Four slices of ham, and plenty of food for thought.
Chapter Seven
As Lizzie stands outside the caravan door in the cold morning air, a little black-and-white dog trots towards her, tail wagging. He’s about the same size as Jones, a mix of sheepdog and something smaller.
‘Hi there, Dumbledore; I’m still here. Have you come to tell me breakfast is ready?’ She bends down and pats his head, and his tongue darts up to her fingers. ‘I’ve got a pal for you to meet later.’ Two nights in the caravan, and she still hasn’t come clean about Jones. She’ll have to confess this morning, and hope to God he’ll be allowed to stay – and that he’ll get on with Dumbledore.
Lizzie straightens up and looks towards the house. Whitewashed walls, like in front, and red windowsills; three windows on the first floor and one long one underneath, looking into the big kitchen where Angela serves breakfast.
She breathes in the salty air and glances around the garden. It could do with a bit of attention. Half a dozen overgrown shrubs down one side, a tangle of weeds pushing up in the narrow flowerbed, some bedraggled plants that she can’t identify near the house . . . Daddy would have a field day here. The wooden tubs of snowdrops outside the back door are nice, though.
Her stomach rumbles. She imagines the breakfast Angela is about to dish up and starts towards the house. Dumbledore races past her and waits at the back door, tail wagging. ‘I’m coming, I’m coming.’
The door opens just as she reaches it. Angela is holding a tea towel and wearing an apron that says ‘Kiss the Cook’. Lizzie can smell bacon and coffee.
‘Good morning, Lizzie. Down, Dumbledore.’ She bends and scratches his head. ‘He’s spoilt rotten, aren’t you?’ Then she straightens up. ‘I hope you slept OK – it was real cold again last night, wasn’t it?’
Lizzie follows her in. ‘I slept like a log; must be the sea air. And that duvet is fantastic – I was really cosy.’ Mammy doesn’t believe in duvets; far too light to have any heat in them. ‘And I love that I can hear the sea from my bed.’ When she woke, she pushed open the little window above her head and lay listening to the rattle of the waves on the pebbles till hunger forced her up.
Angela’s kitchen has sunny deep-yellow walls, units painted in washed-out blue, a cream-coloured giant cooker and washing machine and dishwasher. It has a bare wooden floor, like the restaurant’s; a big oval table sits on a yellow rug in the middle of the room, surrounded by mismatched kitchen chairs with cushions on them. Against the far wall is a dark-blue couch, turned slightly towards a worktop with a little portable TV sitting on it. The room is full of light from the big window looking out beyond the garden to the sea.
Something on the windowsill catches Lizzie’s eye; she didn’t spot it yesterday. ‘Hey, that’s like the clown in the restaurant.’ It’s a little wooden woman in a cook’s hat and apron, holding a ladle in one hand and a saucepan in the other, and beaming.
Angela is nodding. ‘Yeah, both made by Joe – our very talented woodcarver. If you hang around Merway a while you’ll meet him; he has a shop down the street.’ She gestures to the table. ‘Grab a chair. No cereal, right?’
‘Right.’ No more bowls of anything in the morning for Lizzie. The table is set for just one. ‘Have the Americans left already?’ They’d all eaten together the morning before.
Angela puts a glass of juice in front of her, and Lizzie can see the remains of the grapefruit and orange halves on the worktop. ‘Yeah, they’re gone about half an hour – heading up to Donegal. We can move you in later, if you’ve decided to stay on.’ Lizzie nods; she still hasn’t asked if she can stay in the caravan. ‘Here we go; mind the plate – it’s hot.’
Two fat sausages, a rasher, a soft poached egg sitting on a chunky slice of toast, half a grilled tomato, and – Lizzie smiles – not a white pudding in sight. Yesterday the egg was scrambled, but otherwise it’s the same.
‘That looks gorgeous. Thanks, Angela.’ She takes a sip of the juice; the tart, fruity taste fills her mouth. ‘Don’t mind me, if you’ve anything to do.’
Angela places a basket of thick brown toast on the table beside a plate of what look like freshly baked scones. ‘Ah no, you’re fine. Dee’s still in bed, making the most of the holidays, so you’re not last up.’ She brings over a jug of coffee and fills Lizzie’s cup. ‘Shout if I’ve forgotten anything.’ A bowl of brown sugar sits in front of Lizzie, and little dishes of blackcurrant jam and chunky marmalade.
