In the Company of Strangers

by Liz Byrski

  ‘Oh I’m not …’ Lesley picks up her glass, not sure she’s ready for this. ‘I don’t think …’ and she takes a couple of sips.

  ‘It’s always easier to confide in a stranger, in someone unconnected to what’s happening,’ Declan says, and he blushes slightly and looks away. ‘That’s what people say, anyway. You can unload the baggage, and if you want you can walk away tomorrow and no one else will ever know.’

  Lesley hesitates. She can tell that his outpouring has in some way unburdened him, even restored some authority to his manner.

  ‘The comfort of strangers,’ he says. ‘It’s something I’ve resorted to in the past.’ He even sounds different now too, as though he is drawing on some old wisdom. ‘Friendship is so terribly complicated, don’t you think? Strangers offer some freedom and possibilities.’

  ‘I … I don’t know …’ she says, feeling slightly dizzy and as though a part of her might break open at any moment. ‘Perhaps you’re right … I’m so used to being cocooned in the life I’ve been living for years … surrounded by my family … the comfort of strangers … I don’t know.’

  ‘So think of it now,’ he says, nodding. ‘What have you got to lose? I know I talk a lot but I’m also quite a good listener.’

  Alice walks the woman to the door of the café, shakes hands, closes the door behind her and leans back against it with a sigh of relief. It’s done, the final step in the process of getting the café ready to reopen in two weeks’ time. Interviewing and employing the staff has been the hardest part. She’d felt she lacked authority and still had the ‘fresh out of jail’ tattoo on her forehead. But it’s done and, almost dizzy with satisfaction and relief, she can now justify her decision to ignore Declan’s evident, if unspoken, wish to have her take over from Fleur.

  When he’d given her that meaningful look at dinner the night that Ruby arrived Alice knew it was important to him and that he was hoping she’d offer to do it. But she had pretended not to notice and at their meeting the following morning had made a case instead to take responsibility for the café. It was urgent, she’d suggested, to get people coming back to Benson’s Reach on a casual basis for coffee, lunches and breakfasts, especially in the cooler weather, and vital to have it all up and running efficiently in time for the music festival. Those two words ‘music’ and ‘festival’ had struck terror in all their hearts and it had clinched her argument. The festival was a chance to show local people, music fans and tourists what the place had to offer, and the very least they would expect was a functioning café.

  ‘I believe I can do it and do it well,’ she’d said, and it had taken a huge effort to say it, with her confidence at such a low ebb after her failed efforts as a job-seeker. She was about to describe the catering course at the prison when those words died on her lips. Ruby had no idea of her recent past and for the time being, at least, Alice wanted it to stay that way.

  ‘I’ve recently retrained,’ she’d continued, this time with caution, ‘and it was with an award winning chef. I could draw up a staffing plan and menus and you could see what you think.’

  Alice really did believe that the café was crucial to the future of Benson’s Reach but she knew she was equally serving her own interests. This could be the key to her own future. The value of her catering certificate would be considerably enhanced if she could also show that she had reopened the café and turned it into a going concern. Besides, she wanted the challenge: the buzz of the café, the mix of people, and the discipline of getting meals on tables every day.

  ‘Breakfasts, lunches and afternoon teas seven days a week,’ she’d said. ‘Maybe we might even be able to get back some of the staff who worked in the café before Catherine closed it.’ And that is just what she’s done.

  ‘Yeah, I know a couple of them,’ Todd had said when she’d asked him about the previous staff, and he’d given her a number for the apprentice chef who hadn’t yet found a new place, and a young woman who had doubled as waitress and kitchen hand and was keen to come back. With a couple of part timers, and now this older woman, Leonie, who has just moved to the area and has worked in cafés for years, Alice has all the staff she needs, and she is ready to run through her menus with Ruby and Declan. It’s a sliver of hope, this chance to prove herself. If Benson’s keeps going with Declan and/or Ruby she will probably be able to stay on, and if they decide to sell maybe the new owners would keep her. At the very least she will have a decent start to this precarious post-prison life and some recent experience.

