‘About as much as me, I’m afraid,’ Erica answered for her. ‘So you’ve got your work cut out.’
‘It’s much easier than you might think,’ Cathy said to Tansy. ‘You’ll pick it up in no time.’
Tansy gave the distinct impression that all she wanted to pick up was her pace as she left the building, but she said nothing and, as Erica gave her yet another warning look, smoothed her expression into something that – if not friendly – at least now didn’t look as if she wanted to kill everyone in the room.
Cathy let a few more minutes pass. It meant the lesson would start a little late, but she didn’t mind that because she wanted to make certain nobody else was due to come before she started. The last thing she wanted was to keep explaining the beginning bit over and over again for new arrivals – not only would she find it frustrating but it would annoy the other participants too.
As she checked a few things off with Iris everyone chatted, those who knew each other already catching up and those who didn’t getting to know the others. All apart from Tansy, who stood next to Erica with a scowl that could have been set in stone. Why had Erica brought someone who so clearly didn’t want to be there?
Cathy’s nerves had settled more and more as everyone arrived, but now that the session was about to begin they were back with a vengeance. She looked up at the clock to see it was five past the hour, and then once more at the doorway, before deciding that if she didn’t make a start she was going to pass out with fear. If anyone else turned up now they’d just have to catch up as best they could.
Eleven
Iris had offered to stay behind to help Cathy clean St Cuthbert’s kitchen, and then Dora had offered too; Cathy had to laugh because it was clear from her face that Iris didn’t know whether to be grateful or annoyed. But Cathy was grateful because the vicar had stipulated that his agreement to the classes going ahead was on the proviso that the kitchen was left spotless every time they used it. Although people had cleaned their own stations, Cathy had decided that the best way to comply with this request was probably to go over everything again once everyone had left, so that way she’d know the place was definitely clean. Right now, Dora was running a damp cloth over the doors of the ovens.
‘I didn’t care much for that young girl,’ she said.
Cathy turned to her. ‘Which one?’ she asked, though she knew exactly who Dora meant. Partly because nobody had really taken to Tansy (as far as Cathy could tell), and partly because Erica’s niece was probably the only person in that room who could have been confidently referred to as a young girl.
‘The one who came with Erica. Face like a bulldog chewing a wasp.’ Dora scrubbed so vigorously at a burned-on grease spot that Cathy was tempted to run and take the cloth from her, certain that such violent exercise couldn’t end well in a woman of Dora’s advanced age. ‘Never stopped complaining and hardly an expression that wasn’t a sneer. If she was mine she’d get a smack round the ear.’
‘Good thing she’s not then,’ Iris put in. ‘Because that sort of thing has been banned by the government, you know.’
‘Ridiculous.’ Dora sniffed. ‘I had many a cuff round the ear as a young girl and it did me no harm. Most of the time I deserved it too.’
Iris rolled her eyes. ‘Things were different back then.’
‘Yes they were,’ Dora agreed vehemently, perhaps not seeing quite what Iris was getting at. ‘And that’s what’s wrong with society today – no discipline. Treated like little princes and princesses these kids are – they need a few life lessons, a bit of hardship. Wouldn’t do them any harm to have no said to them once in a while.’
‘Oh, I think Erica’s niece has had plenty of life lessons,’ Iris said darkly, and now Cathy – who had been letting their bickering wash over her to some extent as she mopped the floor – whipped round to face her, noting that Dora also looked keen to know more.
‘What do you mean by that?’ Dora asked.
Iris shrugged. ‘Erica said a few things in passing.’
‘Like what?’
‘It’s not my place to say,’ Iris said sanctimoniously, though she had a gleam in her eye and Cathy knew she was enjoying the fact that she had information they didn’t. More particularly, information that her cousin didn’t have. It was obvious she was going to milk the situation for all it was worth.
Dora turned back to her task. ‘Suit yourself then.’
A few minutes passed and then: ‘Erica says she hates her mother’s new boyfriend!’ Iris blurted out.
Cathy smiled to herself. So much for Iris’s impeccable discretion.
