Sweet Treats

by Christine Miles

  Chapter 25

  c. AD 600, MIDDLE EAST: Arabs knead dates and milk to make a sweet paste called halvah; they also whip together tasty nougat, using boiled honey, egg whites, nuts, and preserved fruit.

  Nina rinsed her mouth with water and splashed her face. She pressed cool hands against her eyes, and then peered at her nose in the mirror. Honestly, what a sight, and a bus had pulled in. She straightened her apron, pinched her cheeks a little, hoping that pink cheeks might make her nose seem less red. She practiced smiling at the mirror, slapped her cheeks once more and returned to her job.

  Four o’clock came and Nina closed the front door. Maudie came in the back door shortly afterwards. “I’ve just come to tell you,” she began, when she caught sight of Nina’s red eyes and blotchy face.

  “What’re you crying for?” she said. “There’s nothing to cry about!”

  Nina shook her head, wiping at her eyes with the apron. “Can you leave?” she said. “Just leave.”

  “I’ll just tell you my good idea. It’ll make you feel better,” Maudie said, and she rushed on to say it before Nina had a chance to object. “Why don’t you move in here? Save yourself from Mrs Potts’ soup.”

  Nina stared at Maudie. “Move? In here? Are you crazy?”

  “Seems more crazy to stay where you are when there’s a perfectly good bed here.”

  “And no electricity.”

  “That could be a problem,” Maudie agreed. She took a tea towel from a drawer and proceeded to dry the dishes, putting each item in its place as she went.

  It dawned on Nina that Maudie was very comfortable in Miss Clapham’s kitchen. “Miss Clapham did say accommodation would be provided.” Her voice was uncertain. “But she can’t have meant me to stay here, because she would have been here herself.”

  “Have you looked in her room yet?” Maudie said.

  “What for?”

  “To see if she intended you to stay here? I’ve been putting two and two together…”

  Nina groaned. Maudie raised both hands, and took a step back. “Listen,” she said. “I put two and two together, and I reckon Miss Clapham planned to go away. I reckon she decided to trust you with her shop. And I reckon that she expected you to use her bed.”

  “For your information, I did look,” Nina said, her voice flat. “Her bedroom is absolutely perfect. I could not sleep in her bed. I could not put my clothes into her cupboard. I’ll stay with Mrs Potts.”

  “But her soup!” Maudie said.

  “A few Brussels sprouts never killed anyone.” Nina could feel her throat gag even as she spoke.

  “They’d kill me,” Maudie said. “Sure as eggs are eggs, Brussels sprouts would kill me.”

  *

  Often, the pain of grief spread across Nina’s shoulders, up her neck, and into her head. Quite often, the pain radiated down her spine and wrapped itself around her chest, around her pelvis, to sit there, aching, waiting for someone, anyone, to acknowledge the sadness so it could overflow and steal any little joys from her memories. Sometimes Nina took painkillers to ease the ache, knowing full well that no amount of medicine would remove the pain from her heart.

  She booted up the computer, and plugged the USB in. She opened the folder marked ‘photographs’ and flipped through each one. Greg had loved looking at photographs and she had loved re-telling the tales of where they had been, what they had been doing, sometimes what happened before and what happened after. There were photos of Greg as a baby, and Greg as a toddler, then a schoolboy, then in hospital. He’d had a cheeky grin in every single photograph, even the one where he was hooked up to the intravenous fluids, clad in a ridiculous pink hospital gown.

  There was a series of pictures that had never been snapped by any camera but were firmly embedded in her mind. They had been taken the day the doctors told Greg there was nothing more to be done for him, even though he’d endured long months of gruelling treatment. He had stamped his feet, and flailed his arms, and finally, finally, momentarily given up the brave face he’d had ever since that fateful day in the doctor’s surgery.

  She had wanted to stamp her own feet and throw things at the doctor, the nurses, the lab technicians and even the hospital cleaner but she hadn’t. She had let Greg rant and thrash, then held him in his spent rage as his heart beat erratically in his thin chest against her. They had cried then – it was the only time they had cried together, both of them gulping air between their sobs, not caring what the doctors or the nurses thought of them. Greg had fallen asleep in the crook of her arm, and she had eased back into the sticky vinyl recliner inhaling the sweet but already faintly dying smell of him, gently twirling the silky hair that had grown in since his last treatment.

  She took an extra painkiller, knelt at the side of her bed, and begged God for relief from the pain. “But don’t let me forget him,” she whispered. “Don’t let me forget anything about him at all. Ever.”

  Chapter 26

  c. AD 610, ITALY: a monk invents pretzels.

  Bryn and Maudie both visited Sweet Treats before their doors opened. Nina looked from one to the other. What did they want so early in the day?

  “We’ve come to explain about the fete,” Maudie said, and Nina felt rather than saw Bryn’s gaze slide to the bags of sugar even now stacked against the wall awaiting their fate.

