The Tea House on Mulberry Street Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE TEA HOUSE ON MULBERRY STREET

  Sharon Owens was born in Omagh in 1968. She moved to Belfast in 1988, to study illustration at the Art College. She married husband Dermot in 1992 and they have one daughter, Alice.

  The TEA HOUSE on

  MULBERRY STREET

  Sharon Owens

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published by Poolbeg Press Ltd 2003

  Published in Penguin Books 2005

  15

  Copyright © Sharon Owens, 2003

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-192119-8

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many thanks to everyone at Poolbeg and Penguin for all their advice and kindness. And also to my husband Dermot, for his love and support.

  For DERMOT

  Chapter 1

  THE TEA HOUSE

  Daniel Stanley came hurrying down the stairs from the first-floor flat, and flicked on the lights in the tea house. The room was cold, and he shivered as he crossed the floor of the shop, and pulled open the blinds. The sky was still dark.

  It would be another couple of hours, at least, before sunrise. He hurried around the cafe, switching on the small yellow table lamps, and the room was suddenly filled with a warm glow. For a brief moment, the old place looked almost cheerful. The dusty curtains, the faded linoleum, the cracked furniture and the flaking walls were bathed in a golden light.

  Daniel peered at himself in a small mirror beside the door. His eyes were large, blue and intelligent-looking, with worry lines settling in around the edges. Well, that was understandable: running a small business was not easy. He was winter-pale, and he needed a haircut. But the fine bone structure he had inherited from his mother – the straight nose and high cheekbones – was still evident while other men’s faces had softened and blurred as they filled out into middle-age. Yes, even at forty-seven, he was still passable, in a neat and tidy sort of way.

  He opened the front door and carried in the day’s delivery of milk. He began to switch on the appliances in the kitchen: the toaster, the water-heater, the old oven that still worked perfectly although it made a rattling noise when the temperature exceeded 200 degrees. He filled the kettle and switched it on. He looked at his watch. It was half past six. The ancient central heating system rumbled into life, then, and Daniel breathed a sigh of relief that it was still working.

  While he waited for the kettle to boil, he wandered back to the front window of the shop and surveyed the comings and goings on Mulberry Street.

  The city was waking up.

  Lorry-drivers were already moving along the Lisburn Road with their deliveries. At half past seven, the early commuters would appear. Daniel watched a lorry-driver waiting patiently for the green light, tapping his fingers on the dashboard. He seemed to be listening to a song on the radio, too distracted to toot his horn when the car at the front of the line moved off too slowly. Daniel rarely played music in the cafe. He liked the peace of the early morning, and the familiar sounds of the kitchen. The silence helped him to concentrate on his cooking. Today, he would bake a luscious cherry cheesecake, and a moist coffee-cake with toffee-coloured cream piped around the edges.

  Across the road, the willowy florist with red hair was arranging a selection of white flowers in the freshly polished bay window of her shop. She handled the stems gently, almost with love, trailing her slender fingers through lush green leaves that were still wet with dew. Her name was Rose. Daniel could not have guessed but she had chosen white flowers that day as a kind of memorial, to mark the end of her short marriage to John. She was single again, and all alone in the city that locals called The Big Smoke. She surveyed the orderly show of ghostly blooms and then, satisfied, filled the kettle to make a cup of tea. Since leaving her husband, she’d been waking up earlier than usual, but the shop had never looked better.

  Daniel watched from his cafe her leisurely progress, thinking what an easy job it must be to sell flowers: no lightning hygiene inspections to worry about, and no risk of poisoning the customers either. Red roses for Valentine’s Day, fir-trees for Christmas, and nothing else to do all year except potter about, arranging steel buckets in the window. Yes, a real soft number. Although the smart, metal containers looked well, he admitted. Rose always put on a good display. They acknowledged each other with a nod, sometimes, when Rose came into the tea house for a sandwich at lunch-time.

  Lunch-time! Daniel was awakened from his daydream of an easy life as a florist, and remembered all the work that had to be done before the first customers of the day arrived. And when there was work to be done, he thought of Penny. It was time to make the first pot of tea of the day. He hurried back to the kitchen.

  He flicked open the lid of a little steel teapot and added one tea bag and a tiny deluge of boiling water from the kettle. The water-heater gave off a puff of steam at that moment and it startled him a little, as it always did.

  “Are you there, Penny?” he called. “Tea’s in the pot! Hurry up!”

  “I’m up,” said his wife, slowly descending the creaking stairs. “What’s the rush? We’ve over an hour, yet, before opening.”

  She was wearing a long white dress and cardigan, pretty blue shoes, a gold-coloured belt with decorative coins on it and big hoop earrings, not to mention full make-up and sparkling, butterfly hair-clips. That was Penny, always holding things up with her little bit of glamour.

