Christmas at the Marshmallow Cafe (Delightful Christmas Book 4)

by CP Ward

  Although the electricity worked, the water had been switched off, and it took her a few minutes of poking around downstairs to find a water cut off lever where she could turn it on again. Back upstairs, the taps ran dirty for a few seconds, before the water began to come through clear. Satisfied, Bonnie made herself a cup of tea using some Ahmad English Breakfast teabags she found in a tin. There was no milk, but in a cupboard she found some coffee creamer which was still in date.

  Retiring to an armchair in the living room, she sat down with the tea on her lap, gazing at the view outside, wondering whether she had come by an unbelievable stroke of fortune or been lumbered with a burden she didn’t need.

  Things still didn’t seem real. The lawyer’s letter had laid out some of the terms that restricted things. She couldn’t sell the property, for one. It didn’t legally belong to her, although the lease was for an hundred years. Whether that restricted what maintenance she could do on it, she didn’t know, but she suspected it was likely. And the biggest question was that if she didn’t technically own it, then who did?

  Her uncle, like a lot of things in her life, remained a mystery. Had she known he was here all this time, living and working in the middle of a forest in the Lake District, she might have visited. She didn’t even know if he had been close to her family, because after her father’s death, things had become difficult, with her mother working all hours to keep them afloat. The years of struggle had strained their maternal bond too, and Bonnie’s divorce had gained no favours from her elderly mother. Now, at the age of eighty-seven, she lived in a care home in Bristol, and while Bonnie visited as often as she could, during her few moments of clarity, her mother did little other than berate her for seemingly throwing her marriage away.

  It remained a sore subject, one she didn’t like to think about.

  Outside, a wind whipped through the trees, whistling through the eaves and rattling the window. Behind her, something creaked, making Bonnie nearly jump out of the chair. She looked around, and there, in an alcove occupied by a standing lamp, she saw a thin door, no more than two feet wide, cracked open.

  Neither she nor Debbie had noticed it. Painted the same dark brown as the rest of the hardwood that elegantly framed the little living room, it had appeared to be part of the paneling, a small notch for a handle only noticeable now as the door caught the light. Debbie stared at it, wondering where it could lead. The dimensions of the house didn’t allow for any other rooms on this floor, so perhaps it led to a back stair down to the ground, a fire exit of sorts.

  She put her tea aside and got up. She had to move the lamp out of the alcove in order to open the door, but when she cracked it she found a steep hardwood slope leading up, interspersed with ladder-like footholds, something that reminded Bonnie of a ship’s hold.

  Her fingers tingling with excitement, Bonnie stared up. She hadn’t realised that the house had another floor, but now, remembering the design from the outside, it was possible the roof held some kind of attic space.

  The stairs opened up on a room that was surprisingly wide, bigger than the living room downstairs but with slanted corners where the roof intersected. Tall enough to stand in, to Bonnie’s utter delight, there was yet another door, this one leading outside, up a ladder and onto a rooftop space entirely hidden from the ground. Through a glass window in the door she saw a picnic table and a telescope on a tall stand, angled up to the sky.

  It was the attic room which was of most interest, though. Here, she realised, was Uncle Mervin’s true living space. Shelves filled with books lined the walls, most of them related to Christmas or festivals. A desk stood against one wall, still heaped with papers and notebooks, as though whomever had discovered Mervin’s death had known nothing of this secret personal space.

  Without the orderliness of the rooms downstairs, here Mervin’s true personality stood out. There were little figurines from all over the world lined on shelves, Russian and Japanese dolls, even, hilariously, a Caganer from Spain in the shape of Margaret Thatcher. And snow globes, too, dozens of them, ornate, expensive ones rather than mass-produced tourist rubbish. In a wicker tray to one side lay piles of letters with postmarks from all over the world, Brazil, Alaska, the Maldives, New Zealand. Some were open, most were still sealed, as though Mervin had died before looking through them. And ringing the desk were several framed photographs, far more personal than the few downstairs.

