Kate and Clara's Curious Cornish Craft Shop: The heart-warming, romantic read we all need right now

by Ali McNamara

  ‘But why would he send me flowers?’ I say, desperately trying to make her understand without telling her the truth. ‘Why not simply get in touch over the phone?’

  I’d had to change my number after Joel and I had split up, and when we’d moved here to St Felix I’d only given my new number to a select few people so the chance of him being able to contact us in that way was in reality pretty slim.

  Molly shrugs. ‘Maybe he’s trying to be romantic?’

  ‘After all this time? I hope not.’

  Molly’s keen expression drops.

  ‘I’m sorry to interrupt, dears,’ Anita says quietly, ‘but who is this Joel you’re talking about?’

  ‘My ex,’ I explain. ‘We were together before we moved here. It didn’t work out.’ I give Anita a meaningful glance and I see in her eyes she understands immediately.

  ‘It happens,’ she says knowingly. ‘Right then, Molly, dear, since you’re home early from school to study, perhaps you’d like one of my fresh fruit scones to help you along. There should be some jam and clotted cream in your mum’s fridge to go with them.’

  ‘That sounds sick, Anita!’

  Anita looks perplexed by her comment.

  ‘“Sick” means good in her language,’ I explain.

  ‘Oh …’ Anita says, looking relieved. ‘It meant something else when I was young.’

  Molly hungrily heads upstairs to the flat.

  ‘I sense there’s something more to your story with Joel,’ Anita asks quietly, when we can hear Molly moving around in the kitchen. ‘It’s none of my business, of course, if you’d rather not talk about it.’

  ‘It’s fine, Anita. I don’t mind telling you anything. I like to think by now we’re friends, aren’t we? Not simply colleagues.’

  ‘Of course, dear,’ Anita says warmly. ‘I feel exactly the same way about you.’

  I return her smile with just as much affection. ‘I’ll try to keep this as simple as I can,’ I say in a low voice. ‘Joel is my ex. We were together for over a year, but he became … demanding.’

  ‘How so?’ Anita asks.

  ‘It started with small things … like we didn’t even live together but he always wanted to know where I was and what I was doing. I didn’t think anything of it at first – it just seemed like he was taking an interest in my life – but then if I wasn’t at home when he popped round or he phoned, or I was out late on a night out with friends he’d get … funny.’

  ‘Funny?’ Anita repeats.

  ‘Annoyed. Really sulky and difficult. When he started calling my friends to find out where I was and attempting to check up on my diary at work, it all got a bit too much. The final straw was when he started following me around – stalking my friends said it was – so I had to finish it. It was then the real problems began.’

  I think back to those times a couple of years ago. For the first time in my life I had understood how a celebrity might feel when one of their fans got a bit too close for comfort. It wasn’t nice, in fact it was downright scary. Yet whereas a celebrity stalker will usually be someone the famous person doesn’t know, in my case this had been my ex-boyfriend calling my friends at all hours of the day and night, constantly contacting me over social media and standing outside my house every evening.

  ‘He just wouldn’t accept that we’d split up,’ I tell a concerned-looking Anita. ‘He pestered everyone who knew me and he’d hang around my house. The last straw was when he tried to meet Molly after school one day. He waited outside her school gates, for heaven’s sake! So it was then I had to get the police involved.’

  ‘Restraining order?’ Anita asks, sounding like she’s watched one too many American cop shows.

  ‘No, it didn’t get that far. They simply warned him off, and he seemed to listen then, but he still lived quite close to us and so did his family and friends. There were too many reminders and I always felt like we might bump into each other, so I made the decision to move away with Molly. I didn’t know at the time it would be quite so far away as here, but when the opportunity of the shop came up I took it. As you know it had always been my dream to have a shop selling my own designs.’

  ‘So, do you think this is him trying to get in touch again?’ Anita asks, gesturing to the flowers.

  ‘I don’t know. I hope not, not now. I hoped that part of my life was over with. I don’t want to go back and have to start dealing with him again.’ I’m on the verge of crying, so Anita puts a soothing arm around my shoulder.

