Netherwood (40 page)

‘Well,’ said Eve, ‘a slow start won’t be a bad thing, will it?’ She made it sound as if she’d planned it. ‘Anyway, do folk really give up owt for Lent these days?’

‘Well, I know I do.’

Nellie looked like a woman who’d never declined food in her life. She wasn’t quite five feet tall but she had plenty round the middle, and when Anna had made Nellie’s aprons, she’d needed almost as much in width as she did in length.

‘She has figure of football,’ Anna had said, mystified, holding up the finished article to show Eve, who was helpless with laughter. Now, if anything a little rounder in girth since starting work for Eve – too many samples – Nellie stood before her claiming piety and restraint.

‘Very commendable, Nellie,’ Eve said, unconvinced, and rightly so. ‘I ’ope your principles don’t extend to servin’ other folk who aren’t quite so ’igh-minded. Now, pancakes. Nice and simple, we can all make ’em blindfolded, right?’

Nellie was having to learn to be overruled for the first time
in her adult life, but it was the only thing she was struggling with. Eve had chosen well in her three kitchen staff; all of them were capable cooks of the variety in which Yorkshire specialised. No nonsense, nothing fancy, limited repertoire, but perfect results, time and again. They hadn’t a recipe book between them, and although Eve was thinking she should perhaps remedy this if only to extend the range of what they offered, they hadn’t yet felt the lack of one. Eve had demonstrated her own methods, they had followed them, and Eve was always on hand to check they were right.

In the week before the café opened for business, however, she decided that everything they made – the pork pies, steak puddings, drop scones and Eve’s Puddings – should be entered in a ledger for the sake of consistency. The café menu would have to change from time to time, and Eve wanted no mistakes slipping in, no customers going home feeling they could have done better themselves. It meant committing to paper for the first time the exact quantities of ingredients necessary and it was a laborious process, since Eve baked everything by eye and instinct so wasn’t certain of the actual amounts herself. She and Anna had spent a day making everything on the menu, weighing flour and lard and fillings as they went, writing down the precise pounds and ounces in a book. The pages were streaked with fat and flour – one glimpse and Absalom would have been cured of his infatuation – but the book became the kitchen bible. Anna’s dishes – the chicken soup and the pig parcels – were entered by her as the originator of the recipes, likewise Ginger’s potato pudding-pie and Alice’s savoury pudding, which they’d enhanced by serving with a thick, caramelised onion gravy. When they’d finished they found they had made a banquet, and they invited Ginger, Nellie and Alice, their husbands and children, and Seth, Eliza, Ellen and Maya, to come that evening to eat it all up. They carried the food upstairs to the newly furnished café, and ate at the tables there.
Anna produced candles and stood them on saucers on the gingham cloths, and it felt like a celebration of everything they’d achieved together. Ginger made a toast to the future, and then Eve, inspired by the candlelight and a sense of life’s unpredictable turns, made another toast, to the past.

‘To t’memory of Arthur Williams,’ she said. ‘My good and dear departed ’usband.’

‘To Dad,’ said Seth, emphatically, raising his glass with everyone else. Eve smiled at him, hoping that he, like she, could sometimes now remember Arthur without pain.

They were run off their feet on Pancake Day. There were too many folk with not enough in their bellies in Netherwood, and once word got round that there was free food at Mitchell’s Mill, people swarmed in. The café seated forty-eight people, and Eve had to station Jonas Buckle at the door to operate a one-out-one-in policy. Anna joined the four of them in the kitchen flipping pancakes, and the three little waitresses Eve had taken on, Molly Buckle, Sarah Kay and Jennifer Timpson – all school leavers, all in their different ways their mothers’ daughters – ran up and down the wide staircase from opening to closing and never seemed to flag. Seth and Eliza came as soon as they could to help wash the pots and Amos appeared too, as Eve had hoped he would, after his day shift had ended. He kept his distance from the women though, standing with Jonas at the entrance on crowd-control duties.

In the kitchen there wasn’t time to exchange a word, and by the time the last person left they had made something approaching three hundred pancakes each. At about half-past two they ran out of lemons, but within the half hour a crate of hothouse oranges arrived from Netherwood Hall with the earl’s compliments. Fifteen hours at a hot stove, but at the
day’s end the five women were euphoric. There had been customers that day who they all knew would never be back, not having two pennies to rub together, but none of them cared, not even Nellie. They felt blessed with good fortune themselves and, just for that day, felt like spreading it around.

S
mall wonder, then, that Eve felt cut adrift, trotting through the finer streets of London with Samuel Stallibrass and his cheerful running commentary. There wasn’t a milliner, a jeweller or a fine hotel that could properly distract her from her current sense of loss. Eve was bodily in London but her spirit was in Mitchell’s Snicket with the ladies in the kitchen, and at home in Beaumont Lane with her three children, whose value she felt she hadn’t fully appreciated until now. There was so much to worry about she hardly knew where to start. The business was still so new, only six months old, and any number of disasters could befall it. She’d appointed Ginger as deputy in her absence – that went down like a lead weight with Nellie, but never mind – but it felt to her now like a careless act, ill thought through, like handing Ginger a new baby then walking away without a backwards glance.

Then there was home life, which for the children would be chaotic. The little ones would have to spend more time with Lilly because Anna was needed at the mill during the day now that Eve was gone; that in turn meant the myriad domestic tasks around the house all had to wait until the evening. The front-door shop was closed for the duration, though Eve
doubted they’d ever reopen – no need for it, when everything was available at the mill. But still, Anna would be spread very thin. She made light of it of course, shrugging off Eve’s concerns, refusing to engage with any objections, except to repeat that all would be well if Eve would but trust her.

