The Tea House on Mulberry Street Read online

  What would Millie do if she knew that Daniel had refused to discuss even the possibility of having a child with Penny? He said they had neither the time nor the room for a baby. And that they were far too old for trips to Mothercare and pre-natal classes, anyway. If Millie knew that, she would trail Penny up the street to the solicitor’s office, and fill out the divorce petition herself. That’s what she’d do.

  No, it was far too late in the day to ask for help now. Penny’s situation was the kind of thing that ended up in the gutter press: Belfast Couple Make Sandwiches, But Not Babies!

  She would die of shame if anybody knew the kind of life they led above Muldoon’s Tea Rooms. And so, she told Millie that they were just too busy to have children.

  Penny poured herself another cup of tea and began to make plans.

  The main thing was, she was exhausted. She began work in the shop at six thirty each morning and did not finish until well after nine in the evening. It was far too long a time to spend at work. She rarely left the building, for heaven’s sake! Daniel took the daily takings to the bank in the afternoon and managed the money side of things. But Penny knew they had more than enough to hire some staff, and do less work themselves. Penny didn’t even have to be in the shop at all, strictly speaking. Daniel could employ a couple of waitresses to replace her. At least they should have a cleaner. Who ever heard of the owner of a business cleaning her own shop? It was embarrassing.

  And all the time Daniel spent on the food was beginning to drive Penny crazy. He was – what did they call it? A workaholic. She would suggest to him that they buy some pastries ready-made from a bakery, the way her father used to do, when he was the boss. That way, they could just concentrate on presentation.

  And they must consider closing the shop at a reasonable hour each night, never mind the rush for snacks when the soaps were over. But that was going to be a big battle. She would need a lot of courage to even suggest something like that.

  The door of the shop opened and a group of untidy schoolchildren came in, spilling bags and hockey sticks on the floor, and forming an untidy queue for filled rolls and shortcake fingers to eat on the way to school. Penny looked at their young faces and wondered if she would ever have a son or a daughter of her own to worry and fuss over. They could all have done with having their uniforms pressed and their hair combed, but they did seem to have healthy appetites, at any rate. Soon, the display case was empty. When they had gone back to school, Penny wiped a tear of longing from her eye and polished all their fingerprints off the glass.

  She sliced open more rolls and forked in flakes of canned tuna and generous dabs of home-made mayonnaise, and garnished them with chives. She wiped the tables and washed the dishes. She swept the floor and thought of the beautiful kitchen in the magazine. She dreamed of perfect topiary trees, and dishwashers filled with spotless china, as she filled the sugar bowls, and picked dead flies out of the net curtain on the back door. She dreamed of huge, white sofas and fat, tasselled cushions as she carried the rubbish out to the yard.

  Chapter 3

  BRENDA BROWN FROM BELFAST TOWN

  It was nine o’clock in the morning, and the cafe was filling up with customers. Just as the Crawleys were gathering up their money tins and sheets of stickers to go collecting, a dishevelled young woman wearing paint-spattered boots came into the shop and ordered a cup of tea. She flicked her black fringe out of her eyes as she handed over the exact amount in payment to Daniel. The Creepy Crawleys often wondered why the young madam bothered to keep the back of her hair so short, if she was going to leave the fringe four inches long and hanging in her face. But the object of their scorn never noticed them glaring at her as she drank her tea and ate her meals in Muldoon’s.

  “No toast,” she said, in reply to Daniel’s question.

  “Can I tempt you to an Ulster fry? Free-range eggs, you know. It’s all the rage. Lovely bit of soda bread, we have today…”

  “No, thank you. Nothing to eat. I’m not hungry.”

  She was hungry but money was in short supply that morning. Her cheque from the unemployment office wasn’t due until the following day.

  Daniel shook his head. With customers like this, he thought, was it any wonder takings were so poor, some days? He shook his head again as she made her way to a seat, and he hoped that the smear of blue paint on the hip of her jeans was dry. He didn’t want the chairs marked any more than they were already.

