Two years ago when my aunt’s arthritis had got so bad they were beginning to think about selling the café, and about a year and a half after Karol Bergenstein first put Sanderson Bay on the map, Moby’s tried to buy the café.
I get it. From a business perspective Sanderson Bay suddenly looked like a winner, somewhere to put a franchise, somewhere people would want take-away coffees. But Sanderson Bay didn’t want a Moby’s and when my uncle first got the letter offering to buy the café he told them he wasn’t interested, that he wanted a private sale.
But they didn’t give up. They pestered and pestered, they upped their offer and, although we have no proof I’m sure they were doing something behind the scenes that meant the café wasn’t selling because, although James and Miranda had taken excellent advice from a business sales agent who knew the area, they didn’t get any other offers. Just Moby’s.
‘Perhaps we should take the offer, love,’ my uncle had said to me when this had been going on for over six months. ‘We can’t run this place forever and the twenty-first century has arrived in Sanderson Bay, maybe we should all embrace it.’
‘And the money is not to be sneered at,’ Miranda had added. I can remember looking at her hands then, hands that had been so good at knitting, sewing, baking; hands that were now riddled with pain and misshapen from inflammation. I’d almost given in.
‘You can’t,’ I’d said. ‘Just give it a bit longer – something is bound to turn up and we’re coming into the quiet season. Let’s see where we are in the spring.’
My aunt and uncle had agreed but before spring came, Marcus dropped his bombshell and everything I’d been clinging on to by my fingernails in York for so long finally fell away. And so I ran. I ran to the place I always ran to, the place I’d run to when I ran away from boarding school, the place I’d gone whenever York got too much, the place where I’d spent every Christmas and Easter since I was thirteen years old.
I had barely got through the door when I asked my aunt and uncle what their absolute minimum amount was to sell the café, the money they needed to buy the bungalow they dreamt of, the bungalow that would let them enjoy their retirement.
Then followed the most awkward telephone conversation ever with my father, a conversation in which I told him my plan and asked him if it he would agree to allow me to sell the flat that he’d bought for me York. The flat he’d insisted on buying if I absolutely must stay in York and not set my sights and ambitions on somewhere further afield – New York, Paris, even London.
‘You’re a grown woman now, Eloise,’ he’d said to me, his voice tight. We always speak in French and my father is the only person I speak French to these days. Sometimes I struggle to be fluent and when I’m anxious, as I had been that day, my French can be slow and he was already frustrated. ‘Old enough to make your own decisions. The flat is yours to do with as you wish and if this is what you wish to do with your life, then that is your choice.’
My father, Michel Caron, used to be – until my mother’s untimely death – professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, while my mother sat in her tiny office and wrote ground-breaking biographies of feminist writers. I grew up in an apartment on the Left Bank that was lined with books – books that I was encouraged to read in both French and English – and, until I was sent away to boarding school, I spent my mealtimes listening to my parents talk about Socrates and Aristotle, Sartre and de Beauvoir. Later, after I’d finished my A levels – my father suffered the first of the many disappointments that I threw his way. I told him that I wanted to stay in Yorkshire, near James and Miranda, that I didn’t want to go to Oxford and study English like my mother, that I didn’t want to come back to Paris and go to the Sorbonne like him. I wanted to study art history and I wanted to do it in York.
He accepted it, in a fashion. But then my mother died – the result of the aneurysm that had been quietly sitting in her magnificent brain bursting suddenly and my father left Paris too, returning to the south of France, taking up a position at the University of Aix-Marseille. But he never seemed to be able to accept how the academic life hadn’t suited me and he certainly didn’t accept it when I told him I couldn’t take it anymore, that I was leaving and going back to Sanderson Bay with my PhD in pieces and nowhere close to being finished.
I swallowed down the guilt I’d felt at how obviously I’d disappointed him, at how disappointed the ghost of my mother would be, and tried only to think of my aunt and uncle, the two people who had been more like parents to me than my own parents.
I sold everything, not just the flat but all the furniture in it as well as half my wardrobe, my car – which I never used in York anyway but in hindsight would have been quite handy in Sanderson Bay – everything. It was just enough for the deposit, and my business plan was just enough for the bank to take me seriously.
Because I couldn’t let Moby’s buy it.
Of all the coffee shop chains in the world, the only man I’d found even remotely attractive since Marcus had to work for Moby’s.
And there was more to it, I was sure of it. It seemed like more than coincidence that someone from Moby’s was back sniffing around again. Everything about Ben’s arrival since he asked me if I was Eloise Caron on Monday night – since he’d told me he expected someone older – felt like more than just a coincidence.
7
‘Stop being so paranoid,’ Sascha says later when I pop up to the hotel to give her the ginger and peppermint tea I’ve mixed for her morning sickness. ‘Just because he works for Moby’s doesn’t mean he’s up to something. Thousands of people work for Moby’s and I expect some of them come here on holiday. Some of them probably even drink tea in your café, grateful to be away from the smell of coffee.’
We’re sitting in her kitchen drinking tea – ginger and peppermint for her of course, Earl Grey for me – and eating the last two pieces of Bessie’s walnut loaf that I brought from the café. We don’t do lunches at The Two Teas, mostly because I don’t want to be in direct competition with Terry and Mo at the pub but also because I don’t want the café to smell strongly of soup and melted cheese. Tea has such delicate scents and flavours that I don’t want them overpowered with anything stronger than a chocolate croissant or Bessie’s amazing walnut loaf.
‘Even I took the Moby’s dollar for a while, you know that,’ she goes on. Before Sascha had moved to Sanderson Bay she had been a corporate lawyer, although it’s hard to believe when you see her now, and Moby’s was a client of the firm she worked for. When I first took over the café she told me she was glad I’d stopped James and Miranda from selling to them. ‘They have a habit of taking over,’ she’d said.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, realising that Sascha is probably right and that I am being paranoid. Or at the very least projecting my own hatred of Moby’s onto Ben, an innocent employee. ‘I’m not here to rant about Moby’s all afternoon again.’ Ranting about Moby’s has started to turn into an obsession and I know I need to stop.