A Winter Kiss on Rochester Mews

That still left all three of Tom’s helpers getting in the way, giving her curious looks as if they’d never seen a real live woman before. Maybe they hadn’t. Who was to know what Tom and his friends got up to?

‘Are they your people?’ Mattie asked Guy when he brought up the holdall with all her bathroom paraphernalia in it.

Guy raised one impeccable eyebrow in horror. ‘With those T-shirts? God, no, they are nothing to do with us. Your gaydar is worse than useless.’

By now, one of Tom’s friends was lingering in the kitchen where Mattie was unpacking a box of cooking utensils: it seemed that Verity had taken pretty much every last teaspoon with her.

Said friend was small and wiry and quite incapable of standing still, bouncing on the soles of his boxy trainers.

‘I’m Phil or the Archbishop of Banterbury,’ he said at last, holding out his hand.

Mattie shook the hand. ‘I think I’ll stick with Phil,’ she said. ‘I’m Matilda. Mattie.’

‘A beautiful name for a beautiful lady,’ Phil said and they heard a pointed cough from the hall.

‘Don’t even bother,’ said Tom as he passed the doorway with a couple of tweedy suits over his arm. ‘She’s not interested and she’s way out of your league.’

Mattie blinked. Was that Tom paying her an actual compliment? Surely not! Phil nodded in agreement. ‘True that,’ he said gallantly.

Over the course of the next fifteen minutes, Tom’s other two friends introduced themselves. By their given names: Daquon and Mikey; and their respective preferred names: The Bantmeister and Bantdaddy.

‘And what do you call Tom?’ Mattie asked Daquon as he wiped down the little bookcase in the kitchen so she could arrange her cookbooks on it. All three of them had cracked on to her, but she was quite capable of batting them away and they were also very helpful. ‘Bants-R-Us?’

‘Haha! Tom has no banter. He’s like a banter-free zone. The banter stops when it gets within fifty metres of him.’ Daquon slapped his thighs at the very notion of Tom having good banter. ‘These days we call him The Professor, on account of all the book-learning.’

‘Right …’ Mattie filed this piece of information away for later use. ‘And where do you know Tom from?’

‘Funny you should ask that, because The Professor you see before you today is very different from …’

‘Shut up! Seriously, stop making sounds come out of your mouth.’ Tom was in the kitchen doorway again. He’d even taken his glasses off, all the better to polish them furiously and glare, although Mattie wasn’t sure if the glare was for her or The Bantmeister. Most likely, it was meant for both of them. ‘We talked about this.’

‘You talked about it,’ Daquon muttered.

‘Didn’t stop talking about it all the way here,’ said Mikey, coming up behind Tom. ‘But what we didn’t talk about is why you have the big room and the lovely lady here is stuck in a tiny cupboard like Harry Potter when he was living at the Dursleys’.’

‘Mattie and I have already discussed that,’ Tom said, and if he kept polishing his glasses with such vigour, there was every possibility that they might shatter.

‘We didn’t really discuss it.’ Mattie sighed. ‘He made me toss a coin and then he was very smug about the outcome.’

‘Rude!’ decided Mikey, with a shake of his head. ‘You should let the girl have the biggest room on account of the fact that she’ll have loads of girly stuff to put in it.’

‘Handbags and shoes and pretty dresses,’ said Phil dreamily because now he was at the kitchen doorway too. ‘Probably Matilda really needs an extra room just for her shoes.’

‘She doesn’t have that many shoes,’ piped up Guy, who was passing. ‘Just several pairs of very ratty Converse.’

Fortunately, everyone ignored his contribution. ‘Mattie should have the bigger room. It’s just, like, basic good manners,’ Phil said, bouncing on his feet again and working his jaw furiously. ‘It’s not like you even need a double bed.’

‘Yeah! Like, who’s going to want to pull your ugly mug?’

There were hoots of laughter and Tom’s face was clenched so tight that it looked as if he had lockjaw. Mattie even felt a little bit sorry for him.

‘It’s all right,’ she said and she sighed again. She knew that she looked quite forlorn in the dungarees and jumper that she’d worn for moving day, because her perennially chic mother had complained about her appearance before she left Hackney. ‘Ma cherie, you look like Little Orphan Annie.’

‘Fine! She can have the larger room,’ Tom snapped. ‘Though I do need a double bed and I don’t see how my one is going to fit in the smaller room.’