  The young woman’s name was Brenda Brown. She was a regular customer in the shop, given that she lived right next door, in a one-bedroom flat. Brenda seemed to prefer her own company. She liked to listen to Radiohead, or Placebo, on her personal stereo. And she never seemed to have a boyfriend. She often sat near the counter, for hours on end, writing long letters on red paper with a gold-ink pen, and putting them into red envelopes. The paper and the envelopes were always red, never any other colour. Brenda talked to herself, too – that was another strange thing about her.

  Brenda was an artist, and consequently penniless. Brenda’s mother didn’t understand art but she tried to help her destitute daughter. Mrs Brown was a great fan of car-boot sales and she frequently offered to sell Brenda’s collection of paintings for her at such events. The paintings were a bit weird: full of people with blue faces, their too-big eyes weeping and crying. And angry storms and old-fashioned, cracked windows and big blackbirds hovering above bare trees. But still, some people would buy anything. That was the magic of car-boot sales. They attracted the sort of people who might buy weird things. She might be able to shift a few pieces for Brenda.

  But Brenda didn’t want her great gift to the world to languish on trestle-tables in windy carparks. Her paintings were not just something to hang on the wall, she had explained to her mother, countless times. They were not just pictures, something to match the carpet. They were paintings. They were Art. Fine Art. They must be sold in a proper art gallery, to discerning and sensitive people who lived in houses with plain white walls. Anything else would be an insult to her talent. If Brenda was going to sell out, she would start churning out watercolours of pretty Irish cottages and deserted sunny beaches, and be nice and agreeable to everyone, and be done with it.

  “I’d think about it, if I were you,” said her mother, when she came to visit Brenda in her tiny flat. Brenda’s canvases were stacked against the walls in every corner and passageway. There was hardly room to walk about, never mind get busy with the vacuum-cleaner. And at twenty-four years of age, she thought, wasn’t it time Brenda was earning a decent living? Mrs Brown herself made far more money, buying and selling bits of old junk, than Brenda ever got for her pictures. To Mrs Brown’s knowledge, Brenda hadn’t sold even one painting.

  “Money is money, at the end of the day, and this place could do with a good clear-out,” said Mrs Brown, as she tripped over a small canvas, titled Waiting For My Love.

  Brenda sighed a lot when her mother came to visit, and wondered how her parents, two Elvis fans who had never been anywhere remotely cultural, could have produced a great and talented artist such as herself. And in Belfast, too, of all places. When everyone knew it was Donegal and Dublin that were the cool places to be born. Painfully, unbearably cool. All Celtic wildness and Bord Fáilte landscapes. James Joyce, and all the rest of them, writing poetry in smoky bars that reeked of porter. Would Bono or Enya have done so well, she wondered, if they’d grown up in a small village in County Tyrone that no-one had ever heard of? Or if their names had been something terrible like Maisie Hegarty, or Francis Magroarty?

  Then again, there was Liam Neeson. He was from a town called Ballymena. That wasn’t so far from Belfast – well, Brenda had never been there and wasn’t exactly sure of where it was on the map. Yet Liam Neeson had managed to achieve world-wide fame as an actor, despite his ordinary name and humble beginnings. (Every rule had one exception.) Brenda made a mental note to go to Ballymena some day and see if there was a Liam Neeson exhibition in the town hall, or a plaque on the wall of his
childhood home. Maybe, if she went to Ballymena, and walked the streets that he had walked, some of Liam’s good fortune and charisma might rub off on her. She was a superstitious kind of person, full of strange notions.

  And so, she persisted with the conviction that it was her boring name and birthplace that were holding her back. Any artist born in a cool place, with an elegant family name, had a head start on the likes of Brenda Brown. Two years it was, since her graduation; two years painting great works on the subjects of love and loss, and peace and war, and life and death. Mostly death, actually. She spent weeks on every painting, fussing over every detail, mixing hundreds of different shades of blue on her artist’s palette. And whole days thinking up poignant titles for them, when they were finished. And not a glimmer of interest from the galleries. Every single gallery in the north had rejected her. There was no justice in the world.

