Page 119 of The Little Teashop of Lost and Found
‘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 –ordryad.’
‘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 toldmethat 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 wouldboth 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 infront 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 –orvice 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 telling Father.
I knew he’d never notice the additional pills I slipped in among the others he had to take.
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