  ‘I’m sure you won’t, my dear, and if he does turn up here, Sebastian and I will see him off for you. Sebastian can be quite fierce at times if he wants to be.’

  ‘Oh, I know!’ I say, blinking back my tears. ‘And I bet you can be too if pushed.’

  ‘Anita!’ Molly says, coming back into the shop again carrying a half-empty plate. ‘Your baking, it’s just too good! You could easily rival The Blue Canary if you wanted to open your own bakery.’

  ‘That’s kind of you, my dear,’ Anita says, dropping her arm from my shoulders, ‘but I prefer to keep my baking small and personal so only my friends and family can enjoy it.’

  ‘Then I for one am glad we’re a part of your family,’ Molly says, hugging her.

  ‘And so am I,’ I say, smiling at Anita over Molly’s shoulder. ‘Very glad indeed.’

  Seventeen

  ‘Did you get another one?’ I ask breathlessly into my phone, as I stand in the corner of the basement of the shop trying to be as quiet as possible.

  ‘Sure did!’ Jack replies. ‘Does it look like Harbour Street to you?’

  ‘Mine looks like a shop, but I guess it could be in Harbour Street.’

  ‘When shall we compare them?’

  ‘I’m supposed to be going to see Lou later this afternoon, but I could pop in afterwards. Are you working today?’

  ‘I work every day. I don’t have quite as many staff as you!’

  ‘I have one more than you, that’s all. You’ll need to take on someone else!’

  ‘My son Ben is coming soon,’ Jack says, and I can hear the delight in his voice as he tells me. ‘Maybe I can take an odd day off then. He’s going to work in the shop in his summer holidays before he goes back to uni in October.’

  ‘That’s wonderful news,’ I tell him. ‘It will be good for you to spend some time together.’

  ‘I hope so. It’s the longest he’ll have stayed with me. I guess the lure of a summer by the sea has swayed him a fair bit. Anyway, back to these pictures – what time are you going to see Lou?’

  ‘Four thirty. I could probably be with you around five thirty depending on how it goes?’

  ‘Five thirty is fine. If you get here earlier Bronte can close up the shop. Then you can have me all to yourself.’

  ‘Great …’ I suddenly feel embarrassed at Jack’s choice of words.

  ‘Could you sound any less enthusiastic?’ Jack says lightly, and I know I’ve probably dented his pride.

  ‘Sorry, I wasn’t talking to you,’ I pretend. ‘I was talking to Sebastian. He popped his head around the door to ask me something about a product. Yes, Sebastian that’s fine,’ I say, taking my phone away from my mouth a little as though I’m talking to someone across the room. ‘Now, Jack, what were you saying?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Jack says quickly. ‘You’re obviously busy. I’ll see you later then?’

  ‘Yes, see you later.’

  ‘Do I have a ghost?’ Sebastian says, making me jump as he appears at the entrance to the basement. ‘Only I could have sworn I heard you talking to me as I came down the stairs.’

  ‘What are you doing down here?’ I ask briskly. ‘Who’s minding the shop upstairs?’

  ‘Calm down, I’m just getting something for a customer.’ He pulls a packet of knitting needles off the wall. ‘They’re elderly and can’t manage the stairs so I’ve not abandoned your empire for long! Anyway, we have cameras, don’t we?’

  He dashes back up the stairs again while I
stand staring after him.

  Of course – the security cameras! Why had I not thought of this before? In fact, why had none of us thought of this when the first embroidery appeared? To be fair the cameras were pretty small. I’d only been able to afford a cheap system when we’d opened the shop, and they didn’t record for long. Quite often I forgot to change the memory card when it filled up as we thought about them so little. I’d always figured the cameras worked more as a deterrent than anything else, so none of us gave them much thought, but now I was giving them a lot of thought. We had one stationed down here so we could keep an eye on things when customers came down here on their own, and we had one upstairs in the shop that not only recorded everything going on during the day but also what happened at night too …

  While Sebastian is on his lunch break, I collect the memory card on which our CCTV footage is stored, wishing that I’d invested more money in a better system that recorded for longer than twenty-four hours at a time. At least I should have last night’s footage – that had to show something of the strange goings-on in my shop overnight.