  Brenda didn’t notice the dabs of oil paint on her clothes any more, and she whispered softly to herself when she was thinking of her next canvas.

  It was a lonely business, being an artist. Other girls her age were only interested in marrying eligible men or having affairs with unsuitable men, going on foreign holidays, buying trendy cars and getting onto the property ladder. They weren’t remotely bothered by the kinds of things that Brenda was obsessed with. She spent hours just sitting alone in her flat and thinking about the complexity of the world, and its people. For example: if Vincent van Gogh were alive today, she wondered, would he be doing well on anti-depressants and making a fortune? Or, were his paintings only valuable now, because he’d shot himself in the chest, in a cornfield full of crows? Brenda didn’t want fame that badly.

  Or, if poets and painters were in charge of the world, instead of politicians, would they make a better job of things? Or a worse job? Or was the whole planet simply doomed to stagger between war and famine forever?

  Was there a God? And if there was a God, why did He tolerate so much suffering? And why wasn’t God a woman, anyway?

  Strangely, none of Brenda’s contemporaries shared her sadness about the weird and self-destructive nature of the human race. Sometimes, people she knew from her college days avoided her in the street. They usually disappeared into the nearest shop when they saw her coming.

  Only last week, she saw Emily Shadwick diving into the optician’s – Emily, who had perfect eyesight. Brenda knew this but she wasn’t really hurt by it. After all, she didn’t want to talk to Emily either – about that loser from her workplace, most likely. Emily was making a doormat of herself over him; she was living with him, sleeping with him, paying the rent, waiting on him hand and foot, and he still wouldn’t get married. The lazy scoundrel! If Brenda had to listen to the dreary saga of their non-romance one more time, she’d end up chewing blankets in a psychiatric ward. (Poor Emily was delighted if her boyfriend occasionally gave her a bunch of flowers that cost £2.99.) That was the trouble with most girls: no imagination at all. They had wedding dresses on the brain. Brenda was better off on her own.

  She had no-one like-minded to talk to, so she talked to herself quite a lot. She was fond of a wee nip of gin and tonic and sometimes she looked hung over and haggard when she came into the tea house, counting out loose change in the palm of her hand. Daniel thought Brenda was unpredictable and he kept an eye on the cash-register when she was around, but Penny liked her. Brenda seemed to be searching for beauty in this rain-soaked grey city; and Penny could identify with that. Sometimes, when Daniel was not looking, Penny gave Brenda a free sandwich or a second cup of tea, and she smiled at her when she was writing her letters. Penny was the nearest thing Brenda had to a friend.

  Penny had often wondered who the recipient of the mysterious red letters might be, but she was too well-mannered to ask directly. Then one day, when she was cleaning the tables, she saw the address and Brenda told her everything. They had quite a long chat about it, over two lattes and a slice of pecan pie. Penny’s treat. A wiser woman would have told Brenda to have a titter of wit, or to get real, as they said nowadays. Or, get a life. But Penny was a bit of a dreamer, herself.

  Brenda was in love with Nicolas Cage, the actor. She had been writing love letters to him for years, but she hadn’t posted any of them. They were simply bits of romantic nonsense: things like wanting to walk through the streets of Paris with him, in the wintertime, kissing him softly amid the swirling snowflakes (they would both wear long black overcoats). Or describing how she wanted to take a black and white photograph of him in Pere Lachaise cemetery (he would be looking up at the sky, thinking something profound). And afterwards they would drink strong coffee in some run-down little bar in the back-streets (hiding from the paparazzi) and hold hands on the table. Stuff like that. She kept the letters in her little flat, under the bed, in a shoebox. There were ninety-two letters in the box now, all stamped and ready to go.

  The letters formed part of Brenda’s Fine Art degree show in 1997, although by that stage there were only fifty-four of the red envelopes. Brenda had tied them in a bundle with fine wire, and placed them on a cushion made out of razor-blades. She called the piece The Fragile Heart, and her tutor was very impressed. Brenda got a double first in her degree and lots of praise from the Dean, but unfortunately, no commissions.