Angela goes to the dishwasher and starts unloading it. ‘Mornings are fairly quiet here, especially at this time of year. I just tip around for the day, really, till it’s time to start the evening meals.’
Lizzie spears a chunk of sausage. ‘You don’t open for lunch?’
Angela shakes her head. ‘Not in winter – just the evening meal, from about half five onwards. In summer I open for a couple of hours in the middle of the day for salads and sandwiches. Merway’s on the tourist trail, so we can get quite busy at the height of the season.’ She takes a stack of plates over to a press.
Lizzie pours milk into her coffee. ‘You seem to have it well organised. It’s still a lot of work for yourself and Dee, though – I presume she’s still at school.’
Angela goes back to the dishwasher and starts taking out cups. ‘Yeah, she’s doing her Junior Cert this year; she gets the bus to the Comprehensive in Seapoint every morning. We manage between us in the winter, when it’s just the dinners, but I take on a local woman in the summer. Dee – she’s really Deirdre, I call her Dee – is fifteen next week; she needs a bit of freedom in the holidays, to be off with her pals.’ She looks over at Lizzie. ‘Are you all right for everything there?’
Lizzie nods. ‘Fine, thanks.’ She splits a scone and spreads it with butter, pushing away the guilt; she’ll skip lunch again. ‘Have you had the business long?’ It’s the first time she’s been able to chat to Angela properly.
Angela pauses, hands full of cups. ‘Let’s see now, it’ll be two years in March – I started it when my husband left me.’
She says it so bluntly, Lizzie immediately feels as if she’s been prying. She puts down her fork. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean –’
Angela starts to stack the cups in the press. ‘Don’t worry; there’s no secret about it. He walked out one day, after telling me he’d been having an affair with a lassie down the road for six months and now they wanted to move away together. I let him go – what else could I do? – and a couple of months later I was serving up my first meal.’
She turns and faces Lizzie, and her expression is perfectly calm. ‘We had this place already – we’d been running it together as a video shop, but it was always his baby, really.’
She comes over to the table, fills a cup from the coffee jug and sits across from Lizzie. ‘So when he upped and moved, I sold the stock to the video shop in Seapoint and went back to doing what I knew best – cooking. I trained as a chef before we got married; I always loved rustling up a meal for a crowd. And there was no restaurant here – except in the hotel, and that one’s not great. People had to go to Seapoint for a decent meal out.’
Lizzie is struck by her openness – no pussyfooting around. She’s willing to bet that Angela doesn’t set too much store by what other people think. Remembering Mammy’s dread of upsetting the neighbours, Lizzie smiles.
Angela adds milk to her coffee and stirs it. ‘My pals were great – I got loads of help with the decorating; everyone just pitched in. I went into a fair bit of debt for the new appliances’ – she gestures round the kitchen, and then grins – ‘but the bank manager is married to a cousin of mine, so he gave me a year before I had to start repaying. After I opened, everyone around here came in droves – they’re good like that.’
Lizzie is looking across at her in wonder. ‘Your marriage broke up, and you turned around, with a teenage daughter to look after, and started a business from scratch.’ She tries not to compare their achievements – or lack of them, in her case; tries not to t
hink about how little she’s got to show.
Angela shrugs, looking down into her coffee. ‘Yeah, I suppose it was some achievement, all right. We had the mother of all hooleys on the opening night – dinner on the house for all the helpers, and my parents arrived with a few bottles of champagne. Dee was roped in as my kitchen skivvy – but she didn’t mind; she’s great. My mother moved in here for the first month, as well, to get things up and running. Poor old Dad was left to his own devices.’
She picks up her cup and sips. ‘Mind you, it was bloody hard work; I might be making it sound easy now, but let me tell you, I cried myself to sleep many a night – I was sure that I was taking on too much, that I hadn’t a hope in hell of making it work . . .’
She puts her head to one side. ‘You know, I’m not sure what kept me going, really. Maybe I felt I had something to prove – I know I was determined that I wouldn’t let John ruin me. And, of course, I had to keep going for Dee.’