  “Every year we have a fete,” Maudie said, “and we give the money to a person or a group who needs it. Last year it was for the school playground, and the year before it was to buy new books for the library. This year it’s so that the campground…”

  “Yes, I know about this year,” Nina interrupted. Did these two not recognise that, regardless of their efforts, neither the school nor the library were viable entities right now?

  Maudie launched into a lavish description of Miss Clapham’s generous contribution to the fetes over the years, making her way around the kitchen and explaining how the boxes of confectionery were stacked ‘up to here’ and ‘out to here’ and how the trestle table at the fete itself groaned with her offerings, with men to-ing and fro-ing to Sweet Treats all day long to refill empty cartons with Miss Clapham’s home-cooked delicacies.

  Despite the heat of the fire, Nina’s face paled to near-transparency. “I can’t do it,” she said, her voice as white as her face. “Nobody can do that.”

  “Miss Clapham did.”

  Bryn still gazed out the window, at Queen Victoria, at the weighing scales, at anything other than Maudie and Nina.

  “And I am not Miss Clapham.”

  He suddenly brought his gaze into focus, turning to Nina with such a look of determination on his face that Maudie put her hand out to stop him. He shrugged her hand from his arm, and leaned close in to Nina.

  “I don’t care if you don’t wish to help open the campground,” he said, in a voice thin with anger. “That doesn’t matter to me at all. You don’t know how it was. You don’t know how it could be. But I will care a lot if your non-action results in this village suffering. I, like Maudie and Miss Clapham, will find it impossible to create a living. The people who live in this area will become even more remote. The history – and there’s a lot of significant national history here – will be lost for all time. Laud Mayor stalks us like a dog stalks a kiwi-bird, waiting to go in for the kill. While Miss Clapham was here, he was a dog on a chain. With Miss Clapham gone, he may as well run loose. He won’t give Miss Clapham an opportunity to harness him again.”

  Nina’s eyes had widened at Bryn’s diatribe. “He sounds a nasty, horrid little man,” she said.

  “He is a nasty, horrid little man,” Maudie said. “He expects to be called ‘Your Honour’.”

  Nina put both hands to her mouth. “I know who you’re talking about,” she gasped. “He was at your coffee shop the day I arrived. He stared at me the whole time. And I heard you call him Your Honour.”

  “Ah,” Maudie said. “You’ve put two and two together. So you’ll help us, right?”

  Nina’s shoulders s
lumped. Her eyes were drawn to Queen Victoria. She seemed reproachful, not in the slightest bit amused with Nina’s obstinacy. “I’ll think about it,” she said. “Ask me again later.”

  “Later today?” Maudie wanted to be certain.

  “Later today.” And Nina was relieved to see Bryn loosen his fists and attempt a softening of his jaw. But she shuddered a little when she thought about what a decision was going to cost her. Either way, it was going to cost her a lot.

  *

  During a lull between customers, Nina took a coin from the drawer. She flipped it from one hand to another. She’d throw it in the air, see which way it landed.

  “What are you doing?”

  Nina jumped. “You scared me,” she said to Maudie. “I’m flipping a coin. Heads up, Miss Clapham will be back before the fete. Tails up, Miss Clapham will not be back.”

  “But that’s not the question,” Maudie said. “The question is if you will help us or not.”

  “I’ve already flipped for that one,” Nina said. “I’ll help you.”

  Maudie raised both arms in the air, letting out a victory whoop as she danced around the little shop. “You’re going to help! You’re going to help!”

  Nina shook her head a little. “Heads up, Miss Clapham will be back before the fete. Tails up, Miss Clapham will not be back.”

  “I shall be your solemn witness,” Maudie said, and Nina could tell she wanted to laugh out loud.

  The coin hit the ceiling on the way up, and rolled to a clattering stop alongside the hearth when Nina missed catching it on the way down. “Be heads up, heads up,” Nina muttered.

  But it was tails up, and Nina exhaled loudly. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “Let me flip it again.”

  Maudie put her hand on Nina’s arm. “Don’t,” she said. “We’ll work as though Miss Clapham isn’t coming back. She’ll be so proud of you if she walks in that door and you’ve got the sweets all ready.”

  “She doesn’t know me,” Nina said. “She can’t be proud of me.”

  “Not now, she might not be,” Maudie said. “But she will be when she sees you’ve done your best.”

  The fire spat a spark onto the rag rug and Nina quickly stomped it out. “I won’t do it,” she said, after Maudie clattered down the steps, running across the road without looking either direction. “Whoever heard of anyone taking any notice of a stupid coin?”

  But she knew she would help Maudie and Bryn because she didn’t want to be responsible for the taut, white fierceness in Bryn’s face. And she knew she would go all out in her efforts because it seemed to her that the work might fill the empty space which had always been filled by Greg.

  Chapter 27

  c. AD 650, CHINA: sugarcane juice is boiled and dried in the sun to make “stone honey”.

  “You’d better tell me about the Mayor,” Nina said, when Bryn came in to solemnly shake her hand and thank her.

  “Come for dinner,” he said, giving her his address. “There are things you should know.”

  “Can I come after dinner?” Nina said with a grimace. “It’s just that Mrs Potts will expect to know I’m not eating with her before now. She’ll have already started her preparations.”

