting about the Continent with unsuitable men in tow. She’d bet she was the type to flaunt herself in those new-fangled bikini articles that were all the rage, along with mini-skirts and the other ridiculous paraphernalia that was creeping in.

  “Be sure to say your prayers every night and find a Catholic church as soon as you can so that you can go to mass every Sunday. I expect those aunts of yours are good Catholics?”

 
“I don’t know, Sister, I’ve never met them.”

  “You’ve never met them?” Sister Matilde was horrified.

  “No, Sister. I didn’t even know they existed until a few days ago. I didn’t realise I had any family apart from my mother.”

  Sister Matilde frowned down at the girl’s worried face.

  “Well, well, I’m sure they’ll be lovely people, and it’ll be good for them to have a youngster around the house.”

  “I’m not staying in a house, Sister, it’s a hotel.”

  “And what, pray, is the name of this hotel, Cecilia?”

  “It’s called Shrimp’s Hotel, Sister, and it’s near a place called Kilvenny in Wales.”

  Sister Matilde stared at the girl before her without really seeing her.

  She caught hold of her rosary and held it tightly. Sweet Jesus.

  Sister Matilde had hoped fervently that she’d never hear that place mentioned again. She wiped a bead of perspiration from her brow.

  “Tell me your name again, child.”

  “Catrin. Catrin Grieve.”

  Sister Matilde closed her eyes, felt her heart beating erratically, her stomach twisting into a painful coil.

  For a moment she was back in Kilvenny, hearing the sea crashing against the rocks below the hotel gardens, a swing creaking in the wind. The cry of rooks rising up from the tower of the castle, and the first touch of warm lips upon her own.

  Dear God in heaven, can I never be allowed to forget?

  “The train now standing at platform one is the four fifteen, London Paddington to Swansea.”

  Sister Matilde straightened up and put all unpleasant thoughts from her mind.

  “Come on, let’s find you a seat. Remember, now, make sure that you eat well during the holidays. I want to see you hale and hearty when you come back to us in September.”

  “Yes, Sister.”

  Sister Matilde climbed on to the train and settled the girl in an empty compartment. She lifted the suitcase on to the luggage rack and handed Catrin a brown paper bag which contained some food for the journey. She smiled, thinking that the meagre rations of convent food would be the last tedious meal that Catrin Grieve would eat all summer. Whatever unpleasant connotations Shrimp’s Hotel had for Sister Matilde, the food there had been exquisite. Thinking of the small earthenware ramekins of potted shrimps and the homemade brown bread made her stomach rumble. Squab pie and sticky almond pudding. Hopefully Catrin Grieve would renew her appetite and put on a few pounds over the summer – she sorely needed to.

  She leant towards Catrin, touched her gently on the forehead, then slipped her hand into the pocket of her habit and absentmindedly took out one of her holy pictures and put it into Catrin’s blazer pocket.

  “God bless you and keep you safe.”

  “Thank you, Sister.”

  Then Sister Matilde got off the train just as the guard blew his whistle.

  She stood watching the train pull slowly away from the station.

  Catrin waved to Sister Matilde, who looked at her through the window. She had taken off her boater and for a moment her face, framed by a halo of unruly curls, was bathed in a shaft of light, softly illuminating her small features. It was a curious moment of deja vu. Somewhere, a long time ago, a face just like this one had looked at her…

  During the return drive to school, the nun had a terrible feeling of foreboding – and that feeling was to remain with her for a long time.

  4

  In the doorway of the Café Romana, Tony Agosti lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply, pulling up the collar of his jacket, for the night had turned suddenly chilly.

  Every night before he locked up the café he loved to stand outside listening to the rhythmic lapping of the waves down on the beach and the first tentative calling of owls over in Gwartney’s Wood. He breathed in the familiar smell of the wild garlic and nettles that grew in profusion alongside the creek. There was a whiff of pungent herbs from the castle’s kitchen garden, and the sweet night fragrance of roses.

  Hell, he was going to miss this place if he was forced to sell up and move away. But things were looking dire at the moment; the takings were rock bottom again this week and he couldn’t carry on like this for much longer. There was no way he could survive selling half a dozen meat pies and a few ice-cream sundaes. It would be for the best if he bit the bullet and broke the bad news to Norma sooner rather than later.

  If only it were that easy, eh? How did you tell your ancient grandmother that everything she and her late husband had worked for was about to go down the pan? How could he tell her that one day soon he’d have to uproot her and move away from Kilvenny, although God knows where they’d go?