‘What new boyfriend?’ Dora asked.
‘What’s her name…?’ Iris’s brow creased.
‘Who?’ Dora asked, her tone becoming ever more impatient.
‘The girl…’
‘Tansy?’ Cathy offered.
‘Yes,’ Iris said. ‘Tansy hates her mum’s new boyfriend.’
‘Well,’ Cathy said, ‘that’s hardly a novel situation. I’ll bet there are thousands of teenagers who hate their parents’ new partners. So her mum and dad are divorced?’
‘I don’t think she knows who her dad is,’ Iris said.
Cathy frowned slightly. ‘Erica told you this?’
‘Not exactly,’ Iris said. ‘But I think so.’
Cathy wasn’t going to give too much credence to a statement like that, with very little to back it up. But she pushed on anyway. ‘Is she close to her mum?’
‘And another thing,’ Iris said, ignoring Cathy’s question. ‘What was Tansy doing here today?’
‘She came to join in,’ Cathy said, a little puzzled by the question.
‘But why wasn’t she at school?’
‘Isn’t she too old to be at school?’ Cathy asked.
‘Well…’ Iris folded her arms and regarded Cathy with a look of triumph. ‘If she’s too old for school then she ought to be working.’
‘Maybe it was a day off,’ Cathy said.
‘Or maybe she’s a benefits scrounger,’ Dora said. ‘You see them on the telly.’
Cathy turned to her. ‘Dora!’
At this, Dora at least had the decency to look ashamed.
‘She didn’t exactly endear herself to me,’ Cathy said, recalling how more than once she’d tried to start a conversation with Tansy only to receive stony silence in return or a sneer or some other look that said: I can hardly be bothered to acknowledge your existence because you’re really quite pathetic. ‘But I don’t think we should be judging her just because she’s not whistling a happy tune all the time. Some people just don’t have happy faces.’
‘She didn’t have a happy anything,’ Iris said, and Dora nodded.
‘OK,’ Cathy said slowly. ‘Did Erica say anything else?’
‘I overheard Erica telling her more than once that she’d have to go home sooner or later and that she’d have to talk to her mother properly and she couldn’t keep running to her or her uncle every time she had a spat with her mum.’
‘She’s running to Erica a lot then? Is that what you mean?’
Iris nodded. ‘And her uncle.’
‘Erica did tell me she had a brother,’ Cathy said thoughtfully. ‘Matthias I think his name is.’
‘I hope she doesn’t bring her niece again,’ Dora said. ‘Brings down the whole mood of the room.’
‘She wasn’t that bad,’ Cathy said, though she couldn’t help but agree a little with Dora. Erica’s niece certainly had been difficult to engage with. Even as she tried not to think this, Cathy’s mind flashed back to a number of incidents that reinforced everything Dora was saying, like Tansy’s sneer at poor Myrtle’s offer of a mint, how she’d marched in front of Colin to put her cake on the oven shelf he’d been planning to use and how she’d smirked when someone’s cake had burned.
‘They’re all the same at that age,’ Iris said sagely. ‘Hormones.’
In one breath, Iris was telling them that she thought Tansy was having a difficult home li
fe, and in the next she was blaming it on hormones. Cathy resisted the urge to shake her head in bewilderment. She couldn’t help but think that there might be something in what Iris had originally said, though she wondered why Erica hadn’t volunteered that information to her. Not that they were close, of course – they’d only just started getting to know one another – but Erica had told her so many other things about her family life, and had alluded to the fact that she found her sister frustrating at times, that it seemed strange she’d have kept this from them. Unless she somehow felt that it wasn’t her story to tell. Perhaps she wanted to respect Tansy’s privacy and her right to share her problems with the people only she chose to. Still, Cathy thought she’d call Erica later. She wouldn’t ask outright, but maybe Erica would bring it up and then at least if Tansy came to the class with her again, Cathy would have some background.
She shook herself as Iris turned on the tap to refill her bowl.
‘Sewing club will be here in half an hour,’ she said briskly. ‘Better get cleaned up and be out before they arrive or someone will be running to the vicar to complain.’
