A Winter Kiss on Rochester Mews

‘It would be information that was in the public domain, as it were,’ Verity pointed out when she came calling to discuss the Christmas decoration budget for shop and tearooms, which turned out to be just a flimsy excuse. As was her not-at-all casual enquiry as to whether Mattie had chanced upon a stray pair of socks that Verity couldn’t find. What Verity really wanted, like Posy before her, was intel on Tom. ‘And if you don’t have intel at the moment, you can still gather intel in the general course of day-to-day living with him. And then you could share that intel with me.’

‘Isn’t there a commandment about that?’ Mattie asked. She sprinkled flaked almonds on her cherry frangipane loaf cakes that she was just about to put in the oven, because it was now after lunch and soon the afternoon tea crowd and the four o’clock energy slumpers would be in, wanting something sweet to get them through the rest of the day.

The reminder of Verity’s father’s calling worked like a charm, as ever. She huffed a little, said, ‘Well, if those socks do turn up, I’d like them back, please,’ then flounced back to her office.

After Mattie turned the tearoom sign to ‘Closed’ that evening, the machinations of her colleagues made her hesitate as she moved towards the stairs up to the flat. That flat that she shared with Tom. The flat where she would now have to spend the evening with Tom. What had seemed so straightforward was now giving her pause for thought, so it came as a huge relief when Tom came thundering down the stairs.

‘I’m going out,’ he said shortly. ‘And when I do get in, I’ll be quiet in much the same way that I hope you’ll be quiet tomorrow morning.’

Mattie wasn’t sure she’d ever known such sweet relief tempered with spitting indignation. ‘It’s not my fault that you’re obviously such a light sleeper,’ she said, but Tom was already gone, slamming the shop door behind him and leaving Mattie home alone.

After that, she wasn’t even a little bit tempted to rifle through Tom’s belongings. He hadn’t made good his threat to put a padlock on his bedroom door – she’d be mortally offended if he had – but there was no way that Mattie was going to invade his territory. She liked to think that she had a strong moral code, even though life had taught her that very few people shared her sense of ethics. Anyway, the thought of Tom returning the favour and going into her bedroom when she wasn’t there, made her go hot and cold.

Not that Mattie had anything to hide, but it was her space, her stuff. The idea that Tom or anyone might look through her underwear drawer was bad enough, but there were some things that were far more personal than underwear.

Like her little collection of Paris snowglobes: the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the Moulin Rouge windmill, all trapped in a winter wonderland under glass. They were neatly packed away in a box that had once stored the most delicious sablés au beurre, because Mattie could hardly bear to look at them.

Or her framed graduation certificate from L’Institut de Patisserie and the framed graduation snap of Mattie and her classmates, all of them in chef’s whites and toques, smiling happily, while Mattie stood off to the side, her lips compressed thinly, a haunted look in her eyes. That was packed away too, along with all the other painful reminders of her other life, her Parisian life; the very idea that Tom would pick through them with a sarcastic inner monologue cut Mattie to the core.

She was sure that Tom didn’t have the same souvenirs of heartbreak – she wasn’t even sure that Tom had a heart to break – but if he did, then it would be just as agonising for him to have someone go through them with careless fingers.

So she wasn’t even tempted to gather intel. Not even a little bit.

But as she had the whole building to herself for once, Mattie gave in to the temptation to wander around the empty shop. Usually the little series of anterooms on each side of the main shop were places Mattie passed through to get to the office to speak to Verity or for one of Posy’s dreaded brainstorms, like the imminent Christmas showdown where they’d discuss the possibility of life-sized reindeer for hours. In fact, the anterooms on the right, on the opposite side of the shop to the tearooms, were uncharted territory.

