2008 - Recipes for Cherubs (8 page)

Tony Agosti stared at her in bewilderment.

Catrin looked back at him, her face draining of all colour as if a vampire had sucked all the blood out of her.

And then she fainted.

C
atrin opened her eyes and blinked in confusion. Above her head a ceiling fan turned slowly, whirring lazily and scattering flies in all directions. There was a smell of strong coffee and warm pastry. She turned her head and realised that she was lying on a red leather banquette from where she could see nothing except table legs. She heaved herself up on her elbows and looked warily around.

She was in the Café Romana opposite Kilvenny Castle, and Tony Agosti was sitting at a table near the window, talking quietly to the old man she’d seen reading in the library last night.

Hell’s teeth. She couldn’t remember walking over here. She must have fainted and been carried. How embarrassing. She lay down again quickly, straining her ears to hear what the two men were saying.

“As I said, Dan, I’d been over to the chapel like I do most days to light some candles for Norma, and I thought p’raps you were in the castle so I went in. There she was, this little girl, standing alone in the kitchen. Gave me a right turn, it did. I thought for a moment that she was a ghost.”

“Plenty of ghosts knocking about over there – bound to be, with the age of the place.”

“We got talking about the old days and then just as I was leaving she said she’s called Catrin Grieve and Ella Grieve is her great-aunt.”

“Well, stone the bloody crows!”

“She says she’s Kizzy Grieve’s daughter.”

“Well, I’ll be damned. What the hell’s she doing here?”

“She said she’d stayed the night up at Shrimp’s and she was waiting to get a train back to London.”

“Bit young, ent she, to be traipsing about the country on her own?”

“That’s what I thought, especially with the look of her –  she looks half starved to me.”

“I’ve seen more fat on a kipper.”

“Why the hell would she be staying with Ella? No one in their right mind would stay up there in that dirty hole of a place.”

“They say it’s filthy up there, rats and mice and mouldy food all over the place.”

Tony wrinkled his nose in disgust and Dan went on, “There’s cobwebs as thick as blankets and spiders the size of dinner plates.”

“Ugh. They say she still lays the tables and puts warming pans in the beds as if there were guests staying there.”

Dan nodded. “It’s all very sad. She doesn’t seem to know her arse from her elbow these days, or whether she’s living in the past or the present.”

“Poor Ella was never the same after Alice died,” Tony mused. “It was strange, too, that Kizzy stopped coming.”

“There was a rift of some sort, I gathered, between Kizzy and Ella but God knows what it was all about. The Grieves were always very tight-lipped about their own affairs.”

“I just can’t understand why any mother with her head screwed on the right way would send a child to Shrimp’s, knowing the state it’s in.”

“Hang on a minute, Tony. Did you say she’s called Catrin Grieve?”

“That’s what she said.”

“So she’s taken her mother’s name, not her father’s?”

“So it would seem. Oh, I see what you’re thinking…”

Catrin pulled a face. People always thought the worst, when in fact there was a perfectly reasonable explanation why she had her mother’s maiden name.

“What will happen to her now?”

“Well, the only thing I could do in the circumstances was to ring Ella. Thank God, she actually answered the phone and she’s on her way down here as we speak.”

“You’re joking! You think she’ll really leave Shrimp’s after all this time? It’ll be a turn-up for the books if she does. She hasn’t set foot outside of there since the day they buried poor Alice.”

“She said she’d be here as soon as she could.”

“Well, I’ll be off, then.”

“Why don’t you stay?”

“No, thanks. Ella never could stand the sight of me.”

As he was about to get to his feet a figure passed the café window and the bell above the door tinkled a warning.

Ella stood for some time at the top of the steps, looking down on a deserted Kilvenny beach, trying to gather the courage to make her way across to the village. There, pulled up above the high-water mark, was her old boat, the
Dancing Porpoise
. It was shabby and rotting, the paint blistered and peeling, and it was certainly no longer seaworthy.

She stepped down on to the beach hesitantly. It was strange to feel the sand and shells beneath her feet again and the sea breeze cool on her sallow skin. She felt as though her blood had thinned during all the years she’d been shut away.

