by Laura Powell
‘Perhaps he’ll fix the car in time for sweet. Should we wait?’ says Mother hopefully.
‘No, no, he’s not coming. Very generous of you to have George and me, though.’
For a split second Mother’s face darkens. She ushers them into the big room and removes a set of cutlery and placemat. Betty takes a place and George sits opposite. She tucks her legs under her chair, not to touch his. Mother returns from the kitchen with plates of steaming pie, the pastry charred black.
‘Well, isn’t this a sight?’ says Mrs Paxon, with a bitten lip.
‘It was no bother. It’s your favourite, isn’t it George? And your father’s too,’ says Mother.
Betty frowns. She doesn’t remember telling Mother that.
‘I’ll have to package up a piece for him,’ she continues. ‘Men and their motorcars, eh.’
George fidgets with his fork handle.
‘I suppose you’re quite used to serving people,’ says Mrs Paxon.
Betty wants to kick her shin under the table but Mother smiles.
‘Oh, you know how it is, we muddle along. And Betty’s learning fast too. Aren’t you?’ There is a pause. ‘So how is Mr Paxon?’
Mrs Paxon doesn’t reply. They eat in silence, nothing but the clink of silver on Mr Eden’s Royal Doulton china. Someone hiccups. Mother looks sheepish.
‘Excuse me.’
George sniggers but Mrs Paxon keeps her eyes low. No one speaks and Betty can hear stifled hiccups pulse through Mother’s chews. She smiles at Mother, but Mother glares back.
‘I hear your school marks are exemplary, George,’ says Mother after a mouthful of water. ‘Tell me – and Betty – what good things you will do with that fine brain of yours.’
George opens his mouth but Mrs Paxon speaks first.
‘He’s taking over the reins of the family business.’
‘Isn’t that exciting?’ squeals Mother.
‘He’s very keen,’ says Mrs Paxon, looking sharply at him.
‘And what will Mr Paxon do, then? A talented man like him.’
‘They’ll be partners. George has a long way to go. Don’t you, George?’
George’s eyes glue onto his plate. He slices his carrot into tiny bits with the edge of his fork.
‘I need a hand with the custard,’ says Mother in a curt way and nods at Betty.
Betty is about to reply that they have barely begun their pies, but Mother has scraped back her chair and is halfway to the kitchen. Betty murmurs an apology to Mrs Paxon and follows. Mother storms into the back yard and slams the kitchen door behind them both.
‘You’re making me look like a fool,’ spits Mother.
‘What? I don’t understand.’
‘George! Can’t you even string together a sentence to say to him?’
‘I don’t know what to—’
‘Because this is it, you silly girl. Your future hangs at that table and if you don’t grasp onto him right now, you’ll lose it. And then where will we be? Still slaving in this hotel twenty years from now, that’s where!’
‘I’m trying.’
‘You’re not. Before you know it, you’ll be thirty-six years old with no home and no man wanting to even look at you sideways. If you hadn’t… If your father hadn’t got himself killed and left me lumbered, things wouldn’t be this way. You don’t know what I do for you, Betty. And for us. You really don’t.’
There is a tapping at the kitchen window.
‘Everything all right?’ mouths Mrs Paxon.
Mother looks up. She blinks hard and pastes on her widest smile.
‘Coming,’ she tinkles, knocking into Betty on her way back inside.
Betty follows. They sit back down and Mother kicks her shin under the table.
‘George,’ begins Betty. They all look at her. ‘How was the outing to Torquay?’
‘It was all right,’ he says, still avoiding her eye.
‘Did you see Agatha Christie on your travels?’
Mother gives her an encouraging nod.
‘That madwoman writer?’ splutters Mrs Paxon. ‘Wasn’t she sent to a lunatic asylum?’
‘Because her second husband left her,’ says Mother smugly.
‘The Mousetrap was marvellous,’ pipes up George.
‘Then she should have clung onto her husband a little tighter, instead of writing those silly books,’ retorts Mrs Paxon and sets down her knife and fork, her mutton barely touched.
Mother smiles in a funny sort of way, then conceals it with her hands.
