The Little Teashop of Lost and Found

by Trisha Ashley

  Anyway, it was the flat, where I hoped to make my home, that I was most eager – and afraid – to see now. There was a door at the bottom of the stairs that led up to it. Mrs Muswell had told me that in the days when it had been a holiday let, the café and flat shared the rear entrance.

  She’d also said she’d rarely used the flat herself, preferring to board with friends who had a nearby guesthouse when she was over here, so I unlocked the door with some trepidation. Who knew now what was true and what wasn’t? Because it was plain that I’d been sold, if not a pup, then an elderly and slightly flea-bitten mutt.

  Those pictures I’d pinned my dreams on must have been from some long-ago incarnation and hadn’t included the flat.

  Still, I’d sort of assumed that whatever I found, it would at least be as clean as the café, but I was immediately disabused of this idea by the furry festoons of cobwebs that clutched at my face as I went upstairs. I opened another door at the top with a metal latch and shone my torch round a kitchen-cum-living room that stretched from front to back of the building. Old lino had worn into holes and dust lay like thick felt along every surface … except the bare places where furniture had once stood and the marks of footsteps going to and fro. It clearly hadn’t been occupied for years, except by about a million huge black spiders.

  There was a sliver of a bathroom, containing the smallest bath I’d ever seen, and two bedrooms, one of them partly over the passageway between the café and the next building.

  It all looked dismal, dank, chilly and unwelcoming, though the ghastly weather wasn’t helping it any. I’d need to spend time and money refurbishing it before I moved in, which I hadn’t banked on, and I wouldn’t even let myself think about what I’d have to do to get the café up to scratch!

  I went back downstairs, ducking below the cobwebs this time and feeling glad I’d booked myself in for the first night at a guesthouse … the one recommended by Mrs Muswell, now I came to think about it. If they were her friends, I wasn’t too sure how good an idea that was.

  I felt damp and cold, and there was no point in lingering there. I’d get a better look next day in good light and perhaps things wouldn’t seem quite so dismal.

  So I unstrapped my overnight bag and tucked the suitcase under the desk in the office, then put on my wet anorak and went out, locking up carefully behind me even though there wasn’t a single thing in there worth stealing.

  The cascades of rain had finally stopped, but it was still Waterworld out there and I was now so stiff from the damp and cold that I felt as if I’d been hung to petrify in the Dropping Well at Knaresborough for a century or two.

  Next day, although physically I felt as if I’d been fed through a mangle, mentally I’d entirely returned to my usual calm and logical self. This was more than could be said for Mum, once she finally awoke from her pill-induced oblivion.

  ‘What did you do with—’ she began fearfully, when I took her some early lunch in on a tray. With her bleach-blond hair and pale, pond-water eyes, she always looked like Marilyn Monroe’s less attractive sister, especially now her generous curves were running to fat. Luckily, I take after my long-absent father in appearance … and presumably in intelligence. I must have got it from somewhere.

  Then Mum added quickly, in a trembling voice, ‘No – don’t tell me! I don’t want to know.’

  8

  Away with the Fairies

  Luckily the Gondal Guesthouse was only a short walk away, but it was not the welcoming haven I’d hoped for. Instead, it wore a slightly depressed, shabby, end-of-season air and I was checked in by a morose and pimpled youth, who seemed to take positive pleasure in informing me that they didn’t do evening meals.

  But at least my room was clean and warm, with a kettle, tea and coffee. I changed into dry clothes and then, over a hot drink, looked through a menu I’d picked up from a box on the café counter on the way out, then read through the paperwork the solicitor had given me when I’d collected the keys.

  Facing the reality of what I’d actually bought had had the effect of shocking the last lingering miasma of mingled grief and antidepressants right out of my system and I’d snapped straight back into my old self – the one who operated on a practical level to earn a living, but was away with the fairies whenever she could escape into her writing … though actually I really must have been away with the fairies when I bought the café sight unseen.

