‘Oh wow, it’s beautiful,’ Bo murmured, tracing the cool, shiny surface with her fingertip.
‘Thanks,’ Florence beamed. Bo leaned against the buttoned backrest of the orange sofa. ‘Well, funnily enough, I’ve been thinking about a career change, since I got back from Denmark.’
‘Oh, yeah?’ Florence replied, intrigued. Then her brow clouded. ‘I hope you’re not going to ask to borrow my Wonder Woman costume?’
Bo giggled, set her tea down on the coffee table and drew her phone out of her bag and called up the photo of the converted horse-box.
‘You buying a horse, babe?’ Florence asked, dubiously.
Bo shook her head, and told them about her street food business idea and how it had come about as a result of her time in Denmark; that she had been inspired by the hygge ethos of making time for simple pleasures, and thought it was a natural fit for a mobile coffee-and-cake business. ‘At least, that’s the plan, if I can find a vehicle to trade from. That’s where the horse-box comes in,’ she concluded, a rueful smile playing around her lips.
‘I love it, babe, it’s a brilliant idea,’ Florence cooed, and even Simon looked quietly impressed.
A little later, they went for a walk along the seafront. The white dome and flashing lights of Brighton pier seemed to hover about the water in the distance, and the stony beach crunched and slid under their feet. Simon went to the water’s edge to skim stones against the surf.
‘So, no need to ask how things are going with you two,’ Bo said, slipping her arm inside Florence’s as they made their way along the shingle.
Florence broke into a grin. ‘No one’s more surprised than me, babe,’ she replied. ‘Turns out Simon’s a bit of a secret softy underneath that gruff exterior.’
‘Not a psychopathic serial killer after all, then?’ Bo teased.
‘Well, if he is, maybe he’s just learnt to hide it better,’ Florence replied.
Bo laughed, but she didn’t think Simon was hiding anything, in fact, quite the reverse. His furrowed brow had vanished, and he seemed more relaxed, more open, as if the repressed rage which had seemed to lurk beneath the surface had been worn away by Florence’s good-natured optimism.
‘And what about you?’ Florence returned, with a significant look. ‘Heard anything from Emil since you got back?’
Bo smiled coyly. ‘Yeah, we’ve been in touch,’ she replied carefully. She could see Florence’s eager expression out of the corner of her eye. ‘He’s got a new job. He’s setting up a new restaurant, so . . . who knows?’ She trailed off.
Bored of stone-skimming, Simon drifted back to join them, and the three of them walked along the beach until the chill wind and lowering sky led them to take refuge in a brightly lit chippy.
They sat around a Formica table eating battered cod and salty chips with their fingers, chatting about their time in Skagen.
‘We should ask Pernille if we can go back, don’t you think?’ Florence said, dousing her fish with malt vinegar. ‘Maybe in the spring, when the weather’s nicer. Get Emil along too. It would be like a reunion.’ Florence’s eyes sparkled with excitement.
‘I’d love that,’ Bo replied wistfully, ‘but I can’t think that far ahead at the moment. I’ve got a business to launch, remember?’
‘Bo’s Buns,’ Simon said, absent-mindedly, munching on a mouthful of battered cod.
‘Say what, babe?’ Florence said, licking vinegar from her fingers. Simon swallowed his mouthful.
‘A name for your business: Bo’s Buns. Just a suggestion,’ he added modestly.
Bo laughed. ‘Thanks, Simon. It’s catchy. I like it, but I’ve already decided on a name.’
The others looked at her expectantly.
‘Hygge and Kisses,’ she said.
Chapter 23
On Sunday morning, the buzz of an incoming text startled Bo out of a dream. She swung her arm sideways and rifled across the bedside table for her phone.
Are you around today? Barbara wanted to know. Bo rubbed her eyes groggily and glanced at the clock. It was nine o’clock.
Yes. Why?
Don’t go anywhere. Dad’s coming over.
Bo stared at the screen, mildly perturbed by the seeming urgency of her mother’s words.
When the doorbell rang an hour later, Bo padded apprehensively down the hallway to find Clive standing on the front doorstep. He was wearing his weekend corduroys, with a navy scarf tucked neatly inside the collar of his Barbour jacket.
