The Reluctant Elf (Kindle Single) (3 page)

‘Lottie, and this is Mabel. Nice to meet you.’

I just hope he’s more domestic than I am.

This is probably going to sound impossibly spoiled and sheltered, but I only lived away from my parents for a few years when I went to university. That’s where I fell in love with Mabel’s father and, full of excitement and the folly of youth, played fast and loose with the birth control.

I knew almost as soon as I saw those two pink lines on the wee stick that I wanted the little person growing inside me, and that my parents would be supportive. I never imagined just what a support they’d become.

I waddled through my final year’s classes, morning-, noon- and night-sick but so excited to meet my child at the end of the term. She came into the world with a full head of hair and a strong set of lungs and we’ve been a family of two ever since.

I moved back to my parents’ Hampstead house where my old room was waiting for me. Mum painted the spare room lilac and stencilled fairies all over the walls for her granddaughter.

By then Celine had been part of our family for nearly my whole life. We didn’t have much extra money when I was growing up but with both Mum and Dad working at the university, they needed someone to look after the house and, sometimes, me. Celine started as a one-day-a-week cleaner but she soon worked her way into my parents’ hearts and stomachs. She always found time to cook delicious dinners on the days she came. Eventually the whole family was addicted to her Filipino dishes and she stayed with us every day.

When I was around ten her landlord tried extorting her for more rent. Falsely believing she didn’t have a work permit, he threatened to report her to Immigration if she didn’t pay up. That was when Dad invited Celine to live with us. Her salary remained the same but she’d never have to worry about her living situation again. As long as the house in Hampstead was in our family, Celine had a home.

With such a fantastic cook in the house it’s no wonder I never really learned my way around the kitchen. Perhaps if I’d lived with Mabel’s father things might have been different, but that was never going to happen.

Mabel, Danny the driver and I arrive back at the B&B, me with a lighter bank account and Danny with a grin on his face.

The house’s prospects haven’t improved in our absence. If anything they look even more dire.

‘Time to go inside,’ I say to Mabel, taking the hand she offers me. A tiny part of me hopes that we’ll be surprised. Maybe Aunt Kate concentrated her efforts inside where her guests spent the most time. Then who’d care if the outside was a bit shabby?

Aunt Kate used to be an opera singer, so maybe she’s draped the rooms in sumptuous velvets and brocades. She always had an eye for lovely furniture, and dragged me along Notting Hill's Portobello Road and Grays Antique Market nearly every weekend that she visited. We searched for chairs or tables with elegant legs (Aunt Kate has a thing for elegant legs), brocade footstools and gilded mirrors. All those purchases over the years must have found their way into the B&B.

By the time I wriggle the key in just the right way to open the large wooden front door, I’m nearly sure it’ll look like the prop room at the Royal Opera House.

I take about two steps inside the dim hall. ‘Oof. Shit!’

‘Mummy, are you okay?’

I don’t know which to rub first, my throbbing toe or my knees where they’ve hit the floor. ‘I’m fine, I just tripped.’ Motherhood is full of small lies.

‘You said a swear word.’

‘Yes, that wasn’t very clever of me, was it?’

‘I guess your Aunt planned some renovations,’ Danny says. When he sheds his giant coat I can see that he’s a bit older than he first seemed, and a few years older than me, probably in his early thirties. ‘There must be fifty tins of paint here.’

Exactly why they should be in the middle of the front hall is another matter. As I look around, my hopeful bubble bursts. This is no Royal Opera House.

Three tall windows run along one side of the wide hall and a staircase climbs up the other side. But the grimy windowpanes let in only weak light.

‘We may as well try to see what we’re dealing with.’

I hoist up the sash panes on every window so the daylight can reach the darkened corners.

‘It’s yucky,’ Mabel says.

It’s worse than yucky. The walls are pockmarked with holes and painted a dreary yellowish brown.

‘Who’d use that colour in a house?’ I ask.

‘I think it was probably a different colour to start with,’ Danny says. ‘It’s yellowed over the years.’