‘Gray’s father took us to watch it at the Ambassadors in London last summer,’ continues George.
Another silence falls over the table. Betty roots around for something to say.
‘That’s very interesting, George,’ she manages stiffly. ‘I’ve never been to London.’
‘George, you’ll like this,’ says Mother, when they have all finished. ‘We borrowed that music player over there from Mr Eden. Why doesn’t Betty show you how to play it?’
George pushes back his chair and Betty follows him to the dresser, while Mother pours two thimbles of sweet wine and hiccups again. Betty lifts the needle and drops it halfway through the record. A tune bleats out. George looks bored.
‘Don’t you like Little Richard?’
‘We have one of these things at home. Two, actually.’
She blushes. She can feel Mother’s eyes on her and she can’t stand it any longer.
‘Excuse me,’ she mutters, squeezing past him and hurrying to the hall.
‘Tell me about this Mr Eden who owns the place,’ Mrs Paxon is saying to Mother as Betty makes her way up the stairs.
‘He’s on a cruise with his wife Evelyn,’ Mother is saying distractedly. ‘It’s quite the cruise liner, so I’m told. Popular with the Royal Family and—’
Betty closes the bathroom door and their voices fade away. It is cold inside; someone has left the window open. She presses her forehead to the wall tiles with tiny pink roses and green vines creeping over them. The coolness is a relief against her headache. She can’t go back downstairs. She has never liked George and now that he has gone off her too, Mother will soon find out. Betty sighs, just as the door jerks open and Gallagher appears.
‘Sorry,’ he blusters, looking away and backing out. ‘Sorry, it wasn’t locked and I didn’t know anyone was—’
He is about to close the door behind him when he stops.
‘Is everything all right?’
‘It’s fine… I just came in here for some peace.’
He peers back around the door and opens his lips, pausing before he speaks.
‘Your mother shouldn’t speak to you like that.’
‘You were listening?’
‘My window was open… It was difficult not to.’
‘You shouldn’t even be in the hotel at this time of day,’ she snaps. ‘What are you doing, creeping about and eavesdropping, you don’t know anything about me or Mother, so why don’t you just—’ she stops, appalled.
He steps inside the bathroom and closes the door behind him.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispers.
He crosses the bathroom to her and wraps his arms around her shoulders so her head buries in his chest. It is familiar and comforting. She cries in deep chesty heaves, relieved but horrified at herself too.
Minutes pass. She pulls away from him and wipes her face with the pink hand towel from the peg. When she looks up, he is crouching and level with her.
‘Tell me what I can do to help,’ he says gently.
‘Just take me away from it all for a day.’
‘Where?’
‘Anywhere.’
He gives a single sharp nod. She looks down, not meeting his eye. Her hands, she realises, are shaking.
‘The morning after tomorrow,’ he says. ‘Half past eight by the farm. We’ll meet then.’
He kisses her lightly on the forehead and walks out of the bathroom.
The morning after tomorrow arrives e
ventually. Betty wakes at seven o’clock. She had hoped that Mother would be asleep so she could leave a note and slip away unnoticed, but she finds her in the garden scrubbing the window nets. She has flung open every window so the curtains dance and Hotel Eden breathes again.
‘I’m going to Spoole for the day to see Mary,’ mutters Betty. ‘But if there’s too much to do, I can stay here.’
There, she has said it. It is the first time she has properly lied to Mother. She waits to be caught out or for Mother to refuse because of the Cleaver. She half hopes that Mother will refuse.
‘Of course I’ll manage,’ says Mother. She points at a plate of doorstep-thick bread and syrupy jam on the window sill. ‘Can’t have you going all that way on an empty stomach.’
Betty’s insides knot up, she feels doubly bad now. She eats the drippy sandwich under the cool morning sun, not minding when the blackcurrant jam spots the ground and an army of ants swarms around it.
‘There’s something I have to say,’ says Mother seriously, shaking soap suds from her hands. ‘I see how much you do for… this hotel. And I’m going to try harder too.’
‘Don’t get all soppy,’ says Betty and chews her tongue to stop herself confessing where she is really going. ‘What are you clucking on about?’