‘Oh, it should do,’ Mattie assured him sweetly. ‘Mine does. Pity that there’s not much room for anything else in there besides the bed, but you can’t have that much stuff, can you? Being a man and everything.’

Tom did have lots of stuff. Or rather, he had boxes and boxes of books – he couldn’t possibly have read them all, Mattie decided, as the contents of the two rooms were transferred, with Tom glowering silently in the background. Why would anyone surround themselves with books all day, then come home to yet more books?

Still, there was plenty of room on the shelves in the living room for Tom’s library and she even offered to help him unpack, but he shooed her away with a tight ‘I can manage perfectly well by myself, thank you.’

Tom was the only person that Mattie had ever met who could make ‘Thank you’ sound like ‘Get out and never darken my doorstep again.’

So she got out and finished hanging up her quite sparse collection of clothes in the wardrobe in her new room. Unlike the other ladies that the Banter Boys knew, Mattie travelled light. All her clothes and shoes had fitted comfortably in one suitcase. And she didn’t even possess a single solitary handbag – just a leather-strapped backpack that had seen much better days – because all her money went on kitchen equipment and fancy ingredients and the odd cookbook. Whereas Tom had so many tweedy suits and jumpers and probably a trunkful of bow-ties and ties in contrasting colours. Mattie realised that she was actually feeling quite guilty again …

Maybe they could put the bigger room on a six-month-rota basis, she decided as Phil, Daquon and Mikey took their leave, each of them lining up to kiss her hand, look deep into her eyes and express the desire to see her again very soon.

‘It’s weird, but normally that kind of chat from men makes me want to rip them a new one,’ she remarked to Guy and Pippa as she set about making them dinner. ‘But those boys are so obviously harmless that I didn’t really mind.’

‘Do you still hate all men?’ asked Guy. It had been a little while since they’d last had a catch-up.

‘Mattie is taking time out from relationships to work on herself,’ Pippa said loyally. She knew exactly why Mattie had good reason to hate all men. Or one man in particular. ‘Not that Mattie needs to do a lot of work on herself, but I think we can all benefit from an opportunity for personal growth.’

‘Thanks, Pips. And I don’t hate all men, Guy.’ Mattie considered her brother’s question as she grated extra-mature cheddar for the twice-baked cheese soufflés she was going to serve with a warm salad. ‘I don’t hate you and anyway, I haven’t met all the men in the world yet, have I? There must be four or five that aren’t hateful.’

‘Do you hate Tom?’ Guy asked in a whisper. ‘You’re certainly not very nice to him.’

‘I am,’ Mattie said, though all the evidence suggested otherwise. ‘He’s not very nice to me.’

‘It’s the chicken and egg, really. Who wasn’t nice to whom first?’ Guy stared at Mattie without blinking. Pippa tilted her head and looked at Mattie too, as if she was disappointed in her, so Mattie felt forced to put down her grater with a beleaguered air and flounce out of the kitchen to knock gently on the door of Tom’s room.

‘Do you want dinner?’ she called out, while silently praying that he’d say no. ‘I can easily make enough for four.’

There was silence and Mattie wondered if Tom had been crushed between the wall and his huge kingsize bed. ‘I’m all right,’ he called back finally. ‘I had a very late breakfast panini.’

‘Yeah, of course you did,’ Mattie muttered under her breath, going back into the kitchen so she could stand there with her hands on her hips and demand, ‘Happy now?’

‘Deliriously,’ Guy drawled back. ‘I’d be even happier if I didn’t have to drive Ma’s car back so I could have another glass of wine.’

Although she begged them to stay, Guy and Pippa left as soon as they’d cleared the last smear of apple and blackberry crumble from their bowls. After she’d locked the shop door behind them, she very slowly and very unwillingly retraced her steps back to the flat.

Tom was in the kitchen with a tin of baked beans and a loaf of sliced white. ‘I was just making dinner,’ he said defensively as if Mattie had asked him what the hell he thought he was doing. Then he opened the tin of baked beans in a very passive-aggressive manner, sighing and shaking his head and generally acting as if both tin opener and tin had done him wrong.

‘Well, you know where I am if you need me,’ Mattie said, exiting the kitchen as fast as she could. But just before she shut the door of the room that they’d fought so bitterly about, she heard Tom say to himself in withering tones, ‘What on earth would I need you for?’

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Thankfully, when Mattie woke up at seven thirty the next morning, which pretty much constituted a long lie-in, Tom was nowhere to be seen.