A Winter Kiss on Rochester Mews

Last night had been awkward enough; both of them confined to their rooms apart from the mortifying ten seconds when Mattie had tried to get into the bathroom, only to find it already occupied.

‘Go away!’ Tom had shouted rather than politely requesting that Mattie come back in a short while.

As it was, she’d left it for a good half an hour before she plucked up the courage to venture into the bathroom, terrified of what horrors might be lurking. But there were none. Just Tom’s electric toothbrush (which seemed very cutting edge for Tom) and a few of his toiletries: shampoo, hair pomade, some fancy gloop that called itself a skin elasticiser rather than moisturiser. It struck Mattie, as she massaged her own moisturiser into her face then cleaned her teeth, that she hadn’t given a moment’s thought to how intimate it was to share a flat with someone.

Mattie had shared flats before. At university, she’d lived in a four-bedroom house with seven other girls, which had been chaotic and messy, but mostly fun. And of course, when she’d lived in Paris, she’d shared a tiny attic garret with … well, that hadn’t ended up being fun, for reasons that had nothing to do with the actual living together.

But sharing a flat with Tom, wondering if he could hear her brushing her teeth, felt intensely intimate. Mattie made a solemn vow that she’d never leave her room unless she was fully dressed or had her dressing gown tightly belted over her pyjamas. Not that she thought that Tom would be overcome with lust at the sight of her – Tom wasn’t the lustful sort at all – but she could picture his lip curling and he’d mutter something sarcastic under his breath. And the idea that she might bump into Tom wearing nothing but some very old-fashioned underpants, like those baggy shorts that men wore in old black-and-white films, had her choking on her toothpaste.

This Thursday morning Tom was still tucked up in bed and if he was snoring, then Mattie couldn’t hear him through his bedroom door.

And for all the awkwardness and the intimacy that had been thrust upon them, that thirty-second commute down the stairs and through the shop was worth it. Mattie unlocked the front door of the tearooms just in time to surprise Kendra, who ran a dairy in East London.

‘What are you doing here?’ Kendra said, as she hefted in the crate of milk instead of leaving it outside, as she usually did. ‘You must have been up almost as early as me.’

‘Actually, I’ve only been up half an hour,’ Mattie said a little apologetically. ‘Moved in above the shop, haven’t I?’

‘All right for some! How’s that working out for you?’ Kendra asked a little enviously.

‘Not without its challenges, but also kind of life-changing,’ Mattie decided as she checked the cartons of eggs to make sure that none of them were broken.

Kendra left, the glass bottles on her milk float rattling as she carefully manoeuvred over the cobblestones, and then Mattie was alone. It was her favourite part of the day in her favourite place; early morning in her little kitchen at the back of the tearooms.

Mattie looked at her hideaway with a pleasure that was still undimmed after eighteen months of running the tearooms. The kitchen walls had beautiful Art Nouveau tiles, dating back to when the bookshop had first opened in 1912, in the suffragette colours of purple, green and white. They were partly obscured now by the shelves and hanging rails Mattie had installed so she could store her pots and pans, whisks and wooden spoons. Jars and tins of dry ingredients and little glass bottles of spices, essences and flavourings sat on the scant wooden worktop, where she whipped up cakes and cookies, tarts and turnovers, breads and bakes. The oven where all this magic happened was the only new piece of kit and had cost the same as a small hatchback.

Along the opposite wall was an old-fashioned butler’s sink and tiled drainer, a tall, very skinny fridge and a door that led out into the back yard where there was an ancient privy for the hardiest and bravest of paying customers, especially on a chill winter’s day like today.

You couldn’t create culinary delights in a kitchen so miniscule without being very organised and very tidy, which Mattie was. ‘A place for everything and everything in its place,’ she said at least a dozen times a day when a dirty cup and saucer were left unattended for longer than thirty seconds. Or when Cuthbert left the milk out instead of putting it back in the fridge under the counter, because he was busy serenading a customer with a rousing chorus of ‘They Drink an Awful Lot of Coffee in Brazil’.

As well as her usual bakes, which tended towards English classics with a French twist like her famous citron drizzle cake, Mattie also had both a sweet and a savoury daily special. Today, it was a cinder toffee and apple layer cake and individual stilton and leek tarts. With a quick glance at the right page in her handwritten recipe book to check quantities, Mattie started amassing the ingredients she needed.

By the time Cuthbert arrived at ten to nine, all the breakfast pastries were out of the oven and arranged on their cake stands and trays on the counter. And by the time Posy and Verity arrived to open up Happy Ever After just before ten, the tearooms had been open for almost an hour. Half the tables were filled with customers lingering over a cup of coffee and a flaky buttery croissant, with others dashing out with a coffee to go (fifty pence cheaper if they brought their own cup) and something delicious in a paper bag.

At ten past ten, even though Happy Ever After opened at ten, Tom arrived with his breakfast panini purchased off the premises at the Italian café round the corner and his own mug, which proclaimed ‘Academics Do It In A Mortarboard’, so he could take advantage of free, freshly brewed coffee.

Mattie had never said anything about the actual blooming liberty of Tom expecting free coffee when he never once purchased anything from the tearooms, and after nearly eighteen months, it was too late to bring it up. That didn’t stop her seething every time he did it, though.

And considering that they were now roomies, it wouldn’t have killed Tom to say, ‘Good morning,’ rather than a sour, ‘You might try and be a bit quieter first thing and not slam the door on your way out.’

‘I’ll be sure to remember that,’ Mattie snapped, snatching Tom’s mug of coffee from Cuthbert and slamming that down too. ‘Anything you might like to purchase while you’re here?’