‘I was half expecting to find you in pyjamas,’ he said with an amiable smile. Bo was conscious of a wave of relief passing through her; her father’s demeanour did not suggest he was the bearer of bad news.
‘Hi, Dad,’ she said, standing aside to make room for him to pass, but Clive stayed put.
‘Actually, you might want to slip some shoes on,’ he advised, glancing at her fluffy slippers. Puzzled, Bo pulled on her Uggs, grabbed her keys and followed him up the stone steps, past the wheelie bins and onto the pavement.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked, mystified. There was no sign of her father’s Lexus on the street.
‘I suppose that’s up to you,’ answered Clive, fishing a key from inside his jacket pocket and handing it to her.
‘What’s this?’ she asked, bemused. Clive chuckled and guided her by the elbow along the pavement.
‘Graham at the golf club has been looking to get rid of it for a while. He used to take it fishing, but he’s had to chuck that in. His arthritis has been playing up. Poor bugger.’
Bo sensed that her father was in danger of digressing. ‘Get rid of what, Dad?’ she said, keen to steer him back on track. Clive drew to a halt a few houses further down the street.
‘This,’ he said, gesturing towards a dark green Land Rover parked by the kerb.
A moment’s silence, then, ‘I don’t . . . is it . . . Dad, what’s going on?’ Bo felt simultaneously excited, confused, and like she was about to cry.
‘Barbara and I thought you might be able to make use of it,’ replied Clive. Bo opened her mouth but no words came out. ‘Lauren phoned us,’ Clive explained, his blue eyes crinkling. ‘Told us you need some wheels for the business, but that you’d be too proud to ask. It’s fully insured. Consider it an early birthday present.’
Bo stared, speechless, at the car in front of her. It was a boxy model, over ten years old, with a few scratches on the paintwork and a dent in the bumper, but it looked sturdy and dependable. Overwhelmed, Bo burst into tears in the middle of the street.
‘There, there,’ Clive whispered, putting his arm around her heaving shoulders.
‘Sorry, Dad, it’s just . . . thank you!’ she sobbed, wiping her eyes with her sleeve.
‘It’s quite all right,’ Clive said soothingly. He waited while Bo fished a tissue out of her pocket and blew her nose, then said, ‘Right, you need to take this old girl for a test drive, and I need a lift home. So pull yourself together and let’s get going.’
*
First thing on Monday morning, Bo opened up her laptop and scrolled through the selling site, praying the horse-box had not been sold. Upon finding the listing still active, she seized her phone to dial the vendor’s number and, by lunchtime, was hurtling up the A1 on her way to Hertfordshire for a viewing.
Rough gravel crunched beneath her tyres as she steered the Land Rover past a complex of agricultural buildings towards a neatly maintained farmhouse. She parked the Land Rover and climbed out onto the drive, stooping to pat the black and white collie which had appeared from nowhere and begun to sniff eagerly at her shoes. The front door of the farmhouse swung open and a fifty-something man in wellies and an anorak stepped out. He introduced himself as Steve, shook Bo’s hand and, with the collie trotting at his heels, led her across the courtyard.
‘It was our son’s idea,’ Steve explained, as they walked past a stable block, from which a row of hay-munching ponies observed them benignly.
‘He persuaded us to pay to have it adapted into a
mobile coffee shop,’ Steve said, squeezing past a rusting iron trailer at the entrance to a corrugated iron shed. ‘Had all these dreams of touring the festivals, earning a living as he went.’ Steve shook his head, emanating the faintly resentful demeanour of a parent who had been left to clear up their child’s mess.
‘Course he lost interest as soon as the summer was over, and now he’s gone off travelling.’ Bo felt obscurely like she ought to apologise to Steve for his son’s behaviour, as though she were somehow guilty by association, by dint of her age.
Inside, Steve tugged at the corner of a tarpaulin sheet, which fell away to reveal the horse-box, its curved roof and tongue-and-groove panelled exterior coated in a thick layer of dust and cobwebs.