  Now, sitting in the tea house, her cup of tea within reach, Brenda took a deep breath, flexed her writing hand, and began.

  5 January, 1999

  Dear Nicolas Cage,

  I hope this letter finds you well.

  I just want you to know that I saw you in Wild At Heart in the Nicolas Cage Season at Queen’s Film Theatre, and it was the most thrilling experience of my life. That snakeskin jacket really suited you, as did smoking two cigarettes at once.

  I’ve never been abroad but my parents used to own a caravan in Donegal. We used to spend entire summers in it, just looking out at the Atlantic Ocean, while eating cooked ham and tomatoes off a fold-down table. And all the time you were living over there on the other side, in America.

  Anyway, I knew, when I saw you in Wild At Heart that you were just born to become an international star. The way you killed that would-be assassin in the opening scene, with your bare hands. Oh, it was so STYLISH. Normally, I’m a pacifist, you understand? Coming from Belfast, as I do, I feel I should make that clear from the outset. I cannot bear violence of any kind, unless it’s very tastefully done, in a film.

  Laura Dern was good, too – driving you across the state line in that old convertible, playing loud rock music on the car stereo; helping you to break parole. Dancing in the desert. Oh, what a film!

  My family car was a rust-covered second-hand Vauxhall Cavalier. Mum and Dad and me and my two sisters used to go to Bundoran, in it. Listening to rock-and-roll, all the way there and back again. Elvis, usually. It would have been fantastic in an open-top, with the sun blazing down on us as we sang along to ‘In The Ghetto’ by the King. But the truth is, it was usually overcast. Or raining. We spent most of the time in the Bon Tuck restaurant, in Bundoran town, eating burgers the size of dinner plates. (Word has it, the burgers in Bundoran aren’t as big as they used to be.)

  I loved Moonstruck, with you in a tuxedo, and only one hand – going to the opera with Cher. I loved you in the role of the brokenhearted baker. Suffering as you worked. A bit like me. (I’m a painter.) You can roll me in flour any time you like. (Just my little joke.)

  Please send me a signed photograph. I’m sorry my name is so dull.

  I’m writing to you from Muldoon’s Tea Rooms on Mulberry Street. It’s a peaceful place, and there’s a postbox just outside the window, which is handy.

  I look forward to your reply. I am a genuine fan. Yours sincerely,

  Brenda Brown

  Brenda folded up the letter, and kissed it, and slipped it into a crisp red envelope (25p each from Bradbury Graphics). She wrote on the front, in gold ink: To Nicolas Cage, Hollywood Actor, Hollywood Hills, Hollywood USA. She stuck several First Class stamps on the envelope and held it softly ag
ainst her cheek.

  “Ah luv ya, Brenda Brown from Belfast Town,” she whispered, in an American accent.

  Penny came out of the kitchen just then, with some clean cups and saucers on a tray.

  “Writing to him again, are you? If I were you, I’d post that letter right this minute. You’re not going to live forever, you know. And neither is he. I saw him in Hello last week, and his hairline is receding, for heaven’s sake. We’ll all be pensioners before anything exciting happens around here.”

  Brenda was shocked. It was so unlike Penny to be outspoken. She was usually the most docile of creatures. There was something about her today, some bright look in her eyes that disturbed Brenda. Were her words an omen? Brenda believed in omens.

  Suddenly, she bolted from the shop to the postbox outside and thrust the letter into the slot. Then, immediately, she was sorry. She peered into the postbox, but it was too late. The letter was gone, down into the darkness at the bottom. It was now the property of the Post Office.

  With knees that had turned to jelly, she tiptoed back inside, and sank into her chair. Her tea was cold. She looked hopefully towards the counter. Penny usually gave her a free refill, but her luck was out today. Penny was back at the sink and there was only Daniel at the counter, with a frown of concentration on his face as he carefully sliced up a big cake with fancy icing on it.

  Brenda began to breathe very softly, to calm the panic that was making her heart flutter. And she waited for the postman to come, to make the ten o’clock collection.