Then I told Lola that I was living in a small hotel on the seafront called The Bonny Banks, and the owner, Edie, was going to try me out in various jobs to see what I was best at.
I’d already discovered that it wasn’t making beds.
We quickly found that my métier wasn’t cleaning, either (too prone to fall into a dreamy trance), or waiting at table, since I was not only very reserved, with a full-lipped mouth that made me look permanently sulky, but when I did utter, tact didn’t seem to be my middle name. I expect I was too used to giving back as good as I got, having grown up with Nessa, the expert in barbed and belittling remarks.
I think Edie was starting to worry that her lame duck would never turn into a decent swan, until finally I came into my own – in the kitchens. For thanks to Lola’s mum’s cookery lessons, I could make cakes and pastries to die for and if my mind was wandering in a warped fairyland while I was dreamily rubbing the fat into the flour, then that must have been a good thing, for there was always a touch of magic in my baking.
Predictably it was Dolly, Lola’s mum, who drove down to see me a couple of weeks later. Though I knew she would have told Nessa where I was, there had still been no word from her, so I assumed she’d washed her hands of me.
I hadn’t really expected the Wicked Witch to get on her broomstick and fly down there to check that I was all right, but still, it was another total abandonment. First my birth mother, then Dad (even though he couldn’t help dying, I was still angry with him for doing it), and now Nessa had finally cast me adrift. Or maybe I cast myself adrift and she simply decided not to toss me a lifejacket.
It seemed I was right about that. Dolly, once she’d had a chat with Edie, took me out for tea and told me that she’d been round to talk to Nessa as soon as I’d told Lola where I was.
‘I thought she’d be desperately worried about your safety and relieved to know you were all right,’ she said. ‘But she told me you’d accused her fiancé of such dreadful things that she wouldn’t have you back under her roof again.’
‘I did, but it was all true.’
‘Yes, I told her that you’d always been such a truthful girl that if you said he’d made a pass at you, then he had.’
‘Did you say fiancé?’ I asked. ‘She’s marrying that creep?’
‘Apparently, and they’re moving to London once the house is sold. There’s already an estate agent’s board up in the garden.’
I felt a pang of sadness – not so much for the house as the studio in the garden, which held so many happy memories of Dad. But in any case, by now the entire contents had probably been loaded into a container and shipped off to America.
‘I really don’t understand how any mother can behave that way,’ Dolly said, shaking her head sadly so that fine, silky strands of white-blond hair came loose from a mother-of-pearl butterfly clip and fell around her face. ‘She’d already packed up all your belongings and was about to give them to a charity shop until I said I’d store them. They’re in my attic now, though Lola’s sent you a few things she thought you might need.’
‘You’re so kind,’ I said gratefully, wishing not for the first time that she was my mother, rather than the Wicked Witch.
‘Well, we all love you, darling. You know you could come back with me right now and go off to college in the autumn with Lola, don’t you? And, of course, you’d make your home with us during the holidays.’
I was so touched I felt choked. She meant it from the heart, I was sure of that. But still, I didn’t want to be the bit of jigsaw that didn’t really fit into their happy family picture, but had to be squeezed in somehow.
‘I’ll be OK,’ I assured her. ‘I’m going to stay in Cornwall and work, and get a place of my own eventually. And there are evening art classes and writing groups I can join … I like it here.’
Which was true, because it was a lovely place. Of course, it wasn’t really my place, any more than our village near Shrewsbury had been. Nowhere was.
Not even Haworth, once the Avalon I’d both longed and feared to visit – a fear arising from a suspicion that it wouldn’t live up to Dad’s comforting stories about my abandonment. For now I knew that I’d been left out on the moors, probably miles away, I could have come from anywhere.
But I settled in Cornwall for the next few years, even if my roots were never more than shallowly put down.
Edie became a good friend, despite the difference in our ages, and Lola’s family provided support and a bolthole I could always return to, sure of a warm welcome.
Of the Wicked Witch I heard nothing more, once the house was sold and she decamped to London. It felt as if all those years she’d only been pretending to be my mother … which actually, I suppose, was the truth. She was thrust into the role but the run was lengthier than she’d hoped for.
Lola went off to university the following autumn to study history but then, instead of carrying on and doing a postgraduate teaching course as she’d intended, fell in love with a visiting historian older than her father and settled in Hampstead to raise three children. She said Harry, her husband, had a young soul and the same sense of humour, which, when I met him, I discovered was true. They were genuine soul mates and, if the stars were not quite in alignment regarding their ages, then they were prepared to take what happiness they could together.
Meanwhile, I drifted from job to job, baking in a café, working as a pastry chef in a big hotel, torturing icing into edible fantasies for a celebration cake maker … all kinds of things. In between, I’d return to Edie, where my room was kept ready for me and I was always welcome. In my spare time I took painting classes and accepted that my talents lay more in illustration than fine art, tried on several writing groups for size and socialized in one of the artier pubs with a group of bohemian and often transient friends.
And that’s where I eventually met and fell for Robbie … though by then I’d become so used to having my own space that I never actually moved in with him. I’d climbed up the housing ladder slowly, from rented room, to bedsit, to minute flat. It wasn’t easy to find anything affordable in a tourist resort on my wages.
