The Tea House on Mulberry Street (38 page)

BOOK: The Tea House on Mulberry Street

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Henry and Rose fell quietly in love in the wilds of Connemara. Henry bought a little cottage and a year’s supply of turf, and they sat beside the fire each night reading gardening books and drinking red wine. They planted all the trees that they thought might survive the heavy rainfall and the strong winds coming in from the Atlantic. When Henry woke up in Rose’s arms each morning, he thanked God for her long red hair and her freckles and her pale white skin. And for the tea house on Mulberry Street from where he had first glimpsed her. The first time Rose told him she loved him too, he proposed to her, and she said yes.

Clare Fitzgerald and Peter Prendergast set the date for their wedding. They had wasted enough time, they said. She teased him sometimes, about his job. She thought he should have been able to find her a lot sooner, seeing that he was a detective, and he agreed that he probably could have, but that his male pride kept getting in the way.

“I thought you had gone off me – you were a bit of a snob, as I remember,” he said.

Clare wanted to hit him with her handbag but she couldn’t find it.

Peter got a transfer to New York, and moved into Clare’s beautiful apartment. They got married in a simple ceremony, with just the two of them, and all the emotion that had been denied by fate for so long. Mike, Clare’s colleague, and his boyfriend, who acted as witnesses, showered the newly-weds with pink and gold confetti, and Clare kept a handful of it in a glass box, on her bedside table.

Penny’s father would have been very pleased with the tea house, if he had still been around to see it. The crowds were lining up to get into the place, and everyone said the atmosphere of happiness and love was the best thing about it. Penny had a special bullet-proof, burglar-proof glass case made for the shop. She displayed Nicolas Cage’s snakeskin jacket in it, and Brenda’s painting of him. Stanley’s became a mecca for fans of his films. Penny was regularly offered a fortune for the jacket, but she refused to sell it. After all, it wasn’t hers to sell. She was only looking after it for Brenda Brown.

Brenda Brown, or rather, Tatiana Cobalt-Clearwater, was living in Connemara with her little dog, Nick, and she had never been happier. She was far away from Belfast and the Assembly, and the riots and the flags, and the police and the psychiatrists, and the credit-card bills. But best of all, she was far away from art. By day, she cycled round the countryside, collecting rainwater statistics, with Nick barking at her heels. And by night, she listened to the crackle and hiss of the fire, and watched the patterns it made on the walls of the cottage. Sean called by from time to time, and they had great chats about the environment. They took part in a peaceful anti-pollution protest in Dublin, and held hands on the march. Sean said he thought Brenda would look beautiful with long hair, so she stopped shaving the back of her head.

She worried that she was losing her feminist backbone, and might be falling in love with Sean, but then he installed a wind-powered electricity generator in the cottage, and she had to admit, men could sometimes be very useful indeed. She kissed him gently, under the new electric light, and thought that he was very handsome in his old denim dungarees. Sean didn’t need a snakeskin jacket, or a vintage car, to make him attractive. He was lovely, just the way he was.

She asked him for a photograph of himself, and he gave her one, and she put it in a little frame she made out of pebbles and seashells. It was nice to have a face in a frame at last.

When Penny’s baby was born, Daniel told every customer who came into the shop that his wife had had a healthy baby boy, and that she was going to call him Daniel too. Danny, for short. He gave cups of tea and coffee away for free, for three whole days. They held a big party for all their friends, in the cafe, to celebrate the joyous occasion of Danny’s christening, and even Millie Mortimer and Jack (and the weans) were invited. They showed up, looking slightly shamefaced, but left their toolbox at home. Penny filled the cafe with fresh flowers, and balloons and streamers, and everybody wore brightly-coloured party-hats and danced till dawn. Danny slept through it all, in the cafe that would one day be his. Passers-by looked in the windows and wished they had been invited, too. The buffet was magnificent, and Daniel had even made a big sponge cake with a little sugar-paste model of himself, Penny and Danny on the top.

Stanley’s Tea Rooms soon became the most fashionable coffee house in the city and people came from all over the world to marvel at its marbled magnificence, and Nicolas Cage’s snakeskin jacket in its shiny, glass case.

THE END

Table of Contents

The TEA HOUSE on MULBERRY STREET