Page 95 of The Little Teashop of Lost and Found
‘That’s the end of him, then,’ said the mouse, who had followed the spider out. ‘Not that I’m sorry, because he tried to eat me.’
‘That mouse is talking,’ Shaz whispered to Prince S’Hallow.
‘I know – you just can’t stop rodents nattering on, can you?’ he replied, looking at her in a dazzled kind of way, while Beauty was winding her arms around Kev’s neck and puckering up her lips invitingly.
The mouse contemplated the two mismatched couples and said, ‘You do realize that you can’t change things once you’ve made your decisions, don’t you? Beauty will have to stay for ever in the Here- and-now with Kev, and the prince and Shazza in the Once-upon- a-time.’
Then he sighed, because none of them was listening to him.
Next morning, it being Friday, Tilda came to clean and brought Nell with her. She liked to pop in occasionally, to check how things were going, offer sometimes forthright advice to the workmen, and ply them with cups of treacly tea.
That day there was just Jack, fitting new paper towel holders in the kitchen, utility room and cloakrooms, so she plied me instead while Tilda cleaned my flat.
‘Our Tilda only just told me about that Jim Voss having the cheek to come round and demand you give him that old tea set, on Molly Muswell’s say-so,’ she said, stirring the teapot before pouring the brew. By now, I think I’d built up an immunity to tannin.
‘Yes, it was a bit much considering how she cheated me out of all the things I’d paid for. I expect Jim Voss told her about our finding the willow-pattern china in that cupboard and it jarred her memory, but of course, there isn’t any tea set, so she must have sold it and forgotten or something, though she said it had been her mother’s.’
‘Oh, there is a tea set, but it’s nothing to do with Mrs M,’ Nell announced, to my surprise. ‘I remember it well. It was a legacy to the Misses Spencer from their aunt Queenie, but it was so hideous they packed it up and put it away. They did get it out and use it once a year, though, in remembrance of her. I’ve got a couple of snaps of them having tea from it in my album at home.’
‘Then where did it go? I mean, there’s nothing except the vacuum cleaner in there now.’
‘Miss Clara pushed it round the corner out of sight,’ Nell said. ‘Come on, we’ll see if it’s there.’
Old houses have strange quirks and the cupboard proved to run round to the right into a little alcove, with an exceedingly dusty box in it.
‘Tilda can’t know there’s a space there, because the rest of the cupboard’s clean as a whistle,’ I said.
I opened the top and unwrapped a piece of the most hideously dark, gilded and overblown china I’d ever seen. ‘It’s vile!’ I said.
‘The Misses Spencer kept it for sentimental value, but even they didn’t like it,’ Nell said.
‘Well, it certainly doesn’t belong to Mrs Muswell, so let’s just put it back where it was for now,’ I said.
‘It might be worth a few bob,’ suggested Nell. ‘Mrs M must think it is, if she sent that Voss round for it.’
‘I’ll ask Nile to take a look some time,’ I said. ‘But I don’t think Mrs M really had much in the way of good taste, so it’s probably not valuable.’
‘Common as muck, she were,’ agreed Nell, leading the way back upstairs.
When Tilda came down with the vacuum cleaner and I could get back to my flat again without being under her feet, I made the mistake of checking my emails before settling down to write, and there was the next lot of edits from my publisher!
Senga had warned me that there would be more, but they’d only be minor changes, and to my relief she was quite right.
I’d entirely forgotten the thread of my new book by the time I’d sorted those out, so when Bel rang and said she was in Haworth and was I too busy for a visitor, I told her to come straight round.
She was even more welcome when I discovered she’d brought fresh cream cakes and good news: she’d been out delivering some of her ceramic pieces to a small craft gallery in Oxenhope and stumbled across the workshop of an upcycler.
‘Upcycler?’ I had a mental image of someone riding a unicycle across a high wire.
‘Yes, you know – they take bits of old bric-a-brac and furniture and make them into something else, so they have a new lease of life.’
‘Oh, right, I know what you mean now.’
‘I only went in out of curiosity, because I’m not that keen on coffee tables made out of old wooden pallets and bits of car engine, but his stuff was a lot nicer than that – and the great thing is that he makes tiered cake stands out of old plates, too.’
‘Are they nice?’ I asked, interested.
‘Lovely. I bought one for Mum, but I left it in the car because I have shopping to get. I’ve got lots of pics on my phone, though,’ she added, showing me.