  When Sebastian returns from lunch, I head upstairs to take my break. ‘I might be a little longer than usual,’ I tell him before I go. ‘I want to do some … paperwork while I’m upstairs.’

  ‘Okay, boss,’ Sebastian says, not seeming at all bothered. ‘See you later.’

  ‘Give me a shout if it gets busy.’

  ‘Will do!’

  I head upstairs quickly and find my laptop, then I insert the memory card and wait for it to load.

  ‘Right, my mysterious visitor,’ I say to the computer as I tap play, ‘let’s see who you really are.’

  After a minute or two of watching an empty shop, I begin to fast-forward slowly through the footage. Six o’clock passes, seven, eight, nine and on past midnight. I don’t have a full view of the shop, just the shop counter where the till is, but access to the inside of our small window is directly to the side of this, so if anyone is going to come past and insert embroidered fabric into my window display, I’m going to see them.

  Yet, as the early hours of the morning dawn on the footage, I haven’t seen a mouse scuttle across the floor, let alone a person, and I begin to wonder whether I’m going to see anything at all.

  ‘This is impossible,’ I mutter to myself as I watch the time tick on to 5am. ‘Why haven’t I seen anything?’

  6am, 7am, 8am, and then the first movement is a little before nine when I see myself carrying the till drawer across the shop floor and placing it into the till. I then go to unlock the door and I see myself jump as I realise there’s something new in the window.

  ‘That’s impossible,’ I say out loud. ‘How did I miss it?’

  Not only had I been watching the screen as I forwarded through the footage, I’d been watching the clock too. I’d seen enough TV detectives solve crimes by discovering there was a jump in CCTV footage where a few seconds had been deleted by the perpetrator of the crime or their accomplice. Yet every second of last night’s recording had been there on the screen – I’m sure of it.

  ‘I should have known better than thinking something so modern as CCTV would be able to solve this mystery,’ I tell myself as I remove the memory card and close the computer. ‘I’ve a feeling we’re going to have to take a few more trips back in time to St Felix if we’re ever going to get to the bottom of this.’

  *

  Later that afternoon I knock on the door of Snowdrop Cottage and wait for Lou, but to my surprise Poppy answers. ‘Hello, Kate,’ she says, holding open the door. ‘Come in. Lou said you were dropping by.’

  I follow Poppy through Lou’s hall into the sitting room of her cottage. Lou is sitting in an armchair with a small toddler on her lap, and next to her on the sofa sipping on a cup of tea is Jake, her nephew, who is Poppy’s husband.

  ‘Hi Kate,’ Jake says. ‘Don’t worry, we’re leaving in a moment. We just popped in with Daisy to see Lou. Here, sit down,’ he says, shuffling along the seat a little.

  ‘Please don’t go on my account,’ I say, sitting down on the edge of the sofa.

  ‘Daisy needs to take a nap anyway,’ Poppy says, gathering up her daughter’s toys. ‘And probably Jake too for that matter.’

  ‘Hey, it’s not easy having a toddler running around when you’re my age!’ Jake says, putting his tea down, and then standing up and stretching.

  ‘Wait until you have two running around,’ Lou adds, passing Daisy to Poppy.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Jake says, ‘I’ve been there before, remember?’

  ‘You shouldn’t have married such a young wife then,’ Poppy says, winking at me.

  ‘I wouldn’t have it any other way.’ Jake kisses her on the cheek. ‘Right, Aunt Lou,’ he continues, kissing his aunt on the cheek now. ‘We’ll see you on Thursday for Daisy’s birthday tea.’

  ‘You will indeed. Bye-bye, Daisy,’ she says, waving at her great-niece.

  Daisy waves back from Poppy’s arms.

  ‘We’ll let ourselves out,’ Poppy says. ‘You see to your next guest. See you soon, Kate.’

  They head out into the hall and we hear the door shut behind them, and Lou’s little dog Rosie comes poddling through.

  ‘Rosie avoids Daisy,’ Lou says, bending down to stroke her. ‘She’s that little bit too small and too grabby for her right now. Would you like a cup of tea, Kate?’ She points to a large china tea-pot standing on a tray on the table. ‘There’s still some in there if you do.’

