The Little Teashop of Lost and Found by Ashley, Trisha (20)

20

The Road Less Travelled

I think Nile must have left for London before dawn, for there was no sign of his car when I arrived at the café very early next morning.

Mind you, I was not quite as early as I’d intended to be, because I’d been scared witless by the huge, spectrally pale shape of a barn owl swooping low past my windscreen, returning late from a night’s hunting. I hadn’t realized before how big they were. I thought it was a ghost and had to pull in and wait for my heart rhythm to stabilize.

The bed and mattress were delivered soon after nine and when Bel came a little later to help with the last of the unpacking and curtain-hanging, I’d almost finished screwing the frame together. It was more complicated than it looked: I think there should be some sort of award for doing that kind of thing.

I hung Dad’s small portrait of me in pride of place on the living-room wall and Bel admired it. ‘It’s a speaking likeness, though you must have been quite young when he painted it?’

‘I was about fourteen. He painted a lot of pictures of me, but this is the only work of his I’ve got, apart from a few sketches. My adoptive mother sold the entire contents of his studio to an American collector soon after he died.’

‘Harsh!’ she said with sympathy.

‘Nessa was like that, and she showed her true colours the moment Dad was gone.’

Seeing the memory still upset me, Bel quickly changed the subject, handing over the house-warming gifts she’d brought from the family to celebrate the first night I would spend in my flat. Sheila’s was a ceramic cookie jar shaped like a sheep, full of iced biscuits; Geeta had sent a plastic box of spicy vegetable samosas; and Bel gave me a pair of her porcelain earrings shaped like pale fragments of fan coral, complete with minute sea creatures.

Since the post had already brought me a home-made wreath of dried leaves and flowers from Lola and her family, and a tea cosy from Edie, I was feeling very touched by everyone’s kindness.

The wreath looked very Country Living when I’d hung it on the inside of the flat door, but I thought the light blue hand-knitted tea cosy with a pompom on top from Edie was a hat, until I put it on and realized that unless I’d grown a unicorn horn in the middle of my forehead, like Princess Beauty, I wouldn’t need a hole there.

And then another scene dropped straight into my head and I got it down before it vanished like fairy dust.

My tapping at the keyboard slowed and then finally petered out altogether, like a slightly weary woodpecker.

I found I was staring directly across at the front windows of Small and Perfect, which were shuttered, dark and slightly mysterious … much as Nile’s face often was when he looked at me … until he unleashed the ultimate weapon of that sudden and devastating smile.

He had to know the effect it had and was probably puzzled about why his charms weren’t working on me the way they had on every other woman who’d ever crossed his path. Not that I was mad enough to think he was seriously interested in me: I was sure it was just an automatic reflex.

Slowly I became conscious of the sound of the Hoover zooming about downstairs and realized that it had been going on for some time: it was Friday and Tilda Capstick’s day to clean.

I went down to say hello and Tilda said she’d called up the stairs and there had been no reply, so she’d just got on with it.

‘But I packed all the white china into boxes and put it in the cupboard where the willow pattern was, first.’

‘Oh, thank you,’ I said. ‘I meant to put it on one of the free recycling websites, because it isn’t really worth selling, but I haven’t got round to it yet.’

‘It was cluttering up the place, but now it’ll be out of the way till you do,’ she said, then added slightly accusingly, ‘Nothing much seems to have changed in the café yet?’

‘No, but it soon will,’ I assured her. ‘I had to get the flat ready first. Come up and see it.’

‘You’ve moved in, then?’ she asked, following me upstairs.

‘Not yet. I’ve been staying at a guesthouse on the moors – Nile Giddings’ family home. I’ll move in officially on Monday, though I will be here tonight because I’ve got to wait in for the cooker, washing machine and fridge to be delivered. I’ve got a four-till-ten time slot.’

‘Eh, the world’s gone mad, delivering orders in the middle of the night!’ she exclaimed, then took a look round the flat and said approvingly, ‘Well, this all looks grand now, doesn’t it? So … are you still going ahead with the teashop, flower?’

‘I certainly am,’ I assured her and then asked if she and her aunt Nell would come for tea on Monday, when we could discuss it all.

As she turned to go she spotted Lola’s gift hanging on the back of the door. ‘Yon Christmas wreath’s gone up a bit early.’

‘It’s not a Christmas one, just an all-year-round kind of decoration,’ I explained.

‘I wondered why there was no holly,’ she said, then remarked disparagingly that dried flowers were bad for collecting the dust and she herself wouldn’t give them houseroom. I suspect she’s not a reader of Country Living magazine.

My white goods arrived just after six, but the delivery man refused to take them up to the flat, instead leaving them in a forlorn row at the bottom of the stairs.

It would still have been early enough to go out to Oldstone Farm for the night, but I had something planned for next morning: Nile had drawn me a map showing the route over Blackdog Moor to the parking area near the Oldstone, and I intended setting out on my first visit there at a very unsociable hour, when I would be sure of having the place to myself.

In fact, dawn had only just begun to rim the blackberry sky with silvered steel as I took the by-now-familiar road up on to the moors, though this time I carried on past the turn to the house, where the Giddingses would probably all be fast asleep … unless baby Casper, who was teething, had woken his parents up early, or Sheila had been struck by inspiration and wandered down to her studio.