At night, lit softly by the spots above the counter, Happy Ever After was full of shadows and ghosts. But they were kindly ghosts and the empty shop had a peaceful feeling. The main room had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on either side with an old-fashioned rolling ladder, and in the centre were three sagging sofas in varying stages of decay grouped around a display table. On the table was a selection of books: everything from Jilly Cooper’s Riders to Pride and Prejudice, as well as ten or twelve other titles, ranging from familiar classics to books that Mattie had never heard of. There were also velvety-smooth, pale-pink roses in a chipped glass vase and a black-and-white photograph of a young man and woman standing behind the counter of the shop decades earlier. The woman was gazing up at the man with an adoring smile on her face and he was gazing down at her with tenderness in a way that Mattie could never imagine. But then, according to everyone who’d known them, Lavinia, the former owner of the shop, and her husband, Peregrine, had had eyes only for each other.

There was one other item on the table, a notice printed on fancy card:

In loving memory of Lavinia Thorndyke, a bookseller to her bones. On this table is a selection of Lavinia’s favourite books; the ones that brought her the greatest joy, that were like old friends. We hope that you may find the same joy, the same friendship.

‘If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading at all.’ – Oscar Wilde

Though she kept it on the downlow (mainly because she’d never hear the end of it), Mattie’s preferred books were cookery books. She’d tried once to explain to Posy that when she curled up in bed with How To Eat A Peach by Diana Henry or Nigel Slater’s Kitchen Diaries or even her treasured copy of her own grandmother’s handwritten recipe book, she was as transported as Posy was with one of the Regency romances that she could bolt through in an afternoon.

Mattie loved to imagine all those recipes, all those meals that she’d yet to eat; loved how they inspired her, were a springboard to creating new dishes of her own. With a cookery book open in front of her, Mattie had travelled the world. She’d visited Italy with Elizabeth David, India with Madhur Jaffrey and the Middle East with Yotam Ottolenghi. She’d found comfort in the recipes of Delia Smith and Julia Child, which echoed the food of her childhood, whether it was the English cakes and biscuits and puddings of her father’s mother or the more fancy éclairs, flans and financiers of her French mother’s mother.

But now, with the empty shop at her disposal and more free time than she knew what to do with, on the second night in her new abode, Mattie found herself drifting to the boxes of books in the back office behind the shop counter.

These books weren’t for sale but were proofs, or advance copies, sent out by publishers to booksellers and reviewers. The staff were allowed to take anything that they fancied, which Cuthbert had really leaned into, taking armfuls of sassy office romances home to his beloved Cynthia.

‘Even read a couple myself,’ he’d confessed to Mattie, his eyebrows waggling. ‘Gave me quite a few new ideas, let me tell you.’

Mattie didn’t need any new ideas and she certainly didn’t want any romance in her life, much less to read about it, but that night she felt as if she’d read all her cookery books a thousand times over and, nestling on top of one of the boxes was a novel called Passion and Patisserie at the Little Parisian Café.

‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ she muttered, picking it up and, half an hour later, she was tucked up in her bed reading about the heroine Lucy’s adventures as she opened what was actually a boulangerie rather than a café and resisted the charms of a hunky French pastry chef called Pierre because she was wedded to her career.

Though Mattie didn’t think much of the recipe for macarons in chapter two, she was nevertheless enjoying Lucy’s exploits when she heard a noise outside.

Although the mews felt as if it was its own little oasis of calm away from all the hustle and bustle, it was still in the centre of London. It wasn’t even eleven o’clock, so on Rochester Street, No Plaice Like Home would only have just finished serving, and The Midnight Bell and the fancy new bar in what used to be the undertakers would still be open. So there was no need for Mattie to stiffen just because she’d heard a noise outside.

After all, she used to live in Hackney, where she’d often been woken up by sirens or a police helicopter overhead. But this was a different kind of sound; a frantic squalling, like an animal in distress. And was that … was that a rattling of the electronic gate that Posy and Sebastian had installed at the entrance to the mews? It was left open all day but Tom would have closed it when he went out earlier and you needed a code to get through. Was someone trying to break in?

Mattie cowered for a second and then she remembered that she was made of much sterner stuff than that. She got out of bed and padded over to the window so she could open it and peer out into the darkened courtyard below.

‘Is anyone there?’ she called, but if someone were trying to break in, then they’d hardly reply with a ‘Yoo hoo! Over here!’

