‘Well, I think that was meant to be a bit of a slap in the face,’ I commented as we carried on.
‘Yes, but she’s very brusque like that. We all prefer to see one of the others at the practice,’ Bel said. ‘She’s super-efficient, but I think she views people as cases to be dealt with, rather than as individuals, so she’s not very popular. But they were desperate for another GP to share the workload, even if she’s only part time.’
‘Was she OK with the baby?’
‘Fine. Geeta was convinced he had meningitis, though it turned out to be just a slight fever, but Dr Collins told her it was always better to get a professional opinion if a baby showed any symptoms, so she’d done the right thing calling her out.’
‘Well, that seems … kind.’
‘I’m not sure it was intentionally kind, just a statement of fact. I heard she was working in Scotland before, and then moved back here about ten years ago, because her elderly father was getting very frail. He has a large house this side of Upvale.’
‘I suppose registering with a doctor is one of the things I should do soon,’ I said.
‘You’d better register with the same practice, then,’ suggested Bel. ‘It’s the nearest. Just remember to ask for another doctor if you make an appointment!’
It took us most of Saturday to strip the wallpaper off the bedroom opposite mine. I think the Victorians must have invented some kind of Superglue-type paste.
Teddy joined us for the first couple of hours, before he and Geeta went out, and by the time Nile arrived to take his place with the water spray and scraper, we’d almost finished.
Bel accused him of getting there late on purpose and they had a bit of a battle with the water sprays. My hair went extra curly in the damp mist.
It was just the four of us for dinner and afterwards Sheila took her coffee out to her conservatory studio at the back of the house and Bel went to answer some urgent emails about the forthcoming exhibition of her work in York.
‘Well, it’s just you and me, kid,’ Nile said in a fake American drawl. ‘Film? Or shall I beat you at Scrabble?’
And he did win the first game, but only because some evil fairy had bestowed letters on me that naturally formed themselves into a series of such terribly rude words that I couldn’t bring myself to put them down.
Then later, when I’d gone to bed and was in that delicious limbo state between awake and asleep, the characters in my novel suddenly decided to have a conversation in my head and I had to get grumpily out of bed and put it all down before it vanished like a popped bubble.
Annoying.
‘Where did they go?’ said Kev, looking after the dryads in a dazed kind of way.
‘Never mind them – you’re mine, so now stop messing about and kiss me,’ she ordered impatiently.
‘This is the weirdest dream ever,’ Kev muttered.
‘Kev? Where are you hiding?’ yelled a voice like a corncrake from somewhere beyond the circling thicket, and his face cleared. In fact, he looked relieved. ‘I’m in here, princess,’ he called back.
‘Princess?’ Beauty scowled: she had competition?
A skinny woman with short, spiky pink hair, a cropped top that showed a washboard stomach and a navel-piercing set with a gold ring, stepped through a gap in the hedge – and at the same time, with a kind of popping noise, a tall, handsome, princely figure walked out of thin air and came face to face with her.
They stared deep into each other’s eyes, and then the prince stepped forward and kissed her.
In fairy tales, especially mine, things were never quite as they seemed …
I could have done with a bit more sleep, because I set off with Bel and Nile before eight to a car boot sale on the outskirts of Keighley, the last local big one of the year.
Nile had insisted on the early start: he said you got all the bargains at the beginning of the day. I’d have thought car boot sales were beneath his notice, but no, he absolutely loved it, swooping down like a magpie on small sparkling objects and making several finds. He had a way of methodically but rapidly turning over the stuff on every stall and in every box and moving on, while Bel and I were more leisurely.
We quickly parted company with him, but met up later at the refreshment van, where a few plastic picnic tables and chairs had been set out for customers, where we compared our purchases.
I’d bought a battered but still lovely blue and white Minton teapot to display in the café – I wanted some variety, because you can have too much willow pattern.
‘It reminds me of that beautiful jug you’ve got at the back of your window,’ I said to Nile.