  “Brussels sprouts, I suppose,” Bryn said.

  “One way or the other,” Nina said, knowing Maudie had fed this information to Bryn and reminding herself to mention nothing that she didn’t want spread throughout the universe. “It’s good for me, I’m sure.”

  Bryn cracked his knuckles. Between Maudie with her generosity and Nina with her small displays of inherent kindness, he felt like the tightest, most self-centred person he’d ever had the pleasure to know. As he dragged the fruit displays into Staceys before closing up for the night, he saw Nina close her shop and walk towards Mrs Potts’ home. Who was she really? And who was he?

  *

  “The mayor,” Maudie said, “doesn’t live here. He is the mayor of three villages. We are the smallest.”

  Nina struggled to keep her attention on Maudie’s chatter, but the great mound of apple crumble Bryn had plunked into a bowl shouted her name. Three scoops of ice cream – all different flavours – melted extravagantly over the dessert. She would not eat it all, she was sure she could not, but my goodness, it was the best food she’d had for days!

  “So far, he’s shut down the church, the library, and the school. Three quarters of the shops are closed – you must have noticed – and the rest are only open because travellers stop here to eat, or to buy Miss Clapham’s sweets, or to use our rather phenomenal toilets. You’ve seen them, haven’t you?”

  Nina nodded.

  “Sometimes holiday-makers take a walk along the beachfront or sit on one of our park benches, but most of the time, nobody stays any longer than they have to. We used to have a campground that was fully booked out for the entire summer. Laud Mayor raised the rates so high there was no way the cost of running the campground could be absorbed. People won’t pay the same price to camp in a tent as they would to stay in a high-rise apartment with room service. They’ve all gone.”

  “Laud Mayor,” Nina said.

  “Should be Mayor Laud,” Bryn said, “but we call him Laud Mayor because it explains his arrogance.”

  “Yes, Laud Mayor,” Maudie continued as though Bryn had not spoken. “He ought to live in England where villages are owned by the squire.”

  “No, wait,” Nina said. “Laud Mayor has a chair by the beach.”

  “Oh that.” Maudie was dismissive. “Miss Clapham put that there, as a bit of a joke you see. It’s hard, it’s uncomfortable, it’s alone and doesn’t invite others to keep his company. Laud Mayor doesn’t see it like that. He considers it his throne.” Maudie paused. “Not that I’ve ever seen him sit on it,” she said.

  They talked long into the night, not about their pasts and not about the future, but about life as it was right now. So when they went their separate ways, Nina knew a little more about life behind the scenes in the village, Maudie had a little more to gossip with, and Bryn felt that his world had a little more colour.

  But not one of them had any idea how they’d save the village from Laud Mayor.

  Chapter 28

  c. AD 690, CHINA: King Tang employs “ice men” who make a kind of ice cream with water-buffalo milk, flour, and camphor.

  She burnt the toffee for the apples. She made a double batch of hokey pokey. She carried in wood for the fire, and hauled water from the well. She answered questions and admired herself for the things she knew about the village which she had not known mere days before.

  “Where are the toilets?”

  “What’re the prices like in Staceys?”

  “Is the sea warm?”

  “Miss Clapham never said I was the local Information Centre,” Nina said, when the three of them met, this time at Staceys to see if they could figure out a solution to the problem of Laud Mayor and their village.

  “I like being the Info Centre,” Maudie said. “People are interesting.”

  Bryn put a fork loaded with quiche into his mouth. It saved him from admitting that he rarely dished out information to anyone. Jen had always looked after that side of things. Now it was Maudie that people went to for answers to their questions.

  He drew his thoughts back to the present. There had to be a solution to this madness. While Jen lived he’d been able to solve any problem. It had been second nature to look at life constructively. Surely he could use the same problem-solving skills to sort out the Mayor.

  “Do you have a pen?” he said to Maudie.

  She scrabbled around, looking for the elusive pen, and when she gave it to him, found it wouldn’t work. Nina took a pen from her bag. She took an exercise book from her bag too. He nodded his thanks, took up the pen, opened the book to its middle page, and wrote a bold heading across the centre of the page. Save the Village.

  It felt good to be decisive. He smiled at the near-blank page and wrote more words, each in their own circle, and each w
ith a line connecting them to the heading. He turned the page around and showed it to Nina and Maudie. The Mayor. The Fete. Our Businesses. In the fourth circle were three question marks. “All with their problems,” he said, tapping the page. “This one,” – and he pointed at the question marks – “I can’t think what the problem was, but I know there was one. It will come to me.”

  “Which problem will we start with?” Maudie said.

  “We’ll let Nina decide,” Bryn said. “She’s less cluttered with village baggage. She’ll have clearer insights.”

  Nina studied the page. The fete was her problem. The businesses weren’t her problem at all, at least she didn’t think so. Laud Mayor was likely to be as big a problem to her as he was to the others, especially once he realised she was Miss Clapham’s stand in. “Easy choice,” she said. “We need to sort out the mayor. Move him on.”