Page 48 of The Little Teashop of Lost and Found
‘That seems perfectly reasonable to me, Nile,’ Sheila commented, then added, ‘Did I hear you say you’re off to London tomorrow?’
‘Yes, early.’
‘Then do give my love to Zelda.’
‘That’s Nile’s partner,’ explained Bel. ‘She lives on a boat in Camden.’
‘Businesspartner,’ Nile amended, frowning down at his plate as if it had a disquieting message written across it in chocolate sauce.
I remembered the phone conversation I’d overheard and wondered if there was, or perhaps had been, more to it than that …
Not, of course, that it was any of my business.
Later, when Nile had gone and Bel and I were alone in the kitchen clearing up, she explained a bit more, some of which Nile had already told me.
‘Nile and Zelda were at university together. She occasionally comes up to stay and we love having her, because she’s fun, in a mad kind of way,’ she added, and I felt a pang of jealousy, though if anyone was the cuckoo in the Giddings nest, it was me.
With suitable (as I thought) temporary live-in care arranged for Father, I returned to my home and informed my practice that in due course I would be leaving them. Of course, they were devastated to lose me, but I was fully aware that this was because of the increasing difficulty in finding doctors interested in becoming general practitioners, rather than on any personal level.
I began to wind up my affairs and put my house in the hands of the local estate agents. I was pleased to discover that it had increased in value to such an extent that I thought once it was sold, I might invest the proceeds in a property adjacent to one of the golf courses in Portugal I favoured. I could let it, until such time as I was able to retire there.
20
The Road Less Travelled
I think Nile must have left for London before dawn, for there was no sign of his car when I arrived at the café very early next morning.
Mind you, I was not quite as early as I’d intended to be, because I’d been scared witless by the huge, spectrally pale shape of a barn owl swooping low past my windscreen, returning late from a night’s hunting. I hadn’t realized before howbigthey were. I thought it was a ghost and had to pull in and wait for my heart rhythm to stabilize.
The bed and mattress were delivered soon after nine and when Bel came a little later to help with the last of the unpacking and curtain-hanging, I’d almost finished screwing the frame together. It was more complicated than it looked: I think there should be some sort of award for doing that kind of thing.
I hung Dad’s small portrait of me in pride of place on the living-room wall and Bel admired it. ‘It’s a speaking likeness, though you must have been quite young when he painted it?’
‘I was about fourteen. He painted a lot of pictures of me, but this is the only work of his I’ve got, apart from a few sketches. My adoptive mother sold the entire contents of his studio to an American collector soon after he died.’
‘Harsh!’ she said with sympathy.
‘Nessa was like that, and she showed her true colours the moment Dad was gone.’
Seeing the memory still upset me, Bel quickly changed the subject,handing over thehouse-warming gifts she’d brought from the family tocelebrate the first night I would spend in my flat. Sheila’s was a ceramic cookie jar shaped like a sheep, full of iced biscuits; Geeta had sent a plastic box of spicy vegetable samosas; and Bel gave me a pair of her porcelain earrings shaped like pale fragments of fan coral, complete with minute sea creatures.
Since the post had already brought me a home-made wreath of dried leaves and flowers from Lola and her family, and a tea cosy from Edie, I was feeling very touched by everyone’s kindness.
The wreath looked veryCountry Livingwhen I’d hung it on the inside of the flat door, but I thought the light blue hand-knitted tea cosy with a pompom on top from Edie was a hat, until I put it on and realized that unless I’d grown a unicorn horn in the middle of my forehead, like Princess Beauty, I wouldn’t need a hole there.
And then another scene dropped straight into my head and I got it down before it vanished like fairy dust.
‘I’m afraid, dear Prince S’Hallow, that there’s a teeny-tiny problem,’ confessed the stepmother, when they were alone. ‘Beauty was cursed in her cradle, which made her so spiteful to my own children that I had her imprisoned in an enchanted bower, where she must sleep for ever.’
‘These things do happen,’ he said, admiring his reflection in the mirror behind her and smoothing his butter-yellow hair. ‘There’s usually a solution.’
‘Yes, the traditional kiss from a prince such as yourself should wake her up, though first you must follow her to another time and place. Of course, when you have set her free, you will be magically transported back here to the Once-upon-a-time and live happily ever after.’
My tapping at the keyboard slowed and then finally petered out altogether, like a slightly weary woodpecker.
I found I was staring directly across at the front windows of Small and Perfect, which were shuttered, dark and slightly mysterious … much as Nile’s face often was when he looked at me … until he unleashed the ultimate weapon of that sudden and devastating smile.
He had to know the effect it had and was probably puzzled aboutwhy his charms weren’t working on me the way they had on every other woman who’d ever crossed his path. Not that I was mad enough to think he was seriously interested in me: I was sure it was just an automatic reflex.