It’s got the patina of nicotine-stained fingers and the far corner is streaked with water damage. The varnish is worn off the floorboards where feet have trod over the decades, and everything needs a good wash. Whatever Bronwyn does with her time here clearly doesn’t involve soap and water.

Slowly we walk through the rest of the house like fearful tomb raiders. Every gasp from Danny or Mabel makes me jump, expecting the worst. It’s obvious that the house was once grand. Probably before the First World War. The sitting room is large, overcrowded with Aunt Kate’s elegant-legged tables. I run my hand over a small mahogany side table.

‘Mabel, do you remember when we found this, in that skip in Highgate?’

She smiles. ‘You climbed in with the rubbish.’

The things I do for my Aunt. ‘And we brought it home and Dad stripped it?’

Mabel’s smile fades. ‘Mummy? Will Aunt Kate die like Granny and Grandad did?’

‘Ahem, I’ll have a look upstairs,’ Danny says, considerately absenting himself.

I lead Mabel to one of the silver and red Chinese silk sofas.

‘Honey, the doctor said that Aunt Kate should be okay when she wakes up. She’s only sleeping now so that her body can heal itself.’

‘So she definitely won’t die?’ Mabel’s eyes search my face. I wish I could give her such absolute certainty.

‘I don’t think she will. I’m not planning on it, that’s for sure. Do you still worry about something happening to me?’

When she nods, my heart breaks a little. How am I supposed to make her feel secure? I don’t have the authority to tell the Grim Reaper to bugger off and bother someone else.

I hug her little body to mine. ‘Well I’m not going anywhere and neither are you. We’ve got too much living to do!’

She returns my smile.

‘Let’s go see what the rest of the house looks like, okay?’

‘Yes, that’s quite enough of this morbid talk for one day,’ says my world-weary seven-year-old.

Danny bounds down the stairs just as we come out of the dining room. ‘What’s the prognosis down here?’ he asks.

‘It looks like the ceiling is coming down in the dining room and there are mouse droppings in the kitchen sink. How’s it looking upstairs?’

He shakes his head. ‘Mushrooms are literally growing on the floorboards in the bedrooms, and mould up most of the walls.’

‘Maybe you could cook them.’

‘Not unless you want to risk poisoning. I think your Aunt was optimistic when she got all that paint. This place needs more than a coat on the walls. It needs a structural engineer.’

Nobody has ever accused Aunt Kate of pessimism.

‘Well we’ve only got three days to do what we can and hope the place doesn’t fall down before the guests leave. At least the furniture is all right. There’s just too much of it. But yes, Aunt Kate is definitely an optimist.’

While Dad went to university, studied hard and gained respectability in professorial circles, his little sister was traveling by campervan across Europe trying to make a go of her musical career. Whenever their parents told her she was nuts, she just laughed and hugged them. There wasn’t much that Aunt Kate couldn’t overcome with a giggle, a hug, a wing and a prayer.

She did achieve some success as an opera singer, and performed small parts in most of Europe’s capitals.

She was never great with money though, and often accepted payment for her roles in clothes instead of cash. After ten years she came back to England with trunks full of gowns and little else. But she didn’t mind that. ‘My life is rich,’ she said. ‘My bank account doesn’t need to be.’

Chapter Four

‘
What are you doing?’ Danny asks the next morning, possibly wondering why I’m standing on the dining room table in my pyjamas holding my phone towards the crumbling ceiling.

‘Oh,’ I say, pulling my robe around me. ‘You’re early.’

It was nearly midnight by the time he left last night. We’d worked straight through but when I got up this morning it didn’t look like we’d made much difference.

We did find all the sheets and towels at least, and Aunt Kate’s hoarding tendency means there’s plenty of formal china and glassware for the guests. Today the heavy work really begins.

‘I’m trying to get a signal. I’ll try outside in a minute but I wanted to see what the reception was like in the house. So far it’s a 3G black hole in here.’

The reviewer may not appreciate having to stand on the dining table to send a text.