Robbie was a bit like my father, I suppose, in that he was a big, easy-going and comforting bear of a man, given to warm, wonderfully consoling hugs. He was a dentist, of all things, though his real love was surfing, kayaking, hang-gliding or any sport that had a dangerous edge to it. I was always afraid I was going to lose him, though not in the way I finally did, when he emigrated to Australia.
He wasn’t big on permanent commitment and though he suggested I follow him out there once he’d found his feet, I didn’t believe for one minute that he really meant it. In any case, I didn’t want to go. I mean, I have ghost-white skin, red hair and wilt even in mild sunshine, so I’d have to live the life of a vampire to survive in a hot country.
The day he flew off, leaving me with his old and sea breeze-blasted Beetle car, with the hippie-style daisies painted up the side, as a keepsake, it felt like yet another abandonment.
Still, as Lola pointed out to me when I was staying in London with her and Harry soon after Robbie left, my life was also a series of lucky breaks: against all the odds I’d been discovered alive after my abandonment, I’d had a wonderful father, and Edie had rescued me on my very first night in Cornwall from who knows what danger.
‘And you and your family have always been there for me,’ I said gratefully. ‘I’m OK about Robbie really, because I can see now that we were just drifting along together and he was never going to commit to marriage or a family, but we did have some good times.’
I looked back at over a decade spent in Cornwall and added, surprised, ‘You know, when I moved down there I didn’t think I’d be spending my life working in café kitchens! Somehow, I imagined I’d magically be able to earn my living from writing and painting.’
‘You have sold some of your paintings and you’ve had short stories published,’ she said encouragingly.
‘I’ve given up trying t
o sell my pictures, because in my heart I know now I’m not that good, and all my novels have been rejected.’
‘I think your pictures are great, but probably a bit of a niche market,’ she suggested tactfully. ‘And I expect readers just aren’t ready for dark, adult fairy tales yet. Perhaps you should try a change of direction?’
And I did, though not quite in the way she meant. In the spring of 2007 I loaded my entire worldly possessions into the old Beetle car and upped and moved to Scotland, to work in Dan Carmichael’s Climber’s Café.
Looking back now at my teenage self, I’m amazed that I managed to drive up on to Blackdog Moor while still weak and shivery with shock, and negotiate the maze of narrow, rutted lanes in the pre-dawn darkness.
Father had given me the Mini only a few weeks before, after I’d passed the test first time, and it was my pride and joy … or it was until it became for ever tainted with the happenings of that night.
The vile Thing – I couldn’t think of it as a baby – was bundled into a once-white sheepskin rug and lay still and silent in the passenger footwell. Indeed, I presumed it to be dead, since it had shown no sign of life after those first mewling weak cries, for which I was profoundly thankful. I felt like Frankenstein, repulsed by the monstrous creation that had resulted from my first – and, I was determined, only – love affair the previous summer.
It held the power to destroy my safe, comfortable future, should Father ever find out about its existence, but I was totally determined he would not.
3
Sad Café
That move from Cornwall to Scotland was a culmination of several things, not least turning twenty-nine and suddenly spotting thirty looming on the horizon like a slightly forbidding cloud.
And, once he’d emigrated, Robbie had communicated with me only during the short, drunken, self-pitying intervals between a series of leggy and beautiful Australian girlfriends. (When later we became Facebook friends, I actually got to see the girlfriends, since he pasted his whole personal life on the page.)
My local friends were moving away, getting married or settling down – sometimes all three – while I didn’t even have a Significant Possibility, let alone a Significant Other. So when Edie decided to semi-retire, selling her hotel and purchasing a guesthouse in her native highlands, I felt increasingly lonely and stuck in a rut. And that’s when Dan’s advert for kitchen help in his Climber’s Café, in a village not too far from Edie, caught my eye.
Dan was ten years older than me and an inch shorter, but a wiry, charismatic character and a rock-climbing legend even I’d heard of. With his spiky fair hair and bright blue eyes, I’d found him immediately attractive, but it had still taken him nearly a year – not to mention an engagement ring – to persuade me that happy-ever-after wasn’t just the stuff of fairy tales and to get me to agree to move into his square stone Victorian house next door to the café.
I should have known better. A handful of years passed, yet we were still no nearer setting a date for the wedding or starting the family of my own I desperately wanted – and then he went and got himself killed while scaling for a stupid TV programme some coastal stack of rock he’d climbed a dozen times before.
He was tackling the very difficult route up Gannet’s Rock on Lundy Island for the first programme. You’re only allowed to climb there before April, or late in the year, and he’d chosen early March. I’d been cross with him because he’d forgotten my birthday was on the 2nd and seemed to think it didn’t matter if we celebrated it later … Afterwards, I kept thinking that my last words to him had been angry … and now, no matter how illogical it was, I was still angry with him, but this time for leaving me permanently.
He was so vibrant, alive and charismatic – I simply couldn’t believe he wasn’t going to walk through that door at any moment.