‘Do you mean the Spode?’ He looked at me as if I was mad. ‘It’s nothing like it!’
‘It might not be to an antique dealer, but the pattern’s the exact same shade of blue,’ I said firmly.
‘Show him what else you got,’ Bel said quickly, scenting an argument brewing, so I opened the wooden box containing six mother-of-pearl-handled cake forks.
‘I got them for a fiver, but they’re for the flat,’ I said. ‘I don’t want any cutlery in the teashop that I can’t put through the big dishwasher.’
Bel had bought a strange and slab-like pot as a present for her mum. ‘I can’t find a mark on it, but it looks like Troika,’ she said, passing it over the wobbly plastic table to Nile.
‘Is that good?’ I asked. I thought it looked more like the product of an evening class, but what do I know?
‘I think you’re right,’ Nile told her, and then explained to me, ‘Troika pottery is very collectable and you don’t find much of it cheap any more. Sheila loves it and I buy it at auctions for her, if it doesn’t go too high.’
Nile himself had purchased an old breadboard with a cute mouse carved on it, which he said was a genuine Mouseman, so it was my day for learning about obscure collectable stuff. His pockets were full of all kinds of other things too, including a domed greenish glass paperweight in which bubbles seemed to be rising in a cloud … which reminded me of something I’d been meaning to ask him.
‘Is that small millefiori paperweight in your window as hideously expensive as I suspect it is, Nile? Only Lola spotted it and absolutely loved it, so I thought if I could afford it I’d buy it her for Christmas.’
‘It is, but I’m sure we could work out some kind of discount – for services to be rendered,’ he said, eyeing me speculatively, much as the three young women at the next table were regarding his handsome, austere profile and the tumbled blue-black hair.
‘What kind of services?’ I asked suspiciously.
‘Free afternoon tea delivered to my door every day?’
‘In your dreams, buster!’ I said.
‘You must be joking, Nile,’ Bel said, grinning. ‘If you ate a full tea every day you’d soon be like Winnie-the-Pooh after he guzzled all the honey and was too fat to get out of his hole again.’
‘I might manage a small bag of sandwiches and savouries every afternoon, if you came over to pick them up,’ I suggested. ‘You did say you weren’t a big fan of sweet things.’
‘Oh, I like some sweet things,’ he said, giving me that sudden and knee-quivering smile, so that I was quite glad I was sitting down. ‘But in moderation. It’s a deal – we’ll arrange full terms later and sign it in icing sugar.’
When we got back, we found the rest of the family gathered in the kitchen, helping or hindering Sheila’s preparations for the usual lavish Sunday lunch.
Casper was in his highchair, splashing a plastic spoon about in a bowl of something gloopy, while Honey sat in his usual position underneath, looking hopefully up.
‘Here’s the prospective bridegroom,’ Teddy said with a grin at Nile as we walked into the kitchen. ‘Do you want me to be best man, bro?’
Nile seemed totally taken aback. ‘What on earth do you mean?’
‘Don’t tease, Teddy,’ chided Sheila, turning round from the stove. ‘Zelda rang while you were out, Nile, and she told me you were going to ge
t married, which was a bit of a surprise, after all these years of thinking you were only friends.’
My heart did that weird thing again, where it seemed to stop dead and then restart with a thump, and I turned to look at Nile.
‘It’s a surprise to me, too,’ he said drily. ‘She was only joking.’
‘She didn’t sound as if she was joking,’ Sheila replied doubtfully. ‘When I said it was a bit sudden, she told me you’d made a pact long ago that if you hadn’t married someone else by the time you were forty, then you’d marry each other.’
‘Except you’ve only just turned thirty-eight, Nile – I don’t call that near forty,’ Teddy said.
‘Gee, thanks,’ said Nile.
‘But Zelda is forty,’ Bel pointed out helpfully. ‘And she hasn’t been in a relationship for ages, has she? Perhaps that’s what made her remember it.’
‘I do vaguely recall saying something like that when we were students, but only because she reminded me about it recently,’ Nile said. ‘I mean, we weren’t serious then, or now.’
