The drive was more of a rutted farm track and led over a small bridge made of stone slabs to a stretch of gravel in front of a long, low stone building that looked as if it had been squatting there, glowering defensively at the nearby hills, for a very long time.
‘Here we are,’ Nile said unnecessarily, switching off the engine. ‘Welcome to Oldstone, the Giddings family’s ancestral pile.’
I was to be glad I’d taken all those precautions when, against all the odds, the discovery was made – and even before I’d read the newspaper reports, I’d guessed who by.
Predictably, Mum became hysterical and asked me if I’d known the baby was still alive when I’d left it … not that I’d thought of it as a baby at the time, since I was so filled with shock and revulsion.
‘Of course I didn’t, or I’d have put it somewhere I’d be certain it would be found quickly,’ I assured her.
‘Some doctor you’ll make!’ she scoffed, which I thought was pretty rich, considering she’d originally trained as a nurse, even though once she’d snared my father she’d given up work.
But I was still determined that medicine would be my career, even though I now intended to have as little to do with obstetrics and gynaecology as possible …
13
Pondlife
‘It looks ancient – or what I can see of it does,’ I commented, for although the rain had stopped, a heavy wet mist obscured the full extent of the house and anything beyond it. It didn’t look like my idea of a moorland farm, but at least the situation didn’t seem as bleak and exposed as that of Top Withens, which was reputed to be the inspiration for Wuthering Heights.
There was a battered carving on the lintel, illuminated by a large glass and metal lantern that hung over it from a wrought-iron bracket. I was sure I could pick out a Pan-like creature and also a bunch of grapes, though they can’t grow many of those up on the Yorkshire moors, can they?
The huge front door below it was open on to an inner hall, despite the dark and the autumnal chill. A large, elderly golden Labrador trudged out, stared at us, and then plodded dejectedly back in again with his tail down.
‘Doesn’t he like visitors?’ I asked.
‘Yes, but whenever a car pulls up he still hopes it’s my father, even though he died a few years ago, just after the family moved up here permanently,’ Nile explained. ‘He’s disappointed, but he’ll come round when we go in.’
‘Poor old thing,’ I said, and then added, awkwardly, ‘and I’m sorry you lost your father. I know how that feels, because mine died when I was still a teenager.’
‘It was … devastatingly sudden,’ Nile said, his profile in the light cast from the lantern looking severe and shuttered – and, it has to be said, still very handsome.
The car’s engine ticked quietly as it cooled and he added, with a brisk return to his usual manner (or his usual manner to me), ‘Well, there’s no point in sitting out here half the night, when you can get a better look at the exterior of the house tomorrow in daylight.’
‘It’s certainly much bigger than I expected,’ I said.
‘The central hall is the original part of it and very old, but the rest of it’s been added on over the years, so there’s plenty of room for everyone to be sociable or not, as the fancy takes them.’
‘Everyone?’ I repeated. ‘How many people live here?’
I hoped it wasn’t some kind of weird hippie commune! Though, thinking about it, I decided Nile wasn’t really hippie commune material.
He shrugged. ‘All the family. Sheila’s letting rooms are in the Victorian part and we live in the rest. My brother, Teddy, and his wife and their baby have a sort of apartment in the eighteenth-century wing, but it’s not completely closed off. It’s all a bit of a hotchpotch.’
‘It sounds it.’
I got out of the car and followed Nile round to the boot to retrieve my luggage, shivering in the cold dankness.
It didn’t seem to affect Nile, who gestured into the murky darkness and said, ‘There’s a stable block over there, partly turned into offices where Ted and Geeta run the family business. Did you see the sign on the way in?’
‘Pondlife?’ I asked. ‘Aquarium supplies? Garden ponds?’
The wet grey misty curtains opportunely parted at that moment to allow a slightly sickly moon to briefly reveal a large pond in a hollow below the house, equipped with a hut and jetty. Everything glistened and it looked a little surreal.
‘More that kind of thing,’ Nile said.
‘Right. Not your average plastic garden liner with a fake heron standing at the edge, then.’
