Page 17 of A Touch of Magic at the Comfort Food Café
I leave the bike by the front door of the farmhouse, as Max assures me there will be no passing bicycle thieves on the prowl, and we climb into her car.
‘Not really,’ I reply, doing up my seat belt. I’m uncharacteristically excited about this trip, though– I really need to get out more. ‘My life is very dull.’
‘Ah, but surely your internal life is rich? I bet you tell yourself stories all the time!’
‘I do,’ I concede, as she drives us through picturesque lanes dripping with evergreen hedgerows and swirling autumn leaves, ‘but they’re not always nice stories. It’s not all rainbows and unicorns and roguishly handsome art dealers. I’m more of a “worst case scenario” kind of girl.’
‘I get that,’ she says, tucking a strand of her long dark hair behind her ear. ‘And life often has a way of proving you right, doesn’t it? When I moved here, I was a mess. My husband had had an affair, and when he left me for the other woman, he took all my self-confidence with him.’
‘I’m so sorry Max. I’ve… I’ve been there, too. It really hurts. And it definitely doesn’t boost your belief in happy endings.’
‘Look up!’ she says suddenly, pointing ahead of us. ‘It’s a sparrowhawk! They’re so pretty… but some little creature down here is about to have a terrible day…’
I watch the bird hovering on the wind currents, and I smile at its effortless grace. There are more wild creatures than you’d think in London, but seeing them here is somehow even more natural. In London, a sparrowhawk might be diving for a discarded sausage roll.
‘Anyway,’ she continues, ‘I get that, too. I never expected to find a happy ending. Maybe I thought I didn’t even deserve one,that I must be a crap wife and a crap mum and a crap human, or why else would he have done that to me?’
‘I’m not sure, but possibly because he was a bit of a twat?’
‘Indeed, eloquently put– I can see you’re a wordsmith! He was a bit of a twat, but we’re okay now. Much easier to be laid back about it all now I have Gabriel and I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life. I genuinely didn’t think it was even possible to be this happy, not without some class-A party drugs in your system. When I’m with him, I feel like I’m on ecstasy all the time!’
She sounds thrilled about it, but I’m not so sure that would suit me. I’ve always valued my self-control too much to do drugs, or to even be curious about how it would feel to abandon my inhibitions. It would be scary, for sure. Still… I remember the way Gabriel looked at her that day in the café. The way his guarded face came to light, the way their eyes seemed to sparkle for each other. Okay. Maybe that would be nice… but it’s not for the likes of me.
‘What about you?’ she asks, her accent telling me she is originally from somewhere near Birmingham. ‘Any romance on the horizon? Barring Laura’s misguided attempts to matchmake you with… Oh God, what was his name? The American werewolf in Budbury?’
‘Aidan,’ I say quietly. How could she forget? Even his name is sexy. Not to mention the way he said it, his voice so deep and self-assured.
‘Yes, that’s it, Aidan. He doesn’t live far from us you know. Closer to Eggardon Hill. You could even go home that way if you took a slightly different route.’
‘Why would I want to do that?’ I ask, frowning. ‘I’m not interested in him, and I’m one hundred percent sure he’s not interested in me!’
‘Um, I know. I just thought you were interested in Eggardon, that’s all. Lady, you doth protest too much!’
I laugh and hide my face in my hands. I know it’s blazing when I finally come out again. ‘Okay,’ I say, ‘I admit he was cute. I’m only flesh and blood. But no, to answer your original question, no romance. I’m all about the self-love.’
‘Self-love is important,’ she agrees, nodding wisely. ‘Just make sure you don’t run out of batteries!’
That sets the tone for the rest of the trip really, and we laugh all the way to the antiques market. It turns out to be in a huge old warehouse in a small town on the Devon border, and is packed with an entire world of ‘carefully curated tat’. Some stalls are offering genuine antiques with eye-watering prices and letters of provenance; others are flogging copies of Vogue from the eighties and collections of vintage Pez dispensers.
Max is in her element, veering from stall to stall, making small talk with people she knows. She bargains her way into two elaborate cast-iron fireguards that she says will be ‘just perfect’ for her latest project, and pays what seems like way too much money for a pottery badger.
‘It’s junk really,’ she says, as she places it in her bag, ‘but we have a badger sett in the woods at the back of the farm. Gabriel loves badgers, and he named them all after different types of lager. This one looks just like Estrella. Have you seen anything you fancy? Have you got a theme in mind, colour or otherwise?’
We talk my ideas over for a while, and I end up promising to look at her beloved Farrow & Ball paint card before I make any decisions. I’m kind of thinking dusky pinks, lavenders and mauves, and Max is practically salivating at the thought. She clearly loves her job. I end up buying a gorgeous oil painting of Lyme Bay, not done by anybody famous but still so pretty I can’t take my eyes off it. I pick up a couple of lovely glass vases, some old leather-bound books about insects with amazingillustrations, and finally a crocheted toilet roll holder with a plastic doll’s head on top. It comes complete with a free toilet roll, and you can’t go wrong with that.
‘Very retro,’ Max says, eyeing up her purple ball dress and blonde hair, poking the matching woollen bonnet perched on her head.
‘It’s awful I know, but my nan used to have one of these in her bathroom. It’s a really vivid memory from when I was a kid. I shall call her Loo-ise.’
I’m elated with my purchases, and truthfully also with the company. Max is laid back and fun, and although she does ask a lot of questions, she also shares as well, so I don’t feel like I’m being interrogated. She fills me in on the background of the other ladies, and I find myself dumbstruck when she reveals the painful stories that so many of them have. None of it is a secret, she stresses, so I know she’s not gossiping.
I would never in a million years have guessed that Laura had lost her first husband, widowed by an accident when she was so young, left with two children to raise alone. Or that Zoe moved here because her best friend passed away from breast cancer, and she took over the care of her teenage daughter, Martha. Or that Auburn and her sister Willow, the one who lives in Spain, nursed their mum through years of Alzheimer’s at home.
‘And Edie,’ she explains on the drive home, ‘Edie… Well, this is a strange one really. But you might notice that Edie sometimes takes extra food home from the café, or mentions her fiancé.’
‘Fiancé? Crikey, that’s optimistic– isn’t she ninety-nine?’
‘She is! And her fiancé was actually killed during the Second World War. She just… sometimes thinks he’s still around.’