  Bonnie looked at each in turn. One was a picture of a young Mervin with his arms around a woman Bonnie didn’t recognise. Now that she thought about it, she didn’t know if her uncle had even been married, so perhaps this was some lost love. Another was with a man she recognised with a skip of her heart as her father, their arms around each other’s shoulders, a pair of motorbikes standing off to the side, and a lake that was possibly local in the background.

  But it was one larger, more prominent photograph which brought tears to Bonnie’s eyes. Inside a thin paper frame with a faded Christmas Land logo along the top, it showed the same two men standing outside the theme park, with a sparkling, freshly decorated gatehouse in the background.

  And in the arms of her father, a young girl, no more than three years old.

  Bonnie wiped her eyes. She had seen baby photographs of course, and recognised herself immediately.

  She had been here before, when the park was new, perhaps before it was even fully opened. Her father had always promised to take her when she was old enough to enjoy it, and now she realised that the stories he had always told her about the park came from personal experience.

  They had always felt so real, so clear in her mind that she could almost visualise them. Now she understood why. She had been here before, and locked away in the vaults of her long forgotten memories, were the experiences her father had told her about.

  Why he had never told her, she could only speculate. It was unlikely that her mother, perhaps holding the camera in the photograph, perhaps not, would be able to enlighten her, but now she realised that coming here, inheriting Uncle Mervin’s legacy, was the closure of a circle that had encompassed her entire life.

  Needing something stiffer to drink than a cup of tea before she began the task of sorting through her uncle’s things, she descended the stair-ladder, just as she heard Debbie come in downstairs.

  They met in the living room. Debbie had a beaming smile on her face and a rosy tint to her cheeks.

  ‘You’ll never guess what I found,’ Bonnie said.

  ‘Me either,’ Debbie answered. ‘I have good and bad news. The good is that I found a pub. The bad is that those three lads from yesterday were in it.’

  11

  New Friends

  The weight of secrets and revelations hung so heavily on Bonnie that she needed to get out for a while. Debbie offered to show her the pub, so together they walked down a forest path leading among customer chalets and one or two smaller attractions that actually seemed to be open, to the larger restaurant forum area Brendon had mentioned. Inside, a communal seating area belonged to all the encircling restaurants, of which only two restaurants were currently open. Bonnie spotted her first customers—an elderly couple with a Labrador—sitting on a table that overlooked a fish pond.

  Here’s the pub,’ Debbie said, indicating a gloomy, ornate building that looked part ice castle, part dungeon. A sign hung over the door: THE GROTTO: REAL ALES FROM SCANDINAVEA.

  Debbie pushed through a heavy wooden door and led them inside. Bonnie blinked, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the gloom. Slowly, an intricately adorned hardwood bar came into focus, then a number of tables and chairs, all of them scored and ancient. The décor looked like a Christmas antiques market had exploded. In one place, the back of a life-sized plastic reindeer appeared to enter one wall, with its front end poking out on the other side. A giant model of an open Christmas present had a giant snow globe poking out, its contents a miniature version of the pub in which they now stood, glitter flakes of sand pushed up through the water by a pump. To Bonn
ie’s delight, goldfish swam between miniature plastic trees.

  ‘Debs!’ came a cry from a corner table, and Bonnie looked over to see the three lads they had first encountered yesterday at the service area. ‘We got you one in.’ Then, on noticing Bonnie, a hail of greetings rose up. ‘Hey, Grandma!’ ‘Mrs. Goggins!’ ‘We’ve got you a sherry in. Large!’

  ‘I see you’ve made your peace with them,’ Bonnie said.

  Debbie shrugged. ‘There were only the four of us here,’ she said. ‘It was a case of drink with them or have a scrap. I was up for the scrap, but they bought me a pint and decided to make a truce. Plus, see that plastic tub on the bar? Free mince pies. Who could possibly stay angry in such a situation? It is Christmas after all, kind of.’ She grinned. ‘They’re all right, for a bunch of chavs. Come on, I’ll introduce you.’

  She led Bonnie over to the table.

  ‘All right?’

  ‘Get on.’

