‘Now listen to the job spec, Rosie, you’re going to WET yourself. The successful candidate will be at the global forefront of …’
My pulse quickened as I listened to the job specification. It was perfect. In the month that I’d spent at the café, I think the only time my pulse had raced like this was when Biddy’s sister had reversed her new motorized wheelchair into the toy corner and I’d had visions of little Alfie Sargent getting squished under the wheels. Luckily, he hadn’t and the incident had soon been resolved with a chocolate-chip cookie for him and a stern word from Biddy to her sister about reading the instruction manual.
‘Michael, you’re a miracle worker. When’s the interview?’
‘Next week, I’ll email you the details. Ooh, another call’s coming through. Laters.’
‘Whoop! Thank you!’ I said as he hung up.
I’d got an interview, just as I’d hoped. But then I looked back at the Lemon Tree Café across the road. Even on a grey day like today, with its sunny yellow awning, pretty lettering and miniature lemon trees flanking the door, the café looked warm and welcoming. I’d been here nearly a month and despite the ups and downs, I was going to miss it terribly. Which was ridiculous, it couldn’t ever replace my career and, besides, Nonna didn’t want me to stay. I gave myself a shake and went back inside.
I’d barely shut the door when Doreen and Juliet practically dragged me through the café and outside to the courtyard at the back.
‘It’s not what you think,’ Doreen blurted out.
‘So I didn’t see you take money out of the till and put it in your own purses?’ I folded my arms and stared beadily at them both.
I hoped I looked authoritative because my legs felt as wobbly as one of Stanley’s favourite custard tarts.
‘Aye, you did, but it was our money.’ Juliet jabbed her own chest with her fingertip.
‘And if we don’t help ourselves we don’t get it,’ Doreen added.
‘True that,’ Juliet confirmed with a nod.
‘Hold on.’ I held my hands up. ‘Nonna pays you both in cash, in an envelope. I’ve seen her.’
She even paid me that way, even though I’d offered to work for free. But she’d insisted, saying fair was fair. I bristled; what these two were doing was anything but fair.
‘Aye, that’s wages, although goodness knows what she’s doing about tax and stuff.’
‘But she forgets to pay us for other things,’ Doreen explained, lowering herself down on to the chair Nonna kept out here for napping on whenever she got the chance.
‘What things?’ I retorted.
‘Look,’ said Juliet, running her hands through her hair until it stood up in clumps rather than its usual spikes, ‘I make cakes for the café, right?’
I nodded. She made batches on her days off. She’d made loads for the funeral.
‘Well, the money I took covers the ingredients, plus a bit extra to cover fuel for cooking.’
‘And I buy supplies when we run out before the wholesaler delivers,’ said Doreen. ‘Like toilet paper and soap, or eggs. Things like that.’
‘We’d never steal off Maria,’ Juliet growled.
I nodded again, tears pricking at the back of my eyes as a giant wave of relief and shame came over me.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘I should never have doubted you.’
Doreen struggled out of her chair, put her arms round me and squished me to her chest. ‘You’re just protecting your grandmother’s business. Nothing wrong with that. No harm done.’
‘Aye, easy mistake,’ muttered Juliet.
‘But why not just put in a receipt and ask for the money?’ I said.
Doreen cringed. ‘Maria isn’t fond of paperwork.’
‘And she forgets,’ said Juliet. ‘It’s easier to sort it out ourselves than wait for her to do it.’
My mind was racing. This was all well and good, but if Nonna wasn’t keeping a note of money coming in and out of the business, how was she going to be able to work out the café’s finances?
‘What about financial records?’ I said. ‘It’s nearly the end of the tax year; won’t she have to send the accountant her books soon?’
Doreen and Juliet looked at each other shiftily.
‘Come and look at this,’ said Doreen with a sigh.
There was a tiny store cupboard near the toilets where we kept the mop and bucket and basically anything that was too big to fit on a shelf in the kitchen.
‘Right at the back, behind all this clutter, is a filing cabinet.’ Doreen snapped on the light, a single bare bulb hanging from a cable.
I squinted at the harshness of the light. ‘I see it. Just about.’