  ‘How’d it go?’ Todd asks, hobbling in through the back door of the café on his crutches. ‘Was she okay?’

  ‘She was ideal,’ Alice says, grinning, and they stand together by the kitchen window watching as Leonie climbs into an ageing Barina, and pulls out of the parking area and onto the drive. ‘And she’s starting on Monday. So it’s all systems go – how are you on the computer?’

  He nods cautiously, hoisting himself up onto a stool by the workbench. ‘Not bad. Depends what you want, really.’

  ‘Some fliers and some small posters to put up around the town, let people know we’re opening again – can you do that sort of thing?’

  ‘I can try – I did some before for the lavender products but they weren’t very good. I told Catherine she needed better software, and she wrote down what to get, but I don’t know if she did.’

  Alice looks at him more closely. He looks so different from the pale and anxious boy whom Declan had collected from the hospital a couple of nights after his fall. He’d clearly been nervous when Declan explained that they thought he should stay at the house for a while. Being alone in the caravan didn’t bother him, but he’d said he could also see that for a few weeks at least he wouldn’t be able to manage up there alone.

  ‘And the other thing is, Todd,’ Declan had said, ‘that because you’re not sixteen yet, unless I’d said we’d look after you here I think the hospital would have alerted social services. I didn’t think you’d want them moving in on you, asking questions about your mum, maybe sending you off somewhere else.’

  Todd had looked horrified then and for the first couple of days had spent a lot of time in his room with the television that Declan had moved in there from Catherine’s room.

  ‘We need to get him out of there,’ Ruby had said eventually, ‘get him involved in something.’

  And Alice had gone in there the next morning and told him she needed help with the stocktaking. ‘I’ll go through all the equipment and supplies in the kitchen,’ she’d said, ‘and call it out, and you enter it into this book, then I can look at what we’ve got and sort out what we need.’

  He’d been reluctant at first but he’d kept at it, and once that was done Fleur took him off to do the stocktake on the lavender products. He was a good worker, and as he grew accustomed to being in the house he’d started to come out of himself more.

  ‘So how’s it going then?’ Alice asks him now. ‘Staying here, I mean? Are you getting used to it?’

  He nods. ‘It’s cool. I never lived anywhere like this before.’

  ‘Was it you who helped Catherine move her stuff into that room?’

  ‘Yeah. Got some help with the bed but I did all the rest of it. We made it nice but it got pretty messed up at the end. She wouldn’t let Paula in and she wouldn’t let me tidy up. I just used to sit in there with her and talk, and read to her.’

  ‘You read to her?’

  He nods. ‘When she got sick she was too tired by the evening to read, so she said I should read to her.’

  ‘Really? So what did you read?’ Alice asks, intrigued by the idea of a teenage boy spending his evenings reading to a dying woman.

  He shrugs. ‘Newspapers sometimes, but books mainly.’ He leans forward, hands clasped on the bench. ‘She said there were books she wanted to read before she died and as she couldn’t do it I should read them for her.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Um … there was Bleak House first, that was brilliant, and then
a Russian one … Crime and Punishment, hard work with all the Russian names, but it’s a good story. And then The Turn of the Screw.’

  ‘And you didn’t mind?’

  ‘Nah! It was cool. Never would’ve read them if it hadn’t been for her.’ He pauses, and looks at her awkwardly. ‘There were some other books in there that we were going to read but …’

  ‘You ran out of time?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he says sadly. ‘That’s it – ran out of time. D’you think I could … ?’

  ‘Borrow them? I’m sure you could,’ Alice says. ‘But you’ll probably need to go in and get them yourself. No one seems game to take that room on just yet. Shall I ask Declan for you?’

  ‘That’d be cool.’

  ‘Okay. And what about your other job, Todd, at the supermarket? What did they say when you told them you couldn’t go in while you’re sick?’

  Todd flushes and looks away. ‘Oh well, they didn’t say much, really.’

