A Winter Kiss on Rochester Mews

‘Well, a bit sooner than that. If we start extended opening hours, which will mean opening on a Sunday, then I guess it will have to be … well, the day after tomorrow, if that’s OK,’ Verity said apologetically. ‘I could leave it until the new year, but Johnny has had one of those boiling-water taps installed so I can have instant tea, and he’s had a new window seat put in my favourite reading nook, it’s very comfy, and I spend all my time round his anyway … Oh! Yeah, I would be moving in with Johnny,’ she added, as though there had been any question.

Johnny was Verity’s beloved. A posh architect, who, much like Darcy in Verity’s favourite book Pride and Prejudice,with his ‘very fine grounds at Pemberley’, had a five-bedroom house in Canonbury and no one to share it with. Until now.

‘Oh! Very! Why didn’t you say something earlier?’ Posy exclaimed, grabbing Verity’s hand. ‘Let’s look at the ring! Oh … no ring.’

‘Because we’re not actually engaged. Just living together.’

‘Living in sin,’ Tom intoned, his hands in the prayer position, now that he’d eaten every single last cheesy chip without any thought for anyone else. ‘And you a vicar’s daughter, too.’

‘You know, Tom, that’s Nina’s line, you can’t really pull it off,’ Verity said. ‘And also, hello, welcome to the twenty-first century.’

Mattie was delighted for Verity, she really was. Even if living with a man was her idea of hell. She tried to smile happily and sincerely while she wondered what would be an acceptable period of time to pass before she could ask, plead, even beg Posy to be allowed to …

‘Well, if Very’s moving out, then I’ll take her room,’ Tom said calmly, as if his living rent-free in the flat above the shop was a done deal. ‘That’s fair, isn’t it?’

‘Wait, no, it’s not at all fair!’ Mattie exclaimed. ‘I was about to ask if I could take the room.’

‘Well, you should have been quicker,’ Tom said in that patronising way of his that made Mattie want to bash him over the head with the nearest heavy object to hand. In this case, a fire extinguisher. ‘Anyway, the flat is for bookshop staff.’

‘The tearooms are very much a part of the bookshop,’ Mattie said icily, never mind that she usually insisted that though they were very grateful for the footfall of the romantic-novel-buying public, she was running an autonomous business. ‘Though thank you very much for making me feel part of the Happy Ever After family.’

‘In case you’d forgotten, I’ve worked at Happy Ever After much longer than you’ve been at the tearooms,’ Tom pointed out superciliously.

‘You were part-time for ages,’ Mattie said calmly, although on the inside she was raging. ‘I bet if you add up all the hours I’ve spent in the tearooms, then it would be more hours than you’ve clocked up on the shop floor. I’m in at seven thirty every morning, I don’t leave much before eight most nights, and now you want to deprive me of the two hours of sleep I could snatch back.’

‘You’re completely overreacting,’ said Tom sourly, even though he’d worked among women for the last four years and knew only too well that to tell a woman that she was overreacting when she was reacting just enough was practically a hate crime. ‘Posy. It’s your decision.’

Posy burped. ‘My heartburn’s back. You two have given me heartburn and I’ve a good mind not to let either of you have the flat.’ She burped again. ‘I’m not meant to be getting stressed out, so you can sort out who gets the flat between you. Tomorrow,’ she added. ‘Now one of you go and get me another elderflower and soda, because I need to burp like no woman has ever needed to burp before.’

‘You’ve been burping on and off for the last hour,’ Verity ventured because she was a much braver woman than Mattie was.

Posy sighed. Then burped again. ‘Believe me, this is just the warm-up,’ she said sadly. ‘I’ve got an absolute ripper lodged somewhere in my midsection, which is yet to make its presence heard.’

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The next morning, after the usual rush of customers desperate for one of Mattie’s breakfast specials and the bespoke blend of coffee that she had sent over from Paris, she, Posy and Tom inspected the upstairs flat.