‘Not really. I’ll explain at dinner,’ he promised, hauling out my suitcase and refusing to let it go when I tried to take it from him. I’m five feet nine inches and I can carry my own luggage, but I only just managed to grab my overnight bag before he got that, too.
‘Come on,’ he said, as a small, plump figure appeared in the open doorway. ‘Here’s Sheila, wondering where we’ve got to.’
Nile’s mother drew us into the hall, closing the outer door behind us, and then shook my hand with a square, firm grip.
‘There you are! Welcome to Oldstone,’ she said warmly. She was blue-eyed and with pale golden hair, so totally unlike Nile that he must have got his darker colouring from his father’s side of the family.
‘Thank you for letting me stay at such short notice,’ I said.
‘Not at all: we’re delighted to have you here and dinner’s nearly ready. All my guests eat with the family, so I’ll show you to your room and then you can follow your nose down to the kitchen when you’re ready.’
Nile had already vanished through one of the doors with my case and it was waiting for me in my room when we got there. Since we hadn’t passed him on the stairs, I don’t know where he went after that. Perhaps he flew out of the window like a giant bat?
Or maybe I’ve watched too many old Dracula movies.
It was just as well that there was nothing of the Victorian Gothic about the room, for it had been remodelled in a modern and slightly incongruous Scandinavian style, with light wooden furniture and the walls and paintwork in shades of white, warm cream and a soft greyish-blue.
‘I know it’s all too modern for a Victorian room,’ said Sheila, with whom I’d been on first-name terms before we were halfway up the stairs. ‘But the roof had leaked and brought the ceiling down, so everything was spoiled and we had to start again. I already had this furniture from our previous house.’
‘I like it,’ I told her, and she beamed.
‘I can see the dark antique furniture goes with the age of the house, but here and in my own bedroom I decided to have things the way I like them, instead.’
‘I think Nile said you were Norwegian?’ I ventured.
‘Only a quarter – a grandmother,’ she said. ‘But I often spent my summer holidays there, as a child.’
She opened a door in one wall to reveal a bathroom. ‘It’s what they call a Jack and Jill bathroom, with a door to the bedroom on the other side too,’ she explained. ‘But there are no other guests, so you have it to yourself. Now, I’ll leave you to unpack and settle in, but come down in about an hour for dinner, or earlier if you’re ready.’
She bestowed another naturally warm smile on me, so that I felt my last reluctance at the prospect of being marooned out at Oldstone melt entirely away. Nile might be insufferably overbearing and bossy, but it had worked out all right this time.
Even the cheerful Scandi-style ambience was just right because, given my overactive imagination, anything antique would have conjured up not only vampires, but Cathy’s hand tapping at the window to come in, just when I was falling asleep.
I hung up my clothes, which were getting perma-creased from never being unpacked, then washed and tidied up in the bathroom, which was an austere but pristine black and white tiled apartment. There was a shower attachment over the claw-legged bath, and though the radiator was barely lukewarm to the touch, the towels w
ere huge and fluffy.
I changed into a clean pair of jeans, a long green shirt and my favourite pair of Minnetonka beaded moccasins, then went down the stairs I’d come up. This time I noticed a door on the landing that must lead into the rest of the house, so maybe Nile hadn’t flown out of the window, after all.
As Sheila had suggested, I followed my nose through dimly lit passages booby-trapped with random steps up and down, until I reached the kitchen.
The door was ajar, and warmth, light and a cheerful babble of conversation spilled out, so that I paused for a moment feeling rather shy, before entering.
The large room was brightly lit after the dim passages and seemed very full of people. Nile was facing me, sitting at the head of a long table and holding a lively dark-eyed infant upright, while it flexed its knees and bounced up and down, as if revving for take-off. When he looked up and caught my eye, his expression was still amused and tender, which was quite a revelation …
A slender woman with a long plait of hair hanging like a black silk tassel down the back of her deep pink salwar kameez was laying out soup plates.