  ‘But what did they say?’

  ‘They said there might not be anything for me when I go back.’

  Alice gives a snort of disgust. ‘Bastards!’ she says. ‘What complete bastards.’

  Todd laughs, looking at her now. ‘It was only casual,’ he says, ‘they don’t have to pay you or take you back or anything if you’re sick. Anyway, I hated it there. When I’m okay again …’ he hesitates, shrugging, ‘I’ll just have to find something else. How long d’you think they’ll let me stay here? They haven’t said if they want me to go on working or anything.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Alice says. ‘But they certainly won’t expect you to go home until your ankle is okay and that’ll be a few weeks yet. You can ask them, you know, Todd, they don’t bite.’

  He blushes and looks away again. ‘Yeah, but … they don’t have to keep me working here, do they?’

  ‘No, but you’ve the right to ask.’ But she can see that he won’t and that his caution is about asking for what seems to him like a favour. ‘I could talk to them if you like,’ she says.

  His face creases into a smile. ‘Really?’

  ‘Leave it to me, I’ll pick the best time. Meanwhile I’m going over to the house to show Ruby the menus. If you want to hobble along with me we could have a look at the office computer and see if Catherine ever got that software.’

  Todd slides off the stool, steadies himself with his crutches, and together they walk slowly towards the office.

  ‘She was my friend, you know,’ he says suddenly, looking up at her. ‘Not mates like at school – a proper friend, like they write about in books.’

  Alice reaches out and puts a hand on his shoulder. ‘That’s very special,’ she says. ‘And I’m sure she felt you were that same friend to her.’

  He nods and clears his throat. ‘No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence,’ he says.

  Alice stops and looks at him. ‘She said that?’

  ‘Yeah, but she was quoting …’

  ‘Quoting who?’

  He sighs and screws up his face. ‘One of those women who called themselves by men’s names – writers, you know.’

  ‘Charlotte Brontë? George Sand?’

  He shakes his head. ‘No, but George something.’

  ‘Eliot?’

  ‘Yeah! George Eliot, that’s it. Catherine said that trust and reverence was what we had to have – her and me. She said it was at the heart of friendship and she hadn’t always respected that and so I was her last chance. I think she meant it was her last chance to get that right. She …’ he pauses again.

  ‘Go on,’ Alice says, ‘what were you going to say?’

  Todd inhales deeply and then lets the air out of his lungs in a rush. ‘She saved me from getting into trouble,’ he says. ‘And then she sort of made me be her friend, like she insisted. I didn’t have a choice about it. She said she wanted to show me another side of life.’

  ‘And that was in the reading, I suppose?’ Alice says.

  Todd nods. ‘She thought the school was rubbish, because I didn’t know stuff she thought I should know.’

  ‘And that was it?’ Alice cuts in, seeing now where the conversation is going. ‘That was the trust and the reverence, she was educating you and you were accepting it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he says, nodding, ‘that’s it, I guess. That’s cool, isn’t it, really cool … only then …’

  ‘Then she died.’

  He nods. ‘I didn’t know anybody that died, so I didn’t know how it would feel.’

  ‘So how does it feel?’

  He hesitates, trying to find a way of expressing it. ‘Like something’s been cut out of you and you’ll never get it back, and you’ll never feel the same again. D’you think it’s like that?’

  ‘Just like that,’ Alice says quietly after a pause. ‘And you won’t feel quite the same again, but it won’t always feel as bad as it does now.’

  ‘I’m never going to forget her.’

  ‘Of course not, but you will find a way of getting along without her, and it won’t hurt so much.’

  They walk a little further in silence, until they are only a few steps from the office.

  ‘You know,’ Todd says, ‘she didn’t really have friends. She said Mrs Medway was her oldest friend, but they hardly ever saw each other for years.’

  Alice stops at the office door and turns to him again. ‘Then your friendship would have been especially important to her, Todd,’ she says. ‘You gave her something very precious when she needed it most.’

  uby has taken responsibility for creating order from the chaos of the office, ensuring that the staff and the bills are paid, looking at the ways in which Catherine had organised things and using that as a basis for planning the next few months.