  “What do you think?” she said, giving a little twirl. “Do you think the butterflies suit me? They’re new.”

  “Very nice,” he said gently. “Not a very practical outfit for working in, of course, but nice, yes.”

  “We’ll have to take down the Christmas decorations, tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll really miss them.” She straightened up some tinsel on the tree.

  “The food won’t make itself,” he reminded her, gravely. “Oven’s on.”

  “We’ll get it made in time. Don’t we always?”

&nbs
p; “I suppose so… What kind of muffins do you fancy for today? Blueberry? Chocolate? They’re still popular with the office people. For the time being, at least.” He was checking the containers on the counter.

  “What about banana muffins, for a change? Where’s that American flag? I’ll stick it in the window and we’ll have a Coffee-and-Muffin promotion.”

  She found the flag at the back of the storeroom and crossed the shop, yawning, to hang it in place. Daniel told her his baking plans for the day, and Penny wrote it all down in coloured chalks on the blackboard and set it out on the footpath. Then she sat down at a small table and gazed out at the few people going past the window at that early hour. She waved at the florist across the road. Rose was dragging a large topiary tree across the floor.

  “Rose is up and about, already,” she said. “Have you noticed she’s been doing that a lot recently? She’s changing the window-display, I see. It looks nice, don’t you think?”

  “Mmmm,” said Daniel, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. Penny had a hankering for pretty things and he didn’t like to encourage her.

  She turned away from him. It was a cold Monday morning in January and her back was stiff already, just thinking about the day ahead. Penny Stanley had worked in the tea house since she was a child, and could have cut sandwiches and brewed tea in her sleep. She knew the sagging cupboards and the leaking taps in the cafe better than she knew her own body. She had drifted along through thirty-five years of nothing in particular, like a leaf in a stream. Her life had been uneventful, to say the least, and most days she was just grateful it had not been filled with tragedy. There was her parents’ car accident, of course. But apart from that, there was nothing at all to write home about. Somehow, she felt ashamed of her ordinary life. There was a resigned stare in her big brown eyes, and her hands were rough and reddened from twenty years of baking bread.

  But today, in her humble heart, Penny Stanley felt the stirrings of a revolution. She wanted things to change, and she knew that she was the only one who could change them. It was no use making wishes and waiting for another day. She had done that all her life.

  She could not explain it. It might have been a conversation she’d heard on the radio, about the approaching Millennium. One woman was spending thousands of pounds on a beach-party, which would take place in Australia. She was paying the travel costs for her entire circle of friends and family. Then, there was a man who was taking his wife and children to an isolated cottage, on a remote Scottish island, with enough food and water to see them through a nuclear disaster. Penny did not want to do anything so extreme, but she wanted to do something. The Millennium was only twelve months away. The earth was a thousand years older, and so was Penny. A thousand years older than she was on her wedding day.

  She found an upmarket interiors magazine on a chair and began to turn the pages. Daniel carried a cup of tea and a plain, buttered scone over to her on a tray, and frowned when he saw the magazine. He blamed glossy magazines for most of the unhappiness in the world. They filled people up with dreams of things they could never have.

  “Thanks, love,” said Penny, and she took a sip of the tea. “Now, here,” she said, “is the way a home ought to look! It’s a dream house! Look, Daniel, it’s a hotel, down south. The Lawson Lodge, they call it.”

  He peered over her shoulder at the pictures. “That’s some inherited mansion full of priceless antiques, Penny. You’ll only upset yourself, wanting a house like that.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with dreams. Dreams cost nothing,” she said. She put down her cup and rested her pointed chin in her hands. She gazed down at the pictures with longing in her dark brown eyes.

  Daniel went back to the kitchen.

  “Dreams are what keep you going when real life lets you down,” said Penny to herself. Her eyes scanned the photographs, taking it all in.

  A stately home on the south coast of Ireland, built in the nineteenth century by an English lord. Nowadays, the lord’s descendants had returned to London, where they lived in tiny overpriced flats, and the house was a hotel. Outside: grey stone facade surrounded by ornamental hedges, neatly clipped. Cracked urns on the doorstep, with fresh herbs spilling over the top. Two pedigree dogs with sleek black coats lay on the lawn, which was mown in neat stripes. Inside: rustic kitchen with dozens of copper saucepans hanging from racks above the massive blue stove. Cookery books stacked neatly on a painted Welsh dresser. Pots of home-made jam cooling on the windowsill. Dainty blue gingham curtains at the windows.