  Sweet Jesus, his grandfather would turn in his grave if he knew how tough life had become here. Luigi Agosti had walked all the way through Italy and France and got on a ship which had brought him to Wales. He’d worked in the docks in Swansea and then somehow or other he’d made his way out here to Kilvenny and put down roots. At first he’d worked all hours at the herring smokehouse further along the coast, scrimped and saved until he had enough money to open the Café Romana, where he soon built up a thriving trade. The café had been busy from morning till night. Work used to start at dawn making tea and toast for the early shift workers waiting for the boneshaker bus that took them to the herring smokehouse. He missed the smell of fish that used to fill the air when the breeze was in the right direction, but now the crumbling remains were all that was left and the bus had long since been sent to the knacker’s yard.

  Later in the day, the women of the village used to venture out to Bryn Jones’s shop, then on to Watkins the Butcher’s, finishing up in the Café Romana for the daily dose of gossip and tea with side orders of ice creams and Welsh cakes. In the night the teenagers came, sloping down from the farms, smoking filched Woodbines, spitting and talking too loud, on the lookout for a pretty girl and to buy a soda or a chocolate nut sundae.

  His reminiscing was interrupted by the distant sound of the late train chugging sluggishly towards Kilvenny station. The locals euphemistically called it the Tate train’ as though there were early trains and lunchtime trains and not just this train which came once a week to Kilvenny and rarely stopped unless you asked the guard first. It was all the talk that next year the line would close for good and Kilvenny would lose its last link with civilisation and sink further into isolation and decay.

  He watched the steam from the engine rise into the night sky and drift above the one remaining tower of Kilvenny Castle.

  He strained his ears, heard the train creak to a halt, a carriage door slamming and then the train moving off again, building up a head of steam as it clattered on round the coast.

  He wondered who could be arriving in Kilvenny at this time of night, for as far as he knew no one had travelled out recently and few visitors ever made their way here except by accident.

  He stepped out of the doorway and looked towards the bend in the road where whoever had arrived on the train would surely appear soon. Ten minutes passed and no one came, which was odd because there wasn’t anywhere for miles if one turned left instead of right out of the station.

  Unless…unless whoever had arrived had decided to walk down to the village through Gwartney’s Wood for old time’s sake.

  He put his hand in his jacket pocket and felt for the dog-eared postcard he’d kept there all this time. A frisson of excitement made his heart beat erratically and he shivered with anticipation.

  He screwed up his eyes waiting for someone to appear. First there would be the sound of whistling and the telltale smell of a foreign cigarette on the night air. Then suddenly they would step into the pool of light from the crooked gas lamp. But no one came.

  He pushed open the café door and the bell above it tinkled gaily. He looked round sadly at the faded posters on the walls and the battered boater that he’d worn that summer long ago. There too was the little statuette of St Joseph of Arimathea, the patron saint of foundlings,
in his niche; a poignant reminder of his grandfather’s childhood in Italy.

  He climbed the narrow stairs with a heavy heart. Before he went to bed he’d check on Nonna, and if she were still awake then he’d break the news to her gently.

  Nonna lay asleep in the big bed; her silver hair undone from her braids was spread out over the starched white pillow like a frozen river in the moonlit room. Even in sleep she clasped her rosary tightly, the pink beads pale against the dark skin of her old hands. The room smelled as it always did, of lavender and coffee dregs, of the orange-blossom scent one of Nonna’s nieces sent each birthday from Italy.

  Nonna stirred in her sleep, moaned softly, reaching out across the bed as though she were expecting to find her husband still lying there beside her although he’d been dead and buried these fourteen years.

  Tony backed out of the room, covering his mouth with his fist to stifle a rising sob. Tonight he would let her sleep peacefully but one day soon, unless a miracle happened, he would have to break the bad news to her.

  5

  It was dark when the train pulled in to Kilvenny. Catrin stepped awkwardly down from the carriage, set down her heavy brown suitcase and looked around fearfully. She was the only person who had got off the train and there wasn’t another soul in sight.

  The station was the smallest she had ever seen, lit by one old-fashioned gas lamp whose meagre light spread gloom and despondency across the weed-clogged platform. There was a ramshackle waiting room which looked as if it would collapse like a house of cards under the first rough breeze.

  The train whistled, belched out a cloud of writhing steam and moved slowly away, abandoning her to the misty dark.

  She stretched her arms above her head and yawned. Any minute now Aunt Alice and Aunt Ella would dash out from the shadows to meet her for the first time. They would fuss and kiss and hug and do all the other rubbishy stuff that aunts were supposed to do.