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Authors: Sharon Owens

Tags: #Fiction, #General

The Tea House on Mulberry Street (9 page)

BOOK: The Tea House on Mulberry Street
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Daniel was delighted with himself. He had hoped to be offered a position in the family business, and now he was being handed the whole thing
on a plate
. (Pardon the pun, he thought.) His ship had come in at last. He wondered if his father was still alive; maybe sitting on a rocking chair, on a porch somewhere in America, eating corn bread. He thought of Teresa, and he knew she would be proud of him. She would have enjoyed this party, everyone dancing so close to the sea. And he thought of his Aunt Kathleen, stern-faced and silent, still looking after her heavenly pennies, high above him in the darkening sky.

Chapter 7

A L
ADY IN A
V
ELVET
H
AT

The night that Penny brought up the unfortunate subject of trying for a baby, Daniel slept in the spare room. He tossed and turned on the stiff mattress all night. He briefly considered giving in to Penny’s desire to reduce her working hours. But that would mean hiring new staff. And if Penny had more time off, she would only spend it looking at baby clothes in the shops, and begging him to give her a child. And if they had a new baby, what then? She would want a new house to live in. A proper house with its own front door, and a garden with a swing. And maybe another baby to keep the first one company? That was the problem with women, they were always having ideas. They would be bankrupt in less than five years. He couldn’t support a family home and extra staff out of selling tea and sandwiches, no matter how hard he worked.

The next morning he brought Penny a cup of tea in bed and told her he would think about what she had said, hoping to buy himself some time.

“In the meantime,” he added, “we’d best go on as usual. Right, I’ll start the baking and you tidy up the cafe. I notice the floor could do with a wash.”

“Listen to me, Daniel,” she said, slowly, settling back on the pillows. “I’m not cleaning the cafe today, or ever again.”

“What?”

“Not ever. Do you hear me?”

“Have you gone mad?”

“I’m worn out and that’s the truth. Either a cleaner does it, or you can do it yourself. It’s up to you.”

“But I do all the baking!”

“I’m working eight hours a day from now on, and not a minute more. It’s my cafe too, you know! I’m entitled to some say in the running of it.”

“Is that so? Well, what are you going to contribute to the business, exactly?” he asked.

“I am going to start work at nine o’clock, and serve the customers and make the soup for lunch. Now, let me get back to sleep, or there’ll be ructions in this flat. If you want the floors done, you’d better shake a leg. I’ll not detain you any further.” And she finished her tea, lay down again and pulled the duvet up to her nose.

Daniel stood there, for a moment, completely speechless. The old Penny had gone away in the night, it seemed, and the new Penny was not afraid of standing up to him any more. It was already a quarter to seven, and there was nothing in the oven, a pile of dishes from last night to wash, the whole place to clean…

“Have you gone on strike?” he asked.

“Yes, I bloody have.”

“But you can’t, Penny. It’s your own shop…”

“Aha!”

“This doesn’t make any sense –”

“And another thing, you can sleep in the spare room from now on. There’s no point in you lying in here, reading cookery books half the night, keeping me awake!”

Daniel went out and closed the door quietly, as if someone had died in the house. Penny waited for him to explode; to shout at her, strike her, even. She imagined a passionate struggle on the stairs as he tried to drag her down to clean the cafe, an erotic tangle of limbs in the dark hallway. But he went downstairs quietly and started the baking on his own. She listened for the early-morning sounds of the equipment starting up, the milk bottles being brought in. She could hardly believe what she had done.

When she heard the lonesome scrape of the mop bucket in the yard, she almost ran down the stairs to help him, but then she thought of Jack and Millie Mortimer. If someone had told her, on her wedding day, that she would ever be jealous of the love life of that pair, she’d have laughed until her face ached. No, she was going to get her own way or die in the attempt. She closed her eyes. Her whole life had taken on a fragile quality. Every moment was stretched and full of tension.

But even though she was a nervous wreck, she knew she would not change her mind. Daniel was not used to her doing things on her own initiative, that was all. He would get used to it, he would have to, she fumed. She would say how tired she was, over and over, every time he asked her to do anything. He would have to leave his precious cakes and roll up his sleeves and do the donkey-work himself. She was not giving in this time. She would make life so difficult for him, he would be a broken man in a couple of months. All she had to do was stay calm, and keep gently pushing her husband round to her way of thinking. Gradually, very gradually. That was the way to do it. The balance of power was shifting, slowly but surely, to Penny’s side.

That afternoon, a wealthy-looking woman came into the cafe and approached Penny to ask if a magazine had been handed in. An interiors magazine, it was, with a picture of an antique armoire on the front, she explained, with real worry in her big grey eyes. Penny was startled by the woman’s beauty, and only half-listened to the details of her question. Her make-up was perfectly applied, smoky eye-shadow tapering into a neat point beneath exquisitely waxed eyebrows. Penny noticed little things like that, and she just knew it was the expensive make-up that came in fancy packaging, from big department stores. The waft of designer perfume was almost overpowering. Some feminine instinct in Penny made her glance around the cafe to make sure Daniel was not in the room.

The woman was dressed in layers of plum velvet: a floor-length coat with beading on the hem, a large, floppy hat and an embroidered scarf.