She smiles again, looking off into the distance. ‘I know I could have found a dozen easier ways to make ends meet; but my mother always told me I was a stubborn little thing, and she was right. I got it into my head that I’d open a restaurant, and by God I was determined. Nothing was going to stop me.’
Lizzie opens her mouth to speak, then closes it again, not sure what she wants to say. Then she opens it again: she’ll say what’s on her mind. It’s high time she started doing that.
‘I wish I had your determination. I’ve been dreaming about a career in baking since I left school over twenty years ago.’
Angela looks back at her, intrigued. ‘Have you really? Did you ever try and get a job in a bakery?’
Lizzie shrugs, beginning to be sorry she brought it up. ‘I made a half-hearted attempt, and when that got me nowhere, I gave up. I got a summer job in a restaurant the year I left school, and . . . I just stayed on there.’
Angela is silent for a second. Then she says slowly, ‘You had a summer job for twenty years?’
Lizzie nods. ‘And for eleven of them I was engaged to someone I didn’t love.’ The words pop out of nowhere. As she hears them, she feels something bubbling up inside her; a giggle escapes.
She looks over at Angela and sees her trying desperately to control a twitch in one corner of her mouth. Their eyes meet and they both burst out laughing. As the full absurdity of Lizzie’s confession sinks in, they roar and guffaw and slap the table in merriment.
After a minute, Angela gasps, ‘Dear God – you’d get into the – Guinness Book of Records – no problem; I must see if – they’re in the phone book.’
Lizzie is off again, holding her sides and trying to breathe. ‘Stop – I’m going to rupture something . . .’ She tries to control the laughter, but it keeps bubbling up and flowing out of her – and, with it, all the loneliness and frustration of the past. She feels like she’s sliding out of something heavy and clammy and skipping away, lighter and happier.
Finally Angela wipes her eyes with her sleeve. ‘God, I needed that. I haven’t had a good laugh in ages.’ She looks over at Lizzie, who’s still giggling quietly. ‘Did your poor fiancé have any idea you wanted to be a baker?’
Lizzie nods, feeling the laughter ebb out of her as she hears Tony telling her that it was one thing being able to bake, and quite another knowing how to run a business. Angela would have shoved his patronising opinions down his throat; why the heck hadn’t she?
She picks up her coffee cup. ‘He wasn’t very supportive. Wanted to keep me as a waitress – it was his family restaurant I worked in.’
‘Ah, it’s all becoming clear.’ Angela nods. ‘So you’re making a fresh start now, like I did.’
‘God, yeah . . . I suppose I am doing the same thing you did.’ It hadn’t occurred to Lizzie how similar their situations were. Each of them had come to a point in her life where radical change was called for – even if they’d come to that point from very different positions. And if Angela could turn her life around, with a young daughter to cope with too . . .
Lizzie thinks about Deirdre, having her whole life changed at a time when she’d have been pretty fragile, just starting into her teens. ‘Deirdre must have found it tough, when your husband left.’
Angela nods. ‘Yeah, she was very upset at the time; but I have to say that John’s been pretty good about keeping in contact with her. They’re always on the phone – he got her a mobile soon after he moved out, probably so he wouldn’t have to talk to me when he rang her – and every few weeks he comes and takes her out to Seapoint for the day and spoils her rotten. She’s coped very well with the break-up, poor old thing. And she’s a great help to me – I’d never manage without her.’
She glances up at the clock on the wall and stands. ‘Right, enough of all this chit-chat. I’ll go up now and change those sheets, and you can get started on your packing after your breakfast.’
Lizzie takes a deep breath: now or never. ‘Actually, Angela –’ How to put this without sounding like a lunatic ‘– I know it might seem a bit strange, but – well, the caravan is the first place I’ve had all to myself – and I really don’t find it a bit cramped; and it’s not cold at all – the gas fire is brilliant – and I’m sleeping like a log out there, honest . . .’ She’s babbling; Get to the point. ‘So I’d really like to stay out there instead of coming in here, if that would be OK.’
Then she stops and waits. Please say yes. Please say yes.
Angela turns with her hand on the doorknob and stares back at Lizzie. ‘Are you telling me that you’d rather live in a teeny little caravan by yourself, in the middle of winter, than in a nice warm house with a charming woman and her equally charming daughter?’
