2008 - Recipes for Cherubs (3 page)

“Tell me your name again, child.”

“Catrin. Catrin Grieve.”

Sister Matilde closed her eyes, felt her heart beating erratically, her stomach twisting into a painful coil.

For a moment she was back in Kilvenny, hearing the sea crashing against the rocks below the hotel gardens, a swing creaking in the wind. The cry of rooks rising up from the tower of the castle, and the first touch of warm lips upon her own.

Dear God in heaven, can I never be allowed to forget?

“The train now standing at platform one is the four fifteen, London Paddington to Swansea.”

Sister Matilde straightened up and put all unpleasant thoughts from her mind.

“Come on, let’s find you a seat. Remember, now, make sure that you eat well during the holidays. I want to see you hale and hearty when you come back to us in September.”

“Yes, Sister.”

Sister Matilde climbed on to the train and settled the girl in an empty compartment. She lifted the suitcase on to the luggage rack and handed Catrin a brown paper bag which contained some food for the journey. She smiled, thinking that the meagre rations of convent food would be the last tedious meal that Catrin Grieve would eat all summer. Whatever unpleasant connotations Shrimp’s Hotel had for Sister Matilde, the food there had been exquisite. Thinking of the small earthenware ramekins of potted shrimps and the homemade brown bread made her stomach rumble. Squab pie and sticky almond pudding. Hopefully Catrin Grieve would renew her appetite and put on a few pounds over the summer – she sorely needed to.

She leant towards Catrin, touched her gently on the forehead, then slipped her hand into the pocket of her habit and absentmindedly took out one of her holy pictures and put it into Catrin’s blazer pocket.

“God bless you and keep you safe.”

“Thank you, Sister.”

Then Sister Matilde got off the train just as the guard blew his whistle.

She stood watching the train pull slowly away from the station.

Catrin waved to Sister Matilde, who looked at her through the window. She had taken off her boater and for a moment her face, framed by a halo of unruly curls, was bathed in a shaft of light, softly illuminating her small features. It was a curious moment of deja vu. Somewhere, a long time ago, a face just like this one had looked at her…

During the return drive to school, the nun had a terrible feeling of foreboding – and that feeling was to remain with her for a long time.

I
n the doorway of the Café Romana, Tony Agosti lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply, pulling up the collar of his jacket, for the night had turned suddenly chilly.

Every night before he locked up the café he loved to stand outside listening to the rhythmic lapping of the waves down on the beach and the first tentative calling of owls over in Gwartney’s Wood. He breathed in the familiar smell of the wild garlic and nettles that grew in profusion alongside the creek. There was a whiff of pungent herbs from the castle’s kitchen garden, and the sweet night fragrance of roses.

Hell, he was going to miss this place if he was forced to sell up and move away. But things were looking dire at the moment; the takings were rock bottom again this week and he couldn’t carry on like this for much longer. There was no way he could survive selling half a dozen meat pies and a few ice-cream sundaes. It would be for the best if he bit the bullet and broke the bad news to Norma sooner rather than later.

If only it were that easy, eh? How did you tell your ancient grandmother that everything she and her late husband had worked for was about to go down the pan? How could he tell her that one day soon he’d have to uproot her and move away from Kilvenny, although God knows where they’d go?

Sweet Jesus, his grandfather would turn in his grave if he knew how tough life had become here. Luigi Agosti had walked all the way through Italy and France and got on a ship which had brought him to Wales. He’d worked in the docks in Swansea and then somehow or other he’d made his way out here to Kilvenny and put down roots. At first he’d worked all hours at the herring smokehouse further along the coast, scrimped and saved until he had enough money to open the Café Romana, where he soon built up a thriving trade. The café had been busy from morning till night. Work used to start at dawn making tea and toast for the early shift workers waiting for the boneshaker bus that took them to the herring smokehouse. He missed the smell of fish that used to fill the air when the breeze was in the right direction, but now the crumbling remains were all that was left and the bus had long since been sent to the knacker’s yard.