  And best of all, the huge sitting-room, painted a deep dark sinful red. A perfect backdrop for the comfortable white sofas, the ornate white table lamps, the heavy white brocade curtains, the plump white cushions with fringing round the edges. Original oil paintings hung on the red walls – of dreamy landscapes, in gilded frames. And on the occasional tables, there were pretty bowls of potpourri and handmade chocolates, thick books on modern art, fresh flowers in glass vases. Luxury at every turn.

  She sighed and touched the picture gently, as if she could somehow close her eyes and open them again and find herself in that beautiful room, standing by the arched window, gazing out over the topiary to the majestic ocean beyond. She wouldn’t even sit on the armchairs, if she were there. She wouldn’t lean back on those plump fringed cushions and squash them out of shape. She wouldn’t touch anything. She would just look at the paintings and enjoy the perfume of the expensive flowers. Penny loved beautiful things. She felt soothed by beauty, in all its forms.

  She brought her empty cup and saucer back to the counter. She laid the magazine reverently on its marked surface.

  “Look, Daniel – there’s the kind of thing I’d like to do in here. Paint the cafe blood-red. Just look at the effect when the table lamps are switched on. It’s so warm and rich.”

  “Here we go,” he sighed, as he polished the glass stand for the cheesecake. “These walls aren’t in good-enough condition to be painted. You know that, sweetheart.”

  “Can’t we get some people in to fix them? Or just bite the bullet and have a complete renovation? Bigger windows and new furniture. New units in the kitchen? You know we can afford it.”

  “People like it here, pet,” said Daniel firmly. “It’s one of the last places in the city that is still family-run and unchanged from the old days. The students from Queen’s love it. They say it’s ‘cool’. Retro-style or something.”

  “Retro, my foot! They don’t have to work in it, and live with it, and see it every day. Anyway, they only come in here because it’s cheaper than the nice places.”

  “We aren’t going to waste good money on rip-off builders and fancy designers, Penny. There’s no need for any of it. Extravagance is all it is, with so much poverty in the world.”

  “But it would make me so happy, Daniel! We could have a white sofa, there by the door, and a row of high chairs at the counter… I’ve so many ideas…”

  “Please, Penny, don’t start this again – not now. We still have to finish the baking. Will you check if the rolls are done? And I’ll get on with the cakes.” He consulted his watch.

  Penny looked at her husband and, for the first time ever, she thought she might stop loving him. She brushed past him, quite roughly, and went into the kitchen where she began to bang the cupboard doors in a small display of rebellion. She ignored the oven and made herself a very thick bacon sandwich with lots of red sauce, and a huge mug of sugary tea to go with it. Daniel might prefer a light breakfast, but Penny had a healthy appetite. She wasn’t a robot, she told herself; she would start work when she was good and ready. She sat down on a rickety kitchen chair and enjoyed her breakfast. Daniel sighed, and checked on the bread rolls himself. They were golden-brown and glossy. He slid the tray out of the oven and left them to cool on a wire rack.

  Penny and Daniel did not speak to each other again until the coffee-cake was ready to go into the oven. And that was only to discuss whether they should open a bag of paprika-flavour crisps or spicy tortill
a chips, to go with the sandwiches. Penny watched him expertly spooning cream onto the top of the cheesecake, smoothing the edges with a palette knife. Then, he added the cherry topping, and placed the whole thing on the pretty glass stand with painted mint leaves around the edges. He smiled with pleasure when it was finished. He was very proud of his baking skills. Penny was jealous of the attention her husband lavished on his desserts. She wished he would look at her with the same devotion in his eyes. She quickly made up a batch of banana muffins and bunged them in the oven with casual abandon.

  At seven thirty, Penny unlocked the front door and turned the cardboard sign to OPEN. A smiling postman emptied the letterbox outside the shop, waved to Penny, and drove off smartly in his little red van with his cargo of good news, bad news and bills for the citizens of Belfast and the world beyond.

  Chapter 2

  THE CREEPY CRAWLEYS

  At eight o’clock precisely, two old women came in, peeling off their scarves and gloves and rattling two collection tins. Beatrice and Alice Crawley. Twin sisters and best friends. They laughed and smiled all the time, and had numerous friends and interests. The secret of their happiness, they said, was that they were never foolish enough to get married. Daniel did not like it when they said things like that.

  They were retired schoolteachers and they had the abrupt manner of all professional educators. They walked everywhere, briskly, linking arms, and had a habit of finishing each other’s sentences. Daniel called them The Creepy Crawleys behind their backs.

  Beatrice and Alice lived in the small, terraced house at the quiet end of Mulberry Street that had been their childhood home. When they were not engaged in charitable activities, they worked hard at keeping their little house perfect. Starched, white lace hung at the windows and the front door was given a fresh coat of dark green paint every summer.