  ‘No, thank you, I’m fine. I had a cuppa before I came out.’

  ‘So you want to talk to me about the fifties?’ Lou asks, sitting back in her chair.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Any particular reason why?’

  I had thought Lou might ask this so I’d already prepared my answer. ‘I found a few old diaries up in the attic of the shop. Nothing that interesting, but it got me wondering about the history of St Felix around that time.’

  Lou nods, but I’m not sure if she entirely believes me.

  ‘So what do you want to know? Like I said the other day I can’t remember too much as it was a long time ago.’

  ‘I was wondering if you remembered any more about Clara’s shop?’ I begin. ‘You said it used to be where mine is now.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. I thought about that a little bit more after I saw you. I remember the shop well – quite successful it was. As you can imagine we were a bit remote here in the fifties. The railway opened things up a lot, bringing holiday-makers and the like, but it was difficult for us teenagers to access all the latest fashions, magazines and records. We could order things from catalogues but they took so long to get here, not like today when you can order something over the internet one day and it’s delivered the next. To suddenly have a shop that was making and selling fashionable clothes was quite unique, and very popular amongst us girls.’

  ‘I can imagine – and you say Clara made everything herself?’

  ‘I think she did to begin with, but as the demand grew I believe she hired a few local ladies to sew for her.’

  A bit like me, I think to myself, but instead I say, ‘Goodness, she must have been doing well.’

  ‘I think she was. You know, I thought a bit more about her daughter too – she would have been about my age back then.’

  ‘Really? So you did know her.’

  ‘Well, not really. When she moved here because she’d been ill – polio, I think it was – she was held back a year at school, so when she became well enough to start at our local grammar school she was a year below me.’

  ‘Did she recover from polio?’ I try to ask as casually as I can. ‘Did she walk again?’

  ‘I think she was on crutches for a long while. I seem to remember her around the school on them – big wooden things they were, but she wasn’t in a wheelchair then like you said.’

  ‘That’s good to know,’ I say, thinking about Maggie. Perhaps Arty pushing her to walk had helped after all. ‘D
o you remember anything else? What about the artist I mentioned – Arty or Arthur, you might have known him as?’

  Lou shakes her head. ‘No, but like I said there were a lot of artists coming to St Felix back then. That’s when it all began really, in the fifties. We didn’t have the big art gallery like we have now, or all the smaller galleries dotted about the streets, so people used to display their paintings in the windows of their homes and people would buy them direct.’

  ‘That’s lovely,’ I say, totally able to imagine this.

  ‘I do remember this one old man – lovely fellow, he was. Quiet, unassuming. He used to paint on all sorts of things, usually bits of old wood – you know, scrap bits when they’d broken up one of the fishing boats. I don’t think he could afford proper canvases and I’m surprised he could even afford paint. He was very kind to us children though. If you asked him nicely he’d let you have a go with some of his paints.’ Lou screws her forehead up trying to remember something. ‘Oh, what was his name … on the tip of my tongue, it is.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter now,’ I say in a kindly way. ‘So you don’t remember an Arty then?’

  Lou shakes her head. ‘No, the only other painter I remember was another Lou, strangely enough – except this one was male. He used to travel around in a red camper van – the same one Ana uses now, I believe. Now that’s a story and a half … Poppy told me all about it if you’d like to hear?’

  ‘That’s kind of you, Lou,’ I say, smiling at her, ‘but it’s really the late fifties I’m interested in right now – only because the diaries I found date from then.’

  ‘It’s a shame Stan isn’t still around,’ Lou says. ‘He would have been able to tell you more. Stan was wonderful for old stories about St Felix. He would have been in his early twenties back then. Sadly, he passed away a couple of years ago.’

  ‘Oh, that’s a shame.’

  ‘Yes, Poppy, Jake and myself were very close to him.’

  ‘Well, thank you for your time, Lou,’ I say, standing up. ‘You’ve been very helpful. It’s good to join up the dots. The diaries are a bit vague, you see.’