‘But …’ Cogs slowly turned and I realized that Nile had only told her that to put her off. My first impulse was to deny it hotly – but it didn’t sound as if she’d believe me. ‘Nile and I—’
‘Look,’ she interrupted, ‘you can tell him you don’t mind him doing it. I mean, he needn’t have anything to do with the baby, if he doesn’t want to. There’s no reason why you should mind, is there? So you could talk him round and—’
‘No!’ I exclaimed with more force than I meant to. ‘Zelda, you’ve entirely got hold of the wrong end of the stick. It’s nothing to do with me! And now I’m so tired I can’t even think straight any more and I’d like you to go away so I can get into bed,’ I finished forcefully.
‘Oh, all right,’ she said, getting up. ‘But you can’t fool me about what’s going on, so you think about it and we’ll talk again tomorrow.’
‘There’s nothing else to say. Please go away!’ I snapped, and she flounced out, giving me daggers as she went.
Wait until I got my hands on Nile tomorrow, using me as a scapegoat!
I woke late next morning so it was a scramble to get ready and downstairs in time to snatch a cup of coffee and piece of toast before the reporter arrived.
Bel was on breakfast duty and told me I was still down before Robbie and Zelda, though Sheila had long since retreated to her studio.
‘And Nile’s in the library emailing – he’s left bids for a couple of auctions today, I think,’ she added. ‘You’d better remind him you need the room.’
‘I’ll do that,’ I said, heading for the door. And I’d ask him what on earth he’d told Zelda!
‘But she was convinced she could talk me round if she saw me face to face and she went on, and on, and on, like water dripping on a stone,’ Nile explained. ‘So in the end, I thought the easiest way of getting her off my back was to tell her I couldn’t do it because I was in a serious relationship with someone else. I didn’t say who – she filled in the lines between the dots herself,’ he added innocently.
I glared at him. ‘Yes, she did – and you’re lucky I didn’t tell her that we’re not in a relationship, serious or otherwise!’
‘Yes, we are. I’m seriously attracted to you and you seriously doubt my intentions,’ he said flippantly.
‘Don’t be daft!’ I snapped. ‘You realize she’ll tell Robbie the first chance she gets? If she hasn’t already!’
‘Well, that’s all right because you don’t want him, do you? Or … do you?’ He eyed me narrowly.
‘No, of course I don’t!’
‘Bel said she walked into your flat just after he’d arrived and found you both in a clinch.’
‘It was one-sided: Robbie had just pounced on me and was being a bit overenthusiastic,’ I snapped. ‘Not that I wasn’t pleased to see him – I’m very fond of him – and anyway, it isn’t any of your business!’
‘Right: that puts me in my place, then,’ he said sarcastically. ‘But if you seriously don’t want him back, then I don’t know what you’re making such a fuss about, because by telling Zelda you and I are an item, I’ve solved two problems in one.’
‘You might at least have warned me what you’d said!’
‘I didn’t get a chance, or I expect I would have, but I really didn’t expect her to buttonhole you so soon.’
‘She didn’t waste any time: when she followed me upstairs last night it was to ask me to persuade you to help her get pregnant.’
‘Then I hope you told her that wasn’t going to happen. You look really pretty in that top, by the way,’ he added. ‘Not a bit Lizzie Siddal – or dryad.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ I told him, slightly baffled. ‘And stop trying to change the subject.’
‘I wasn’t – I meant it.’ He raised that quizzical dark eyebrow again, looking slightly piratical. ‘And here’s your reporter arriving to interview you,’ he said, hearing the distant ring of the doorbell and unleashing one of those sudden and demoralizing smiles on me. ‘I’ll bring him into the library and head everyone else off.’
The reporter was young, keen and enthusiastic and had already read all the articles printed from the time I was found. He said it would make a great human interest story and my having come back to the place where I was born to open up a teashop added a nice extra dimension.
Both the article and the advert about the opening of The Fat Rascal would be in Thursday’s edition. There was no going back now.
