18
Mapped Out
It was a delight to be able to drive myself into Haworth next morning and the car had been so lovingly restored that it felt brand new. I wished I had a garage to leave it in, rather than it sitting forlornly on the rough patch of ground at the back of the café.
I’d just left a message for the man who serviced the café’s gas boiler, asking him to come and do the same for the flat one, when Nile waltzed in through the unlocked back door, deposited the promised telephone handset on the table and left again with nothing more than a brief, muttered, ‘See you later.’ He seemed preoccupied: perhaps that was why he’d forgotten to knock.
To my amazement, and against all the laws of workmen, the boiler man appeared within the hour, right after my phone had been reconnected (so it was just as well Nile had remembered the handset).
He sneered at the antiquated boiler in the flat and said it probably came out of the Ark, like the one in the café, and if either of them broke down, he wouldn’t be able to get the new parts, so they’d have to be scrapped. That I might have to buy two new gas boilers before very long was a cheering thought.
Still, it was a productive morning in that I had a working landline telephone, a functioning boiler and warm radiators upstairs, by the time Bel arrived. We applied the first coat of warm white emulsion on to the living-room walls, and if the entire interior of the café and flat hadn’t been coated in shades of dark mushroom, one coat might even have been enough.
Bel could only stay for a couple of hours, but I painted round the edges of the walls and she rollered the middles, which made it speedy, and since we were chatting while doing it, it took my mind off what we’d discovered in the newspapers the previous day.
Images of the Oldstone and lost lambs had haunted my dreams last night. It was all starting to get way too Wuthering Heights for my liking. Why couldn’t I have just been left in a cosy basket on the Brontë Parsonage steps, like Dad always told me I was?
Nile had been so preoccupied earlier that I thought he might forget his offer to take me furniture hunting, but he appeared after lunch. Or actually, he appeared with lunch, since he brought me a cheese and tomato sandwich in case I hadn’t had anything.
I hadn’t, and I was suitably grateful, though I fully intended stocking up the café fridge with a few basics like bread, cheese, eggs and milk at the very first opportunity.
Nile seemed in better humour than earlier, so I suspected he was one of those men who get grumpy when their blood sugar dips. It was very thoughtful of him, anyway, and I ate the sandwich while he drove me to his friend’s barn showroom.
It was cosy and comfortable in the car, and once I’d demolished the sandwich and relaxed a bit, my mind strayed back to what Bel and I had discovered from the newspapers. In fact, I was miles away on a blasted heath when Nile’s voice suddenly jarred me out of my reverie.
‘What’s the matter, Allie? You’re not listening to a word I say and you don’t even seem to have noticed that I’ve pulled over.’
‘Don’t call me Allie!’ I snapped. ‘Nobody calls me Allie.’
He grinned. ‘I thought that would get your attention! You’ve been lost to the world ever since we set out, so if any more devious Mrs Muswell dealings have come to light, you’d better tell me about them now, not keep them to yourself.’
‘No, it isn’t that,’ I said, and then, without in the least intending to, found myself telling him about the newspaper articles.
‘I’d only had my birth certificate to go on before, so all the extra information about how and where I was found has really thrown me. It … made it suddenly real, rather than just a story.’
‘I suppose it would, especially now you’ve seen what the moors are like. I expect you want to visit the actual spot soon, the Oldstone? We go on family picnics there in summer, but it’s a bit bleak at this time of year.’
I shivered slightly, despite the efficient heater blasting out warm air. ‘I can imagine, but you’re right: going up there is something I’ll have to do.’
‘I could come with you, if you like,’ he offered.
‘That’s kind, but I feel it’s something I’m going to have to do alone the first time.’
‘OK, I’ll draw you a map of how to get close to it by road, instead, because it’s impossible to find if you don’t know the way.’
‘That would be really useful, thank you,’ I said gratefully.
‘That’s all right. Let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with.’
‘I think the next step after that will be to find the two eyewitnesses and talk to them. It’s just to complete the picture – I’m not expecting it to lead to finding my birth mother.’
‘Well, you know my opinion on that one,’ he said. ‘Better to leave it alone.’
‘Now I know how remote a spot I was abandoned in, I have to admit you have a point, because she can’t have expected me to be found … or not alive, at any rate, can she?’
‘She may not have thought it through to that extent, Alice. We don’t know the circumstances, but they must have been traumatic and desperate to make her do something like that.’
‘That’s what Dad said. He thought she was probably very young and when I arrived just wanted to get rid of me and pretend it never happened.’
‘I think that’s a fairly common scenario,’ Nile agreed.
‘But if you think about it, she can’t have been that young, because how could she get me to a remote spot like the Oldstone in the early hours of a freezing cold March morning if she couldn’t drive?’
‘That’s a point,’ he said, frowning. ‘There aren’t many houses within easy walking distance, only a couple of farms, and I expect the police checked those out at the time.’
‘It was miraculous the farmer found me at all, because I don’t suppose I’d have lasted very long, even though I’d been wrapped in a sheepskin rug.’
‘A rug?’
‘Apparently, and it kept me warm, but even that wouldn’t have saved me for very long, because I was slightly premature and had a harelip, too,’ I confessed. It wasn’t something I generally threw into the conversation with near-strangers … not that any of the Giddings family actually felt like strangers any more, even the irritating Nile.
‘Oh? I hadn’t noticed.’ He turned his head and smiled at me, which I’d already discovered was way more disconcerting than the frown.