She puffs out her cheeks like a chicken and flaps her arms like wings, the way Mother used to when she was young. You don’t need friends when you have me, Mother used to say.
‘Cluck, cluck, chicken,’ says Betty.
Mother laughs and copies, the way she always does when Betty pretends to be small again. It is when Mother is at her brightest.
‘Cluck, cluck, hen.’
They waddle in a circle around the small paved yard, clucking and flapping and laughing until Betty’s chest hurts so much, it is ready to rip in two.
‘Go on. Off with you. Let me get on with my washing,’ says Mother, wiping away happy tears.
She strokes Betty’s hair. Betty beams. Mother is back.
Betty arrives at Trevarthen Farm before Gallagher, still bristling with guilt. She should have stayed with Mother. She will tell him that there was a mix-up, that she can’t go with him after all, but his Austin rumbles up the track, his curls flapping about in the breeze, and he pulls over and leans across to open the passenger door for her.
‘You came,’ he says sounding relieved.
She nods and slides in, forgetting her planned speech and wishing she had checked her teeth were clean of bread and jam. They weave their way out of St Steele. The sun glares down on them and Betty covers her parting with a hand in case it burns. Gallagher glances sideways at her with a grin. We could be married and on a Sunday run through the countryside, she tells herself.
When they have driven more than halfway and the sun is lost behind clouds, Betty’s hands unclammy themselves and a sort of relief settles inside her. Rows of thatched cottages roll past. They pass a thread of bonfire smoke, a hunched-over woman with a prunish face. She waves a red handkerchief and Betty waves back, proud of the car, proud to be sitting beside Gallagher.
After the thatched village, a herd of cows slope into the road and Gallagher brakes. Dozens more cows pour out of the field. Gallagher cuts the engine and strums his fingers on the wheel.
‘We haven’t got all bloody day,’ he grunts.
Betty picks at the skin around her thumbnail. It is as though he is scolding her. This is her part of the country so it is her fault.
‘Christ almighty,’ he groans as two more cows amble out.
Betty unlocks her door and steps onto the road; she won’t let a cow herd spoil their day.
‘What are you doing? Don’t.’ He reaches over to stop her, but she is already walking towards the cows. ‘They’re dangerous.’
‘Dangerous, my foot.’
She charges at them, mooing and shaking her fists. Two cows surge forward into the field. Others slowly follow. She glances back and sees Gallagher clutching his stomach. He seems to be laughing, but he stops when he sees her looking at him.
‘Come on,’ she calls. ‘Help me.’
‘I’m not going near them. Look at their eyes.’
‘You’re scared!’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘Then help me.’
Gallagher steps out of the car. As his foot lowers towards the grass she spots something brown beneath it.
‘Mind,’ she calls.
But it is too late. His shoe lands in a thick slop of cow pat.
‘Stinking bloody countryside.’
‘Clean it on the nettles.’
Gallagher picks a leaf and wipes the sole of his shiny Oxfords with it, muttering under his breath. The last of the cows disappear into the field and Betty sits back in the car. She tries to ignore the strange pound of blood and the adrenaline that is stretching her veins.
‘What am I doing?’ grunts Gallagher, climbing back into the car. ‘Why am I here?’
The blood and adrenaline slow. Betty turns away her head so he won’t see her disappointment. The rest of the drive passes in silence.
Gallagher parks at the railway station on the fringe of St Ives and holds her elbow as he steers her through the labyrinth of streets. They reach a tiny front door that they have to duck to enter. A bell tings and a lady with a flowered apron and grey tufts of hair steps from the scullery to the wooden counter of cakes. Gallagher chooses a table next to the window.
‘Cream tea or afternoon tea?’ she calls from the counter.
‘That’ll do,’ he mutters.
The lady looks puzzled but says nothing. They take opposite chairs and the lady brings them white floury bread with salty butter and apricot jam and the teas. She looks closely at Betty’s face as she sets it down.
‘Perhaps your daughter would like some cold water to cool her tea.’
