Secret Evenings in Pretty Beach

by Polly Babbington

  Lottie took the few steps towards Stephanie’s desk, picked up the revolting squishy cake, and dropped it slowly and ceremoniously into the bin.

  ‘You can take your hour of power, your stress ball cake, your split ends, and your stupid shiny shoes, and you can poke them where the sun doesn’t shine,’ Lottie had said calmly and quietly in her best voice.

  Stephanie Beady had gasped and looked down at the stress cake in the bin and blinked furiously pulling her wiry dirty-blonde hair around to the front.

  ‘You can’t do that! You can't tell me what to do! You’re my assistant! You’re not allowed to do anything unless I say so. You have this job because of me,’ Stephanie had hissed incredulously.

  ‘Let me tell you something, Stephanie. How you operate is known as workplace harassment and you’re not quite as clever as you make out to be. Every single one of your requests including telling me when to go to the toilet are all very nicely documented in my inbox, thank you very much. Your thirty emails in one hour are also in there. You’ve also made up your own case with the copious emails documenting all the other unreasonable ways you have behaved over the past two years. All of which have been forwarded and copied to my own records should I decide to take this further.’

  Stephanie Beady’s chin had dropped towards the floor, she’d snarled her lip, and sank down into her chair.

  Straightening her jacket, Lottie had continued, ‘I suggest you never treat anyone like this ever again.’ And with her head high, gripping her handbag like a vice Lottie had walked out of the office and had never gone back.

  But now, here she was again in the position where the upkeep of the house on Strawberry Hill Lane, the extra-curricular school fees, and replacing her car really were all starting to look like problems.

  Would her, her boys, and her step-dad have to move out of beautiful Strawberry Hill, and have to start to look for a new house?

  Chapter 3

  Lottie walked over to the wide creamy-white dresser running down the left-hand side of the kitchen, opened the drawer, and took out a notepad and pen. It was rare that she wrote anything down nowadays; most things were done on her phone, but she needed the physical feel of pen on paper to recalibrate her brain. She needed to write a list of how she was going to improve her income. A list perhaps of how she was going to improve her life. Because there was one thing that was for certain - she was no longer willing to carry on with it as it was.

  Lottie started the list with the most obvious way to improve her income - by getting a job - and wrote it in capital letters on the top of the page. The problem with getting a job was that it wasn’t quite as easy as writing it across the top of a notepad. She’d long since ascertained that with not many academic skills as such to put down on paper, she’d be looking at a part-time job with a low hourly rate. Add to that the fact that she wanted flexible hours, she knew that she would probably end up working for someone ten years younger than her with decidedly fewer brain cells. She rolled the conundrum round and round in her head and decided that getting a job would be her last port of call. After the Stephanie Beady experience, she wasn’t going to work for anyone else unless she really had to - she absolutely wasn’t willing to go there again.

  She chewed on the end of her pen and thought about her little side business. Expanding her small meals from home business ‘Suppers from Strawberry Hill’ was an option. The small business had started through word-of-mouth mostly through mums at the school and not a lot else. She knew there was money in it, in fact, it brought in quite a tidy sum every month, but it was hard to scale. She pulled over her laptop, opened up her spreadsheets, and calculated taking on a few more clients. That could be an option she thought and put the pen back down on the notepad.

  Lottie sighed and stared all the way down to the end of the garden to the greenhouses right down at the back. There was always room for her to sell stuff from her garden with a produce stall at the Pretty Beach Farmers Market. It was doable, but it wasn't going to be life-changing or more importantly, income-changing. Lottie had no doubt that a stall at the market would help, she already had quite the following of locals hankering after produce from her garden and her homemade Elderflower Wine was a Locals Only delicacy kept by many under lock and key. But none of that was going to be enough. Not by a long shot.

  Just as she walked over to the Aga to put the kettle back on the top Dimitri, her step-dad, in his usual baggy jeans and soft old faded check shirt ambled into the kitchen. Dimitri, after losing Lottie’s mum to cancer, had moved into the downstairs of Lottie’s house in the early days after Lottie’s mum had died and never really gone home.

