The Traveller’s Daughter

Her feet were clad in her usual choice of thoroughly unsuitable heels, and she stepped around the freshly formed puddles. She momentarily wished she had a bit more sense when it came to footwear but ever since she’d had a say in the matter, she’d always opted for pretty over practical. Still, she comforted herself, at least she didn’t have far to walk, and as she tottered down the empty footpath, her mind drifted back over how she’d come to be here.

The letter had arrived from the firm of solicitors, whom her mother had been with for as long as Kitty could remember, four weeks ago. In her opinion, Rosa had single-handedly kept them in business these last few years with her conveyancing, not to mention her final bit of business, dying. It held no surprises, apart from what she thought was an odd request on her mother’s part, that Kitty keep her ashes for at least six months before scattering them. Apart from that, her affairs had all been in order.

Rosa’s will was quite straightforward with no beneficiaries other than Kitty, and so the house at Edgewater Lane was hers to do with as she wished. She hadn’t bothered to glance at the statement attached, knowing the firm’s bill had been paid from her mother’s bank account. The account was now closed, and the balance was to be transferred to her account. It was the formality and finality of the letter that made her eyes burn with threatened tears. She’d sat there for an age in the dip of the old couch in the London flat she shared with Yasmin and Paula feeling utterly lost.

She and Yasmin had only let the room to Paula for two reasons. Number one, being that the third bedroom was a box room so small that no one else had been keen to take it upon viewing it. The second reason was the smell; not everybody could stomach the permanent smell of curry that hovered in the air thanks to the flat’s upstairs location over a Bangladeshi takeaway.

Their flat was located in the East End near the old Spitalfields Market and Brick Lane, which was known these days as London’s Curry Capital and had long been nicknamed Bangla Town. Kitty loved the little pocket of East London she had run away to just on a year ago, determined to put as much distance between herself and Damien as she could manage. You could almost smell the history seeping from the bricks; that’s if you managed to block the smell of curry!

She liked to imagine the drama that had been played out on the streets as she wandered around them and to know she was now part of that thread work made her feel special. Sometimes she’d pause down bustling Brick Lane and imagine she could hear the call of the Costermongers’ selling their fruit and veg. Once she had gotten herself in a right stew hot footing it home as she conjured up the darker side of the East End’s infamous past, Jack the Ripper. She could sense a shadow lurking behind her and had picked up her pace so that she’d been puffing by the time she burst in through the front door of her flat.

“What’s up with you? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” Yasmin had stated as Kitty locked the door behind her before swinging round to face her friend, wild-eyed.

“Nothing, I’ve got an overactive imagination that’s all, my mum always said so, but I think I might need a drink.” She filled Yasmin in on her journey home, deciding not to add that she genuinely had sensed a darkness that had spooked her. She got these little feelings from time to time, like when things had come to a head with Damien. She had felt something coming. When she sat back night after night over the following weeks torturing herself by examining every tiny detail of their breakup, there had been no warning signs, though. Nothing apart from the strangest sense of darkness and impending trouble. It had been there during her mother’s final days too, although at the time she hadn’t known she was dying. She’d found out after the event. A fat lot of good it was having a sixth sense when she had no idea what it meant.

There were other feelings too, such as knowing instinctively who was on the other end of the phone, or sensing who was at the door without answering it. Silly stuff really, and she had asked Rosa about it once. Kitty had thought at the time that her reaction had been most peculiar but like a lot of things her mother had chosen not to elaborate.

As for the encroaching darkness, these days it didn’t frighten her because it had already brought the worst that could happen with it. She had broken up with Damien and lost her mother all within a year. For the here and now, she was trying so hard just to focus on the positives. So it was lucky that her passion in life was food. Most days the smell of spices wafting up the stairwell was enough to make your eyes water!

She shared waitressing shifts with Yasmin at Bruno’s, a trendy little Italian Eatery on nearby Ashwin Street. Its main claim to fame was that a café just a few doors up had been tipped by Vogue magazine as the coolest place in Britain to dine. Bruno’s was determined to bask in its glory. Kitty didn’t mind. The busier work was, the better, in her opinion because it kept not just her body but her mind busy and she needed all the distraction she could get.

