Page 112 of The Little Teashop of Lost and Found
He’d left the door open and Bel put her head in at this point. ‘Alice, are you there? I don’t want to interrupt but—’
Then she broke off, registering that I was clasped in the arms of a strange man and began to back out again, apologizing.
‘Sorry – I didn’t realize …’
‘Come in, Bel, you’re not interrupting anything – or not any more than Robbie has. He’s just unexpectedly arrived.’
‘Pleased to meet you. I’m the boyfriend,’ Robbie greeted her helpfully.
‘The long-agoex-boyfriend,’ I amended. ‘I think I mentioned him to you, Bel – he’s over here from Australia.’
Robbie was wearing his deeply hurt expression again. ‘I dashed straight up here to see you, Alice, but you don’t seem at all pleased.’
‘It’s just bad timing,’ I explained. ‘Of course I’m pleased to see you, you should just have checked this was a good time, you great daft lump.’
He brightened up a bit. ‘Well. I suppose I could find somewhere to stay in Haworth till you’ve sent this important book off tomorrow,’ he conceded magnanimously. ‘It’s a bit far to return to Wimbledon and come back again.’
Bel, having had time to sum up the situation and my probably far-from-welcoming expression, said, ‘I’ve got a good idea, Robbie. My mother takes in paying guests at our house just outside the village and she’d be very happy to put you up. And Alice will be staying with us this weekend too – she needs to relax after all her hard work – so it would all fit in nicely, wouldn’t it?’
‘Great idea,’ I said gratefully. ‘Please do take him away!’
‘How about you just put me up for one night and then I come back here so Alice and I can have the weekend to ourselves and … catch up with each other,’ he suggested, a worryingly keen expression in his eyes.
‘Oh, no,’ I said quickly and emphatically, without thinking. Then Isoftened it by explaining, ‘I’ve promised Sheila, Bel’s mum, that I’d be there for dinner tomorrow and then I’ve got a reporter from the local newspaper coming to interview me on Saturday morning.’
‘Interview you?’ he echoed, looking baffled. ‘I don’t know what on earth’s happening any more!’
‘You should keep up with the plot,’ I said tartly. ‘I told you about my novels taking off and the teashop I’m opening.’
‘You’d better come with me and I’ll explain everything when we get to Oldstone Farm,’ Bel promised him. ‘We’ll leave Alice in peace and you can see her tomorrow evening.’
‘Bel, you’re an angel,’ I told her.
‘I only popped in because I’ve brought you the first batch of cake stands from Thom – I happened to be over there this morning,’ she said, slightly self-consciously. ‘They’re downstairs in the back kitchen and they look exactly what you wanted.’
Then she steered Robbie out and I could hear her asking him on the stairs whether he’d driven up and if so, where he’d parked.
Unsurprisingly, it took me a while to get back into the novel again after that, but once Iwasin, I flew on into the night, barely registering when the light across the way went out …
I swooped down and landed on the closing sentence in the early hours of the morning and sat there, slowly coming back to the Here-and-now.
‘Where’d the other two go?’ Kev asked, finally looking up and noticing they were alone … well, apart from a funny cow with one horn. He’d never been in the country but he’d seen cows on the TV and they hadn’t looked quite like that.
Suddenly the animal made a neighing noise, then cantered past him at speed before leaping into a curtain of shimmering haze.
‘The portal’s going to close and it’s pulling all the Fairyland creatures back to Once-upon-a-time,’ Beauty said. ‘See – there go our enemies,’ she added, as the depleted group of dryads were sucked through the hazy patch in their turn, snarling and struggling.
‘That’s it, it has no power over me now,’ Beauty said. ‘We can get married and live happily ever after in your kingdom.’
The blue-clad man staggered out of the bower, holding his head.
‘What happened?’ he groaned, looking about him fuzzily.
‘You fell down and knocked yourself out, Officer – don’t you remember?’ Kev said. ‘Me and my fiancée were just wondering whether to send for an ambulance or not – weren’t we, Beauty?’
The policeman narrowed his eyes. ‘Beauty? But you’ve been going out with that Shaz for years.’
‘Not any longer,’ Beauty told him. ‘She had too much fairy dust and she’s never going to come back.’