  Dimitri walked over towards the warmth of the Aga, kissed Lottie on either side of her cheeks and after warming his bottom by the Aga, plonked himself down on a chair at the table as Lottie finished making them both a cup of tea

  ‘What’s this?’ Dimitri asked Lottie in Greek and pointed down at the notepad.

  ‘It’s a list of things I can do to make money. Or we are going to have to move out,’ Lottie replied in English.

  Dimitri ran his old, tanned finger down the list. ‘I have an idea for you,’ he said in Greek.

  ‘It needs to be a good one and mustn’t involve a crazy twenty-seven-year-old going by the name of Stephanie. Or in fact, anyone under the age of thirty-five if possible, and definitely not my teenagers,’ Lottie said with a wink.

  Dimitri laughed and pulled out his latest top of the range phone, closed down the Greek newspaper app which was permanently open on the home screen and opened up the internet.

  ‘Where was it again?’ he muttered to himself in Greek and typed in the search box in English.

  Dimitri continued to scroll through and Lottie picked up the pen again and doodled flowers all the way down the side of the list, tempted to cross out part-time job at the top.

  ‘Yes, here we are. Pop-up restaurant or home restaurant. They are sprouting up all over the place according to this article,’ Dimitri said reading aloud from the article.

  Home restaurants, pop-up dining rooms, or supper clubs have become very popular over the last few years. You’ve likely read about them in magazines and newspapers and even seen them on the television.

  Home restaurants offer high-quality, restaurant-standard food in pleasant, relaxed, informal and sometimes secret surroundings and are all the rage.

  ‘Dad, I can’t do a pop-up restaurant. I’m not a chef!’

  ‘That’s the whole point suggested in this article. Home chefs are opening up their homes all over the world. People who love cooking have people in their house for supper or teas. Or they host it somewhere else - as in it pops up somewhere. It’s amazing and you, my girl, would be brilliant at it. You already cook all the time anyway. You’d just have to do it once a week on a Saturday night too.’

  ‘But what about insurance and all that stuff? How much would all of that cost?’

  Dimitri pulled up another website and switched back to Greek. ‘As long as you don’t serve alcohol and they bring their own booze all you need is insurance and it's not that expensive. Nowhere near as expensive as I thought.’

  Lottie sighed. ‘Wow, you’ve really looked into it. It is a good idea, Dimitri, but I don’t know,’ Lottie said as she read all the way through the article about a woman in Shropshire who made an array of cakes and delicacies and served them in her tiny lounge for afternoon tea. The article went further on to feature a woman on a Pick Your Own farm in Kent who’d opened up some of her old stables on Saturday evenings for dinner in a field.

  Lottie continued to read down the article. ‘Fifty pounds! Wow. Goodness, this one even says sixty-five. One of them does takeaway too. Thirty-five pounds per person for a takeaway - I can’t believe people would pay that much!’ Lottie gasped.

  ‘Yup. I’ve already worked it all out. You could get what twenty around this table alone, probably more, and if you opened up the dining room many more. Or, of course, the perfect place for it would be the ol
d outbuildings at the back.’

  ‘There’s no way I’d have people in my kitchen. You wouldn’t know who was turning up in your house!’ Lottie replied.

  ‘That’s why the outbuildings at the back would work. They could even come in through the back gate,’ Dimitri said tapping his finger on the list. ‘Go on, write it down on your list,’ he urged. ‘Put home restaurant on there.’

  ‘I couldn’t do it in those buildings! They’re a disgrace. I haven’t even been in the one on the left for years. I don’t even know if the power works out there nowadays.’

  ‘It doesn’t, I already checked,’ Dimitri replied in Greek and poured a little nip of Greek brandy into his tea.

  ‘Ha! You’ve got it all worked out then,’ Lottie said with a smile.

  ‘It would take us a few weekends to get that whole place spick and span. They are wonderful old buildings. You’ve got three strapping boys to put to good use - they could come home for the weekend. Then all we’d need to do would be to get the electricity fixed up. Set up some tables and chairs... and that’s it - you’d have your very own home restaurant right here on Strawberry Hill.’

  ‘But what about all the things I would need? Setting it all up and all that,’ Lottie said, chewing the side of her finger.