She was fearful of every noise and dreaded bumping into any of the villagers. Already she was contemplating turning tail and fleeing up the steps and back to the safety of Shrimp’s.

She forced herself on, stopping again outside the Fisherman’s Snug.

The old place looked uncared for; the winter storms had taken their toll on the thatched roof. A gull perched defiantly on the chimney, eyeing Ella with suspicion.

By the time she turned into Cockle Lane her legs felt weak with fear and the effort of walking. Once she could have run all the way from Shrimp’s to the far end of the village without drawing breath.

If the news had got out that Ella Grieve had left Shrimp’s, the net curtains would soon start to twitch. The Kilvenny bush telegraph would hum into action. It had never taken long for gossip to get around Kilvenny. It was a miracle that nothing had ever got out about Alice and Kizzy.

She pushed her hair off her face and straightened her back. She was a Grieve and the Grieves were known for their fortitude. Let the nosy buggers get a good look if they liked.

Kilvenny village had changed dramatically since Ella had last set foot there, and she was shocked at how dowdy and run-down everything had become. The once-whitewashed walls of the houses were grimy, and everything looked in urgent need of a lick of paint. A great many of the houses were boarded up and others near to derelict. The Boot Inn was closed, but the cellar flaps were up, waiting for a delivery from the draymen, so there must be customers who still drank there. She wondered if the beer was still brought to Kilvenny by wagons pulled by shire horses.

She caught sight of her reflection in the window of Meredith Evans Photographer’s shop and gasped. She looked bad enough in the mottled hall mirror at Shrimp’s, but out here in the daylight she looked a thousand times worse.

Jesus. She looked like Miss Havisham after a night on the tiles.

There was a sudden movement inside the shop and she looked directly into the face of Meredith Evans. He stared at her, his mouth falling open, bloodshot eyes wide with disbelief. She glowered back at him defiantly; the treacherous little bastard could take a running jump. She sneered at the dusty photographs in the window. It was about time he changed the display in there, it was the same as the last time she’d walked this way more than thirteen years ago.

Further up the road, the house where Mrs Tranter’s Hairdresser’s used to be was boarded up and the curtains in the upstairs windows were rotting where they hung. Mrs Tranter had done a marvellous trade with the villagers and the guests from Shrimp’s. Had she locked herself in and gone to seed as Ella had?

There was a lump in her throat when she saw the Café Romana. When she and Alice were children they had traipsed down here to spend their pocket money. It was a great game of theirs to try and sneak into the café without sounding the bell, so as to surprise Luigi Agosti. No matter how hard they tried, it had always made a noise and he had popped up from behind the counter. He’d been a grand old man and had brought a breath of fresh air into Kilvenny. None of the villagers had ever tasted a sarsaparilla or an ice cream before Luigi came on the scene.

Ella took a deep breath and opened the door. The bell rang out loudly in the silence.

Tony Agosti got to his feet and looked at her, barely able to conceal his shock. It was an age since he’d last clapped eyes on her, and time hadn’t been kind. She’d never been a fussy dresser in the old days but she’d always looked clean and well turned-out. The clothes she was wearing today would have shamed a bonfire guy, her face was ingrained with years of dirt, and her hair stuck out wildly from her head like grey candyfloss.

Dan Gwartney stood up, glanced at Ella, then cast his eyes down towards the floor. It was hard to look Ella Grieve in the face.

“Hallo, Ella,” Tony said, and there was a quiver of apprehension in his voice. “I’m sorry I had to ring you but I didn’t know what to do for the best with the girl.”

“Where was she when you found her?” Ella enquired.

“Over in the castle. She said she was waiting for a train, but like I told her, there’s only one train a week now.”

“One train a week?” Ella asked suspiciously.

“That’s right,” Tony said sadly.

Dan Gwartney bit his lip. Closing Shrimp’s had been disastrous for Kilvenny, and Ella Grieve alone was responsible for that.

“Thing is, she was talking away to me one minute and then out like a light the next. I couldn’t get an answer from the doctor’s house, otherwise I’d have had him have a look at her so as not to bother you.”

“Where is she now?”

“I put her to lie down over there on the bench. She was sleeping like a baby last time I looked – still is, I fancy.”

