Page 35 of The Little Teashop of Lost and Found
The new internet router arrived in the mail, though of course it was entirely useless until the landline was reconnected. But I’d have tomanage without it until then, because I’d learned my lesson about using Nile’s without permission.
Along with the router came a bundle of ominous-looking envelopes for Mrs Muswell. At a guess, I’d say they contained a full set of final demands, so I readdressed them to her solicitor. I only hoped Nile hadn’t been right when he forecast a steady stream of debtors turning up in person at the door … though just after the post, a man turned up and said he’d come to collect the old kitchen table and chairs, which he’d bought from Mrs Muswell. He hadn’t been able to pick them up earlier because his van had been in an accident, and he was more than a trifle angry and belligerent when he realized he wasn’t going to get them at all. I wasn’t going to back down, though, and sent him off to Mrs M’s solicitor, too.
When Bel arrived, I gave her a tour of the café and flat and then we went out to look at beds, the top item on my list.
First, though, we bonded further over a burger and fries during a drive-through lunch (glad that Nile wasn’t around to criticize our food choices). The odd thing about Bel was that the moment I’d met her, I’d felt as if she was an old friend I hadn’t seen for ages, and she said it had been just the same for her.
‘Perhaps we knew each other in a previous existence?’ she suggested, but I was having enough trouble coming to terms with the present one to want to explore that idea.
I told her a bit more about my past in Cornwall and how I’d moved to Scotland and thought I’d finally found the man I could settle down with – until he was killed in an accident.
In return, she explained that she was divorced – not amicably, since he’d had an affair with her best friend – and now just wanted to stay at Oldstone and throw herself into her career.
‘I hated teaching and I don’t think I was very good at it,’ she confessed. ‘I spent all my spare time in my studio shed in the garden and Chris – my ex – got very jealous of the time it took up.’
‘Dan – my late fiancé – was the only man I ever lived with,’ I said. ‘He was away a lot, though, so I had time to myself to write in.’
‘You write? What kind of thing?’ she asked with interest.
‘Sort of updated fairy stories with a horror twist. When I was a little girl, Dad told me a fairy-tale version of how I was abandoned as a baby, and as I grew up we added more and more over-the-top detail to it, so I’ve just carried on from there, really, only darker.’
‘Fun!’ she said. ‘Mum’s been a successful artist all her life, while Dad built up the swimming pond business. I suppose I take after her, but our work is very different. The whole family love Oldstone – we’d spent so many happy holidays here before we moved in permanently – so we’re pulling together to renovate it in our spare time.’
‘I can understand that, because the setting’s beautiful in its way, even when it’s so bleak.’
‘I just love to watch the changing skies over the moors and the way the dark clouds close in suddenly, like curtains,’ she agreed. ‘But in summer, with the bees buzzing and the birds singing, it’s a different place entirely.’
‘And the tourists buzzing, too?’
‘Well, we’re certainly on the tourist trail, because they pass us on their way to landmarks like the Oldstone and the Hikers’ Café and the restaurant over near the Standing Stones Motel. I just need to lure them down the track to our pottery.’
‘Don’t you already get lots of visitors interested in swimming ponds? I assume that’s a demonstration model below the house?’
‘No, that was just put in for us – we all prefer natural swimming, but then, that’s what we grew up with. Most of the orders for ponds are generated through the website and word of mouth, so not many customers actually turn up here. Teddy or Geeta visit the potential clients and then do site visits till it’s completed. They have a team of installers, but they’re still based in Bristol where the warehouse is, so they travel up and down quite a bit.’
‘That must be tricky, with the baby.’
‘Teddy’s been doing most of the travelling since Casper arrived, and Geeta has taken on more of the management side, so it’s worked out, and as Geeta says, children aren’t small for very long. She has a very nice local girl to help with Casper, called Jan. You’ll probably see her about the place.’
‘So, it looks like we’re both making a fresh start – and we’ll build successful businesses and stay here for ever!’ I said.
‘Sounds like a plan to me,’ she replied cheerfully, and then drove me to a nearby retail park, where she encouraged me to buy a pretty white-painted metal bed with moulded swags of roses on the headboard, rather than the plain and economical divan I’d been looking for. Then we bounced our way down a long row of mattresses until we found the right one, like Goldilocks, but without the bears.
After that we picked up armfuls of paint charts and a few tester pots (I was feeling inspired by Sheila’s Scandinavian décor), some cheap white paper globe lampshades and a few other minor bits and pieces for the flat. I didn’t want to buy too much until I could see which of my curtains fitted the windows and whether I had enough bedlinen for a spare bed, when I finally got one.
It was late afternoon by the time we’d finished, so we headed straight back to Oldstone Farm and, once I’d dumped the carrier bags in my room, Bel gave me a tour of the grounds.
They weren’t extensive, since it had long ceased to be a working farm and the land had been sold off, but it did extend to a drystone-walled vegetable garden, where the hens also lived, and a substantial U-shaped block of outbuildings.
The barn at one end was now used as a garage, but the hayloft over it had been converted to the Pondlife offices, with an original flight of stone steps leading up to it.
Some stables in the central part had been turned into two pottery studios, a kiln room and storage. Bel showed me round those first.
‘The stable doors will be ideal, because we can open the top halves to the studios when there are visitors, so they can watch us working,’ she said. ‘Then, when that palls, they can go and stoke up on coffee and cake and buy some of my smaller pieces of work, like the jewellery.’
‘You make porcelain jewellery?’ I asked, surprised.
‘Yes, when I was at art college I used to collect Victorian china brooches, usually flowers, and that inspired me. I’m starting to get a name for it, I suppose because it’s wearable art.’