He took a couple more photographs of me with his digital camera and said he’d hoped it would be a nice day, not a misty wet one, so we could have gone outside and got the distant Oldstone into the background.
‘But we’ve got lots of stock pictures of it: maybe I could Photoshop something?’ he said, perking up, then took himself off.
Going over the whole story again had been more draining than I’d expected and I really didn’t want any more confrontations with Zelda, or an aggrieved Robbie, should she have revealed everything to him by now, so I stuck my head cautiously out of the library door and listened before emerging.
The house was eerily quiet except for a faint clattering in the kitchen. When I went in I found Sheila alone there, brewing herself a cup of coffee and popping something into the toaster.
‘Teacake?’ she said. ‘I need a bit of soothing carbohydrate, and you look as if you do, too.’
I nodded and she sliced another in half and gave me the first one when it popped out, lightly browned and smelling fruitily delicious.
‘Zelda just told me Nile wouldn’t help her with the AI, because he was in a serious relationship with you,’ she remarked casually.
‘Last night she told me that too, but I’ve just had it out with Nile and he only said it to get her off his back,’ I explained.
‘Yes, I know it’s early days in your relationship, and really you would both prefer not to tell everyone about it yet, but I suppose he felt he had to.’
I stared at her and she gave me one of her warm smiles, like the sun coming out.
‘Unfortunately, Zelda doesn’t give up easily. She asked me to try to persuade you to persuade Nile – how complicated things are getting! – and I had to be very, very firm with her about not interfering. Now I’m afraid she’s rather angry and upset and, since she said all this right in front of poor Robbie, he’s much the same.’
‘When he arrived he seemed to be cherishing the mad idea that we could carry on from where we left off when he went to Australia. You’d think I’d been sitting in a tower like Rapunzel for the last few years, waiting for him to come back.’
‘I expect by now it’s starting to dawn on him that you’re not the girl he left behind, but a strong, independent woman: just what Nile needs.’
‘Sheila!’ I exclaimed, and she opened big, innocent blue eyes wide.
I liked the strong, independent bit but I still wasn’t sure I was what Nile needed – or vice versa. Anyway, it made me feel a bit like medicine, to be taken until the symptoms cleared and then the bottle could be thrown away.
‘Zelda had already started confiding in Robbie when they went to the pub yesterday, so I think he’s now chief confidant,’ I said. ‘Where is everyone now? The house is very quiet.’
‘I made Bel and Nile take them for a walk on the moors. It’s stopped raining and I expect it will clear the air.’
I thought that was optimistic: it was probably sulphurous with banked-down emotions.
Unkindly, I suddenly thought how nice it would be if Bel and Nile simply abandoned Zelda and Robbie somewhere in the middle of the moors without a map.
Father seemed to have thought Dr Tompkins’ visit a social one, since they were old golfing acquaintances, but that he had insisted on checking him over while he was there.
‘Load of nonsense!’ he snorted. ‘But he said now he was semi-retired he needed to keep his hand in, the old fool!’
However, when I had a little chat with my colleague my fears were confirmed, though I saw no point in te
lling Father.
I knew he’d never notice the additional pills I slipped in among the others he had to take.
41
Strong Reservations
I spotted the walking party returning from the kitchen window. Bel and Nile were in front, with Robbie and Zelda lagging way behind, their heads together like a pair of conspirators.
They passed out of sight round the side of the house and a few moments later the front door slammed and we heard voices in the hall.
Bel followed Nile into the kitchen and rolled her eyes.
‘Phew! I feel as if I’ve been sucked through a vortex of emotion and spat out on the other side.’
‘It was OK for you – you weren’t directly involved,’ Nile said morosely, sitting down at the kitchen table and stretching out his long, jeans-clad legs. They looked like designer jeans – but then, everything he wore looked expensive, even when I knew it wasn’t.