‘Here’s Alice,’ said Sheila, turning from the large Aga range with a dripping ladle in one hand. The Labrador, obviously used to these moments, caught the soupy drops before they touched the floor.
‘Alice, this is my lovely daughter-in-law, Geeta,’ she said, indicating the woman laying the table, ‘that’s my son Teddy, and Nile’s holding their baby, Casper …’
A timer pinged, distracting her from her introductions, and she began to haul bread rolls out of the oven. ‘Introduce yourselves, the rest of you.’
‘Hi,’ said Geeta with a friendly smile, sitting down near Nile and taking the baby away from him, to his obvious relief.
‘I feel like a springboard,’ he said, ruefully.
‘I’m Bel, Nile’s sister,’ said a woman of about my own age, with curling fair hair and periwinkle-blue eyes. She patted the seat next to her.
‘Come and sit here, between me and Teddy – we’re twins, you might have noticed?’
I nodded, because now I was looking at them they were as alike as a pair of perfectly matched pearls. ‘You both take after Sheila, too.’
‘I know, except we’re about two feet taller, like Dad,’ she agreed. ‘Casper very cleverly takes after both parents – he has Geeta’s wonderful brown eyes and Ted’s fair hair – that’s a really unusual colour combination.’
I didn’t like to ask where Nile got his looks from – these things can be very tricky and he could well be Sheila’s son from a previous relationship – and no one volunteered any information on the subject. Anyway, I was feeling a bit glazed and disorientated by exhaustion and lack of a decent meal by then, so when the familial banter that had ceased when I entered the room began again, I let it wash over and enfold me like a soothing wave.
‘Who’s for mulligatawny soup?’ asked Sheila, dumping a large porcelain casserole dish in the middle of the table and turning for the basket of warm bread rolls.
Until that moment, I hadn’t realized how totally ravenous I was.
The finding of a baby up on the moors and the entirely futile search for the mother proved little more than a seven-day wonder, quickly superseded by sensational news of national importance.
Back at home, relations between Mum and I were soon no more strained than they had been before the events of that night, which neither of us ever referred to again. In fact, by the time Father finally got back, I’m sure she’d developed total amnesia on the subject, which was just as well, since he’d have pounced on any sign of a secret and bullied it out of her.
14
Pot Luck
By the time I’d got outside a big bowl of hot, spicy soup followed by a roast chicken with all the trimmings, I felt back in the land of the living, and began to tune in to the conversation around me. I’d never been in the heart of a big family before – Lola’s was warm and friendly, but she had been an only child.
I found I felt strangely at home, rather than the outsider I really was.
‘Nile’s told us how you were taken in by Mrs Muswell when you bought your café,’ Bel said to me, passing plates of apple pie and thick cream in a blue and white striped jug.
‘She got what she deserved, because only an idiot buys a property without going to look at it first,’ Nile said.
‘It’s not polite to call our guest an idiot,’ pointed out Geeta, giving him a reproving look, before resuming the spooning of gloop into Casper’s mouth. The baby was now in a highchair next to her, with the Labrador seated underneath it, looking up hopefully.
I gave Nile a level stare. ‘I admit that it was a stupid thing to do, but Mrs Muswell fooled you into letting her sell your antiques and then pocketing the money, so it’s a case of the pot calling the kettle black, isn’t it?’
‘That’s true,’ said Teddy, grinning.
‘Yes, you tell him,’ Bel encouraged me. ‘He’s got too much into the habit of being the bossy older brother and he needs taking down a peg or two.’
‘I just give out good advice,’ he said, looking surprised. ‘It’s your own fault if none of you ever takes it.’
‘I suspect it’s going to be pointless you even trying to boss Alice about,’ Sheila said, with one of her warm smiles at me. She added, ‘Nile told us you expected to find the café and flat only needing a little updating and that all the furnishings and fitments were to have been included in the price?’
‘Yes, but Mrs Muswell must have come over from Spain and cleared out anything she could sell the very moment I agreed to buy it,’ I told her, then described the state I’d found the place in. ‘I thought about camping in the flat until the rest of my things arrive on Sunday, but there isn’t a stick of furniture. It was totally filthy too, and the gas boiler doesn’t look as if it has been used for half a century.’
