‘I’ll be in touch,’ I say to a smug-looking Julian as I take my chance to escape them both. ‘Bye, Ophelia. Thanks for an utterlyuniqueevening.’ Astounded, she stares at me blankly. Then I turn and walk away from them as quickly as I can, knowing that if I ever see either of them again it will be far too soon, and that my being ‘in touch’ with Julian is about as likely as a seagullnotstealing a tourist’s Cornish pasty this summer.
Two
‘I’m going to take Barney for a walk, Anita!’ I call down the stairs of the shop. ‘Could you or Sebastian come up for a while?’
I attach Barney’s red leather lead to his collar, and he looks up at me appreciatively so I rub behind his blond ears just where he likes it and he nuzzles my hand.
‘Don’t get too excited,’ I tell him, ‘We’re only going for a quick wander – I’ve got sewing to do later.’
Anita appears at the top of the stairs closely followed by her younger colleague Sebastian.
‘You don’t both need to come up,’ I tell them. ‘I won’t be gone long.’
‘Tea break!’ Sebastian says, clutching theatrically at his throat. ‘Gasping for a cuppa, aren’t we, Anita?’
Anita nods her grey head in agreement. ‘We’ve unpacked most of the delivery now. There are just a few fiddly bits left – crochet hooks, packets of embroidery needles … that kind of thing, but that won’t take long.’
‘You two got on with that quickly!’ I say, amazed they’ve unpacked so many of the boxes we’d had delivered to the shop earlier in the day. It was a delivery of craft equipment so the majority of it was fiddly little things that took ages to hang on the wooden rails or stack on the glass shelves downstairs.
‘We don’t mess around when we get going, do we, Anita?’ Sebastian says, putting his young arm around Anita’s much older shoulders. ‘We’re a great team!’
‘We are when you stop nattering for a minute or two,’ Anita says good-naturedly, patting the hand on her shoulder affectionately.
Barney tugs a little at his lead. ‘All right, I’m coming,’ I tell him. ‘I’ll be back in a bit. Molly might be in from school before we get back. If she is, tell her she can have no more than fifteen minutes down here in the shop before she gets on with her homework upstairs. I know you’ll be tempting her with some of your homemade cake, Anita.’
Anita smiles. ‘Ah, but she deserves it. She’s a good girl.’
‘I know she is, but I also know she’d much rather spend her time down here with you two than upstairs doing schoolwork.’
‘How did the pair of you get on at the gallery last night?’ Anita asks. ‘I heard it was a good turn-out.’
‘Yes, it was packed – you could hardly move. Amazing what a couple of free drinks and a vol-au-vent can attract. The exhibition was okay, I suppose, if you like that sort of thing. The paintings weren’t really my cup of tea. I should probably have given you the tickets, Sebastian.’
Sebastian is a student at an art college in London most of the year, but in the holidays he returns home to St Felix to live with his parents, and when he does he helps me out in the shop. We’re so much busier in the summer months that I can just about afford to employ two part-time members of staff.
Sebastian shrugs. ‘Nah, you’re all right. I’ve been to the gallery plenty of times. I don’t really know much about Winston James as it goes … was his work any good?’
I wrinkle my nose. ‘Good isn’t a word I’d use to describe it … childlike maybe?’
‘Surely you meannaive, darling!’ Sebastian says with a flourish of his hands. ‘That’s what the critics always say when something looks like it’s been painted by a three-year-old.’
I loved that about Sebastian – even though he was an art student himself he never really behaved like one. He wasn’t ‘airy fairy’ as Anita had suggested he might be when I told her I was hiring him last summer. He called a spade a spade and I admired his honesty. Yes, he was lively and a bit over the top at times, but he had a good heart, was a hard worker and the customers loved him.
‘I’m sure that word would most definitely have been bandied about last night,’ I say, winking at him. ‘Okay, Barney!’ I tell the golden Labrador nosing into my leg, ‘I really am coming this time.’
‘Before you go, Kate,’ Anita says, ‘I forgot to tell you – Noah called in earlier from the antiques shop. He says he might have something of interest to you.’
‘Really?’ I ask, wondering what on earth Noah could have that I might want. ‘Right, thanks. I’ll pop in after Barney’s walk.’
Barney and I leave Anita and Sebastian to their tea and no doubt a good gossip, and we make our way quickly along the street down towards the harbour.
I’m very lucky to have found such good staff to help me out. Originally it had just been Anita and myself, and she had sort of come with the premises. Before I became the tenant it had been an old-fashioned wool shop owned by a little old lady called Wendy, who had also lived above the store like Molly and I do now.
From what I’d heard, Wendy and Anita used to run the place like a gossip stop for the older ladies of the town and it had been very popular. However, I’m pretty sure they hadn’t been making any profit for some time. When Wendy had sadly passed away there had been much talk about what was to become of Wendy’s Wools, so much so that when I came along and said I wanted to open a craft shop the landlord had almost hugged me with joy and relief that the beloved place would be re-opening as something along the same lines. He even offered me a discount on my rent if I agreed to keep Anita on, which at the time I wasn’t too sure about. Now, looking back, I don’t know what I’d have done without her knowledge and advice on how to make my little shop work for both the locals and the holiday-makers who flocked to St Felix.
I say ‘little shop’, but we actually have two floors we trade from. To allow us to sell as broad a range of art and craft supplies as possible I’d renovated the basement to hold them all. Upstairs on the ground floor we stock my own textile designs, mostly handmade by me with a little help from some of the ladies of the town, who I’d hired when sales had really taken off last summer.
Having my own shop has been such a long-term ambition of mine that I occasionally have to pinch myself that I am not only ‘living the dream’ but making good money from it too.