Mattie didn’t want to get her hopes up, though she had an impassioned speech all ready as to why she should move into Verity’s soon-to-be-vacated room. Her heart was racing as she walked through the several anterooms of the bookshop, past the counter in the main room, through a door and up a flight of stairs. If she lived here, she’d be home by now instead of having an hour-long commute to and from Hackney – longer, if the traffic was terrible.

‘I’ve been meaning to say it for ages, Pose, but pregnancy really agrees with you,’ Tom said earnestly as Posy unlocked the door.

He really was the lowest of the low: his attempts to curry favour with Posy were laughably transparent and there was no way that Posy was going to fall for them.

‘That’s so sweet,’ Posy said with a watery smile and Mattie’s racing heart raced a little faster. ‘Nice try, Tom, but I’m a neutral observer in all this and also, I’m writing you up in the sexual harassment book.’

‘You know as well as I do that the sexual harassment book doesn’t even exist,’ Tom muttered, standing aside to let Mattie into the flat first because he did have a modicum of good manners, she’d give him that. ‘And if it did really exist, then I think you’d find that the only person who’s sexually harassed in this workplace is me. By post-menopausal women who are alarmingly handsy, and then instead of getting support from my colleagues, I’m further abused.’

Mattie couldn’t understand what the post-menopausal women saw in Tom. Objectively, he was all right looking, she’d have to admit if she was under oath. He was tall, made taller by his wheat-coloured hair, which was swept up in a quiff at the front and a short back and sides everywhere else. Mattie had never gazed into his eyes deeply enough to know what colour they were, but they were hidden behind old-fashioned horn-rimmed glasses that looked like they’d been given out free on the NHS in the 1950s, which somehow worked for him. He also had an OK build, though Mattie didn’t spend much time speculating at what Tom looked like under his clothes. God forbid!

Tom’s physical attributes might be passable but his clothes were another issue entirely. A major issue. He wore trousers that looked like they’d started life as part of a suit belonging to a country curate or some other dull sort of man that had lived eighty years ago and had a fondness for sombre tweed. His shirts, always white, weren’t too objectionable but the ties he wore, sometimes a jaunty polka-dot bow-tie and sometimes a knitted tie, and the cardigan with its leather patches on the elbows, all offended Mattie’s eyes.

Then there was his personality. Mattie knew that he was bookish: he had spent the last four years working part-time in the shop while he also studied for a PhD in philosophy or late medieval literature or some other dusty, dry subject. He refused to go into the details so Mattie had always assumed that it was something very dull and boring, or else, why all the secrecy? Still, Tom never let anyone forget that he was big with the book smarts. He was always superior, always ready with a smart remark full of big-syllable words. It was a wonder he worked in a romantic fiction bookshop when his top lip curled at any mention of romantic fiction.

Mattie couldn’t imagine why Posy had kept him around for as long as she could, even letting him become full-time when he finally completed his PhD. Or why Tom hadn’t wanted to pursue an academic career. Probably because in academia, there were loads of tweedy, supercilious men and at least at Happy Ever After, he had novelty value.

Still, there was no way, no way in hell, Tom was taking this room out from under her, Mattie thought as she peered into the large living room with its original fireplace with beautiful tiled surround and, inevitably, fully stacked bookshelves on either side. There was also a quite hideous floral three-piece suite. ‘It’s much comfier than it looks,’ Posy promised. ‘And across the hall, this is the bathroom. We’ve just had a new shower installed.’

‘Perfect, love what you’ve done with it,’ Mattie murmured.

‘So much better than perfect,’ Tom insisted. ‘It’s very rare that I find a bath long enough that I can stretch out in it.’

‘Not getting involved,’ Posy said in a sing-song voice. She was in a much better mood this morning than she had been the evening before. Apparently she’d drunk a bottle of Gaviscon with her breakfast and her indigestion was temporarily abated. ‘Then this room is Nina’s. It is the bigger bedroom, but that’s neither here nor there, as Nina will be back imminently, I hope.’

‘She hasn’t said then?’ Mattie asked, as they all stared at the closed door of Nina’s room.

Posy shook her head. ‘No, she’s been very diligent with the remote marketing malarkey, but every time I ask her when she’s coming back, she ignores me. It’s very annoying, especially when I’m very pregnant.’