Of course, she didn’t plan on waitressing forever. Once the money from the sale of Edgewater Lane was in her bank account, there would be nothing stopping her from pursuing her dream of opening her very own cupcake café. Nothing stopping her, except for a chronic fear of failure that was.

Kitty wasn’t a trained baker or chef nor did she want to be. She had been there and tried that. It had seen her spend a year living on minimum wage in exchange for being shouted at by a Gordon Ramsey lookalike. The experience had well and truly put her off the idea. She had packed in her apprenticeship in Edinburgh and hot-footed it down to a secretarial job in Manchester, instead deciding it was high time she had a bit of money in her pockets and fun to boot. The decision to move in with her girlfriends in the North’s big smoke and take a position typing in an architect’s firm had been one that her mother had not approved of. Kitty had told her in no uncertain terms though that it was her life, and she would do with it what she wanted.

She was the first to hold her hand up and say that she found it hard to follow instructions, especially if they were barked at her. She found it hard to stick at things too because her feet got itchy, and she felt the need to move on, but despite her change of course she had never stopped loving baking. She had known though that, if she’d seen her apprenticeship through to the end, bit by bit her love for it would have been snuffed out.

Now in a round about way, until she opened her café she had come back to her first love by selling her cakes at the market on Saturday mornings. There was something so intrinsically comforting in the measuring of ingredients, the amounts of which never changed. As for the sweet and tempting result, well that was pure satisfaction. That was why she didn’t mind the early starts on those cold Saturday mornings. Bundled up in her coat with her woolly hat pulled down well over her ears, she would sell her cakes at the Broadway Market in Hackney. All of her cakes were made with love, and Kitty liked to think it was this that made them that little bit extra special.

The unsociable hours she waitressed along with her early Saturday starts suited her just fine. She had Yas for company, and after the disaster that was Damien, well the less time she had on her hands for repeating that epic catastrophe, the better. She was quite happy to whip up her sweet treats at the ungodly time of three o’clock in the morning in readiness for sale at her popular stall. Or at least she was after she’d had a strong cup of coffee. It filled her with a certain pride as she bantered with the punters to know that she was standing in the shadow of the East End’s famous Barrow boys. They had plied their trade with their unique salesman patter.

Her takings supplemented her meagre earnings from Bruno’s enabling her to scrape by, but it certainly wasn’t the money that kept her baking her little cakes. She knew too that the latest fad was to frown upon sugar but hadn’t those sugar free converts ever heard the phrase, ‘everything in moderation’? That was her motto. She’d even heard mutterings that cupcakes were passé and that it was all about the sickly sweet macaron these days, but Kitty wasn’t swayed. In her opinion there was something so marvellous about the look of pleasure on a customer’s face when they bit into one of her cakes, swirled high with a piped frosting finish. It reaffirmed her belief. Sugar might be bad for the waistline, but it was oh-so-good for the soul!

Now, Kitty yawned as she spied the row of shops at the end of the road she had just turned onto. Baintree & Co.’s office sat in the middle of them with a Cancer Research Shop somewhat aptly, given the reason for her selling her mother’s house, on one side of it. There was a travel agents on the other. Her eyes watered, and her body ached with weariness as she tottered along dragging her case behind her. The couple of hours’ sleep she’d grabbed before her usual ungodly Saturday morning start had been fractured. The temptation to ignore her alarm when it shrilled had been strong. She knew, though, that if she was going to get her cakes baked and iced as well as catch the first train up to Wigan, then she needed to get up and get moving.

It was a nuisance having to go all that way just to sign off the last of the paperwork for the house and to hand the key over but needs must. It was simpler than trying to arrange it all by proxy. So, she’d switched the alarm off and grudgingly thrown on the closest thing to hand, a T-shirt and her jeans before padding through to the bathroom. She washed up and tied her hair back in a tight ponytail. A stray hair in a red velvet Pink Lady cupcake would be a recipe for disaster.

She had only got as far as cracking the eggs into the kitchen aid, her one splurge since she’d begun selling her wares at the market, when Yasmin had appeared in the kitchen doorway.

“You’re mad, Kitty do you know that?” she’d said rubbing her eyes and moving across the tired old lino floor in a swish of pyjama satin. Her practised hand picked up the cup of flour resting on the bench, and she began to tip it slowly into the mixer as Kitty had demonstrated time and time again.

