Two places had come up recently: Maureen wasn’t coming any more. She felt able to cope now and she didn’t want to take up a space that someone else might need. Reginald, who had been coming for nine months, had cried and said he hadn’t thought it would have been possible to feel as if he could carry on, but he could now and had taken flight into a new life – a different life – without his beloved wife. The light had come back to his horizon. He’d donated a hundred pounds for tea and cake for those who came after. That left Maurice, who had lived with and cared for his mother since he was a child, Yvonne, recently widowed and Sharon who had lost the dog she doted on: some people grieved as much, if not more, for animals they had loved and Molly saw nothing wrong in that. Pete and Laurie would join them: a young man who had tragically lost his wife in a car accident and a young woman who had lost her fiancé in similar circumstances.
The clock on the wall chimed seven and right on cue in walked Yvonne and Maurice together. Yvonne was surprisingly chipper considering she had only buried her husband two months ago. But then Molly knew that the outside didn’t always match the inner.
‘Hellooo,’ said Yvonne, in a chirpy voice. ‘I hope there’s plenty of cake.’
‘Plenty as always,’ said Mr Singh, rubbing his hands together. ‘What can I get for you, Yvonne?’
‘Chocolate, always chocolate if available,’ she replied.
‘And tea for two?’ Maurice turned to confirm that with Yvonne. Despite them both being in their fifties, Maurice had taken Yvonne firmly under his wing. It hadn’t escaped Molly or Mr Singh how much his mood had brightened since Yvonne had joined them.
The doorbell tinkled again and in walked Sharon. She was a small, round woman in her early forties who wore her grief like a coat that weighed heavily on her shoulders.
‘Hello Sharon, love,’ said Molly. ‘How are you doing?’
‘Bit rough this week, Molly,’ replied Sharon, her voice crumbling with emotion. ‘Billy would have been eight.’
‘Date anniversaries can be tough. You come and join the queue for cake,’ said Maurice, beckoning her over.
‘My husband would never let me eat cake,’ said Yvonne. ‘He said I’d get fat. If only he could see me now,’ she added, as Mr Singh handed her a wedge of chocolate cake on a china plate. A fat Yvonne was difficult to imagine, everyone thought together. She was built like a bird which had fallen out of its nest before its feathers had had a chance to sprout. Her fragile bones would never have supported fat.
‘My mother loved cake,’ said Maurice. ‘She’d have eaten a whole one at a sitting if I’d let her. “Sundays and birthdays, Mother,” I used to tell her. Towards the end, the rules went out of the window though. She had coffee and walnut for breakfast on quite a few occasions.’
Molly checked the time again just as the café door opened a fraction and a sliver of nervous person appeared: a tall, slim woman with a long white-blonde plait resting on her shoulder and a sweet, heart-shaped face.
‘Come in,’ said Molly. ‘Is it Laurie?’ She darted over, hand extended to draw the young woman in. Laurie stepped into the shop now that she had been seen and couldn’t exactly backtrack. She’d been sitting in her car for over ten minutes, building up to joining them. She never felt the slightest bit discomfited mixing with people, but this was different. Here she was expected to let people in, past the armour-plating that had been welding itself around her for six months, exposing her soft, vulnerable underbelly.
‘Yes,’ said Laurie, coughing away a croak.
‘You must have cake, it’s obligatory,’ said Molly. She smiled and Laurie responded with a smile of her own.
‘Okay, if I must, then I will. Thank you.’
‘Well as soon as you’re served, we’ll make a start,’ said Molly. It didn’t look as if Peter Moore was going to make an appearance. Maybe next week, she thought with hope.
*
Outside the café, Pete told himself not to be so bloody stupid and just open the door. It felt like the equivalent of jumping into a swimming pool; the water was always lovely once you were in but taking that initial dive was sometimes hampered by a ridiculous negative anticipation. He ran into burning buildings for a living and yet he was standing outside a café geeing himself up to walk in and have a sodding cup of tea with a pensioner. He counted down from three, depressed the handle, pushed slightly and the cheery bell above his head announced his arrival in a way that said he couldn’t possibly turn and head back to the car. His foot was already over the threshold when his eyes took in the company he was to keep for the next hour or so and his brain sighed. How the hell could this motley crew all sitting around eating cake and drinking tea even hope to help him to fit into the world again?
The Daily Trumpet was in court this week to witness Jason ‘Juice’ Hughes appearing before magistrates after pelting the mayor and lady mayoress with vegan sausage rolls on the steps of the town hall in protest at Brexit and Climate Change. Mr Juice asked it to be taken into consideration that he had not wanted to cause undue offence by lobbing meat-based products at the couple as he respected the mayor and mayoress were virgins.
Chapter 2
August, two weeks earlier
Laurie De Vere pulled up in her usual parking space at Daily Trumpet HQ. It said a lot that a visiting solicitor had her own allocated spot. Coming here was the highlight of the week for her. Much as she loved the daily grind as a general solicitor at Butler and Jubb Legal Associates, the job she did at the Daily Trumpet was more like playtime and the people who worked there like a dysfunctional family that both infuriated her and amused her in equal measures. Laurie had never had the desire to specialise in a particular branch of law; she considered herself a GP of the legal world. One minute she was sorting out Mrs X’s divorce, the next helping Mr Y take Company Z to court for constructive dismissal, but if she was ever going to throw all her eggs in one judicial basket, she would have picked defamation, libel and slander, which sounded like a firm of solicitors in itself – and which was a subdivision of litigation developing at the rate of a Triffid in a growbag. Thanks to all the errors that appeared in the Daily Trumpet, people were always trying to sue it, hoping for a multi-million pound settlement but, maybe not surprisingly, settling instead for an afternoon tea for two or a pie and pea supper at a local hostelry. At the moment Laurie needed the jolly bunch of field reporters and office staff as much as they needed her. Her duty to the newspaper fuelled a joie de vivre that she always felt guilty for experiencing, as if she were benefitting from someone else’s despair. And the editor of the Daily Trumpet, Alan Robertson, really did despair.
The hot summer sun was shining in the cloudless sky and yet it couldn’t warm the chill Laurie felt in her heart which had been there for six solid months, like an emotional permafrost that stubbornly refused to melt. It had been frozen, dark February when Laurie’s world had tipped on its axis and yet for weeks afterwards she had felt a spotlight as intense as this August sun above trained on her with unrelenting brightness, marking her as a creature to be skirted around, dashed away from because she represented an awkward encounter. However adept people thought they were with words, all of them dried up when they had, in their midst, someone recently bereaved. People had even avoided her rather than deliver a platitudinal, ‘Sorry for your loss’, or ‘Sorry to hear your bad news’. Others flapped around in a pool of clichés hoping to net something that would give comfort, but there was none to be found. Even Alan Robertson, who usually had more wise words than a monastery full of Dalai Lamas – albeit mostly invective that he attributed to his great gran – hadn’t even attempted to say anything profound to her at Alex’s funeral. He had put his arms around her and that hug said more than anything words could have conveyed, especially as he wasn’t at all an emotionally demonstrative man. She had taken much strength from the gesture; it had helped her get through a day that was saturated with sadness and one that she thought she might never properly recover from.