Page 4 of The Little Teashop of Lost and Found
Edie became a good friend, despite the difference in our ages, and Lola’s family provided support and a bolthole I could always return to, sure of a warm welcome.
Of the Wicked Witch I heard nothing more, once the house was sold and she decamped to London. It felt as if all those years she’d only beenpretendingto be my mother … which actually, I suppose, was the truth. She was thrust into the role but the run was lengthier than she’d hoped for.
Lola went off to university the following autumn to study history but then, instead of carrying on and doing a postgraduate teaching course as she’d intended, fell in love with a visiting historian older than her father and settled in Hampstead to raise three children. She said Harry, her husband, had a young soul and the same sense of humour, which, when I met him, I discovered was true. They were genuine soul mates and, if the stars were not quite in alignment regarding their ages, then they were prepared to take what happiness they could together.
Meanwhile, I drifted from job to job, baking in a café, working as a pastry chef in a big hotel, torturing icing into edible fantasies for a celebration cake maker … all kinds of things. In between, I’d return to Edie, where my room was kept ready for me and I was always welcome. In my spare time I took painting classes and accepted that my talentslay more in illustration than fine art, tried on several writing groups for size and socialized in one of the artier pubs with a group of bohemian and often transient friends.
And that’s where I eventually met and fell for Robbie … though by then I’d become so used to having my own space that I never actually moved in with him. I’d climbed up the housing ladder slowly, from rented room, to bedsit, to minute flat. It wasn’t easy to find anything affordable in a tourist resort on my wages.
Robbie was a bit like my father, I suppose, in that he was a big, easy-going and comforting bear of a man, given to warm, wonderfully consoling hugs. He was a dentist, of all things, though his real love was surfing, kayaking, hang-gliding or any sport that had a dangerous edge to it. I was always afraid I was going to lose him, though not in the way I finally did, when he emigrated to Australia.
He wasn’t big on permanent commitment and though he suggested I follow him out there once he’d found his feet, I didn’t believe for one minute that he really meant it. In any case, I didn’twantto go. I mean, I have ghost-white skin, red hair and wilt even in mild sunshine, so I’d have to live the life of a vampire to survive in a hot country.
The day he flew off, leaving me with his old and sea breeze-blasted Beetle car, with the hippie-style daisies painted up the side, as a keepsake, it felt like yet another abandonment.
Still, as Lola pointed out to me when I was staying in London with her and Harry soon after Robbie left, my life was also a series of lucky breaks: against all the odds I’d been discovered alive after my abandonment, I’d had a wonderful father, and Edie had rescued me on my very first night in Cornwall from who knows what danger.
‘And you and your family have always been there for me,’ I said gratefully. ‘I’m OK about Robbie really, because I can see now that we were just drifting along together and he was never going to commit to marriage or a family, but we did have some good times.’
I looked back at over a decade spent in Cornwall and added, surprised, ‘You know, when I moved down there I didn’t think I’d be spending my life working in café kitchens! Somehow, I imagined I’d magically be able to earn my living from writing and painting.’
‘You have sold some of your paintings and you’ve had short stories published,’ she said encouragingly.
‘I’ve given up trying to sell my pictures, because in my heart I know now I’m not that good, andallmy novels have been rejected.’
‘I think your pictures are great, but probably a bit of a niche market,’ she suggested tactfully. ‘And I expect readers just aren’t ready for dark, adult fairy tales yet. Perhaps you should try a change of direction?’
And I did, though not quite in the way she meant. In the spring of 2007 I loaded my entire worldly possessions into the old Beetle car and upped and moved to Scotland, to work in Dan Carmichael’s Climber’s Café.
Looking back now at my teenage self, I’m amazed that I managed to drive up on to Blackdog Moor while still weak and shivery with shock, and negotiate the maze of narrow, rutted lanes in the pre-dawn darkness.
Father had given me the Mini only a few weeks before, after I’d passed the test first time, and it was my pride and joy … or it was until it became for ever tainted with the happenings of that night.
The vile Thing – I couldn’t think of it as a baby – was bundled into a once-white sheepskin rug and lay still and silent in the passenger footwell. Indeed, I presumed it to be dead, since it had shown no sign of life after those first mewling weak cries, for which I was profoundly thankful. I felt like Frankenstein, repulsed by the monstrous creation that had resulted from my first – and, I was determined, only – love affair the previous summer.
It held the power to destroy my safe, comfortable future, should Father ever find out about its existence, but I was totally determined he would not.
3
Sad Café
That move from Cornwall to Scotland was a culmination of several things, not least turning twenty-nine and suddenly spotting thirty looming on the horizon like a slightly forbidding cloud.
And, once he’d emigrated, Robbie had communicated with me only during the short, drunken, self-pitying intervals between a series of leggy and beautiful Australian girlfriends. (When later we became Facebook friends, I actually got toseethe girlfriends, since he pasted his whole personal life on the page.)
My local friends were moving away, getting married or settling down – sometimes all three – while I didn’t even have a Significant Possibility, let alone a Significant Other. So when Edie decided to semi-retire, selling her hotel and purchasing a guesthouse in her native highlands, I felt increasingly lonely and stuck in a rut. Andthat’swhen Dan’s advert for kitchen help in his Climber’s Café, in a village not too far from Edie, caught my eye.
Dan was ten years older than me and an inch shorter, but a wiry, charismatic character and a rock-climbing legend evenI’dheard of. With his spiky fair hair and bright blue eyes, I’d found him immediately attractive, but it had still taken him nearly a year – not to mention an engagement ring – to persuade me that happy-ever-after wasn’t just the stuff of fairy tales and to get me to agree to move into his square stone Victorian house next door to the café.
I should have known better. A handful of years passed, yet we were still no nearer setting a date for the wedding or starting the family ofmy own I desperately wanted – and then he went and got himself killed while scaling for a stupid TV programme some coastal stack of rock he’d climbed a dozen times before.
He was tackling the very difficult route up Gannet’s Rock on Lundy Island for the first programme. You’re only allowed to climb there before April, or late in the year, and he’d chosen early March. I’d been cross with him because he’d forgotten my birthday was on the 2nd and seemed to think it didn’t matter if we celebrated it later … Afterwards, I kept thinking that my last words to him had been angry … and now, no matter how illogical it was, I wasstillangry with him, but this time for leaving me permanently.
He was so vibrant, alive and charismatic – I simply couldn’t believe he wasn’t going to walk through that door at any moment.
He’d always jokingly called me Rapunzel, but there was no way I could have helped him to the top of that particular tower … and anyway, it wasn’t lack of climbing skill that killed him, but a great chunk of rock that fractured off and fell from above, sweeping him away as casually as if he’d been a worrisome fly. One of his friends explained it to me – how the rain and ice must have been secretly weakening a tiny fissure deep down into the rock and it was just sheer bad luck that Dan had chosen that moment to make the ascent.
Eventually the anger wore off and my old friends Grief and Despair moved in instead, not to mention an all-too-familiar feeling of abandonment. I wanted to give in to my emotions and lie down and howl like a dog, but instead I battened them down and focused on making all the arrangements to lay both Dan and my dreams to rest, getting through one minute, one hour, one day, at a time.