The store room was a hoarder’s haven, shelves either side bulged with kitchen paraphernalia and the floor was piled high with stuff.
‘That,’ said Doreen ominously, ‘is where your grandmother keeps all the records for the café. Or rather, doesn’t keep them. The accountants got so fed up with her last year that they sent all the paperwork back and told her to find someone else.’
‘So who does it now?’
Doreen shrugged. ‘I’m guessing it’s a time bomb waiting to go off at the end of the tax year. Maria has buried her head in the sand and gets very tetchy when we ask for expense forms to claim our money back. We’ve given up asking.’
‘But … but …’ I stared at Doreen. ‘I thought the leaky taps and dusty corners and greasy griddle and unchanged-since-nineteen-eighty-seven menus were the worst problems. This is far worse. There are hefty fines for failing to submit your accounts. The café would never survive.’
She swallowed. ‘I’d agree with you there.’
‘I’ll have to take a look at it.’ I sighed. ‘Although accounts are not my thing at all.’
‘Private,’ said Doreen, pointing at the big label stuck on the front of the cabinet drawer. ‘She won’t like you prying.’
‘What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her,’ I muttered, pushing myself into the store room.
Just then a lone church bell began to chime softly in the distance. Doreen and I looked at each other; the funeral was over. Nonna was supposed to be going to the wake, but what if she popped in here for some reason first?
I rubbed my hand over my face feeling very weary and wondering why I’d ever thought working in a café would be so much simpler than my old job.
‘I’ll have to leave it for now, but I don’t think I really have a choice, do you? If anyone finds out about the state of the business’s financial affairs, the Lemon Tree Café could be history.’
Chapter 7
The worry over the café’s neglected accounts heavily outweighed the relief I felt that Doreen and Juliet weren’t thieves after all. And Nonna’s lax attitude to doing things properly – in an up-to-date manner – niggled away at the back of my mind for the next few days and all over the Easter weekend.
Things had changed a lot since she’d first taken over in the café. Everything, every tiny thing, had to be accounted for these days and goodness knows what the tax man would have to say about records kept on scraps of paper in a locked cabinet. Or possibly no records at all. It wouldn’t have been so bad if she had an accountant on the case, but apparently she hadn’t.
I felt anxious for her and toyed with the idea of tackling her on it, but decided in a cowardly way to have a look at the contents of the filing cabinet first. You never know, I told myself, she could have everything completely under control; I could be worrying for no reason. There was nothing else for it, Doreen, Juliet and I all agreed: the very next time Nonna went anywhere during opening hours, I was going in.
In the meantime, several new and exciting things happened. Thanks to a rather jolly telephone engineer who’d put away half his body weight in honey cake yesterday afternoon, we now had internet in the café. We also had a Facebook page, a little devoid of photographs or posts or followers, but I was working on it. And Nonna and Stanley had been out for dinner together!
&n
bsp; This morning I’d persuaded everyone to pose for a staff photo and Doreen had come in especially for it. Although given the fact that we were all dying to know about Nonna’s date last night, I suspect that she would have called in anyway.
‘I can’t see that being on Facebook is going to make a blind bit of difference to a village café,’ grumbled Doreen, who was redoing her ponytail for her close-up and dabbing concealer on the mole on her nose.
I smiled to myself. I’d handled plenty of clients in the past who’d been suspicious of new media, only to find them days later secretly logging on to see how many ‘likes’ their picture had got.
‘It might not but if we don’t try we’ll never know, will we? It’s free advertising so it can’t do any harm. And once it’s set up it’ll be easy to run even when I’m not here. Which if I get the job in Manchester could be soon.’
‘Course you get the job,’ Nonna called from the conservatory. ‘If not they all dicky heads.’
‘I’ll tell them that, shall I?’ I said. ‘At the end when they ask why they should give me the job.’
‘Yeah, why not?’ She shrugged. ‘It’s the truth.’
It was only forty-eight hours until my interview with HitSquad. Michael was emailing me every five minutes with articles he’d found online about the company. They seemed like a great bunch to work for. But every time I thought about leaving the café I felt a tremor of an emotion that I couldn’t quite place. It also put me under a bit of pressure; I didn’t have long to break into that filing cabinet. If only Nonna would disappear for the day and give me a chance to look inside it.