  Debbie planted Bonnie on a chair beside her, facing the three lads. From a distance they had been indistinguishable, but up close they separated into three clearly different beings. The first, introduced as Larry, was short, chunky and prematurely balding, yet had the kind of cherubic face which was likely asked for I.D. whenever he ordered a drink. He was the loudest of the three, the origin of most of the jibes, something Bonnie suspected was due to a secret inferiority complex.

  The second, Barry, was harmless in a banker’s son kind of way. He was the kind of person destined to progress through life with little fuss, securing a decent job and a pleasant family along the way. His hair parted centrally in an unfashionable throwback to 1990s boybands, and while he was nice enough looking, he wasn’t the sort of person to turn many heads. It turned out that he was due to get married soon, and this trip was his stag weekend, booked and organised by his two best friends since primary school.

  It was immediately apparent why Debbie had cast off her anger and made peace with them. The third guy, Mitchell, had something about him that the others lacked. He was dark-haired, olive-skinned, and had the kind of brooding look which made girls stumble. Bonnie, long out of the social loop, was able to view as an outsider the way Debbie offered all of her attention to everything Mitchell said, sitting with her body open to him in a subconscious gesture of welcoming. It was sweet in way, although she feared that Debbie, dressed in leathers and chains and with an obsession with Ozzie Osborne, was setting herself up for a fall. Mitchell, all Ralph Lauren and Burberry, his shoes some posh Italian brand they definitely didn’t sell in Morrico, was about as opposite as a person could get.

  ‘So, you just got a letter telling you that you’d inherited a café in this place?’ Larry said, as conversation turned to Bonnie. ‘Mental.’

  Bonnie shrugged, wondering how much Debbie had told them. ‘It was a surprise, that’s for sure.’

  ‘What are you gonna do, like, jack your job in and move up here?’

  ‘I haven’t decided yet. It doesn’t look as though it would be that lucrative.’

  ‘We’d all stop in for a hot chocolate with marshmallows,’ Barry said. ‘Wouldn’t we, boys?’

  ‘Yeah, course,’ Larry said. ‘There’s only that other café open and that hot chocolate’s milk was definitely off.’

  ‘It was goat’s milk, you idiot,’ Barry said. ‘Plus, Mitchell topped you up with some bourbon while you were in the toilet.’

  Mitchell, quieter than the others, just smiled as Larry turned to glare at him.

  ‘I wouldn’t get your hopes up,’ Bonnie said. ‘I’m not sure I could open it any time soon.’

  ‘Ah, sucks. Not much else going on up here. Know what we did this afternoon? Elf hunt in the forest. Mental. They got these wolves to pull us on these sleds which had wheels because there ain’t no snow—’

  ‘Huskies,’ Barry said. ‘They weren’t wolves.’

  ‘Looked like wolves.’

  ‘That’s because they’re actual Siberian huskies, not the bred down ones you see middle-aged women walking on Saturday afternoons.’

  Larry shrugged. ‘Reckon they were close enough. We had to like, drive around, looking for people dressed in elf costumes. If you spotted more than five, you got a prize. Turned out to be a box of out-of-date Christmas crackers. Wasn’t hard, though. Found one of them having a cig round the back of this old shed that was supposed to be where they put the reindeer.’

  Debbie gave a loud laugh, immediately cutting it off and glancing at Mitchell. ‘He was having a cig?’

  ‘Yeah, mental ain’t it?’

  ‘I don’t think they take their jobs too seriously,’ Barry said. ‘I mean, it must be hard when there’s no one here.’

  ‘Not Christmas yet, is it? I bet it gets packed in December. You reckon they open up those rides? I spoke to that caretaker guy we saw and he was like, no chance. He said that coaster ain’t gone in years. Costs too much to run it when there ain’t no one on it.’

  ‘Beers are good,’ Barry said, lifting a nearly empty glass. ‘Who’s for another?’

  Even though Bonnie was keen to get back and start sorting through Uncle Mervin’s belongings, she let them talk her into another drink. As their conversation shifted to other things, she began to feel a little sidelined, and it wasn’t just that she was double their age. While they lamented the fall of the once-great park, all she could see in her head was how her father had described it.