‘You’re only seven months pregnant. I think you’ve still got a few weeks to go before you’re very pregnant,’ Tom said, moving away from the door so he couldn’t see the daggers that Posy was shooting at him.

‘How would you know?’ she demanded. ‘When was the last time you were very pregnant?’

This was going much better than Mattie had imagined. Tom was going to talk himself out of the room without any help from her. Still, a little nudge couldn’t hurt.

‘Men don’t have periods either. Or the menopause. Or have to maintain ridiculous standards of grooming to conform to a patriarchal society’s ideal of what a woman should be,’ Mattie said with a sad sigh.

‘Good points, Mattie, but I’m still neutral,’ Posy said with a disapproving look. ‘Do you want to see the kitchen before we get to the room? And take your hand away from the door, Tom. I’m not having you go in there and try to bags it and claim that bagsying it is legally binding, like you did that time when The Midnight Bell only had one bowl of cheesy chips left.’

‘That was one time!’ But he stepped away from the door of Verity’s room and continued down the hall towards the kitchen, pausing in front of a strange bell-and-lever contraption fixed to the wall so he could give it a fond pat. ‘God bless you, Lady Agatha.’

The first owner of the bookshop had been one Lady Agatha Drysdale, who’d been gifted the business by her parents to distract her from her suffragette activities, with only limited success: Lady Ag was as passionate about women’s suffrage as she was about books.

‘It’s a butler’s bell that Lady Agatha installed so she could summon her employees up from the shop,’ Posy explained, giving it a fond pat herself. ‘Apparently, the wiring disintegrated some time in the seventies, which was a real shame. It would have been great to be able to do some summoning when Sam and I lived here.’

Posy and her younger brother Sam had lived above the shop almost all their lives. Lavinia, Lady Agatha’s daughter who’d by then inherited the shop and sounded as though she had been the most splendid woman, had employed Posy’s father to manage the bookshop and her mother to run the tearooms, but they’d died in a car accident some ten years before. Lavinia had continued to let Posy and Sam live above the shop, and when she died, she’d left both shop and flat to Posy. It also seemed as if she’d left Sebastian, her wildly dashing yet incredibly obnoxious grandson, to Posy too, for they were now married and expecting, and living in Lavinia’s house on the other side of Bloomsbury.

‘Though of course, you could have just summoned by text message,’ Mattie said, then she wished that she hadn’t because it sounded as if she was pouring cold water on Lady Agatha, when she wasn’t, she was just being practical. She also didn’t feel as if it were her place to give the butler’s bell a fond pat, so instead she dipped her head as she passed on her way to the kitchen.

‘It’s awfully small,’ Tom said, as they took in the old-fashioned kitchen cabinets painted a sunny primrose yellow with blue trim and grey Formica worktop. The kitchen wasn’t as small as the kitchen in the tearooms – there was even room for a small table, two chairs and a fridge-freezer – and Mattie wasn’t going to let Tom undermine her.

‘It’s a beautiful kitchen and anyway, size has absolutely nothing to do with it. I once made a triple-layer cake on a camping stove.’ So there, she wanted to add and stick her tongue out at Tom, but she resisted, though it took every ounce of strength that she had.

‘So, the room,’ Posy prompted, hands settling where her stomach used to be so she could rub soothing circles on her bump, which she did whenever she was agitated. ‘It used to be my room. It’s a nice size and the windows look out onto the mews.’

She squeezed past Mattie and Tom back the way she came, so she could open the door on a room. The room. The most perfect room. It was comfy and cosy but large enough for a double bed, a wardrobe, a chest of drawers and, of course, several bookcases. There were two picture windows and on this bright but chilly day, the weak winter sun streamed in.

‘It’s lovely,’ Mattie said in all sincerity.

‘I’ll take it,’ Tom said in a peremptory fashion, as if he dared Mattie to disagree, in which case he was doomed to disappointment. ‘I have worked in the shop longer than even Verity and Nina, yet they were still given first dibs on the rooms, which was very unfair, even though I never brought it up at the time.’ He tapped his chest. ‘That wounded me, Posy.’