Doreen wandered off muttering something about Facebook being an invasion of her privacy while Juliet rearranged her cleavage ready for her picture.
‘This is as good as it gets,’ she said, patting her short red hair. It was rigid with hairspray. She shoved the can back in her rucksack and brushed cake crumbs from her chin. ‘Where do you want me?’
‘Perhaps in front of the cakes?’ I suggested, coughing on the fumes. ‘Looking natural.’
Juliet positioned herself by the counter and pouted flirtatiously.
I managed to get a nice shot of her with a plate of muffins and then it was Nonna’s turn. She posed by one of the lemon trees in the conservatory, sitting in a chair, holding a Lemon Tree Café menu. I don’t know whether it was down to the light in there but the pictures of her were very flattering. There was a soft warmth to her smile and a pink girlish glow to her cheeks. Then again, it might have been a certain gentleman who’d put a twinkle in her eye this morning.
‘Your turn, Doreen. Pop an apron on,’ I said, ‘and pick up that tea tray.’
She obliged, checked her reflection in the coffee machine and flicked her ponytail over her shoulder.
‘Come on, Maria, spill the beans,’ she said, trying not to move her mouth as she spoke. She stared ahead expressionless, while I captured the shot. It wasn’t the most welcoming of looks, but I managed to put her in soft focus and train the lens on the pretty china tea pot instead. ‘We want a blow-by-blow account of your date.’
Nonna smiled mysteriously and tapped her nose.
‘A lady like to have some secrets,’ she said.
‘Some, yes,’ I retorted, ‘but you’ve got more secrets than James Bond and the entire Secret Service.’
‘Anyway, boss, you shouldn’t have gone to the Cross Keys if you wanted to keep a low profile,’ Juliet piped up from behind the counter. ‘I saw Adrian this morning. He said you and Stanley looked very cosy.’
‘Because we sit by the fire that’s why,’ Nonna said, wiping her cloth over the window sill. ‘And no gossip about your boss, thank you very much.’
‘I think it’s lovely,’ I said, lifting my gaze from the camera to smile at her. ‘To find love in old age. Or any age, for that matter.’
‘Don’t worry, love, you’ll meet the right man one day, everyone does, even her,’ said Doreen, nodding towards Juliet who was giving the milk pipe on the coffee machine a thorough rubbing down and didn’t look the least bit offended.
‘True that. Did I ever tell you how I met my Dean?’ Juliet said. ‘One winter, he came round to investigate my neighbour after a report of cruelty to his rabbit, Bobsie. He knocked on my door and when I saw him in his RSPCA uniform and rubber gloves I nearly fainted into his arms.’ She fanned her face with a slice of toast. ‘What a hero. He whipped Bobsie from her hutch while the owner was out. Unfortunately, her wee had frozen her bum to the bottom of the cage.’
Doreen and I winced.
‘Both Dean and the rabbit were traumatized. I took them both in. I remember that bum – as bald as a baboon’s. Bobsie’s that is, not Dean’s. His was peachy.’
Nonna patted my face. ‘You will meet one special boy and boom: you in love. It will happen. It will be peachy for you too.’
‘Can’t wait,’ I said, trying to shake off the image of Dean giving Bobsie a Brazilian.
‘Like me,’ agreed Juliet, retrieving her sturdy bra strap from where it had slipped down her arm. ‘What about you?’
This last question was addressed to Tyson, who had called in for lunch. The garden centre had reopened after a week. Nonna had been to see if Clementine needed any help with the paperwork, but she’d said that she was ignoring all the bills for the moment because the bedding plants season had begun and if they didn’t sell them before they got too big for their pots, there’d be no money to pay the bills with anyway.
‘Me?’ Tyson’s entire head turned pink. ‘I’m not in love.’
‘No.’ Juliet tutted. ‘What do you want to order?’
‘Cheese-and-beans toastie, please.’
‘And you knew Dean was the one, straight away?’ I marvelled.
‘Aye, hen, he’s a proper gentleman.’