Later in the day, the women of the village used to venture out to Bryn Jones’s shop, then on to Watkins the Butcher’s, finishing up in the Café Romana for the daily dose of gossip and tea with side orders of ice creams and Welsh cakes. In the night the teenagers came, sloping down from the farms, smoking filched Woodbines, spitting and talking too loud, on the lookout for a pretty girl and to buy a soda or a chocolate nut sundae.

His reminiscing was interrupted by the distant sound of the late train chugging sluggishly towards Kilvenny station. The locals euphemistically called it the Tate train’ as though there were early trains and lunchtime trains and not just this train which came once a week to Kilvenny and rarely stopped unless you asked the guard first. It was all the talk that next year the line would close for good and Kilvenny would lose its last link with civilisation and sink further into isolation and decay.

He watched the steam from the engine rise into the night sky and drift above the one remaining tower of Kilvenny Castle.

He strained his ears, heard the train creak to a halt, a carriage door slamming and then the train moving off again, building up a head of steam as it clattered on round the coast.

He wondered who could be arriving in Kilvenny at this time of night, for as far as he knew no one had travelled out recently and few visitors ever made their way here except by accident.

He stepped out of the doorway and looked towards the bend in the road where whoever had arrived on the train would surely appear soon. Ten minutes passed and no one came, which was odd because there wasn’t anywhere for miles if one turned left instead of right out of the station.

Unless…unless whoever had arrived had decided to walk down to the village through Gwartney’s Wood for old time’s sake.

He put his hand in his jacket pocket and felt for the dog-eared postcard he’d kept there all this time. A frisson of excitement made his heart beat erratically and he shivered with anticipation.

He screwed up his eyes waiting for someone to appear. First there would be the sound of whistling and the telltale smell of a foreign cigarette on the night air. Then suddenly they would step into the pool of light from the crooked gas lamp. But no one came.

He pushed open the café door and the bell above it tinkled gaily. He looked round sadly at the faded posters on the walls and the battered boater that he’d worn that summer long ago. There too was the little statuette of St Joseph of Arimathea, the patron saint of foundlings, in his niche; a poignant reminder of his grandfather’s childhood in Italy.

He climbed the narrow stairs with a heavy heart. Before he went to bed he’d check on Nonna, and if she were still awake then he’d break the news to her gently.

Nonna lay asleep in the big bed; her silver hair undone from her braids was spread out over the starched white pillow like a frozen river in the moonlit room. Even in sleep she clasped her rosary tightly, the pink beads pale against the dark skin of her old hands. The room smelled as it always did, of lavender and coffee dregs, of the orange-blossom scent one of Nonna’s nieces sent each birthday from Italy.

Nonna stirred in her sleep, moaned softly, reaching out across the bed as though she were expecting to find her husband still lying there beside her although he’d been dead and buried these fourteen years.

Tony backed out of the room, covering his mouth with his fist to stifle a rising sob. Tonight he would let her sleep peacefully but one day soon, unless a miracle happened, he would have to break the bad news to her.

I
t was dark when the train pulled in to Kilvenny. Catrin stepped awkwardly down from the carriage, set down her heavy brown suitcase and looked around fearfully. She was the only person who had got off the train and there wasn’t another soul in sight.

The station was the smallest she had ever seen, lit by one old-fashioned gas lamp whose meagre light spread gloom and despondency across the weed-clogged platform. There was a ramshackle waiting room which looked as if it would collapse like a house of cards under the first rough breeze.

The train whistled, belched out a cloud of writhing steam and moved slowly away, abandoning her to the misty dark.

She stretched her arms above her head and yawned. Any minute now Aunt Alice and Aunt Ella would dash out from the shadows to meet her for the first time. They would fuss and kiss and hug and do all the other rubbishy stuff that aunts were supposed to do.

She stamped her feet impatiently. She just knew that she was going to hate it here; all her mother’s garbled stories on the telephone about how wonderful it was would be a pack of lies. That was the thing her mother did best: tell lies. Her mother must think she was an absolute idiot. The reason she was being sent to stay with these long-lost aunts was nothing to do with it being good for her; it was about her mother getting her own way. Again. She was off gallivanting about in Italy while Catrin was sent here to spend eight weeks in the middle of nowhere.

