Page 10 of The Garden of Forgotten Wishes
It had been brightly painted and the gilded lettering on it advertised Verdi’s Ice Cream.
It was all very picturesque, but a sharp cold spatter of rain hit me and I ran for the café door.
There was a heavenly chiming as I went in, appropriate for somewhere called Ice Cream and Angels, and I found myself in a surprisingly large, white-painted room, with a tiled floor like a chessboard and lightwooden chairs and tables. Hung along one wall were large oil paintings, their subjects hard to make out at a glance.
The only customers were a middle-aged couple dressed for the ascent of Everest, in parkas, knitted hats, rucksacks, boots and sticks, who got up and left as I went in, bidding me good morning as they passed.
‘Dear me! Perhaps I should have offered to find them a Sherpa for the ascent of the Fairy Falls,’ said a small, elderly lady sardonically as she appeared from behind the counter at the far end of the café. She had turquoise hair cut in a sleek pageboy bob, lively dark eyes and a puckish grin.
‘They’ll probably go out by the turnstile at the top of the falls and hike up to Thorstane,’ suggested a young man who had been half hidden by a huge and ancient stainless-steel coffee machine.
The woman lost interest in the hikers and advanced on me, holding out a thin hand encrusted with huge semi-precious stone rings. ‘I am sure you must be Marianne Ellwood. Welcome, my dear!’
I shook the hand gingerly and it rattled metallically.
‘I’m Elfrida Price-Jones, but do call me Elf – everyone does.’
‘Thank you, and you must call me Marnie,’ I told her.
‘Short and sweet,’ she approved. ‘And this is Charlie Posset, whose family have the pub on the other side of the bridge, the Devil’s Cauldron – they’re distantly related through my mother’s side. Such alotof it in small villages like this,’ she added, and Charlie grinned.
He was a very engaging-looking youth, with a wide mouth, a mop of indeterminate brown hair and freckles.
‘I’m finishing off my gap year by helping in the café,’ he said. ‘The lure of all the ice-cream I could eat was too much for me.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ I said.
‘Marnie’s the new gardener,’ Elf explained to Charlie. ‘I told you she was coming, didn’t I?’
‘Yes, but not that she was arriving today.’
‘Didn’t I?’ she said vaguely. ‘Never mind, she’s here now. Come along, Marnie, let’s sit in the window with a nice hot cup of coffee and get acquainted. Frothy or espresso?’
‘Er … frothy, please,’ I said, but turned down the offer of ice-cream.
Charlie produced two cups of frothy coffee from the hissing stainless-steel monster, and it must have had plenty of caffeine content, because I felt myself perking up after only a couple of sips.
‘Hear that noise?’ asked Elf.
I nodded; I had become aware of a faint grinding and rumbling somewhere in the background.
‘That’s one of the original electric ice-cream-making machines in the back room – you need to keep using them constantly or they seize up,’ she said, unpeeling a mini biscotti from its wrapper and dunking it into her coffee. ‘I even sometimes use the original patented Victorian devices, where everything is done by hand. You can see some of the photographs and original adverts for Agnes Marshall’s Ice Cave, and Ice-cream and Water-Ice making tubs on the wall.’
I’d noticed the wall opposite the paintings was decorated with posters and photos, as well as being set with a stable door that had the top ajar, which presumably led into the adjoining Lavender Cottage.
‘The Verdis opened a teashop here selling ices in late Victorian times, you know. They were of Italian descent and my mum was the last of the family.’
‘Oh, really?’ I said, interested. It seemed rather exotic for a little village up a dead-end valley and I’d had no idea ice-cream making was flourishing that early.
‘Jericho’s End was in its heyday of popularity with the Victorian daytrippers then, and they say it was the first ice-cream parlour in the north of England, but I don’t know …’
She broke off as the small, battered white van that had been parked in front of my car drove slowly past, emitting a bronchial rattling noise and the pale face of the red-haired man I’d glimpsed earlier scowled at us through the open window.
‘Dear me – I wonder what he wanted? I suppose he’s been up to the Hall, trying to make trouble again.’
Elf, seeing my blank expression, explained, ‘He’s one of the Vanes, a local farming family, but he set himself up as a self-employedgardener/handyman, though he’s a poor hand at both. And almost as dour and unpleasant as his father,’ she added. ‘He helped in the Grace Garden one day a week for my late brother-in-law, but when my nephew inherited, last year, he let him go. Lazy and couldn’t tell a lupin from a foxglove.’
‘Did you say his name was Vane?’ I asked, most of what she’d said washing over me, as I wondered if this was some relative of mine. If so, I can’t say I’d really liked the look of him.