‘I was lucky – there’s only a very fine scar.’
‘So, once you’ve talked to the two people who found you, will you give up on trying to discover who your birth mother is?’
‘Probably not,’ I admitted.
‘Well, it’s your call,’ he said. ‘But if the police couldn’t trace her at the time, I don’t suppose you will either, unless she finds out that you’re searching for her and comes forward.’
‘Bel suggested yesterday that I tell my story to a local newspaper in the hope that she sees it and does just that – and I might as a last resort.’
He started the engine again and gave me a half-smile that softened his distinctive face. ‘In the end, it isn’t who you started out as that really matters, it’s who you become.’
‘That’s easy enough for you to say,’ I snapped crossly.
‘But I was adopted too – didn’t Bel say?’ he asked, sounding surprised.
‘No!’
‘Bel and Teddy are the real deal, Sheila and Paul’s biological children, but I was adopted when I was eleven, so my circumstances are a bit different from yours.’
‘I wondered why you didn’t look like the rest of your family, but I thought you might take after your father.’
‘I do – my biological one, who was Greek. Not that I ever met him, because he’d vanished from the scene by the time I was born. My mother had a drink problem and she couldn’t cope, so I was in and out of care from the start.’
‘That’s terrible,’ I said, and he shrugged.
‘When she was sober – which was rare – she’d come looking for her darling child. Next bender, she’d abandon me and go off again. Eventually, she added drugs to the booze and moved to London and they stopped giving me back. I settled better after that, but I never saw her again and she’s dead now.’
‘That’s so sad. I was adopted as a baby and although my mother wasn’t great, at least my father was lovely.’
‘It all worked out well for me in the end, because I was fostered by a friend of the Giddingses and when that broke down – I was a bit of a handful – they took me on instead and eventually adopted me,’ Nile explained.
‘And you became an instant big brother, with siblings to boss about,’ I said, trying to lighten the tone a bit. ‘Perfect!’
He’d pulled out again and was negotiating a road even narrower than the last, seeming to sense oncoming traffic long before it appeared, so that he could tuck into the small passing places.
‘That’s how Sheila and Paul got me to settle down, by telling me I needed to be a role model for Bel and Teddy, who are four years younger,’ he said. ‘They were wonderful parents and when they moved up here permanently, I missed them so much I finally upped sticks and moved too.’
‘How long ago was that?’
‘Oh – about six years ago, I suppose.’
‘About the same time I went to Scotland, then,’ I said, seeing our trajectories moving around the country until, finally, our orbits collided here in Haworth. ‘How’d you get into antiques?’ I asked curiously.
‘Studied history of art at university, then worked for a large auction house in London. I’ve got a half-share in a stall in an antiques centre in Camden, too, but my partner, Zelda, runs it now that I’ve got my own place up here.’
He didn’t specify if he meant business partner or another kind entirely – maybe even both?
‘How do you manage to make a living from your shop when it’s hardly ever open?’ I asked curiously.
‘Because I’ve built up a good client list of collectors and know what they’re looking out for. I study the auction catalogues, go to country house sales, and scour antique’s shops … and I have all kinds of contacts. That’s where most of my income comes from. The shop is really more a base and somewhere to sell off the bits and pieces I buy in job lots.’
‘Sounds fun,’ I said, ‘more fun than working in a café, anyway.’
‘Oh, I get the feeling you’re enjoying yourself, planning out your tea empire.’
‘Emporium,’ I corrected him, and he gave me that sideways glinting smile again, then swung the car through a pair of mossy stone pillars into a yard and stopped in front of a large barn that proclaimed over the double doors: ‘World’s End Antiques’.
It certainly felt like the world’s end; I’d never have found it by myself, even with directions.
‘Rick’s got delusions of grandeur, as it’s mostly junk, not antiques,’ he said. ‘Still, there are usually some solid pieces mixed in and I’ve found the occasional gem.’
The building was stacked floor to ceiling with furniture and bric-a-brac and, surprisingly, we weren’t the only customers rummaging round in there. I spotted two huge willow-pattern serving dishes, both cheap because they were cracked and had been mended with old-fashioned metal rivets, but they would look lovely on display in the café. Then I moved on to the furniture and found a pair of white-painted bedside cabinets, a worn but still beautiful old rug for the living room, a Victorian wooden towel rail and a Lloyd Loom ottoman with a padded top. Nile haggled the prices down and then, with practised skill, he and Rick managed to insert all of them into the back of the estate car and we set off home.
‘Thank you so much for taking me,’ I said gratefully. ‘I seem to have bought tons of stuff for amazingly little money, but I feel guilty because you didn’t get anything.’
‘I often don’t find much there but, actually, I did today. I’ll show you when we get back.’
And when he’d helped me carry my purchases into the café, where I put them in a corner until I’d finished painting upstairs, he produced from his pocket a small ivory parasol with a fist-shaped handle into which was set a little glass window.
‘It’s called a Stanhope. If you look through the glass, there’s a magnified view inside. This has St Paul’s Cathedral but there all kinds of different ones and they’re very collectable. I have a client who’ll snap it up straight away.’
‘It’s small and perfect in all ways,’ I agreed, thinking how interesting it would be if you could peer through a bit of glass into the past, or into a parallel universe.
Or maybe not, depending on what you saw …
I got that thought down for a future book, before I forgot it.