‘I’ll open her up for you,’ Steve said, flicking through a jangling bunch of keys before releasing the padlock on the rear doors. Bo gingerly climbed onto the footplate and went inside and stood on the tiny strip of floor between the counter on her left and the sink and storage cupboards to her right. The interior was compact – if she stretched out her arms she would touch both walls with ease, but there was room for a coffee machine on top of the counter and space for a fridge beneath. She ran her hand along the serving shelf, feeling the knots and grain of the wood.
‘Can I open this?’ Bo asked eagerly, pointing at the hatch. Steve nodded, so she slid the metal panel out and up until the supporting struts on both sides clicked into place. A spider scuttled through the opening and vanished over the edge of the serving shelf and she leaned forwards to peer through the hatch, indulging the fantasy that she was not standing in a dusty outhouse, but serving coffee and cakes at a bustling food market. Then she turned to look at Steve through the open rear doors.
‘I love it,’ she said.
At the table in the farmhouse kitchen, Bo went through the paperwork with Steve, then, with a trembling hand, wrote out a deposit cheque, with the promise that she would return to collect the horse-box as soon as she had found somewhere to store it. She drove back to London in a state of mild shock. Somehow, everything else she had done in preparation for launching the business – the online courses she had completed, the licences and permits she had applied for – all had an abstract, theoretical quality about them. It was only now that she had stood inside the half-ton of wood and metal, leaned against its counter and checked inside its cupboards, that the whole enterprise began to feel like a reality rather than a fantasy.
Bo collected the horse-box the following weekend and there followed a few enjoyably productive days during which she had it cleaned and re-sprayed sage-green. She ordered a Hygge and Kisses banner from a printer to display above the serving hatch, a matching apron, and purchased a second-hand coffee machine and fridge. Within a week of going to view it, the repainted horse-box stood gleaming in a rented garage in an industrial estate off Holloway Road.
In February, Bo heard from the council that she had been awarded a regular morning pitch on a train station forecourt in north London. She spent two days baking, and checking and re-checking that she had enough cups and paperware. She barely slept the night before, terrified that she might sleep through her alarm (which was set for five-thirty), and drifting in and out of fitful dreams in which she turned up at the pitch only to discover she had forgotten her stock, or that she was wearing her pyjamas. The hours stretched and it was a relief when her alarm finally went off and she could, at last, throw her clothes on and begin to load her boxes of baked goods into the back of the Land Rover.
It was still dark when she pulled onto the station’s concrete forecourt just before seven o’clock. She attached her Hygge and Kisses banner to the roof, arranged her pastries in neat pyramids beneath glass cloches, and placed her chalkboard menu on the serving shelf. Then she waited.
At half-past-seven it started to rain: fat, icy droplets which bounced noisily off the roof of the horse-box. Although Bo did her best to maintain a cheerful disposition, it felt as though she were invisible to the grim-faced, umbrella-wielding commuters rushing to or from the station platforms. She shivered and pulled the zip of her goose-down coat up to her chin. Gazing through the hatch at the rain-soaked forecourt, she was forced to acknowledge that the reality of running a hygge-themed catering business might not always feel very hyggeligt. She returned home just before lunchtime, shattered and disheartened, with almost as many aebleskiver, snegles and muffins in the back of the Land Rover as she had set off with six hours earlier.
On her second morning, however, the sun shone weakly, and a modest but consistent trickle of customers wandered up to the hatch. Despite her best efforts to engage them in conversation, most of her customers seemed determined to make as little eye-contact as possible, and the majority ignored her glass dome-covered displays and ordered just coffee. But as the days passed, Bo was gratified to note that she was starting to attract regular customers, even getting to know some of them by name, and that she was selling food as well as coffee. Occasionally, customers would comment on the name of the business, asking what ‘hygge’ meant, or how to pronounce it. She fixed a handwritten sign to the panelling on the side of the van, to explain that Hygge was the Danish concept of wellbeing and cosiness, and meant taking time to enjoy simple pleasures, like coffee and cake.
In early March, just as the daffodils were beginning to flower in the garden behind the flat, Bo received a call from the organiser of a food market in South London, to say that there had been a last-minute cancellation, and offering her a pitch that coming weekend.