  ‘And the music festival,’ Declan had said, ‘what about that? I mean, I can sort out parking arrangements, deal with the contractors when they arrive, but the paperwork, well … it’s not my strong point.’

  ‘I once organised a writers festival,’ Ruby had admitted, the words out before she had time to stop them, ‘so I guess I can have a go at this.’ But she feels she’s the last person who should be doing it, too old, too out of touch, but then they don’t really have any other options. She is anticipating a minefield of egos and fears an organisational black hole into which emails are sent and not replied to, and the latter is certainly proving to be the case, the chief offender being a saxophonist from North Carolina called Jackson Crow (a made-up name, Ruby suspects) who broadcasts a jazz and blues program on some obscure radio network to what he claims is ‘a community of music lovers around the world’. He also has his own band, The Crowbars. ‘How ridiculous,’ Ruby had said aloud when she read this. ‘The Crowbars indeed! And who’s going to tune in twice a week to listen to some obscure musician in the backwoods of North Carolina? Probably about three people. Oh no, Mr Crow,’ she went on, grumbling her way around the office, ‘you don’t fool me. An international audience – I don’t think so.’ But it seems that Catherine had been taken in by all this, and dealt with him over the previous festival several years ago. In fact from the correspondence they seem to have been quite friendly. So Benson’s Reach is stuck with Jackson Crow and the bloody Crowbars have booked four of the cottages. And Jackson Crow, through his network of contacts, is organising the Australian bands and singers and managing the program.

  As she set about getting the files up to date Ruby had unearthed more correspondence that fits with what Alice had found, and among it are some printouts from Jackson Crow’s website, on which there is an image of a black crow, and the all-black silhouette of a man playing a saxophone. To Ruby this is a sure sign that the man is not keen on being seen. She has him down as a seedy, ageing Elvis look-alike with a toupee, and his failure to reply to her emails has really riled her, although it’s only seven days since she sent the first one and three days since the second. But in the black hole of Crow’s silence she has also found a box file wi
th all the details of the previous festival, and has now matched that with the paperwork for the coming one. The situation is better than it first appeared. While all of them here at Benson’s Reach had been in the dark, several other people have been doing their own bit to get things underway and it’s clear that Catherine put most things in place some months ago. The insurance cover is fixed, arrangements for the sound system and the lighting, the stage and canopy are all there, a security service and the portaloos are booked and the various licences have been issued, although these will now have to be transferred into her, or Declan’s, name. There is a bank account for the festival, sponsorships and a grant from the South West Regional Cultural Projects funding program. Better get some posters done to advertise it, Ruby thinks, the sponsors will want to see their names prominently displayed. By the time a reply from Jackson Crow arrives in her inbox Ruby is in grumpy mode.

  The message is apologetic: he has been in Mexico with The Crowbars, but he has answered her questions and has attached a draft of the program for the weekend of the festival and a contact list of the performers. He closes his message with, ‘Thank you, ma’am, and please tell Catherine we’re all looking forward to seeing her again real soon.’ Better let him know about Catherine, Ruby thinks, and she dashes off a quick email advising him of Catherine’s death and that she and Declan are now the proprietors of Benson’s Reach.

  Glad to have the Crow connection sorted at last, Ruby shuffles her papers into a neat pile on the desk, which now actually looks like a desk, and leans back, stretching her arms above her head. Being here is a challenge but it also feels a whole lot better than she had imagined. She’d forgotten what it’s like to be far from home and surrounded by people who don’t know her, who actually know next to nothing about her. There are no expectations of her based on what she has done in the past. They know nothing of the London Ruby – who she mixes with, how she spends her days nor the sphere of her influence. They take her at face value: she is just Catherine’s friend, Declan’s business partner, a woman in her late sixties who has a controlling interest in this place. It’s surprisingly liberating not to have the baggage of her London life attached to her.