‘Of course I trust you,’ Eve had said. ‘But you’re only human, Anna. When will you wash the linens and beat the rugs, if you’ve been all day on your feet at the mill?’

Anna, thinking that the linens could perhaps be less than spotless for a few weeks, and the rugs too, simply said, ‘That will be my problem, not yours,’ and Eve in the end had to accept her word.

And then the children. Oh, the children. Especially Seth, with his up and down moods and his persistent, obstinate, groundless dislike of Anna; she still hadn’t cured him of it, or even begun to understand it. She had sat with all three of them the day before she left, and plied them with bread and homemade jam, but it had felt too much like a last supper to help lift anyone’s spirits.

‘Y’know, lots of things will just be t’same as ever,’ she had said. ‘Most things, in fact.’

Ellen, not quite following, had smiled at her jammily, but Eliza had gazed at her with sceptical eyes, and Seth wouldn’t look at her at all.

‘I’ll be back as soon as possible. It might seem a long time now, but time flies, y’know. It does. And Amos’ll be ’ere, Seth – you’ll be busy in t’allotment as usual.’

She had sounded, to her own ears, wheedling and desperate. He stared steadfastly at the table top, but he said grudgingly, ‘I know.’

‘And Anna’s going to be ’ere, just as she is now.’

‘It won’t be t’same, though, Mam.’

This was Eliza, and there was no denying the truth of what she said.

‘Well,’ Eve had said. ‘It’ll be t’same, but different.’

‘Can I live wi’ Amos?’ Seth had looked up now, with eyes brightened by this sudden brainwave. But the shutters came down again when Eve had said no – he was needed at home with his sisters.

‘You’re t’man of t’house now, Seth,’ she had said. ‘I’m dependin’ on you,’ and under other circumstances he might have risen to the compliment, but instead he had glowered at her, as if invoking the absence of Arthur was below the belt.

‘Seth, what is it?’ Eve had said, gently enough, but he shook his head, said gruffly, ‘nowt,’ and got up from the table to leave without asking permission. Eve, normally a stickler for manners, let him go. There was much on her mind, and much to be done before she left. She had smiled uncertainly at the two girls, still sitting with her at the table, and Eliza had said: ‘Don’t worry, Mam,’ but her brown eyes had been swimming with tears, and all three of them had had a little weep then, though Ellen wasn’t at all sure why.

In the end, when the hour came and she had to leave for the station, she had gone alone. If her children’s tragic faces had been watching her from the platform, she had feared she would fling herself off the moving train. Motherhood, she thought, was a cruel mix of pain and pleasure. Two ounces of anxiety for every ounce of joy.

‘And here’s Fortnum and Mason,’ said Samuel, cutting into her doleful reverie.

Oh Lord, more hats.

‘London’s finest purveyor of fancy comestibles,’ he went on.

She sat up and looked left. Not hats. A long shop front, six arched windows, three either side of a central double door, the plasterwork painted a pretty shade of verdigris, the glass so clean it might not have been there. And on display, a lavish selection of luxury groceries: pickles, preserves, tea and coffee, chocolates, truffles, boxes of sugared almonds, bottles of wine,
oils and vinegars, wicker hampers spilling fancy goods from their open lids, an embroidered cloth set with glass and silverware as if for a celestial picnic, with champagne and caviar and crystallised fruits.

‘Stop!’ Eve cried, and Samuel thought her hat must have blown off, but there it was on her head, where it should be. He pulled up alongside the kerb, though, pleased to see her looking interested at last. It seemed to be Fortnum’s that had caught her eye. Well, I’ll be blessed, he thought; not a diamonds and pearls woman then. More of an anchovies and capers type.

‘Can I get down, ’ave a closer look?’ she said. She was already clambering out of her seat anyway, ready to drop the distance to the road unassisted. He made her wait; no lady would dismount his carriage without a gentleman’s help, not while Samuel Stallibrass had breath in his body. He vaulted down himself, quite nimbly for a big man, then bid her scoot along the leather bench so she wouldn’t be risking life and limb in the Piccadilly traffic. He lifted her down and set her on the pavement, but she barely acknowledged him, her gaze intent on the window displays. It was the most magnificent sight she had ever beheld. She wished Anna was here; even she would be impressed.

‘What is this?’ she said, to the window.

‘Fortnum and Mason,’ said Samuel, raising his voice a little to be heard across the busy pavement. ‘Grocer to the king. Grocer to High Society in general, in fact. Very nice, if the cost of food is of no account to you. Have a look inside.’

‘Could I?’

‘Certainly you could. Costs nothing to look. I’ll wait out here with the horses. Don’t be long, mind. They’re expecting us at Fulton House.’

She moved to the doors, and they were opened for her by a portly chap decked out in a black morning coat and pinstriped
trousers, not unlike the funeral garb of Jeremiah Hague, the undertaker back home. Bit sombre, thought Eve. She thanked him, and he gave the slightest of nods though he kept his chin at a tilt and his eyes elsewhere, as if discomfited by the attention. Inside, she wandered among shelves of mysterious goods, as complete a departure from the stock at the Netherwood Co-operative as it was possible to be. She peered in some alarm at bottles of turtle and terrapin soup – ‘thick and clear’ said the labels, as if that might recommend it, at 7s 6d a jar – at tins of boned and stuffed larks – 12 shillings for those, no less – and at what appeared to be jars of snails suspended in brown jelly.
Potage d’Escargots,
said the fancy labels. Just how hungry would she have to be before eating this, she wondered. Only 4 shillings a jar, mind. She marvelled at what passed for a bargain in this emporium of exotica.