Tom held up the bag that contained his sodding panini. ‘No, I’m good. Thanks for the coffee, Cuthbert.’

Cuthbert, traitor that he was, touched his hand to his head in salute. ‘Always a pleasure, young sir.’

‘It’s not a pleasure,’ Mattie muttered as Tom wended his way through her actual paying customers and slipped through the double doors that led to the shop. ‘Never has been and never will be.’

‘You’ll end up with an ulcer with that kind of attitude,’ Cuthbert said as he worked through the next set of orders. In the past, Mattie wouldn’t have tolerated that level of backchat from her baristas, but then, Cuthbert was older than anyone else she’d interviewed by several decades and she’d been brought up to respect her elders. Cuthbert Lewis was seventy-two and had worked for the Post Office all his life until he’d retired two years ago. He’d spent two weeks being retired, decided that he didn’t like it very much and had retrained as a barista. His granddaughter Little Sophie, who worked in the tearooms on Saturdays, had told him that Mattie had a job going, and the rest was history.

Now, come rain, come shine, come whatever inclement weather you could throw at him, Cuthbert turned up for work, always immaculately dressed in suit and tie, and charmed both the coffee machine and customers alike with his grace, mischievous twinkle and old-fashioned good manners. Although Mattie did wish that he wouldn’t keep saying that operating Jezebel to her optimum potential was like bringing a beautiful woman who’d had her heart broken back to life, she still regularly thanked whatever deity (and Little Sophie) had brought Cuthbert into her life. Apart from when he was singing the praises of her arch nemesis.

‘Young Tom is a perfect gentleman. He has a lovely smile. Lovely manners too.’

‘I’ve never seen evidence of either,’ Mattie said with a sniff, disappearing into the kitchen to prepare her lunchtime bakes, which always included a speciality jumbo sausage roll. This week she was trialling a pork belly and apple confit sausage roll.

Mattie was disturbed in her apple prep by the arrival of Posy, who brought her own stool with her: she was obviously planning to stay a while.

‘I can’t be on my feet for longer than a minute,’ she said by way of a greeting.

‘Swollen ankles still bothering you?’ Mattie asked, attacking a mountain of peeled apples with one of her favourite knives.

‘Honestly, Mattie, I’m happy about the baby, really I am, but being pregnant sucks,’ Posy said with great feeling. ‘I wouldn’t recommend it.’

‘I’m not planning on getting pregnant anytime soon,’ Mattie said with a shudder, because when other girls had played ‘Mother’ she’d pretended that she was running her own Michelin-starred kitchen. ‘I know that you feel lousy, but you look very well on it.’

It was true. Posy had always been pretty, but now her pink-and-white complexion had a rosy glow, her hair shone and had picked up an auburn tint and OK, yeah, her ankles did look quite swollen but she had a very pleasingly round bump.

‘I don’t, but it’s sweet of you to say I do,’ Posy said. ‘I was up half the night worrying about the Christmas brainstorm. I really want to wait until Nina gets back, but she won’t reply when I email to ask her for an ETA.’

‘That’s not like Nina,’ Mattie noted with a frown, because usually Nina was so welded to her phone that she responded to messages within the minute. ‘I hope something hasn’t happened to her.’

‘No, she’s definitely still alive because she is sending me all sorts of other emails. For instance, how I feel about having life-sized reindeer in the shop,’ Posy said unhappily.

That definitely warranted putting down her paring knife. ‘Live reindeer in the shop?’

‘Not live. Life-size. Though either way, I don’t think it’s a very good idea,’ Posy said unhappily. She sighed and then her expression changed from harassed to something more speculative, if the narrowing of her eyes was anything to go by. ‘So, Tom, then. I was very surprised when he showed up with those lads yesterday afternoon. Tom has friends, who knew?’

‘Well, I suppose he had to have at least one friend,’ Mattie said uncharitably. ‘Some poor unfortunate who didn’t know any better.’

‘But there were three of them. Three!’ Posy said wonderingly. ‘Did they say where they knew Tom from? How long they’d been friends? Are they academics too? I mean, they didn’t look like academics.’

‘Well, Tom isn’t an academic. He works in a bookshop,’ Mattie said as she threw the now-cubed apples into the big pan on the hob.

‘But he was an academic,’ Posy said and she wasn’t going to let this go. She was twitching with curiosity, so Mattie took pity on her and told her about the Banter Boys: they’d been quite nice, actually.

‘Really? I thought you’d have shut them down in five seconds flat.’

‘I don’t shut down every man I meet.’

‘Most men. So, you and Tom living together …’

‘Are you going somewhere with this?’ Mattie asked, turning to Posy, knife in her hand. ‘Because Tom and I … in fact, there is no Tom and I. There is me having to share living space with Tom under sufferance, and neither of us is happy about it, and his friends insisted that he give up the big room, so he’s much more unhappy about it than I am.’

‘But if in the course of living with Tom, sorry, living in the same space as Tom, you were to find out some personal details about him, you will let me know, won’t you?’ Posy’s eyes were gleaming with the prospect of finally having any nugget of information that might explain the enigma of Tom, her colleague of five years about whom she knew nothing.

‘Posy, just listen to yourself! I’m not Tom’s biggest fan, but you know as well as I do that there are rules about sharing living space with someone, and I’m not about to go rifling through Tom’s underwear drawer or steaming open his post,’ Mattie exclaimed as she grated nutmeg into her pork and apple mix. ‘I, and you, have to respect his privacy.’

‘Of course, of course,’ Posy said quickly. ‘Absolutely, but if you were to find out something, even if it seems quite mundane, like where he was living before, or if he has parents, then it would be perfectly all right to share that with a friend.’