Dora made a noise of agreement.
‘We should be nearly done,’ Cathy said. ‘Thanks for helping me out.’
‘It’s our pleasure,’ Dora said. ‘Isn’t it, Iris?’
Iris smiled at Cathy. ‘It is. I’ve only known you for a couple of weeks and already I feel as if we’ve been friends for a hundred years.’
‘Really?’ Cathy blushed. She couldn’t imagine making that kind of impression on anyone, and perhaps it was a bit of an exaggeration on Iris’s part, but it was a lovely thing for her to say nonetheless.
‘I know,’ Dora said. ‘I feel exactly the same way.’
‘Well…’ Cathy began, blushing harder than ever. ‘Thank you!’
She turned back to her mopping, not knowing what else to say but with a smile broader than any she’d worn in a long, long time.
Twelve
Cathy wrestled with the idea of phoning Erica for a while before she did it. She didn’t want to bother her if Erica didn’t want to talk and she’d thought perhaps that Erica might call her, but when it got to 8 p.m. and that hadn’t happened she gave in.
To her relief, Erica sounded pleased to hear from her.
‘I was going to phone you but I just got so busy,’ she said. ‘Did you enjoy today? I thought it went really well and your students seemed to enjoy it.’
‘Did you?’ Cathy asked.
Erica laughed. ‘Of course I did! Tansy did too.’
‘That’s good,’ Cathy said, though according to what Iris, Dora and Cathy herself had seen, Tansy hadn’t looked very much like she was enjoying being alive, let alone anything about the class. ‘I thought… well, I suppose Tansy felt it a bit – being there with such a lot of older people.’
‘A little bit, but I don’t think it bothered her all that much. She’s usually just happy to be out of the house for a while.’
There was no tone in Erica’s voice that suggested anything other than a relaxed attitude to her niece, which was completely at odds with what Iris had said earlier. Cathy wasn’t going to push a conversation about it if Erica didn’t want to have one, but she couldn’t deny that she was curious.
‘Did her mum enjoy the cake?’ Cathy asked.
‘Oh, Tansy hasn’t been home yet – she’s still here with me and Malc,’ Erica said. ‘I think she’s planning on staying over but she hasn’t said either way yet.’
‘Right…’
‘So you’re going to carry on with the classes?’ Erica asked.
‘Yes. Did you think I wouldn’t?’
‘Not in a bad way – I just know you were a bit anxious about it beforehand.’
Cathy laughed. ‘I’m still anxious about it. I don’t think that will ever stop, but I did enjoy it, and it was nice to see that everyone else seemed to get a lot out of it too.’
‘Oh, they did!’ Erica agreed. ‘Especially me and Tans. I can’t wait for the next one.’
‘Will Tansy come again?’
‘It depends whether she’s with me or if she’s at college that day. She isn’t there every day – she has some gaps in her timetable where there are no lessons and that usually includes Friday.’
‘Doesn’t she meet up with her friends and things?’
‘The thing about Tans is she doesn’t suffer fools gladly and I think that makes it hard for her to keep friends. You know what most teenagers are like – it’s all boyfriend dramas and selfies. She hates all that and she’s not afraid to tell anyone when she thinks they’re being stupid.’
‘Oh,’ Cathy said. ‘So she doesn’t have friends?’
‘I’m sure she has, but I don’t know that it’s a wide circle.’
There was a pause.
‘It’s good to see her voluntarily going out and doing something other than being hunched over her phone actually,’ Erica said into the gap. ‘It drives Malc mad; he thinks she ought to be at her own house anyway so they just wind each other up.’
‘Well, she’s always welcome if she wants to come back,’ Cathy said, feeling terribly guilty about the fact that she was really hoping Tansy would decide not to bother next week.
