1
I sit down placing the teapot in front of me. The tea has brewed for exactly four minutes and I pour the reddish-brown liquid into my favourite blue and white striped china mug. No milk, no sugar. Just tea. I sit and watch the steam curling off the surface of the liquid as I allow it to cool and I wait for the subtle aroma of bergamot to hit me. I close my eyes and listen to the gentle click of knitting needles.
‘Ellie used to be scared of Father Christmas you know,’ my aunt Miranda says into the comfortable silence.
I smile to myself and hear a few chuckles interrupting the knitting. Most people here have heard this story before – it’s one my aunt wheels out every year. It’s the beginning of December and Christmas plans are in full swing – carol singing at the Model Village, a special New Year pub quiz and the inaugural tea and champagne celebration for New Year’s Eve here at The Two Teas café.
I force my eyes open, knowing what’s coming – Sascha won’t have heard this story about my fear of Santa yet. I’m so tired I could just drift off to sleep in the warmth of the café. The last thing I want to do is knit or chat about my childhood fears.
As I suspected, Sascha is staring at me open-mouthed. ‘Scared of Santa,’ she says. ‘But why?’
‘I wasn’t scared exactly,’ I reply picking up my mug and taking a sip, but it’s still too warm to drink. ‘Just very wary.’
‘She claimed that she didn’t want some old man in her bedroom,’ Miranda goes on.
‘I think it showed common sense beyond my years,’ I say.
I watch Sascha think about that for a moment, her eyes turning back to her knitting. ‘It is a strange tradition when you think about it,’ she says. ‘Mostly children are told to have nothing to do with strange men.’ She pauses and I think she’s going to say something else but she doesn’t. I think of the empty room in the flat at the hotel that she owns with her husband Geoff, the empty room that I know they both want to turn into a nursery one day.
It’s no secret to the women sitting around this table that Sascha has struggled to get pregnant. It’s one of the reasons she and Geoff moved to Sanderson Bay, thinking that the slower pace of life would help. They gave up their busy corporate lives in Leeds to move to this little town on the Yorkshire coast over a year ago. I’m not sure that turning a run-down seaside bed and breakfast into the luxurious boutique hotel it has become over the last twelve months has been particularly stress-free, but Sascha insists that despite the fact she still hasn’t fallen pregnant, they are both happier here. Sanderson Bay has that effect on us all.
‘Of course we always used to hang stockings by the fireplace,’ Clara says. ‘Santa Claus came in via the chimney, which is based on the Norse tradition of Odin who came into houses via fire holes on the solstice.’
We all groan at her because Clara knows everything and she isn’t afraid of sharing her vast wealth of useless information with us at any opportunity. As well as running the town’s small supermarket, Clara Bellings is the trivia queen of The Black Horse and her pub quiz team haven’t been beaten in over two months. Terry, the landlord, is thinking of having them banned.
The Knitting Club meet every Monday in my aunt and uncle’s café. I suppose I should say that it’s my café now but I still can’t believe that I’m a business owner. I don’t feel grown up enough to own my own café and, when I think about where I was just a year ago, I can hardly believe that it’s my name on the deeds to this place, that it’s my name on the brass plate above the door and that it’s my name, Eloise Caron, on the Companies House website next to the words “The Two Teas Limited”. It took five minutes to set up the limited company. I feel as though it should have taken much longer to do something that seems so grown up.
Miranda, my aunt, insists that nobody ever feels grown up enough to be doing whatever it is that they are doing – we’re all winging it, or so she says. Even Bessie, who keeps her true age very close to her heart but must be seventy-five at least.
It was my idea to use the café in the evenings as a venue for groups to meet, just as it was my idea to sell our variety of loose-leaf teas along with cups, teapots and other tea drinking accessories. So far it’s been a success. On Tuesdays the café plays host to the local book group and on Thursdays my uncle James helps me move all the furniture to one side for the Pilates class. But the Monday evening Knitting Club is the best night of the week in my opinion – nothing short of a biblical plague would stop the six of us turning up.
Miranda is Darjeeling, light and floral, which she drinks like me with no milk or sugar. Clara is English breakfast with so much milk and sugar I wonder why she bothers with the tea at all. Lisa Martin is our newest recruit even though she has lived in Sanderson Bay longer than either me or Sascha – she is Assam with a splash of oat milk. Lisa works as a lawyer in Hull but bought a house here because she’s loved it since she was a child and, despite her hellish commute, she always makes it in time for both the Knitting Club and the Pilates class. Bessie, the matriarch of our group who has lived in Sanderson Bay her whole life, even if nobody knows how long that life has been, is a hardened coffee drinker.
When I took over the café I didn’t want a huge barista-style coffee machine because I wanted to concentrate on tea and I didn’t want the place to smell of coffee all the time, but thanks to Bessie I always keep a pot of filter coffee on.
Sascha has given up caffeine in the pursuit of pregnancy and tonight she’s drinking nettle tea, made from the dried nettles she helped me collect over the summer and which are supposedly good for fertility. It tastes disgusting and who knows if it even works, but Sascha is determined.
As for me, I’m Earl Grey – Chinese keemun tea and bergamot. I first discovered it at university and it soothes my soul, although I’ve had to cut down on the number of cups I drink these days, as I’m starting to notice I don’t sleep as well as I used to. I probably shouldn’t be drinking it this late in the evening.
Miranda taught me to knit when I used to stay with her and James on my holidays from boarding school. It’s always been one of my favourite things to do, even though I was the brunt of a lot of jokes at university for my old-lady hobby. Knitting wasn’t as fashionable then as it is now, but I’ve always found something meditative in watching a new project grow. It calms me down when I’m stressed or anxious. Not that I’m as stressed as I used to be, now I’ve moved to Sanderson Bay. I’ve started to feel different over the last few months, as though I have the space to breathe again, as though the walls have stopped closing in.
It breaks my heart that Miranda’s arthritis is so bad that some days it is too painful for her to knit. But she never misses Knitting Club, sitting with us and joining in the gentle banter, her gnarled hands curled around her mug of Darjeeling.
‘Nobody wants to hear any more about Saint Nicholas,’ Bessie says now, clearly tired of Clara’s stories.
‘I’m just saying,’ Clara replies. ‘Traditionally we hung stockings by the chimney so children didn’t have to be scared of somebody in their bedroom.’
‘I wasn’t scared,’ I repeat. ‘Just wary.’