Bo felt almost identical amounts of excitement and apprehension as she drove down to South London early on the Saturday morning. The market, on Clapham Common, comprised a farmers’ market selling everything from French cheeses to artisan breads, and a street food market. When Bo arrived at nine o’clock, the site was already a hive of activity, with traders efficiently assembling their tents, hooking up power generators, and setting out their produce. A man in a high-vis jacket flagged her down and directed her to a pitch next to a voluble man selling Cornish pasties.
The first customers began to arrive around ten and within an hour there was a queue of customers at the horse-box which snaked across the grass.
‘Make sure you leave them room for a pasty at lunchtime,’ her neighbouring vendor joked, eyeing the generous portions of aebleskiver being passed through the hatch.
At half past eleven Bo looked up and, to her astonishment, saw Ben browsing one of the market stalls. The market was crowded now and a cluster of other customers surrounded him. It was only when Ben began to move away and started talking to someone over his shoulder that Bo realised he was not at the market alone. He took a few steps away from the market stall and a woman appeared from behind him; a petite, mousey-haired woman in a grey coat. It was Charlotte. Bo felt a pulse of panic at the realisation that they were heading her way, and had an overwhelming urge to crouch down behind the serving counter, but the long line of customers queuing at the horse-box meant hiding was not an option.
Through her peripheral vision, she monitored Ben and Charlotte’s inexorable progress towards the horse-box. There was an unmistakable intimacy in their body language: their arms brushed against each other’s as they walked, and their strides were in step. It was Charlotte who noticed her first. Ben’s attention had been drawn by a stall selling bottles of organic beer, but there was no mistaking Charlotte’s fractional double-take, and the discreet nudge of Ben’s ribs with her elbow. She whispered something, he looked across and, in the fleeting moment when Bo met his gaze, Ben’s dismayed look exactly mirrored her own. She forced her attention back to the job in hand, whilst acutely aware that Charlotte and Ben were wandering over to join the back of the queue.
‘Fancy seeing you here,’ Bo said with an artificial brightness, when they finally stepped up to the hatch.
‘Hi, Bo,’ Charlotte said, a little sheepishly.
‘So, the rumours are true then,’ Ben said, scratching the back of his neck uncomfortably. ‘I heard you’d had
a change of career.’
Bo gave a light-hearted shrug. ‘I guess you could say that,’ she said breezily.
Ben’s eyes were lingering on her torso, which she found faintly disconcerting, until she realised he was reading the text on her branded apron.
‘Hygge and Kisses. Spreading a little hygge-ness, one slice of cake at a time,’ he read aloud. Charlotte let out a little bleat of nervous laughter, which the others both ignored.
‘Hygge. That’s Danish, isn’t it?’ Ben asked, his brow furrowing. He pronounced it higger, but she decided not to correct him.
‘That’s right,’ she said, keeping her tone purposely neutral.
Ben gave a little, tight smile.
‘What can I get you?’ Bo said, conscious of the line of people waiting behind him.
‘I’d love a latte and a chocolate brownie, please,’ replied Charlotte, gratefully.
‘Same for me,’ Ben added, with the slightly reproachful air of one who didn’t want to be overlooked. While the coffee machine hissed and gurgled, Bo put two brownies into a cardboard container and placed it on the serving counter.
‘These look amazing,’ Charlotte murmured.
Ben glowered.
‘That’ll be five pounds, please,’ Bo said genially.
Ben drew out his wallet and passed a note through the hatch. Then, with a smile which failed to reach his eyes, he picked up the cardboard container and walked away, leaving Charlotte to trail after him.
*
‘Talk about awkward,’ Kirsten said, cringing, when Bo described the encounter to her in the flat that evening. Bo swung her legs up onto the sofa cushion and stared thoughtfully at the ceiling.
‘You know, it really wasn’t as bad as it could have been,’ she said, in a tone faintly tinged with surprise. ‘If anything, he seemed to be more uncomfortable than me.’ She looked across at Kirsten, who was eating a microwave meal straight from the plastic container at the dining table.
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