‘I got to hear every last detail anyway, since we were changing partners more often than during a country dance,’ Bel pointed out. ‘First, Robbie spent ages telling me he felt Alice had got him all the way up to Yorkshire under false pretences, while Zelda was buttonholing Nile—’
‘That was her great renunciation scene,’ he put in.
‘I know: she gave it to me, word for word, right after she’d finished winding Robbie up to the point where he went to have things out with you. I feel quite exhausted!’
‘I’m not surprised,’ I said. ‘It sounds like the walk from hell – but I’m glad no one seems to have actually come to blows!’
Nile glanced up. ‘Robbie accused me of being a quick worker and toying with Alice’s heart when she was at her most vulnerable.’
‘I think some of Zelda’s theatrical flourishes must have rubbed off on him, don’t you?’ Bel said. ‘He doesn’t usually seem to talk like a Victorian papa.’
‘Did he really say that?’ I asked Nile. ‘It does sound most unlike him!’
‘Yes, but I managed to persuade him my intentions were strictly honourable,’ he said gravely.
‘Of course they are, darling,’ agreed Sheila, who was starting to prepare lunch.
‘Which intentions?’ I demanded.
‘All of them,’ he said, and his grey eyes met mine, full of limpid and, I was sure, entirely spurious innocence.
‘Zelda and Robbie got their heads together on the way back and I don’t know what the upshot of that was, except Robbie would like a word with you, Alice: he’s in the library.’
‘Oh God, is he?’ I exclaimed, aghast.
‘I suspect it’s going to be his great renunciation scene,’ Nile said drily. ‘You’d better go and get it over with.’
He was quite right, too: it was just unfortunate that I found Robbie in resigned, forgiving and noble mode so funny that I had trouble keeping my face straight. Luckily, he seemed to assume my quivering lip was a different kind of emotion.
‘I wish you’d told me you were involved with someone else before I dashed up here to see you,’ he said reproachfully.
‘Since you didn’t even let me know you were in the country first, that would have been a little difficult,’ I pointed out.
He ignored that. ‘It didn’t cross my mind that you’d have found someone else so soon after Dan was killed. At first I thought Nile must have taken advantage of you when you were at a low ebb, until he explained everything.’
‘Oh?’ I prompted, deeply interested. ‘Like what?’
‘Well … that you were taking your relationship slowly, because he didn’t want to rush you into anything you might regret later.’
‘Oh, right …’ I said. ‘Yes, of course: silly me!’
‘Anyway, now I understand where you’re coming from. But I’ll always be there for you if things go wrong and you need me,’ he assured me nobly.
‘That’s so sweet of you, Robbie,’ I said, though of course his support wouldn’t be a lot of use if he went off back to the Antipodes.
‘I hope you’ll both be very happy.’
‘I expect we will,’ I said, but didn’t add that that might not necessarily be together …
He sighed heavily. ‘I’ve decided to drive back to London after lunch.’
‘But I thought you were staying till tomorrow,’ I said, and added, even though the news was a relief, ‘I mean, I’ve hardly seen you yet.’
‘Well, that wasn’t my fault, was it?’ he said, the nobility slipping and an aggrieved note shoving its way in. ‘Anyway, since I can see there’s no point in my hanging about now, I thought I might as well get back to Wimbledon.’
I didn’t try to dissuade him and we ended our tête-à-tête with a hug.
It was just unfortunate that Nile chose that moment to put his head into the library to tell us that lunch was ready.
Nile’s brooding thundercloud look lasted until Robbie told everyone that he was leaving after lunch, after which the sun came out.
Evidently it wasn’t news to Zelda, because she said, ‘Yes, and I’m going with him: he’s going to drop me off in Camden, which will be easier than my staying tonight and struggling with the Sunday trains. This whole journey’s been a pointless waste of time.’
‘Oh, I hope not, because we love seeing you, darling,’ Sheila told her kindly, even though I was sure she was as relieved as the rest of us to hear she was going. ‘And Robbie’s always welcome to visit us again, too.’
I think she meant it; but I’m certain the rest of us were hoping they never darkened the doors of Oldstone again.