Neither of them answers. Next she carries out a two-tiered stand of wedged Victoria cake sprinkled with icing sugar and an oblong marzipan cake made of chequered pink and white sponge. Gallagher rests his hand on top of Betty’s, which is flat on the table, while the lady lays out the spread. Betty almost jerks back but she doesn’t. His hand is cool and smooth but it makes her very hot. The lady looks between them, and Gallagher only removes his hand again when she has gone. Betty drinks the tea fast, scalding her throat, while Gallagher looks out of the window at a war memorial surrounded by poppy wreaths.
‘Thank you for bringing me,’ she says between mouthfuls of bread.
She wants to ask him why he hardly speaks, why his lips are buttoned together and his posture is ramrod straight, and why he touched her hand in front of that lady, but she is in earshot so Betty says nothing. Gallagher’s long cuffs have been turned up so she can see his slender fingers and neat, trimmed nails as they reach for the milk jug.
‘Tell me something interesting about yourself,’ he says.
The lady brings a fresh pot of water and hovers next to Betty for longer than she needs to.
‘Well, you know my name is Betty – Elizabeth Mary Broadbent in full. I’m fifteen years old, almost sixteen actually, and—’
‘That’s not what I meant,’ he hisses, glancing at the tea lady.
She has disappointed him again in some way. There should be a rule book for boys and men; how to speak to them, what not to reply.
‘So?’
‘Well, there’s not a lot else to say, Mr Gallagher,’ she whispers. ‘There’s not a lot special or interesting about me.’
‘Don’t call me Mr Gallagher. You make me feel like my father.’
‘All right then,’ she says, realising that she doesn’t know his Christian name, but she can’t ask what it is when the cake lady is listening. She thinks for a second. ‘I’ve lived at Hotel Eden since I was three, I suppose that’s unusual.’
‘And before that?’
‘We stayed with Uncle Harold and my Aunt Beryl, Mother’s sister. I don’t remember her very well. We had to move out and I’ve not seen them since.’
‘Uncle Harold said Mother was a bad egg. It was strange; he went from liking her very much, maybe too much, to not even wanting to look at her. But luckily Mr Eden offered Mother the manageress job at the hotel – he and Father were at war together… I don’t know where because Mother doesn’t speak about it. All she would say is that Father died when I was in her stomach and Mr Eden survived, so he feels indebted to us in some way.’
‘Bad egg?’
‘Yes, you know. Someone who isn’t good to have around.
‘I know what a bad egg is, I meant why?’
She looks at him over her teacup, just as the bell dings and a family trickles into the tea room. There is a mother, a father and two small boys wearing matching shiny yellow raincoats. The tea lady doesn’t notice them, she is staring at Betty. Betty ignores her and focuses on Gallagher’s question.
‘What is this, the Spanish Inquisition?’ she says.
‘How do you know what the Spanish Inquisition is?’ he replies with a raised eyebrow.
‘I know a great many things.’
His face is all glowy, not at all like his expression at the dinner table in Hotel Eden.
‘For example?’
‘For example, I know Prime Minister Churchill had special dentures to correct his lisp. And I know that the gold ring you wear is a family ring, probably with your family crest on it. See, I can tell by your face that I’m right.’ He smiles and, emboldened, she continues: ‘And I’d also know how to make very good raspberry buns, if only I could find sweet raspberries that didn’t make my tongue curl up.’
He bites his lip, his expression clouds and the loveliness of it all vanishes.
‘So very young,’ he says.
She has said something wrong again. It is infuriating but she sips on her tea and says nothing.
When they have finished, the tea lady puts a sheet of pencilled paper on the table without smiling. It lists how much everything costs. Betty sets down her birthday half crown.
‘Don’t be soft,’ he says, putting down his own coins.
He presses the half crown back into her hand. His skin is warm now and the only thing that separates them is the hot metal of the coin. He lingers there for longer than he needs to, then scrapes back his chair and walks out. She follows him, passing closely by the family. As she looks at them, she realises that she dislikes being in this tea room. She doesn’t fit in here; she has never belonged somewhere as normal but lovely as this and she still doesn’t, not even with a great man like Gallagher sharing her table.