“Three teaspoons of baking powder,” Kitty mumbled, measuring out the first and adding it to the mix before looking up at her friend; Yasmin was as tall as she was short. “I know, but you don’t need to be. Go on back to bed; you’re going to have a busy enough day as it is.” Yas would never cope with the pace of the market if she were on anything other than top form, she thought, turning the speed up on the mixer a fraction.

The first time Kitty had shared a shift with Yasmin she had thought her like an exotic flower with her penchant for 1950s style frocks. She was studying fashion design at a local college and used her wages and tips from Bruno’s to supplement her meagre student allowance. She was willowy with olive-hued skin and bobbed ebony hair that played up her flashing brown eyes. For her part, Yasmin had confided when they knew each better, she’d thought Kitty was like a dainty pixie. She had felt gangly and ginormous next to the petite blonde with the dancing blue eyes offset by unusually dark eyebrows and a big smile.

Opposites attract, though, and once Kitty had gotten used to Yas’s way of going on, it hadn’t taken many snatched coffee breaks for the two women to establish common ground. They were both new arrivals to the city in need of permanent accommodation. Adrift in Britain’s capital, they’d been grateful to find one another, and they had been firm friends ever since.

“Thanks for doing this Yas, I’m sorry to land it on you.”

“It’s no biggie, all I ask is that when you open your café, you let me design the uniform. I think it should be something that’s short and sweet, now should I add the melted butter?”

Kitty startled back to the present as a car horn tooted at another driver’s indiscretion, and she realized she was there. As she pushed open the door of Baintree & Co., a bell jangled announcing her arrival. She stepped inside and shut the door quickly behind her not wanting to let in a blast of cold air. A girl of no more than eighteen shoved something in the drawer of the front desk she was sitting behind. Her phone Kitty was guessing, not caring if that was how she wanted to pass a quiet day at work; Mr Baintree might not be so easy going about it, though. She looked up at Kitty guiltily before affecting what she must have thought was her professional face. How she could get her facial muscles to move underneath the layers of powdery foundation slathered on her face was a wonder.

“I love your shoes – oh my God are they Alexander McQueen’s?” she asked, standing up to peer over the top of her desk and at the same time waving Kitty over to the two-seater couch against the wall. A stack of realty magazines was on the table beside it, and she sat down to await Mr Baintree’s imminent return.

Kitty crossed her jeans-clad legs lifting the top one up to allow the girl a closer inspection of her shoe. “I wish, they’re a Spitalfields special.”

The girl looked at her blankly.

“Knockoffs.”

“Oh right.” Disappointed, she sat back down and decided this client didn’t look the type to dob her into her boss, so she fished her phone back out of the drawer and resumed her frantic texting.

Kitty’s phone went at that moment, and she answered it knowing it was Yasmin even before she said hello. She was grateful she was not going to have to while away the minutes flicking through the magazines on offer.

“Okay, so you have to go to France, Kitty. I don’t even know why you are thinking about it. That picture was incredible. I Googled it and apparently it is quite famous. How could you have not known that you had a famous model mother? It’s called Midsummer Lovers and has been reprinted thousands of time. Gosh, she was beautiful. I can see where you get your looks from and as for the stud muffin she was gawping up at, well I don’t blame her for having such a daft look on her face.” Yasmin paused then huffed. “My God, Piggy Paula and Slimy Steve are going at it today. It’s disgusting. It’s put me right off my Mars bar.”

Kitty doubted this was true; she could tell Yasmin was talking with her mouth full. “Why don’t you bang on the door and tell them to keep the noise down. Or, better still run in there with a water pistol, all guns a blazing, that should dampen their ardour.”

Yasmin laughed. “Not a bad idea, but it could also put me off sex for life. Maybe that’s it, maybe I am just jealous. It’s been so long.” She sighed and then brightened. “Did I tell you about the guy who came into Bruno’s for lunch on Thursday? Talk about tall, dark and handsome. Honestly, Kitty he was gorgeous – I just about dropped his Spaghetti Amatriciana in his lap I was so busy gawping at him. My luck though, he was dining with an equally stunning female companion, but he did leave me a nice big tip, so I suppose that’s something. Where are you now the Estate Agent’s?”