‘Well, you weren’t serious, but maybe she was?’ Bel suggested.
He frowned. ‘I don’t think so, it was just one of those daft things you say. But you know what Zelda’s like – always tossing squibs into the conversation to see what reaction she gets.’
‘I suppose that’s it,’ Sheila said, looking strangely relieved seeing that she and the rest of the family seemed to like Zelda. ‘I did think it was odd, after all this time.’
‘Friends are all we’ve been for years, and that’s the way it’s staying,’ he said firmly. ‘She knows that; she was just winding you up.’
I wondered if she really did know it. I mean, perhaps she’d suddenly realized Mr Right had been under her nose all the time.
Teddy looked as if he was going to tease Nile again, but Bel gave her twin a quelling look and changed the subject quickly.
‘You’ll never guess who we met up on the hill near the Oldstone, yesterday morning – I completely forgot to tell you.’
‘No, we won’t guess, so you might as well say,’ Geeta told her from her seat next to the highchair, wiping a speckling of food from her face. Casper made another expansive arm movement with a loaded spoon and Honey leaped up with surprising agility for his age and caught the flying blob mid-air.
There could be a good market for flying kitchen waste disposal units, if someone invented them.
Bel was fishing out a shape sorting game in bright colours from the carrier bag she’d brought in with her and handed it across the table. ‘I just remembered I got this from the car boot sale.’
‘Oh, is that for Casper?’ Geeta said.
‘Yes, and it’s like new, but I know what you’re like for germs, so I expect you’ll want to disinfect it before he goes anywhere near it.’
‘You can’t be too careful,’ Geeta said seriously. ‘Remember that nasty bug he caught earlier in the year? I thought it was meningitis,’ she explained to me, her beautiful brown eyes full of the remembered horror of that moment. ‘I was beside myself.’
‘I’m not surprised!’ I said.
‘Well, oddly enough, it was the doctor who came out to Casper that night that we met up by the Oldstone yesterday morning,’ Bel revealed.
‘What, Dr Collins?’ said Sheila. ‘What was she doing up there?’
‘Walking a small white dog. And she wasn’t that pleased to run into us, because she said she’d gone there for a bit of peace and solitude.’
‘That was rude of her,’ said Geeta. ‘But Rilla, the receptionist at the surgery, goes to my yoga class and she told me that Dr Collins moved back here to look after her father when he became very frail, so she must have a kind heart, really.’
‘Well, I was told that she moved back because she’d heard her father was getting too fond of his live-in carer and was afraid she’d lose her inheritance,’ Bel countered. ‘The cleaner told me.’
‘That’s probably all just gossip,’ said Teddy mildly, but was ignored.
‘Dr Collins can’t be that young, so her father must be getting on a bit,’ Bel suggested.
‘She’s only in her mid-fifties, like me,’ Sheila said slightly indignantly. ‘She could be very attractive, too, she just doesn’t make the best of herself. And I think she’s his stepdaughter – his late wife’s child by her first marriage.’
‘How do you know all that?’ asked Bel.
‘Your dad told me after we bumped into her at the garage in Upvale years ago. They’d met as teenagers at a local tennis club one summer when he was staying with his grandparents and though he couldn’t have changed that much, she just brushed past us without a word as if she didn’t recognize him and went out.’
‘He did spend a lot of his school holidays here at Oldstone with his grandparents, didn’t he?’ Nile said. ‘That’s why he was so attached to the place.’
‘And his university holidays too, until he dropped out and went to work for those family friends in Germany who had the swimming pond business,’ Sheila agreed.
‘So – was she an old flame?’ asked Bel.
‘I think they’d had a bit of a teenage summer fling, from what Paul said. I saw her at the surgery once, soon after she joined the local practice, and said I believed she’d known Paul when they were younger, but she was very brusque.’
‘What did she say?’ asked Bel, interested.