He’d always jokingly called me Rapunzel, but there was no way I could have helped him to the top of that particular tower … and anyway, it wasn’t lack of climbing skill that killed him, but a great chunk of rock that fractured off and fell from above, sweeping him away as casually as if he’d been a worrisome fly. One of his friends explained it to me – how the rain and ice must have been secretly weakening a tiny fissure deep down into the rock and it was just sheer bad luck that Dan had chosen that moment to make the ascent.
Eventually the anger wore off and my old friends Grief and Despair moved in instead, not to mention an all-too-familiar feeling of abandonment. I wanted to give in to my emotions and lie down and howl like a dog, but instead I battened them down and focused on making all the arrangements to lay both Dan and my dreams to rest, getting through one minute, one hour, one day, at a time.
The day before the funeral we reopened the café while I baked up a storm in the kitchen, for I expected all Dan’s climbing friends to come back there after the ceremony and some would have travelled a long way – he was very popular.
I was still moving through a miasma of despair and grief, but was a little assuaged and comforted by the familiar smells of allspice and dried citrus peel, the sound of the springy metal whisk beating eggs into a yellow froth and the feel of the butter and flour between my fingers as I rubbed it into tiny, light golden crumbs.
I’d just taken the last of the baking out of the oven when Jen, the café manageress, said there was someone who wanted to speak to me. I thought it might be Edie. She’d rung when she’d seen the news on the TV, but it would be like her to just turn up when she had a moment. Or possibly it was a friend of Dan’s, returned from a climbing expedition and hotfooting it over to offer condolences.
But the woman sitting at one of the café tables was none of these things. She was at least a decade older than me, about Dan’s age, and with a hard, salon-tanned face, eyebrows plucked to thin threads and blond hair that showed an inch of dark roots along the parting. I’m never quite sure these days if that’s a Look or not.
But whatever it was, I was certain she wasn’t one of Dan’s climbing buddies and if she was a rep trying to interest me in her firm’s latest line of meat pies, she’d chosen the wrong day (and anyway, I made them all).
She didn’t get up when I approached, so I slipped into the chair opposite. I hadn’t really meant to sit down, but I’d been on my feet for hours and I couldn’t remember the last time I wanted to eat anything, so my knees suddenly went wobbly and the room spun round.
‘I’m Alice Rose. You wanted to see me?’ I asked her. ‘Only if you’re selling something, this isn’t a good time and—’
‘Oh, I’m not selling anything,’ she said, eyeing me with curiosity. ‘I’m Tanya, Dan’s wife, though I went back to calling myself Tanya Carter after we split.’
Something clicked in my brain. I knew Dan had been married long ago but they’d both been very young and it hadn’t worked out. There had been no children and they’d separated by mutual consent.
‘Of course, you’re his ex-wife, aren’t you?’ I said. ‘I—’
‘Wife,’ she broke in firmly, ‘and now widow!’
I stared at her blankly as this pierced the fog of grey misery that hung around me, my own permanent wet blanket. ‘But … you can’t be, because we were engaged! We were getting married.’
Or eventually we were … for now I remembered all the times he’d put off setting the date.
‘He’d need to divorce me first, and although it’s been more than ten years since I even saw him he knew where I was and he never got round to asking me for one. So when it said on the telly that famous rock climber Dan Carmichael had died in an accident – bit of a shock, to hear the news that way, actually – I thought he’d probably not bothered making a new will either. In which case,’ she added triumphantly, ‘everything he had would come to me. And when I rang our old solicitor, he confirmed I was right.’
‘That can’t be true!’ I cried, but even as I said the words I remembered that Dan’s solicitor, Mr Blackwell, had called only yesterday asking me to search Dan’s papers to see if I could fi
nd a newer will than the one he held. I’d been too dazed by grief to get round to it – or even wonder what the old one might say.
‘When we got engaged, Dan told me he’d always look after me, no matter what happened,’ I heard myself saying. I think I was having an out-of-body experience. Or possibly an out-of-my-mind one.
She shrugged. ‘He’d never get round to doing anything unless you made him. I mean, I’d heard on the grapevine that he was living with someone, but any normal man would have asked his wife for a divorce before he got engaged again, wouldn’t he?’
I didn’t reply. I couldn’t, because this final blow felt like the ultimate abandonment of my life, shrivelling my heart and hopes like an arctic blast. Recently we’d discussed finally setting a date for the wedding, talked of starting a family … and all the time he’d known he was still married to someone else.
And now, after all the work I’d put into his café and creating a lovely home, I had no claim on any of it. It would all go to the woman sitting opposite, tapping acquisitive turquoise talons on the table as she looked round the room.
‘We used to live in a hideous old rented cottage about forty miles from here, but he seems to have done well with this business – and I understand the house next door was his, too?’
She didn’t wait for an answer, or even any response, which was just as well because I was frozen right to the heart. It wasn’t just a house she was talking about, but my home and somewhere I’d finally begun to put down tentative roots.
‘The café can stay open, so when I get probate I can sell it as a going concern. I expect my turning up has been a bit of a shock to you,’ she added, flicking an impatient look at me as I continued to remain silent and stunned.
‘I’d better take an inventory of everything now, though, and then I’ll know what’s what.’
The Little Teashop of Lost and Found Page 2