But she’s smiling. Lizzie takes heart from that and plunges on. ‘Well, when you put it that way . . . But, Angela, honest to God, I love the little caravan. It’s like my very first flat, where I can come and go as I please, and not be answerable to anyone, and not have to be in at six for dinner every evening, and not have to explain why I’ll be gone all afternoon tomorrow . . .’ Babbling again; Shut up, Lizzie.
‘Well, I suppose if you’d really like to try it . . .’ Angela looks highly amused, and with a surge of relief Lizzie realises that she’s going to agree.
She beams. ‘Oh, great – thanks a million. You can work out a weekly rate – whatever you think is fair; and if you’d prefer me to eat in the restaurant, rather than in the caravan, that’s fine.’ She had the vegetarian lasagne yesterday evening, and wasn’t disappointed – but it might be nice to do her own thing sometimes, too.
Angela shakes her head, still amused. ‘Actually, I don’t mind a bit where you eat – good luck trying to produce anything fancy on that teensy cooker, though. No, you suit yourself – we can make it totally self-catering, if that’s what you want. It might have to be a casual arrangement, though, if you know what I mean; I’m not sure the Bord Fáilte people would understand.’
‘Fine.’ Lizzie nods, delighted. If Angela told her she’d have to have her breakfast up a tree with Jones, she’d agree.
Jones. Oh, God, she’d better come clean about Jones.
She stands and picks up her empty plate and cup. ‘There’s one other thing.’ God, I hope this doesn’t scupper all my plans.
‘Stop.’ Angela grins and puts her hands over her ears. ‘I don’t think I can take any more surprises this morning.’
Lizzie smiles apologetically. ‘It’s just that I have a cat. He’s in the caravan right now. I meant to tell you the first night, but I forgot . . . He’s house-trained, though, and no trouble really; I have a litter tray . . .’ She trails off, waiting nervously.
To her dismay, a horrified expression appears on Angela’s face. ‘A cat? Oh, no – sorry, Lizzie.’ She shakes her head firmly. ‘Absolutely no way; I’m highly allergic. You’ll have to get rid of it, or leave, straightaway. Sorry, out of the question.’
Lizzie can’t believe it. Just when she thought she’d found a home she could be happy in, it’s abo
ut to be snatched away. Serve her right for not confessing the first night. Her heart sinks, but she nods. ‘Right – sorry . . . I’ll go and –’
‘Lizzie.’
She looks back.
‘Just kidding.’ Angela’s grinning widely. ‘Actually, Dee loves cats; she’ll be thrilled. I’ll send her down to you when she gets up, to check him out. Mind you, I’m not so sure how Dumbledore feels about them, but we’ll get around him.’
Lizzie feels a surge of relief. She smiles back at Angela. ‘Phew – thanks again. And I promise I’ve nothing else hidden up my sleeve; that’s it.’ She puts her crockery into the dishwasher.
Angela opens the door into the hall. ‘Right, then; see you later. You can decide yourself whether you want to eat in the restaurant, or’ – she smirks – ‘in your caravan. And we’ll sort out the money side later, too; I’ll do a few sums.’
She goes out the door, leaving Lizzie standing in the kitchen pinching herself.
Two days since she left Kilmorris, and already she’s found a place for herself and Jones to live. What’s more, she’s by the sea, just like she wanted. And Angela seems lovely.
Not bad for a start. She crunches happily over the gravel back to her caravan.
Chapter Eight
The days pass; Lizzie fills them with wrapped-up walks along the beach, and her book and her crosswords, and dipping into the shops, and driving into Seapoint to the pictures, and planning her meals, and writing the odd letter home, and being hauled into the kitchen now and again for coffee and a chat with Angela.
She’s starting to meet people. The elderly man who was eating alone in the restaurant on her first night turns out to be an artist; she sees him every time she walks along the beach. He stands before a rickety-looking easel on the lawn of a house just up from the pebbles, and he waves whenever Lizzie passes. She’s dying to have a look at what he’s doing, but she’s shy about approaching him. Maybe she’ll meet him in the supermarket and get chatting. She wonders if he ever paints anything but the sea.
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