  ‘Like what? You’ve been collecting vintage china from everywhere for nearly twenty years. The study is drowning in it. You have piles of it stashed all over the place. I think you could even theme each supper by the country where the china originated from. You have that much of it just waiting to be put to good use.’

  Lottie nodded her head. ‘You’re actually not wrong there. I think I’m addicted. You really think anyone would come, though?’

  ‘Do I think anyone would come? Lottie, I know it.’

  Chapter 4

  If there was one thing Lottie hated it was an unexpected ring on the front doorbell and she tutted as she sat with Dimitri chatting about his idea of a pop-up restaurant when the front doorbell rang.

  ‘Expecting anyone?’ Lottie asked Dimitri.

  ‘No. I never get visitors, you know that. It’s probably someone selling something.’

  ‘I’ll go then, shall I?’ Lottie smiled playfully as Dimitri sat back in his chair and took another biscuit out of the tin.

  Lottie walked through the kitchen, opened the door to the hallway and walked all the way through the vast entrance hall and looked down towards the double door at the end. She couldn’t make out through the glass who it was standing on the step. It had better not be a salesman, she thought. That’s the last thing I need.

  Lottie peered through the glass: it looked like a woman, a woman, not a lot taller than her which was unusual as Lottie Cloudberry was tiny, elfin like, in fact.

  Lottie slid back the chain and turned the door handle and opened the door to see her soon-to-be new neighbour Sallie standing on the front step in a huge puffy coat, skinny jeans, her hair in a large, messy bun on top of her head, and green Hunter boots on her feet.

  Sallie was holding out a cake tin. ‘I thought I would bring this back before I forgot, and it got sucked into the giant hole that is the renovation and the move. Thank you so much, it was delicious. Like, really delicious and Ben loved it.’ Sallie beamed.

  Lottie smiled and opened up the door. She’d heard good things from people in Pretty Beach about this Sallie Broadchurch. Holly from the bakery had become very good friends with her and Sallie had evolved into Lottie's friend Juliette’s walking buddy. Lottie, who was very particular about who she gave the time of day to, took both of those into consideration and opened the door up fully.

  ‘You’re welcome - I’m always cooking something or other and thought a home-baked cake would have gone down well with all the work you’ve been doing in there. Fancy a cup of tea? I’m just sitting with my step-dad and the kettle is on.’

  Sallie took her phone out of her coat pocket and checked the time. ‘Yes. I’d love to, thank you.’

  Lottie led Sallie through the hallway and Sallie looked up and gasped. ‘Wow, this place is amazing! It’s huge! Much bigger than Strawberry Hill House. So, they’re not all the same size. I didn’t realise that.’

  ‘Thanks. Yep, it was built slightly bigger than all the rest of the houses in the row being on the end corner plot. It’s all getting a bit tired and tatty now though, sadly. I really need to find the time to decorate and I need to get someone in too.’

  Sallie looked around at all the beautiful pale tasteful creams and whites of the hallway. ‘Oh, but it’s lovely, really lovely. What a beautiful eye you’ve got. You’ve seen all the reds and yellows I'll be needing to get rid of in our new place. You’ve done just the sort of palette I love here, it’s gorgeous, Lottie.’

  ‘Ahh, I love all the neutrals too, but it could all do with a freshen up - look at those skirting boards. My boys don’t know the meaning of the word careful,’ Lottie said and laughed.

  ‘I’ll know about that soon enough,’ Sallie replied and patted her tiny bump.

  ‘You will? Is it a boy then?’

  ‘Ahh, no, actually we don’t know. I thought I would leave it and see. I figured it might be nice to get a surprise at the end. The whole thing has been a surprise, the whole last few years of my life have been a surprise, so I thought I may as well add that onto it too.’

  Sallie followed Lottie through the large hallway with the herringbone floor, past the two enormous sitting rooms and the dining room, as Lottie led the way into the kitchen. As Lottie opened the door the heat from the Aga engulfed them, the smell of laundry drying on a Sheila Maid above hit their nostrils, and Dimitri, who was sitting on the left of the large table in the middle, got up as soon as he saw Lottie had invited someone in.