Thoughts of Casper, so wanted and beloved by the whole family, contrasted sharply with the baby that had been me, though somehow I didn’t feel connected to that abandoned, sickly and malformed little thing. Perhaps I would, once I was up by the Oldstone.

I’d written Nile’s instructions on a series of Post-it notes and stuck them along the dashboard. They started off clearly enough: ‘Carry on along the main (!) road until you pass a sign on the right for Mr Rochester’s Restaurant and the Hikers’ Café’.

That was where Eleri Groves lived, having married her Mr Rochester. I hoped for her sake there were no madwomen in his attic, and also that he was not quite as irascible as the original.

The road dipped up and down, and the Oldstone on its rocky outcrop seemed to advance and retreat in a tantalizing dance. Then there was a level, straight bit of road and I spotted the sign on the right for the restaurant and paused briefly to peer up the track. Unfortunately, it took a bend and you couldn’t see any sign of the house, apart from a hazy plume of wood smoke rising in the air.

On the sign it said the restaurant was open only in the evenings but the Hikers’ Café proclaimed itself ‘Now open all year!’ though I wouldn’t have thought many walkers would want to take advantage of that in autumn and winter.

I started off again, keeping my eyes peeled for a very narrow lane immediately before a crossroads, but I somehow missed it and had to turn in the car park of the Standing Stones Motel and go back.

I wasn’t surprised I hadn’t spotted it first time: stone walls bordered a thin ribbon of tarmac that meandered off in a series of twists and turns until eventually, just as it seemed to be deteriorating into a track with a grassy ridge growing up the middle and a hedge of blasted hawthorn guarding it like barbed wire, there was a gap and a weathered sign to the Oldstone.

When I turned in, it wasn’t even a track, just twin grooves worn by the passage of many wheels through the turf. I bumped my way along this to where it ended in a half-circle of short turf and a couple of battered, lichen-spotted picnic tables, on one of which a large black crow was sitting, like the last diner reluctant to leave long after closing time.

It eyed me without hope, made a harsh and mocking noise and then flapped slowly and heavily off.

The wind was keen when I got out and the moors bleakly beautiful now that weak sunshine was gilding the picture. It didn’t have any warmth in it, though: if anywhere else in the country was enjoying an Indian summer, it wasn’t Blackdog Moor. The words ‘blasted heath’ were never more apt.

And if it was chilly now, what would it have been like right at the start of March, when I was found? You’d think only a Heathcliffian baby, an indestructible force of nature, would have survived such exposure, not the mewling little weak puny thing I’d been.

The finger of rock was now very near and stuck up like a rudely defiant gesture as I followed a well-trodden path that slowly ascended the ridge. It ended at a flattish plateau littered with the fallen remains of what had once been a small circle of stones around the natural monolith. One, flat and grooved, looked distinctly sacrificial …

My twisted-fairy-tale imagination stirred, but I shoved it firmly back into its box, for today it was time for a reality check.

The Oldstone had been carved with ancient cup-and-ball markings and, standing next to it, you could see for miles. The Giddingses’ house was so far away it looked like a toy, but there was a farmhouse a lot nearer – perhaps even the one Joe Godet had come from.

It was the only other habitation I could spot, at any rate, and my all-too-fertile imagination offered me the image of a young woman in clogs and shawl trudging through the snow clutching her baby. Of course, that scenario was at least a century out of the right timescale – but which direction would my mother have come from? Was it along a path from some hidden, isolated cottage, along the road from Haworth, or from Upvale, the village in the valley below the motel? Or even, losing the clogs and shawl and transposing the image to the right century, from much further afield, if she’d driven, or been driven, here?

That last must surely have been how it was? It couldn’t have been ideal weather for a night walk under any circumstances, let alone for someone who’d given birth within the last few hours …

Then I suddenly remembered that the newspaper had said that Emily Rhymer had actually walked to the Oldstone from Upvale in the dark pre-dawn morning, so perhaps they just bred a hardier race up here and it was quite possible my mother had walked here too.

I’d been numbing my bottom on a fallen monolith while turning all this over in my mind, recalling then that I hadn’t been found at the top near the stones, but in one of the crevices beneath. I got up and made my way down sheep tracks to the tumbled rocks at the base of the stone outcrop. I had no idea into which hole I’d been pushed, but there were several likely candidates and I realized even more strongly how much of a miracle it was that I’d been found – and alive. Left there for long, I’d have been easy meat for any passing scavenger.

I shivered. Now I was on the spot, it really didn’t help to speculate that my mother had been acting in a blind state of shock and panic. I mean, even thirty-six years ago having a baby out of wedlock wasn’t such a cataclysmic event.

I suppose Dad could have been right about her being very young and perhaps in denial about the symptoms of pregnancy until the shock of my arrival – but then, if she was that young, mustn’t she have had someone to drive her here? Or, if old enough to drive, not have been in a fit state to do so, for I can’t have been more than a few hours old when they found me.

It was a puzzle and my thoughts were going round in unhelpful circles, so I began picking my way over fallen rocks towards the car.

I hadn’t seen a living thing other than the crow, so when a sheep suddenly jumped up from under my feet and bounded away, bleating indignantly, I almost had a heart attack – and this was broad daylight!

So what must Joe Godet have felt when he spotted that white fleece and reached into the rocky crevice expecting to find a lamb, pulling out a barely alive baby, instead?

I hoped it hadn’t been disappointment.