Why hadn’t her mother ever mentioned these Welsh aunts before, if they were so damned wonderful? Because they wouldn’t be, that’s why. They’d have false teeth which jiggled when they talked, they’d stink of mothballs and perm lotion, and worst of all they’d be stuffy, boring and as old as the hills.

In the dilapidated waiting room a clock ticked spasmodically.

She walked to the door, peeped inside and withdrew her head quickly; there was a strong smell of torn cats and stale tobacco but there was no one waiting for her.

She made her way out of the station, past the unmanned ticket office where a yellowing CLOSED sign hung haphazardly across the cracked window. She brightened. The aunts must have sent a car to pick her up – her mother had said the old gardener used to collect guests who arrived by train and he’d no doubt be waiting patiently outside the station.

The lane was deserted. A high moon wobbled above the swaying treetops and a lone gas lamp spluttered, casting a watery pool of light around her feet. Moths flickered in and out of the light, their fragile wings fluttering feebly against the dusty bowl of the lamp.

Moonlight dappled the lane and a chill breeze made her shiver and pull her school blazer tighter around her.

Surely someone would come soon? After all, they knew she was arriving on the late train.

It seemed an age since Sister Matilde had seen her off at Paddington. Thinking of Sister Matilde brought a lump to her throat. She wished that she could have stayed at school for the summer instead of being sent here to some stuffy old aunts she’d never met and didn’t want to.

If no one came in the next five minutes, she’d damn well find a telephone box and ring her mother. She’d just have to jolly well come down here and pick her up, except that wasn’t possible because her mother was already on her way to Italy. Catrin brushed a tear from her cheek, screwed up her fists, felt anger rising inside her, a thick, tight band in her stomach which pushed against her lungs and made it hard to breathe.

She would love to have gone on holiday to Italy even if it was with her mother. Sister Matilde had told Catrin’s class loads of stories about when she’d stayed in a convent in Italy. She’d described the cool, ancient churches smelling of incense and wild flowers, and how when the church bells clanged, the startled pigeons flew up into the blue summer skies. She’d told them of the beautiful paintings and the marvellous statues she had seen and how she had drunk icy limoncello and eaten marzipan cakes in a shady café in a tree-lined piazza. She had made it feel so real, so enticing, that Catrin could almost smell the lemons and limes stacked in the baskets on the market stalls, could almost breathe in the aroma of thyme and rosemary that filled the air. In her mind’s eye she could see the old women dressed all in black who sold eggs from wicker baskets while chickens pecked the cobbles in search of crumbs.

A bird squawked as it flew overhead and Catrin jumped, all thoughts of Sister Matilde and Italy disappearing.

Hell’s bells, why didn’t somebody come?

It was the first time in her life that she had been out in the dark in a strange place on her own, and she didn’t like it. There were worrying noises everywhere; the cracking of a twig might mean someone was lurking in the bushes waiting to pounce. It was well known that tramps and tinkers prowled around the countryside at night, with sharp knives and black hearts.

At school the doors were always locked and bolted because you never knew who might try to get in. Once a naked man had climbed over the convent wall and chased Sister Lucy through the cabbage patch.

There was a rustle of leaves as a mouse or maybe a rat scurried into the undergrowth. A spider writhed on a dangling thread from the branch of a tree and bats squeaked somewhere beyond the pool of light.

A cloud passed over the moon, the gas light dimmed and it grew so dark that she almost screamed in fright.

She put her hand in her blazer pocket and for comfort took out the holy picture that Sister Matilde had given her. She stepped closer to the lamplight and looked at it in surprise. The nuns usually gave out pictures of sad-faced virgins, horse-faced saints or a sorrowful Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. This was a tiny painting of a large, fat cat sitting beneath a tree on a withered lawn strewn with fallen apples. She looked more closely and realised that they weren’t apples but pomegranates.

It wasn’t a holy picture at all.

Why would Sister Matilde give her a picture of a fat cat?