‘She said, “I barely knew him, except as a decent tennis player. The locals played like rabbits.” ’
‘I think if I saw her coming towards me holding a racquet, I’d run like a rabbit, too,’ Geeta said.
‘Or with a loaded syringe,’ I agreed, resolving that if I registered with that practice, I’d make sure my appointments were with one of her colleagues.
To meet other early walkers as I was returning to the car with Hugo after one of our morning ambles up to the Oldstone was therefore an unwelcome and unusual intrusion – and doubly so once we came near enough for recognition.
The moment my eyes met those of the tall, red-haired woman with one of the Giddingses I knew my past had come back to haunt me, though I am certain I showed no betraying flicker of surprise – and certainly I could show no other emotion, for I felt none.
Presumably she was simply curious to view the place where she was found, though the news that she was to live in the area was unwelcome: I hope she won’t attempt to stir up the old story again.
She doesn’t look in the least like me, yet there is a familial resemblance that, fortunately, only I am likely to perceive.
28
Mr Wrong
First thing on Monday morning, Jack surveyed the teashop floor, which was now sealed to a warm, mellow, almost honey colour, and pronounced that I could walk on it.
This was just as well, since in two days’ time the job lot of tables and chairs that Nile had found for me were to arrive. If there were any to spare, Teddy would collect them in his big four-wheel-drive pickup and ferry them out to Oldstone for the waffle house.
When I texted Nile to tell him about the floor I didn’t get an answer, so he was probably busy. He’d taken himself off to his flat when we’d returned (in convoy) after lunch the previous day and I hadn’t seen him since.
Ross was stripping the outside paintwork of the back windows with a small blowtorch, which looked rather dangerous, while Jack had resumed his tiling, and on a sudden impulse I slipped out of the front door and across the courtyard to Small and Perfect. Even if he was going to open, I was sure Nile wouldn’t be in his shop that early and I wanted to look at the Spode jug again to confirm it really was the same shade of blue as my Minton teapot in case of any further argument.
There was no sign of it, though. Could he possibly have sold it to an online customer overnight and taken it out of the window to pack up? Its place had been taken by a brightly coloured porcelain parakeet, so it looked rather that way.
I knew it would have been out of my price range but I still felt disappoi
nted and cross as I returned to the café and gave the wall above the panelling in my little office a second coat of cream paint.
Then I retired upstairs to write, though as usual I was called down several times, on the final occasion to admire the new loos and washbasins in the customer toilets, though one white suite looks much like any other.
Nile must have been out all day, because it was only late that evening, just as I was about to stop working, that the lights in his flat went on. The blind was already down, so I couldn’t see him … and he couldn’t see me being a Peeping Thomasina. But two minutes later my phone buzzed with the incoming reply to the message about the floor being finished ready for the furniture.
‘Good ,’ it said, as tersely as if text messages were being charged by the letter.
I went to register at the nearby medical practice next day and was informed that the only doctor taking on new patients was the one I most wanted to avoid. But then the receptionist added that of course, since it was a group practice, I could make appointments with any of the others instead.
Her tone suggested that this wouldn’t be at all unusual and her expression as she glanced at the name board, where a red light was flashing next to Dr Collins, was uneasy.
The forms being completed, I was just about to leave when the woman herself flung open a nearby door and called imperiously for her next patient.
‘Mrs Clemency Jones?’
She scanned the waiting room, spotted a small, inoffensive woman cowering behind a potted palm and jerked her head.
Mrs Jones got up and scuttled in past her.
As she turned to follow, Dr Collins’ basilisk gaze fell on me and for the briefest moment she looked quite startled. Perhaps she thought I was stalking her?
I hadn’t seen Nile to speak to since Sunday lunch, but that afternoon I had another of his terse texts saying he’d collect me at seven on the way to the pub.
Honestly! No ‘would you like to go’ or anything of that kind: it appeared that with the Giddingses, you only had to do something with them once, like go to the pub or stay for a weekend, and it was assumed to be a regular fixture.
The Little Teashop of Lost and Found Page 23