Overnight it had snowed. It was a little early in the season, and Cathy hadn’t checked the weather forecast before she’d gone to bed, so it had come as a surprise when she’d opened the curtains to get ready for work to see the street outside buried beneath a glinting, sugary blanket. It looked pretty – like a Christmas card – another bittersweet reminder that Christmas was fast approaching; a Christmas that Cathy would more than likely be spending alone. She supposed she’d get invites from relatives to have lunch with them, but that would only make her feel worse, because sitting there, she’d recall that she and her mum had never been invited, and that she was only there this year because she was alone. Whichever way she chose to spend the season, it was going to be painful.
Shaking her melancholy, she turned her thoughts to the day ahead. At least she’d be at French for Flowers today and work days were always good days. And as it had stopped snowing now and the winter sun was throwing kind rays across the snowy landscape, it might be a good day to take the longer walk into work to make the most of it. That meant walking the canal path, past the old textile factory that had since been turned into an industrial museum where crowds of bored schoolchildren were regularly ferried in and out to learn about a past that most of them probably didn’t care about and could never imagine. Cathy liked the museum though. She’d taken her mum around it once. Hardly an adventure to the other side of the world, but Miriam had loved it and had talked about it for days afterwards. Cathy had been meaning to take her again – not straight away, because what would have been the point of that? She’d been waiting for some suitable exhibition or event that her mum would enjoy, that would make her visit different from the last one…
Of course that hadn’t happened. Miriam had died before the perfect event had come round.
Cathy wrapped herself up and headed out in plenty of time to get to the town centre via the canal. The frosted air curled away from her as she walked in the bright sunlight, like the clouds of a Van Gogh painting. Fresh snow creaked under her boots, stretching ahead on the path, pristine and glistening and just begging for footprints. A field of new snow was like the first page of a new notebook – it left you itching to make your mark so you could say to the world: look, I’m here. Cathy had never been able to resist either – perhaps because she didn’t often feel she’d made much of a mark on the world in any other respect.
As she contemplated this in the vaguest of ways, she was suddenly aware of panting behind her. She whipped round to see a shaggy-looking Alsatian bounding towards her.
‘Hello, handsome,’ she said with a smile. The dog looked up at her for a moment, as if to acknowledge the compliment, before circling back the way it had come and heading towards a man on the path. Cathy hadn’t noticed him before, so he must have be
en striding at quite a pace to be there now. But he was tall, she noted, though still too far away to be able to tell much else about him, so she supposed he probably would walk quite fast.
She watched for a moment as the dog raced up and down the path, kicking up snow as it went, clearly delighted at the way it filled the air and snapping playfully at the clumps as they came back down. She could hear the low chuckle of the owner, but then blushed as he looked right at her.
Had she been staring? Maybe, but now she felt like a toddler caught with their hand in the sweetie box. She faced forward again and quickened her step.
But before she’d gone six feet, the dog was back, and this time it decided to try to make friends, coming right up to Cathy and sniffing at her.
‘Guin!’ the man shouted.
Cathy turned again to see him racing up the path now.
‘Guin!’ he repeated. ‘Leave the poor lady alone!’
‘Oh, it’s alright,’ Cathy said. ‘He’s not bothering me… It’s a he?’
‘Yes,’ the man said. He’d stopped running now and was striding the last few feet to try to retrieve his dog, who didn’t seem to want retrieving and had already hared off again, down the path ahead of them. ‘I sometimes wonder who’s taking who for a walk when we’re out.’
Cathy gave him a shy smile before lowering her gaze. ‘He’s a beautiful dog.’
‘You want him?’ the man said.
Cathy looked up to see him grin. It was hard not to notice that he had a lovely grin – sort of naughty; not the bad-boy kind of naughty, but an old-fashioned kind of naughty. Fun, harmless, a bit cheeky. He was probably about her age – maybe more mid-thirties than late – and had brown hair and hazel eyes. Even though she knew they’d never met, Cathy couldn’t help thinking he looked vaguely familiar.
‘I don’t think I’d be able to control him,’ Cathy said.
‘Neither can I,’ the man replied with that naughty grin again. His gaze lingered on her for a moment. But then he turned to the path again and let out a shrill whistle.
Cathy's Christmas Kitchen: A heart-warming feel-good romantic comedy Page 9