Yas talked a million miles an hour, Kitty thought with a fond smile. “Yep, I am waiting to hand the key for Edgewater Lane over to the Agent, who should be back in the office any minute and then my work in Wigan is done. I reckon I will make the six o’clock train back to London.”

“No, you won’t, Kitty because you are going to do what this Mr Booba has asked you to do.”

Kitty frowned looking up at one of the many framed sales and marketing certificates adorning the agencies walls. They didn’t hide the fact the place could do with a paint job and with the daylight robbery commission Baintree & Co commanded on their house sales you’d think they could afford to liven up the office bit. “It’s Beauvau, and I can’t go, Yas, I have responsibilities.”

Yasmin made a snorting sound and Kitty held the phone away from her ear knowing she was about to be on the receiving end of a rant; she was right.

“You are making piss-poor excuses, Kitty Sorenson. You’ve told me that you have spent your whole life wondering who your mum used to be, and now you’ve been given a golden opportunity to begin unravelling the mystery. Not to mention an all expenses trip to this Uzés place in the south of France no less. Abandon ship, go! I can cover your shifts at Bruno’s, and you’ll be back well before next Saturday.”

Kitty chewed her bottom lip; she was running out of excuses and it was making her squirm. This Monsieur Beauvau person had said his P.A. would arrange everything. All she had to do was say yes, and the tickets would be there for her to collect at the airport, whichever airport she decided to fly from. A car would pick her up at Marseille Provence Airport to take her on the two hour trip to Uzés. The nephew of the man in the photo had agreed to be there for this anniversary photo shoot Tres Belle magazine was so keen to commission, so it was down to her as to whether it went ahead. She was curious, of course, she was curious as this was a chance to hear about a side of her mother she never imagined existed. She massaged her temples as she wondered why it was her life was never straightforward.

At times, she felt like she was driving down a long and never ending road filled with unexpected potholes to send her veering off course. Sometimes it would be nice not to feel like the rug had just been pulled out from under her. It was a feeling she’d first encountered when her father passed away, and her mother had sold Rose Cottage. It hadn’t lessened each and every time her mother had announced she was selling up and moving again either. Then, just when things had settled down, Rosa had rung her up one afternoon at the apartment she shared with Damien. She’d told her the reason she’d lost so much weight of late was that she had pancreatic cancer. The prognosis was not good. The circling shadows Kitty had felt over those last few weeks had suddenly made sense.

Her first reaction had been to begin frantically Googling all the different treatments for the disease that had her mother in its grip. Her hope was that she would spot some miracle cure that the doctors treating her had somehow missed. Even as she did so, she knew she was kidding herself. Realizing it was futile, she chose instead to cling on to the fact that at least Rosa had had the chance to meet Damien, the man she was going to marry. She could slip away knowing her daughter would be loved and looked after. Then he had gone and done what he did. Three months later Rosa had died with a stranger holding her hand because, knowing her daughter’s heart was shattered, she had not wanted to add to her woes.

These last few months, she’d felt like she was getting her act together. It was still early days in the grieving process, but she had found a modicum of happiness in her new London life. Did she want to delve into the past she knew nothing of? And would the answers as to where her mother came from be answers she needed to know? Her mother hadn’t thought so, and perhaps she’d had very good reasons.

“Kitty?”

“I’m still here.”

“If you don’t go to France, I will, and I will pretend that I am you, and I will get to the bottom of the mystery of who Rosa Sorenson once was.”

“You can’t do that, Nancy Drew because for one thing you look nothing like my mother; Monsieur Beauvau would know you weren’t me straight away.”

“You underestimate my powers of sneakiness. I’ve already thought of how I’ll get round the fact that you are five foot two, blonde, fair-skinned and petite, and I am five foot nine, brunette, olive-skinned and big boned. I will tell Mr Boobo that Rosa had it off with a Lebanese man and that he buggered off back to Lebanon never to be seen or heard from again as my dad did. The elements of truth will give my cover an air of authenticity. And, my friend, I will get to have a lovely little break in France all expenses paid while getting to the bottom of whether your mother has been in witness protection all these years. Or, whether she has a second secret family or if she is a member of the Royal family who abdicated for the love of a common man. Or maybe her family were notorious gangsters, and for your protection she kept you hidden from them all these years, or–”