‘These old walls might look ready to cave in but they’re probably quite thick,’ he says. ‘You could try the conservatory.’

Sure enough, my phone whistles with new emails when I reach the ornate glasshouse.

The noise excites one of the pigeons making camp on the floor. He takes flight through a broken window while the rest of his cooing friends watch me have a minor heart attack.

‘Hey Danny?’ I call back inside. ‘How are your pigeon-whispering skills? We have feathered houseguests. If you can convince them to go outside we can try to clean all the poo off the floor.’

It’s frigid out here but with the wood-burning stove going in the middle of the room and the addition of some sofas and chairs, it might pass for shabby chic instead of just shabby. At least there’s a phone signal.

I scroll through my emails, clicking open the one from my boss.
Sorry to hear about your aunt
, it reads,
and of course I understand that you need to go. Just keep me updated and let me know when you think you’ll be back. I hope your aunt is okay.

I delete the usual proposals from dying African princes to make me their sole heir and click on Bronwyn’s email.

It’s only a few lines long, but at least it’s something.

Dear Lottie, We’re at the airport and Bronwyn is typing this on her phone. I’m terribly sorry about your aunt and I do hope she’ll be well again soon. Our prayers are with her.

Here’s what you need to know about the house:

-
         
Mingus’s food is under the sink. He prefers the fish to the chicken but he’ll eat whatever you put out when he gets hungry

-
         
Always wait five minutes after flushing the loo to turn on the taps

-
         
There’s coal in the cellar for the woodburners

-
         
I believe the reviewer is called Rupert Grey-Smythe

-
         
We have mice

-
         
Watch out for the 8.30 train

-
         
Don’t forget about the chickens

Good luck!

We’ve got chickens? I suppose that means Danny has a fresh supply of eggs to cook. The morning is looking up.

I leave him in the kitchen to acquaint himself with the appliances while I check on Mabel.

‘Mummy?’ she calls as soon as I open the door.

‘Yes, sweetie. Did you sleep well?’

‘I’m still sleepy,’ she says. ‘But I’m too excited to stay in bed.’

‘Maybe a shower will wake you up. I’ll go in first just to make sure it’s working, okay?’ I tuck the thick duvet around her. ‘Have another little rest and I’ll let you know when it’s ready.’

There are three bathrooms upstairs to accommodate the seven guest bedrooms but, as Danny pointed out, not all of those rooms are habitable. Actually, depending on your definition of habitable, it’s questionable whether any of them are. They all have mould creeping up the walls. A fungal pelt covers the floor in two of them and part of the ceiling is caved in in another. That leaves four guest rooms. I just hope the reviewer won’t ask to see the others.

Aunt Kate has clearly done a few renovations in the bathrooms though. They’re wet rooms in fact, fully tiled across their floors and halfway up the walls, with a round drain in the middle of the slightly sloping floor. But they still have all their pre-war features, which makes them so old that they’ve come all the way around to retro.

There’s a cistern above the toilet and a claw-footed tub. The only concession to the latter half of the twentieth century is the hand-held shower nozzle mounted on the wall.

I run the hot-water tap, waiting for it to heat. So far, so good. Gratefully I peel off my pyjamas and set my shampoo in the little tray at the far end of the tub. The round rail suspended above me is bare, so I have to be extra careful not to splash. In fact I’ll see if Danny can find a plain curtain. Even though the door is locked I feel exposed without it.

The shampoo lathers my hair into stiff peaks. The water must be softer here than in London. Maybe it’s well water. Lovely, clean Welsh well water. That could be a selling point to the guests, I suppose-

Suddenly the wall behind the bath moans with the anguish of the undead. Then something starts knocking on the wall, slowly at first, getting faster and faster and faster until….

‘Jesus!’

The water scalds me before I can jump away. Shampoo bubbles slide into my eyes as I feel for the edge of the tub.

Ow ow ow ow.

Then there’s a crash. Squinting through the bubbles, I see the showerhead writhing on the floor beside the tub, soaking everything.