‘Back to normal once more,’ Sheila said with a sigh of satisfaction as we finally waved Robbie’s hired car off.
We all agreed … though, actually, normal at the Giddingses’ isn’t the same as normal anywhere else, and Sheila had me, Bel and Nile sanding down the banisters on the small back staircase practically before the dust of the car had vanished down the drive.
Teddy, Geeta and the baby were out for the day, so there were only the four of us at dinner that night.
I think we were limp with relief after breasting all the crosscurrents, for we slipped back into discussing the waffle house plans and what I still needed to do during my mad dash to get the teashop ready to open on 4 November, as if the last couple of days and all the emotional upsets hadn’t happened. And The Fat Rascal opening was now not much more than a week away!
‘I’m going to invite some special guests for the opening tea, so leave the date free,’ I told Sheila. ‘I’m reserving the big table in the window for you and the family, because I really want you all to be there.’
‘Of course we’ll be there, darling,’ she said, ‘but I intended booking us in for it anyway. We’ll be your first paying customers.’
It took me a while to persuade her out of this resolution and then Nile asked me who the other special guests would be.
‘Well. . . Thom Carey, for one.’
‘Then I’d better sit with him, because there won’t be room at the big table for another person,’ Bel said quickly.
‘I’ll make a note of that when I do the seating plan. . . which reminds me that I’ve ordered some small reserved signs for the tables and they haven’t arrived yet, so I must chase them up.’
I got a sheet off Sheila’s shopping list pad and made a couple of notes.
‘I’ll invite Jack and his wife, and Ross too, if he’d like to come. And then I did wonder about asking Eleri and Henry Godet … but then, Henry might criticize my food, so perhaps not! I’m definitely inviting Henry’s cousin George, though he did say teashops weren’t his thing. And Emily Rhymer and her husband.’
‘What about the reporter who interviewed you this morning?’ Bel suggested.
So much had happened that it seemed like days since this morning!
‘Oh, yes – good idea! He might even write it up again, if he comes.’
‘I thought the teashop was nearly ready and just needed a few tweaks, but it sounds as if you’re going to be frantically busy r
ight up until you open,’ Bel said.
‘I will,’ I said, ‘but at least now I don’t have to juggle it with trying to finish writing a book!’
Sheila spent next morning in her studio, while Bel and I cooked lunch for a change, with Nile as skivvy. I think we’d all had more than enough of emotional scenes and explanations for the moment, so it was nice to do something so ordinary.
When Thom arrived he brought yet more cake stands and we loaded them straight into Nile’s car, which was roomier than mine, so he could drop them off for me later. I now had almost enough … and Thom said he was getting to the point where he was having willow-pattern nightmares.
He was really nice and he and Bel seemed to hit it off so well. By the time I left, she was showing him the plans for the waffle house and then she was going to take him round the studios.
I knew they would like to convert a couple more of the stables into workshops, so perhaps Thom would be their first resident craftsman, making those lovely upcycled tree bookshelves.
I invited him to The Fat Rascal opening tea then and there, and he said he’d love to come, so that was one tick on the guest list.
I’d dashed off after lunch, saying I had something I needed to do – I just didn’t say that the urgent thing was to go up to the Oldstone and think about things, Nile being the main one of them.
I don’t know why I thought I could do it there better than anywhere else, but so it was.
The weather had brightened, but it was still a very cold, late October day, the kind with a hint of wood smoke hanging in the chill air. It wasn’t surprising I had the place to myself. From the top, by the standing stone, I could see for miles … which was a lot further than I could envision where I was going with my personal life.
It had been a very confusing couple of days, but one thing had become crystal clear: Nile was attracted to me and I could so very easily let myself fall hard for him. And that would be such a mistake, because when he inevitably moved on, it would make it difficult for me to continue seeing the Giddingses and I’d lose the closest thing to being part of a real family I’d ever known.
The Little Teashop of Lost and Found Page 35