‘Like Lorenzo.’ Nonna sighed. ‘A true gentleman.’
‘Stanley’s a gentleman too,’ I said softly. ‘That’s two good ones you’ve managed to meet. That’s two more than me. This could be the start of a new love affair, Nonna.’
‘Pfft, and piggies might fly.’ She began tidying the pots of herbs, snipping off dead leaves and pinching shoots between her fingers. ‘Stanley is a good man. But Lorenzo is only man I ever love.’
The faraway look in Nonna’s eyes made my heart squeeze; she’d given up on love at an early age, just like me. Mum had been a baby when her father had died, she had no memories of him at all, and now she was fifty-three. And Nonna had been on her own all those years. Thinking that I might spend the rest of my life without falling in love was a sobering thought.
‘I don’t know whether to be happy or sad,’ I said, lowering my camera.
‘Be happy. I have my work, my family and my health, at my age I lucky to have all those things.’
‘Good,’ I said, ‘and we’re lucky to have you.’
I spent the rest of the morning trying to convince myself that I was absolutely not turning into my grandmother.
By the following morning, we’d got two hundred followers on our Facebook page and I was feeling sufficiently optimistic to have a go at tackling Twitter.
Nonna couldn’t fathom why we’d want to bother.
‘Why everyone wanna beep-beep-beeping all the time?’ she’d scowled, miming pressing the buttons of a phone with her finger.
‘Because people keep in touch with each other these days, Nonna,’ I’d explained. ‘All the time. We’re a nation of sharers.’
‘I don’t wanna keep in touch,’ was Nonna’s response. ‘My worst nightmare. I want “Private, keep out” written on my Facebook window.’
‘Wall,’ I corrected.
‘My friend Tansy from line dancing is on Facebook. She gets men from Russia saying she looks sexy,’ said Doreen, looking over my shoulder as I logged on to the café’s page. ‘Has anyone commented on my photo?’
‘Not so far,’ I said, biting back a smile when her face fell. ‘Give it time.’
I was convinced that offering free wif
i would have its benefits. Teenagers didn’t frequent anywhere without it these days. And it would appeal to business customers too: we could let people have the conservatory for meetings and lunches … Of course, I wouldn’t be here soon, with any luck I’d be at HitSquad by then. I’d have to train Doreen and Juliet up on social media and hopefully steer Doreen away from sex-starved Russians.
But to keep myself occupied until my interview tomorrow, I was focusing my attention on Twitter and had booked a model for a photoshoot …
‘Can you get him to sit up by the chair, Biddy?’ I said, arranging a plate of biscuits tantalizingly close to the edge of the table. ‘And sniff the air?’
I’d found out the previous day that it was National Pet Month and in the absence of anything more appropriate like, say, National Cappuccino Day or Eat More Cake Month, I’d decided that we should get on board and be more pet-friendly. I thought a few pictures of a dog enjoying an afternoon at the café would make a nice story for Twitter. Biddy from the pet shop, who was doing her own campaign – a free bag of frozen mice with every snake purchase – had popped in to lend me Churchill, her elderly black Labrador. It wasn’t going well. So far he’d trumped so viciously that two people had left and then he’d chewed the edge of my cardigan to bits when I hadn’t been looking.
‘I’m trying,’ said a harassed Biddy, poking Churchill in the tummy. ‘Oh, I know! This is his favourite. Come on, boy, frankfurter.’
Biddy was an ‘old before her time’ sort of woman in her late forties. She had thinning blonde hair and was a whizz with a crochet hook. Mum once said that the decor in her house was wall-to-wall woollen squares. She produced an inch of cooked sausage from her poncho and waved it under Churchill’s nose, but he simply yawned and closed his eyes again.
‘What would tempt him?’ I asked, half wishing I’d plumped for National Stress Awareness Month instead; at least I wouldn’t have had to look far for models. I fanned my face, still recovering from the aftermath of Churchill’s wind.
‘Sex mostly,’ Biddy replied with a tinkly laugh.
‘Ha.’ Nonna flicked a cursory cloth over the table, narrowly missing the plate. ‘That tempt us all.’
The Lemon Tree Café Page 7