“So, did you find it, I wonder?”

Penny had, of course but she didn’t want to give it back.

It was very precious to her, the woman explained, that particular edition. It was the only copy she had of the first magazine she had edited single-handedly. Ten years old, it was. Penny hadn’t even noticed the date on the cover.

“Is that a fact?” she said. She wanted to keep the luxurious magazine. “I can’t say I’ve found an old magazine.”

“Oh, it doesn’t look out-of-date. That’s because the rooms featured have a timeless beauty,” said the woman, tucking a stray strand of hair behind one of her small, perfect ears. “Oh, it must be here! A nice-looking man served me. Maybe he has it? Maybe I should speak to him?”

Well, Penny wasn’t having that.

“Wait a minute.” Penny made a half-hearted show of looking under the counter. “Oh, here it is…” She reluctantly handed it over. She knew when she was beaten.

“Oh, thank you so much! I’m always losing things,” said the woman, and she ordered a cup of herbal tea.

Penny watched her from the kitchen, wondering if Daniel had found her attractive. He hadn’t mentioned anything about her.

Very well-dressed, she was. Much wealthier-looking than the regular clientele in Muldoon’s. And she had a strange accent that was a mixture of Belfast and New York. Well, she was in the publishing business, after all, thought Penny. Jet-setting around the globe, living here and there, staying in fabulous hotels like the one with the red sitting-room. She wondered what the woman was doing in her back-street cafe. Hopefully not writing a feature on Belfast eateries.

Penny and Daniel did not speak to each other for a week. When they did communicate, it was only to confirm orders in the shop.

Daniel slaved for a month, doing most of the work himself. Then, he gave in and hired a cleaner in the middle of February. She was called Mary Little, but she told him her friends called her Mary Soap. She came in every day at one o’clock and had the whole place spotless in less than an hour. Penny was amazed by her efficiency and the way she mopped the floor with strong, rhythmic stokes, never going over the same bit twice. And it looked much cleaner than it ever did when Penny cleaned it. The tiredness began to leave Penny’s face and she began to smile again, and look forward to Mary arriving each day. She paid Mary out of the cash register, and tried not to notice the hurt in her husband’s eyes.

Mary knew that something was not right with the Stanley marriage, but she was not in the counselling business. She was only paid to clean the shop, and that’s what she did. She knew the stories that went about the hotel trade, about Daniel Stanley and his peculiar ways. They said he was reared by a mad aunt who wore the same coat for fifty years; and that he wasn’t the full shilling himself.

But Mary wasn’t the sort of woman to carry gossip.

Chapter 8

B
RENDA HAS AN
E
XHIBITION

Brenda Brown was in great spirits. Her pale face was shining with hope when she came into Muldoon’s at five o’clock, for a cheese and pickle toasted sandwich, tortilla chips and a large cola with ice and lemon. She wrote a letter with her gold pen, as she ate.

28 February, 1999.

Dear Nicolas Cage,

Did you get my last letter?

I’m still waiting on a signed photo. I have a little silver frame, all ready for it.

Did I tell you? I’m a painter, and I’m holding an exhibition of my most recent paintings in a local gallery. Myself and a few other graduates have rented the gallery between us, for a fortnight, and we are each exhibiting five pieces. There were endless discussions about who would hang what, where. Everybody wanted the big wall opposite the window. Tom Reilly-Dunseith got it, in the end. He said he had to have that space, as the light coming in from the outside was an essential part of his sculptural forms. Pretentious old fish, that he is. Basically, he makes big question marks out of car-exhausts.

The rest of them are in the gallery now, fussing and fretting with their cans of white emulsion. There was a hole in the stretch of wall that I got, but I patched it up with masking tape and paint.

I enclose a postcard of one of my paintings, called Waiting For The Cortège. It’s about the funeral of a teenage boy who died during a riot. Tom Reilly-Dunseith said it was, and I quote: “Boring, unimaginative and passé.”

I told him he was only welding pieces of junk together, and trying to pass it off as modern art, because he can’t actually draw very well. In fact, he failed his life drawing unit in second year, but I wouldn’t embarrass him by telling people that.

Do you like the painting? You see, the crowd is full of pretty girls who fancied him. (The dead boy.) It’s about all the things he could have done, and experienced, if he’d lived in another time and place. It’s a comment on the futility of violence.

I’m thinking of changing my name to something more mysterious than Brenda Brown. Something Irish that reminds a person of old money and a pioneering spirit.

Maybe Aoife Fitzgerald-Conway?

Maybe Geraldine Murphy-Maguire.

Maybe I’m being daft.

We’ll be having a few jars later, at my place, before the off – I mean, we’ll be having a few drinks at my apartment, before the exhibition begins.

I’ll probably wear my black trouser suit and white shirt, as usual, and slick my hair back with gel. Androgynous and timeless. Lots of dark eye-shadow, nothing on the lips. I’m not the sexy type. But I have a kind of spiritual beauty, I like to think. Something above and beyond the merely physical. (I hope.)

Anyway, must dash. Wish me luck,

Yours sincerely,

Brenda Brown.

BOOK: The Tea House on Mulberry Street
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