  ‘Ahh, Sallie, hello. Lovely to see you!’ Dimitri said, recognising Sallie from when they had met outside in the lane at the back. Dimitri walked over and kissed Sallie on both cheeks, took Sallie’s coat, and hung it on the coat rack by the back door.

  ‘Well, I thought it was lovely at the front of the house! This is spectacular,’ Sallie said looking around at the handmade, unfitted kitchen going around three walls of the room. ‘Oh, the Aga!’ Sallie squealed and clapped her hands together. ‘I cannot wait to get in and use mine.’

  Lottie laughed, lifted up the teapot and poured Sallie a cup of tea. Dimitri walked over to the very end of the kitchen to the wall completely lined floor to ceiling with open shelving. He ran the shelf ladder on wheels along from the other side, climbed up a few steps, reached up, rummaged around and took down an old looking biscuit tin.

  ‘Woah! We’re allowed the Greek biscuits out, are we? Goodness, Sallie, trust me, put this in your calendar. Not many people get to taste these,’ Lottie said chuckling as Dimitri opened the biscuit tin and offered Sallie a pastry biscuit smothered in icing sugar, the whole lot carefully wrapped in greaseproof paper.

  Sallie laughed and took one of the icing sugar-covered pastries and Lottie passed her a cup of tea. As Sallie took a sip of the tea she pointed to the notepad, pen and the list.

  ‘Planning something interesting?’ Sallie asked, looking at the notepad.

  Lottie looked over at Dimitri and wondered whether or not they should talk about what they had just been discussing with Sallie. Dimitri beat her to it. ‘We’ve been discussing a pop-up restaurant for Lottie. She’s such a great cook and I saw this article all about it in a newspaper. Apparently, they’re all the rage.’

  ‘Oh yeah, they’re all over the place now. I went to one when I was up in town with Ben. It was in a house in West London, I can’t remember which Tube station it was now. Absolutely amazing food and it cost a bomb. Like it was not cheap considering it was in a house, but oh my, better than any restaurant I’ve been to. The food was phenomenal.’

  ‘That’s what we’ve just been reading about. How coincidental that you’ve been to one!’ Lottie exclaimed.

  ‘Yes, it is. It was fabulous too. It was held in the front room of this woman’s house and a
couple of tables were in the hallway. All decorated with an eclectic mix of bits and bobs. In fact, the decor was quite similar to this,’ Sallie said looking around at Lottie’s beautiful kitchen.

  ‘Did it feel odd to be going into someone’s house? Like their private space?’

  ‘On the contrary. It felt all secretive and I don’t know a bit weird but that was part of it really. It was sort of quirky and different. I was a bit sceptical, but we loved every second of it. Where would you host it here then?’ Sallie questioned.

  ‘Down at the end of the garden in the old outbuildings,’ Dimitri replied.

  ‘We’re not totally sure about insurance and what else we would need,’ Lottie continued.

  ‘I imagine it would be the same as what I needed for the Boat House,’ Sallie replied, taking a sip of her tea.

  ‘Oh right, what was that then?’

  ‘I had to have public liability and then get the kitchen certified by the council if I wanted to provide dinners. That was it really. I just made sure it was all top-notch and watertight.’

  ‘Same as me for the meals I make from here. I thought it might be the same,’ Lottie said.

  ‘You do meals from here, do you? Sorry, what like a meals-on-wheels type community thing?’

  ‘Oh no! Only for Dimitri, that is,’ Lottie said chuckling. ‘I don’t really publicise it, but I’ve been doing home cooking for a few families for years. I take around ten ready-to-heat meals - some I leave in the fridge and some go in the freezer. It just built by word-of-mouth to where I am today with a waiting list,’ Lottie said smiling.

  ‘Wow, I didn't know that. I don’t suppose you have any spaces, do you? I need someone for the Boat House cottage - I rent it out as holiday accommodation. I’m so up to my eyes in it and it’s one of the things the guests rate highly about staying there. They love the home-cooked food left in the fridge so the most they have to do is put it in the oven, but I’m running out of time what with the decorating of the house and the downstairs renovation of the Boat House and then, of course, the pregnancy means I am exhausted a lot of the time.’