  Why hadn’t I so much as looked at Google Street View? Or checked for reviews on travel sites, to see if customers had mentioned the place?

  But no, I’d blindly trusted Mrs Muswell and rushed straight into the biggest purchase of my life with less care and thought than I’d have given to the buying of a pair of shoes.

  The papers the solicitor had given me contained no promised file of catering suppliers, addresses for the staff, useful contacts – nothing. There wasn’t even any indication of the café turnover. And when I came to look more closely, most of the documents were those passed on by the previous owners of the property, which had operated under the not very upmarket name of The Butty Box.

  I made another hot but disgusting cup of instant coffee, sat on the bed and phoned Lola.

  ‘You told me you visited the Branwell Café when you came to Haworth with the WI, and it was a thriving business in the middle of the village,’ I told her accusingly, though that was rather unfair, seeing that I’d already bought the place before I’d mentioned the name to her.

  ‘The Branwell Café?’ Lola exclaimed. ‘Oh, I misheard you – I thought it was that wonderful teashop in the heart of the village that’s been there for ever.’

  ‘No – how could I have afforded that, even if it was for sale?’ I demanded. ‘And though I was expecting the Branwell Café to need a lot of updating, it’s a far cry from how Mrs Muswell described it to me. She sounded so nice and genuine, too,’ I added bitterly. ‘I should have smelled a rat when I couldn’t see her Facebook profile once the sale went through and my emails started to bounce.’

  ‘Is it very dreadful?’ Lola asked tentatively.

  ‘It’s run down and grim, and it looks as if she’s sold off all the kitchen equipment of any value, even though everything was included in the price. Not only that, but the flat obviously hasn’t been used for years and it’s totally bare – not even a cooker up there, just a space where one has been.’

  ‘How sneaky, removing things she said she’d leave! Isn’t that illegal?’

  ‘Possibly, but I expect it would be difficult to take her to court over it since she’s in Spain and no one will give me her contact details.’ I sighed. ‘Still, it might look better in the light of day, if it ever stops raining.’

  ‘I hope it does, but I suppose you could always cut your losses and sell it again, if not,’ she suggested.

  ‘No,’ I declared with sudden determination, ‘I’ve sunk all my money into the place, so I’ll just have to make a go of it – though not as the Branwell Café, because I found one of the menus and it seems to have been a cheap burger and sandwich joint.’

  ‘Have you considered shutting the café down and turning the whole premises into a house?’ she said. ‘I mean, that’s what you were looking for originally, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose I could, but either way, renovating the place will take most of what’s left of the insurance pay-out, and I don’t think I’m going to make enough to live on from my books, even with a proper publisher and an agent.’

  ‘You’d have to get another job?’

  ‘Yes, and since baking is all I know how to do – well, I might as well do it in my own café as someone else’s.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Lola said. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. Oh, I do wish I could come and help you sort things out!’

  ‘So do I, but I know it’s impossible: you’re already doing too many things.’

  ‘It’ll be easier when the extension is finished and I can move in with the girls,’ she said. ‘At the moment, running the jam and pickle compa
ny with Mum, the school run and juggling all the children’s activities means I never seem to have a second free. Just as well I like being busy.’

  ‘Yes, and I need to just get on with it, like you did after you lost Harry.’

  ‘But I was lucky because I could move back in with Mum and Dad and then, once I’d sold our house, there was enough to fund the extension and a new building for the jamming and pickling. Things have really taken off with the business, and it’s fun,’ she said.

  ‘I think you’ve just infused a bit of backbone into me,’ I told her. ‘The Branwell Café will be reborn as something new – onwards and upwards!’

  ‘That’s the spirit!’ she said, then made me promise to ring her again next day when I’d been back and seen it in daylight.

  ‘I think the electricity might be back on, too. When it wouldn’t work, I assumed Mrs Muswell had had it disconnected, but they said here there’d been a power cut earlier.’

  ‘If it’s light enough to take pictures, send me some.’

  ‘With or without the giant spiders?’ I asked.