‘You need to be so careful with gas,’ Teddy advised me.
‘I know. I’ll get it serviced by the people who’ve been doing the boiler in the basement,’ I agreed. ‘And at least the flat’s now clean as a whistle, because one of the seasonal staff turned up this morning and volunteered to do it instead of the café – she seemed to enjoy the challenge.’
‘Clean or not, you still can’t move in until you have heating, furniture and something to cook on, can you?’ said Geeta practically. ‘Especially in September – it’s so much colder here than where I was brought up.’
‘Where was that?’ I asked, though I thought I could guess from her accent.
‘Bradford,’ she said. ‘My family all think I’m mad, living up here in the back of beyond.’
‘Well, we’re all glad you do,’ Sheila said fondly.
‘Nile said you’d got some plans for the café, but he didn’t say what they were,’ Bel told me.
‘Airy-fairy ideas, rather than plans,’ Nile put in.
‘They’re not at all airy-fairy, though perhaps it’ll be a bit of a gamble,’ I said evenly, giving him a cold look. ‘I’m going to totally refurbish it and reopen as The Fat Rascal Afternoon Tea Emporium.’
‘I rest my case,’ Nile said.
‘I can’t see any problem with that, Nile,’ Teddy said. ‘Sounds fine to me.’
‘Ah, but it won’t be just any old tea emporium, but an upmarket one,’ Nile revealed, as if it proved his point.
‘It will be pretty swish, because I’m using Framling’s Famous Tearoom in London as my inspiration,’ I said. ‘I’ll only serve classic afternoon teas, with sandwiches, scones, cakes and savouries – with a Yorkshire twist, where I can find suitable recipes.’
‘Like the fat rascals,’ agreed Teddy. ‘I’ve had those in Betty’s café in Harrogate, split and buttered, and they’re wonderful.’
I smiled at him. ‘Yes, they’re lovely and I can make a miniature version of them for the cake stands.’
‘I can’t see anything airy-fairy about your plans either,’ Bel said with a teasing look at her elder brother. ‘
I mean, Haworth is awash with cafés and restaurants of all kinds, so something a little different is bound to catch on.’
‘Not if she’s so fancy she prices herself out of the market,’ Nile objected.
‘I only said “inspired by Framling’s”,’ I told him. ‘I’m not going to attempt to recreate it in Yorkshire, with the same prices! Of course I’ll be charging more for afternoon tea than anywhere else locally – I’ll have to sneakily check up on what’s on offer – but then, they’ll get a special experience and wonderful food for the money.’
‘Do you know anything about running cafés?’ asked Sheila with interest.
‘Yes, I’ve worked in them all my life, though mostly in the kitchens, but my late fiancé had a café in Scotland, so even though there was a manageress, I still had a lot to do with the running of it …’
I stopped for a moment, thinking how long ago that seemed now, even though it was only five months, really – but my long journey down the rabbit warren of depression and grief had distanced it, so it seemed another world, another time, an entirely different Alice.
And Dan, so impulsive and living each moment to the full, would have been the first to urge me to embrace the future, not look back sadly at the past … I blinked back a sudden tear.
‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ Sheila said gently, and I didn’t tell her that loss and abandonment punctuated my life at such regular intervals that I was becoming quite accustomed to it.
‘So, you know all about running cafés,’ Bel said, ‘which means there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be a big success. And it’s really lucky that you’re going to stay with us for a while, because we can pick your brains about our café.’
‘You have a café?’ I said, surprised.
‘Not yet, but Mum and I have got plans to open one in the old stables, between our two workshops and the Pondlife offices.’
I must have looked puzzled, because Sheila explained. ‘Bel and I are both potters. I’ve always sold my work through the Crafts Council, exhibitions and galleries, because I do big sculptural pieces. But Bel works in porcelain and makes more accessible, smaller things that she could sell directly to the public, if we could entice them to turn off the main road.’
The Little Teashop of Lost and Found Page 10