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.’
‘I was teaching art in London and working at my ceramics in my spare time till my divorce, but now I’ve moved home again I’d like to see if I can earn my living from it,’ Bel said.
‘I suppose there’s quite a lot of passing tourist trade in the summer?’ I asked.
‘Yes, so if we hung a “Pottery Open” sign at the end of the lane, people could come and watch us work, then perhaps buy some of Bel’s pieces,’ Sheila said. ‘Mine aren’t really impulse buys, though I might get one or two commissions that way, and I don’t mind if people watch me,’ she added. ‘Once I’m working, I won’t know they’re there.’
‘I don’t mind either,’ Bel said, ‘but I thought if we could offer refreshments, too, then that might make more of them decide to turn off.’
‘Yes, it’s not going to be a proper café, just coffee, tea, cold drinks and cakes,’ Sheila said. ‘I’d make the cakes – maybe one or two Norwegian specialities like Bergen buns.’
‘They’re delicious,’ said Geeta. ‘Sort of sponge cakes filled with apple – not really a bun at all.’
‘I think a sign advertising a pottery and refreshments would bring people in in droves,’ I said. ‘But you can’t work and serve food at the same time, can you?’
‘True, though I’m a lark and like to get up early and into my workshop in the mornings and we could open to the public just in the afternoons,’ Sheila said.
‘Once it’s up and running, we could get someone in to help anyway,’ Bel suggested. ‘There’s a local girl, Jan, who takes care of the baby while Teddy and Geeta are working in the office and I know her elder sister’s looking for a part-time job.’
‘I saw the sign for Pondlife on the way here,’ I said to Teddy and Geeta. ‘Nile told me you sell garden pools.’
‘In a manner of speaking,’ agreed Teddy. ‘Geeta and I run the family business, creating swimming ponds.’
‘Swimming ponds?’ I echoed blankly.
‘Ponds big enough to swim in,’ Geeta explained. ‘They’re expensive to put in, but ecologically sound, because they keep clean naturally and are easy to maintain.’
‘Dad started the firm up originally, when we lived near Bristol,’ Teddy said. ‘He dropped out of university after his first year and went to work for some family friends in Germany, who had a swimming pond business – it was popular there much earlier than it caught on here. Our business has slowly built up over the years.’
‘I’ve never heard of the idea, but it seems a good one,’ I said.
‘It was – and you have to admit, Nile, that taking the plunge with what might seem an expensive and airy-fairy idea sometimes works out,’ Sheila said to him pointedly.
‘Touché,’ he said with a grin that transformed his face to something much more human – and dangerously more attractive – than a Greek god. ‘I’m sure there’ll be a huge market in Yorkshire for potteries serving Bergen buns and expensive posh teashops.’
‘There will,’ Bel said firmly. ‘And we can help each other too, can’t we, Alice? Pool our resources. Sink or swim together.’
‘Splash out and go for it?’ I suggested.
Teddy groaned.
‘You have the catering experience we lack, while I’m ace at painting and decorating,’ Bel said.
‘Sounds good to me,’ I agreed.
‘Perhaps you should have a Plan B, in case your teashop doesn’t take off?’ Nile suggested to me pessimistically.
‘Oh, I’d cut my losses, sell the place, buy a small cottage and scrape a living,’ I said, though I didn’t say that it would probably come from writing horror fairy tales.
‘Or just move in here permanently and help me renovate the house, because it’s going to be an ongoing project for ever, like painting the Forth Bridge,’ Sheila offered. ‘But ignore Nile – his glass is permanently half empty. I’m sure your tea emporium will be a huge success.’
I was starting to feel as if I’d known the Giddings family for a long time and I took this opportunity to put the question I’d been dying to ask for hours.
‘How did Oldstone Farm get its name?’
‘Oh, from the natural stone outcrop on a hill nearby – didn’t you see it as you arrived?’ asked Teddy.
‘No, it was starting to go dark and you couldn’t see much because of the wet mist.’
‘The Oldstone isn’t actually that close, but it’s a landmark. At some point a circle of stones was erected round it, but they’ve all fallen down now,’ Nile said.
‘It’s a nice place for a picnic in summer,’ Geeta commented. ‘If you know the way through the small back roads you can park quite near it, though there’s a hiking trail that goes right past it, too.’
‘And there’s a bit of a Brontë connection,’ Bel added. ‘It’s said that it was a favourite spot of Emily’s, though I don’t think there’s any proof, and it would have been a long hike from Haworth.’
‘It’s an odd sort of spot. The wind seems to whistle round the stones even on a summer’s evening,’ Sheila said.
‘There are all kinds of stories about it. Apparently, a baby was once found abandoned there, though I don’t know how any mother could do that to her child,’ Geeta said, tenderly stroking Casper’s downy head.
The room swirled around me.
‘Is that an old legend?’ I heard Bel ask, as if from a long distance away.
‘Actually, I think it was fairly recent, now you come to mention it,’ Sheila said. ‘In fact, not many years before Paul brought me here after we got engaged, to meet his father and grandparents for the first time – Oldstone is the family home, you know, so Paul had always spent a lot of time here.’
Then, catching sight of my expression, she looked at me with concern and asked, ‘Are you all right, Alice? Only you’ve gone very pale.’
‘Yes … fine,’ I said and then blurted out, without in the least meaning to, ‘Only … I think that baby might have been me!’