Catrin cringed with embarrassment, closed her eyes, feigning sleep in case they came to look at her as she lay there helpless.

“What do you want us to do with her?”

“I don’t want you to do anything with her. I’ll take her back to Shrimp’s, I suppose, get hold of her mother somehow.”

“She is Kizzy’s girl, then?” Dan Gwartney asked, still avoiding Ella’s eye.

She nodded reluctantly.

“You can’t take a child back to that place,” he went on.

She looked fiercely at him, until he blushed crimson and looked away.

“She’s family, and I won’t leave her without a roof over her head.”

“For Christ’s sake, woman, we all know that Shrimp’s is a bloody disgrace. You can’t take a sick child there,” Dan said.

Ella rounded on him. “You save your breath to cool your bloody porridge. You haven’t set foot in Shrimp’s for years, so how would you know.”

“You can deceive yourself all you like, but the local kids’ favourite game is to try and peer through your windows, get a glimpse of the funny old woman who lives there like a recluse.”

“Not so bloody old. I can give you a few years.”

“Perhaps it would be best if we got in touch with one of the children’s homes, got her put up there for a while until something is sorted out,” Dan said.

Ella glared at him. “Over my dead body. You keep your children’s homes for those who need them. She’ll be fine with me at Shrimp’s until other arrangements can be made.”

“Sit down, Ella, while I make us all a drink,” Tony intervened. “Let’s talk things through calmly. We don’t want to wake the girl, now, do we?”

Catrin was wide awake but paralysed with anxiety and mortification. If it wasn’t bad enough that she’d been sent here to her stupid aunts, only to find that one of them was dead and the other one didn’t want anything to do with her, but in the next breath they were talking about putting her in a children’s home.

“Maybe she could stay with someone in the village until you can get hold of her mother,” Dan ventured.

The coffee machine hissed ferociously, steam rose up above the counter as Tony busied himself, and soon the sound of cups clinking and the aroma of coffee filled the café.

Catrin tried to swallow, but there was a lump in her throat as big as a walnut. She had to get out of this awful place as soon as she could. She wasn’t going to spend another night up at Shrimp’s Hotel. If only she could get home to London she could look through her mother’s address book, ask her friends if they knew where she was staying in Italy. The only other hope was that her mother had said she’d write, so as soon as a letter arrived at Shrimp’s she’d be able to contact her. If she got round to writing, that was; Kizzy was always making promises and not keeping them.

“You’ve got to see sense, Ella,” Dan Gwartney persisted. “You were always stubborn even when you were a girl, and you must realise that Shrimp’s isn’t a fit place for a child to stay.”

“And you can’t tell me what to do. Never mind I was stubborn. You were a bossy little bugger when you were a boy.”

“Put it this way, Ella. You take her back to that dump and I for one won’t be afraid to ring the authorities. I’m in regular touch with Jerusalem House Children’s Home and I could talk to someone and get some help for you and the girl.”

“Don’t you patronise me with your talk of Jerusalem House and your do-gooding nonsense. When I want your help I’ll ask for it.”

There was a pause, but the air was brittle with tension. Catrin was glad of the silence.

“Ella, no one’s saying you couldn’t look after the girl, it’s just that you’ve not been yourself for years.”

“You think I’m mad, is that what you’re saying?” Ella’s voice was angry and Catrin held her breath.

“Not mad, exactly,” Tony said quietly.

“But you can’t escape the fact that the Grieves are well known for their mad streak and no one who was sane would have lived in squalor for God knows how many years,” Dan said with a note of triumph in his voice.

“You can shut your trap when you like. That sister of yours up in Coronation Row used to have the dirtiest net curtains in Kilvenny. She wasn’t too fussy about the grain on her washing or the company she kept, as I remember.”

“You leave my sister out of this,” Dan growled.

“He’s right, Ella. We mustn’t speak ill of the dead.”

Ella was silent. She hadn’t known that Gwennie Gwartney had passed away. How could she know? She’d not stepped outside Shrimp’s or spoken to anyone in years.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she murmured.

Dan grunted in reply and stirred his coffee briskly.

“What about finding somewhere else for the pair of you to stay?” Tony asked.