  ‘Without!’ she said firmly.

  I borrowed an umbrella from the moronic youth and had a quick meal in the bar of an almost empty nearby pub.

  I was tiring now after all the ups and downs of the day, but as I made my way back to the guesthouse, it suddenly struck me that I was actually here at last, right in the heart of Haworth!

  Perhaps I hadn’t been born in the village, as in Dad’s stories, but I must have come from the immediate area and I felt ready to embrace the part of me that belonged here … if I could find it.

  There was a thin, brisk woman with cropped iron-grey hair behind the reception desk when I returned the umbrella. When pressed, she admitted that she was Hattie Voss, the owner of the guesthouse, and asked me if everything in my room was OK, though not in a tone to indicate that she cared one way or the other.

  ‘OK’ was about the most you could say about it, but I took the opportunity to ask her about Mrs Muswell, since she’d told me she always stayed there and was friends with the owners.

  ‘Well, yes … she does stay here sometimes,’ she said reluctantly, then suddenly called out, ‘Jim!’

  A short, balding man with a military haircut and moustache, who had been visible through a door laying the tables in the dining room for breakfast, stopped clattering plates and joined us.

  ‘Our guest was just asking about Mrs Muswell and I told her she occasionally used to stay here.’

  ‘Ah … yes,’ he agreed. ‘Handy for the café. She had a good manageress, but she liked to pop over from time to time and personally check on things.’

  They were oddly cagey and insisted they didn’t have any contact details for Mrs Muswell in Spain. I didn’t believe them: they smiled and smiled but were probably still villains, just like Mrs M.

  I wasn’t getting anywhere, so finally I gave up and retired back to my room, where I fell into that state of exhaustion where you become febrile and wide awake, but in a slightly nightmare, spaced-out kind of way.

  Since the guesthouse had broadband and I had my laptop with me, I sat at the rickety dressing table and began some of the internet searches I should have done before I signed the contract – and quickly discovered there was a surprising amount about the Branwell Café out there. None of it was good.

  Visitors appeared to have stumbled on the café by accident and then wished they hadn’t. The food was poor-quality burgers and sandwiches, as the menu I’d found had suggested, the premises shabby, the facilities basic and the ambience non-existent. And they had the rudest staff ever.

  I could sympathize with the latter, for my sharp tongue had got me into trouble once or twice when I’d been pressed into serving customers rather than working in the kitchen.

  Then I struck gold with two video clips of the café interior that had been uploaded to YouTube. The quality wasn’t brilliant, but I was riveted.

  In the first, the camera panned round the café and then settled on a tall, gaunt and elderly waitress as she pushed a large mobcap out of her eyes and then slapped a plate of food in front of a beady-eyed and noisy small boy.

  He looked down at his plate and asked suspiciously, ‘Are these Brontëburgers made out of real brontosauruses?’

  ‘Aye, they breed them up on t’ moors,’ she said.

  ‘I never knew that before,’ said his mother indistinctly, having already taken a large bite of what was probably, having seen the menu, a Charlotte Chicken wrap.

  She seemed to be serious. They were both now looking at the waitress with wide eyes and bulging hamster cheeks.

  ‘Like Jurassic Park?’ the child asked. Then he added through a second larger mouthful, ‘This tastes kinda weird.’

  ‘Shut tha moaning and get it et,’ the waitress advised him, then stumped off.

  The other clip was of a customer complaining to a different member of staff – perhaps the manageress Mrs Muswell had left in charge, whenever she’d gone back to Spain. She was younger, possibly late forties, but as tall and gaunt as the first one and clearly related. Mother and daughter?

  ‘Can you take this toastie away and remove the onion? I can’t eat onion,’ said the man.

  ‘You ordered a cheese and onion toastie, you great daft lump – what were you expecting to find in it?’ she said, looking scathingly at him from under a pair of heavy, straight, Frida Kahlo eyebrows.

  ‘I didn’t come here to be insulted!’ the man said indignantly.