  And after a long, hard day of trekking through the snow, out to the ice lake in the forest where you can skate in winter and watch rare birds in summer, it’s back to the forum, where a great vat of steaming hot chocolate, along with a mound of freshly baked marshmallows, is waiting. Christmas songs are playing, reindeer are wandering past the windows, and a light snow is falling. You’re in heaven.

  It wouldn’t take much to put it right, would it? A decent clean up, a little maintenance, and some better advertising. Leaflets through doors, ads online. Wasn’t that how Morrico did it. And that place was always packed.

  The five of them enjoyed another drink together, then decided to head out. The boys were only staying until Thursday, doing a mid-weeker because, as Larry told Bonnie in an aside when Barry couldn’t overhear, ‘It was dirt cheap, like they practically paid us to come.’ Before parting, the boys invited Bonnie and Debbie to meet them for dinner, in one of the few open restaurants, a place standing just up the walkway from the forum called Twinkle Star’s Christmas Grill.

  ‘Apparently the steaks are the best in the Lake District,’ Larry said. ‘So fresh you can practically hear the cow mooing.’

  Bonnie grimaced at the thought, but Larry meant well. While Debbie instantly agreed, Bonnie was more conservative, telling them she would feel how her ancient bones were holding up a little later on. As they walked back to the café, arm in arm, she wanted to tell Debbie about the secret grotto they had found, but the minute the boys were out of sight, Debbie turned to Bonnie, her cheeks flushed, her eyes practically bobbing out of her head.

  ‘Oh my god,’ she said. ‘What am I going to do?’

  Bonnie smiled. ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘It’s Mitchell,’ Debbie said, the earnestness in her voice making Bonnie laugh. ‘I think I’m in love.’

  12

  Staff Quarters

  Debbie was keen to wax lyrical about a man she’d known less than two hours, but Bonnie suggested they wait until they got back to the café and tried to find something less mood-enhancing to drink. In the end, she sat Debbie down in the café’s upstairs living room and made some coffee out of a jar Mervin had left behind.

  ‘He doesn’t speak,’ Bonnie said, handing Debbie a cup.

  ‘Oh, but isn’t that part of the mystery? It’s like, he could be anything.’

  ‘You’re hoping he’s actually a guitar player in a metal band, but he’s probably an accounts manager at Lloyds.’

  Debbie grinned. ‘You know me so well. Let’s hope on that guitar player thing. He can’t have much money if this was where th
ey came for a stag do. Hardly a weekend in Prague, is it?’

  Bonnie patted her on the arm. ‘You keep your dreams alive as long as you can. Because once you marry one, you’ll find out that most men are like radiation. When exposed to real life they immediately begin to deteriorate.’

  ‘Your old man can’t have been all bad. I mean, you must have had some good times, right?’

  Bonnie gave a wistful smile. ‘It was all right in the beginning, I suppose. He was just a player. I knew it when I married him, and he didn’t change. I thought he would, but … nope. The problem with being young is that more often than not, you marry for looks. Someone a bit nice shows some interest in you, and you overlook the little niggles and imperfections because they have a nice smile or they touch you in a way that makes you shiver. Ten years in, though, and that’s all gone. The rot has set in. If you don’t have that meeting of personalities, you’re done for. Sure, Phil stuck around for the sake of the kids, but I knew they weren’t business trips. And eventually, when the kids were old enough to fend for themselves, he went off on one and didn’t come back.’

  ‘That’s sad.’

  ‘It is, but is pretending any sadder? I knew for years what he was doing. You can just tell by the body language when they no longer have any interest in you. Don’t get me wrong, though, I wouldn’t have been any kind of a saint given half the chance. It was just that no one was ever looking at me.’

  ‘Stop. You’re going to make me cry. Usually it takes at least five beers, but I think we’re at a higher altitude.’

  ‘All I’m saying is to be careful of the holiday romance. Or if you do have one, treat it as that and don’t be broken-hearted if it goes nowhere.’

  ‘So you don’t think I should try to pull him at the club tonight?’