Instead, the squalling noise got louder. Was it foxes having sex? Even in the centre of town, there were plenty of foxes who’d take their chances for the rich pickings outside restaurants and shops, or for discarded and half-eaten fast food. Mattie had once seen a rat on Rochester Street, bold as brass, proudly carrying a chicken drumstick in its mouth.

The gates rattled again, and the squalling got even louder.

The best thing to do was to go back to bed, maybe put in some earplugs and … wait to be murdered in her sleep.

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But Mattie was far too sensible to allow herself to be murdered in her sleep. With a resigned sigh, she turned away from the window so she could dig out her Ugg boots. She shrugged her big puffa coat over her pyjamas and before she left the flat, she grabbed one of her really heavy cast-iron pans.

The empty shop was no longer a comforting, warm space but full of terrifying shadows, and Mattie felt like the cliché in a horror film as she unlocked the front door. Instead of staying inside, she was going out towards who knew what fresh hell?

As soon as the door was open and Mattie heard the noise again, it chilled her bones. Because now she recognised the sound, which was why she broke into a run towards the electronic gates where, oh God! There was Strumpet trapped between the railings and very unhappy about it.

‘Strumpo! What on earth are you doing here?’ Mattie exclaimed and poor Strumpet gave her side eye, as much as he could, and yowled again as if to say, ‘What does it look like I’m doing, you foolish human?’

‘What on earth are you doing?’ echoed from the shadows beyond the gate, and Mattie tore her gaze away from the distraught cat to see Tom on the other side. Then he looked down too. ‘Oh God, you idiot!’

‘You are talking about Strumpet and not me?’ Mattie clarified sharply.

‘You’re not the one who’s trapped in the railings, are you?’ Tom took off his glasses so he could scrutinise Strumpet (which also kind of proved that he didn’t actually need glasses at all), who tried to turn his head to look back at Tom, but instead just meowed unhappily. ‘How did he manage to get here, all the way from Canonbury, when the furthest afield he ever used to get was as far as Stefan’s smokehouse?’

‘I have no idea,’ Mattie replied, crouching down so she could take stock of the situation. Strumpet had managed to get his head and his front paws through the railing of the gate on the right, but was stuck at his fattest part, his Buddha-like belly. ‘How about you push and I pull?’

‘Well, I haven’t got any better ideas,’ Tom admitted. Mattie gently took hold of Strumpet under his armpits and Tom grabbed hold of his hind legs but, despite their gentle wiggling, which Strumpet took in remarkably good grace, the cat was stuck fast.

‘You stupid beast,’ huffed Tom. ‘My old cat could wriggle through the tiniest gaps, like she was boneless, but Strumpet has far too much blubber. Should I come over to you?’

‘No! Don’t! Stop!’ Mattie screeched as Tom’s index finger paused over the keypad. ‘What if you electrocute him?’

‘I don’t see how,’ Tom grumbled but he stood back. ‘Well, what else could we try? Could we lubricate him? Have we got any butter?’

‘Yes! Good thinking!’ Mattie yelped. ‘I always have spare butter. Wait here!’

‘I’m hardly planning on going anywhere,’ Tom shouted at her back as Mattie took off towards the shop because, even in the middle of a dire emergency, Tom couldn’t resist having the last word.

But she was far more upset to realise that the only butter she had, ahead of tomorrow’s delivery, was her precious unsalted butter from Normandy, which you couldn’t even get in the UK. Every six months or so, Mattie and her mother made a trip across the Channel to stock up on all the French provisions that they couldn’t live without, mainly butter in Mattie’s case. And now she was going to have to donate it to a greater cause. She didn’t even have any vegetable oil left, she thought sadly as she put the butter in the microwave for a few seconds just to warm it enough for optimum cat manhandling.

When she returned, Tom was squatting down, his hand reaching through the gate to scratch Strumpet behind his ears. ‘I know that it seems like the end of the world right now, Strumpet, but I promise you one day we’ll look back on this and laugh.’ It was the nicest thing that Mattie had ever heard him say.

Then he saw Mattie standing there and he straightened up.