  ‘Well, if tha don’t like it, take thisen off,’ she advised him. Then her eye fell on those customers near enough to hear the exchange, who were sitting, stunned, with their mouths hanging open.

  It was like a halibut convention.

  ‘What are thee all staring at?’ she demanded. ‘Tha dinner’ll be as cold as a stone if tha don’t get a shift on and et it!’

  Well, Edie’d always said I was so brusque with customers that I should never be allowed out of the kitchen, but clearly I had nothing on the staff at the Branwell Café.

  They were women after my own heart, sisters in sarcasm … and as I finally fell asleep in my lumpy bed with the hard, flat pillows, I was visited by the firefly glimmer of a Good Idea …

  ‘There’s nothing to know, you just had a bad dream,’ I told her, putting the tray down on her lap. ‘Now, eat this and forget all about it.’

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t eat a mouthful – and how can you look and sound so normal after what happened last night?’ she demanded.

  ‘The natural resilience of youth,’ I said, which was a bit of a low blow, considering the way she struggled against the signs of ageing, a female Canute battling to hold at bay a sea of wrinkles. ‘And we’re never having this conversation again, right?’

  ‘So cold and hard …’ she murmured, wincing and shutting her eyes.

  But when I went back to collect the tray and tell her I had to go out for a short while, it was cleared to the last crumb and she was watching some mindless soap series on the bedroom TV.

  9

  Up the Creek

  I finally fell asleep from sheer exhaustion, but was awake again at the crack of dawn with a complete scene in my head from When Beauty Goes Bad (as I’d called my new novel), which I got down on the laptop before I forgot it.

  ‘It is your birthday,’ said the stepmother, who wasn’t so much wicked as at the end of her tether. ‘I know how you love a game of hide-and-seek, so I have concealed a beautiful necklace of sparkling diamonds in the bower deep in the woods and if you find it, you may keep it as my gift.’

  Of course, when the stepmother adds that if Beauty doesn’t find the necklace she’ll give it to one of her own daughters, Beauty is off in a flash.

  And after this, I was off like a flash too – down to a large, chilly dining room to eat a fortifyingly huge breakfast with the only other occupant, who might as well have had ‘sales rep’ stamped all over him.

  The food was served by the military-moustache man, who s
eemed even less talkative than the previous night and, while the place wasn’t quite in the Fawlty Towers league, it wasn’t far off. I had the uncomfortable feeling that the owners were surreptitiously observing me and reporting back to Mrs Muswell, too.

  I packed and settled my bill right afterwards. I wasn’t sure where I would be staying that night, because it would take some time to make the flat over the café habitable, but there had to be a better option than the Gondal Guesthouse.

  I decided to worry about it later, when I’d seen the café in daylight and, I hoped, electric light, too.

  When I emerged from the guesthouse, the sun was attempting to come out from behind a lot of billowing dove-grey clouds and, though the cobbles of the main street were still slick and damp, I felt my spirits rise slightly.

  I longed to explore the village and visit the Parsonage and church, not to mention walk beyond them on to the moors, as Emily Brontë used to do. But there would be time for that later, when I’d got to grips with the realities of my impulse buy.

  I turned into the narrow entrance-way to Doorknocker’s Row, which was easier to spot in the full light of day, and noticed for the first time that a shop faced the café across the courtyard.

  ‘Small and Perfect’ boasted the sign over it. Curious, I veered over and had a look. It seemed to be some kind of curio shop. I could dimly make out various bijou objects by peering through the bow window, which was made from small squares of thick greenish glass, just like that of the café. The door was locked, with a sign on it that more or less said, ‘Tough luck if I’m not open, but call this number to make an appointment’, only it put it marginally more politely. It was signed ‘Nile Giddings’. There weren’t any opening times.

  I wondered if the proprietor of Small and Perfect was small and perfectly … I veered away from finishing that thought. He was probably elderly and retired, keeping the business on as an interest and opening when he felt like it.