And I wonder if this guilt and indecision will always plague me. All my adult life I’ve wanted to live in Sanderson Bay, to find some way of making a living here and yet, now I’m here I wonder if I should be back there.
‘I’ve never known,’ I say quietly to Sascha, ‘if I did the right thing by buying the café, by depriving James and Miranda of the money Moby’s were going to give them just because I wanted to run away from York after Marcus left. Perhaps I should have given my PhD more of a chance.’
‘The grass is always greener,’ she replies. ‘Do you think Geoff and I don’t sometimes wonder if we did the right thing moving here?’
‘I had no idea you thought like that too,’ I say.
She laughs. ‘We gave up huge corporate salaries and a gorgeous house to move here and do up a hotel with a leaking roof,’ she says. ‘Of course we feel like that too – everyone does sometimes, it’s the human condition.’
‘I don’t know…’ I begin.
‘You did the right thing,’ she says. ‘You know you did. After all if you hadn’t moved here when you did you’d never have met me and then where would you be?’
‘Serendipity.’ I smile.
‘Exactly that.’
‘Hello,’ a low rumble of a voice says behind me and Geoff looks up from the phone he’s been distracting himself with while Sascha and I have been talking.
‘All right, mate,’ he says shaking hands with Ben. ‘Did you enjoy the carols?’
Ben nods. ‘It feels like the start of Christmas now,’ he says catching my eye. Sascha nudges me and I stumble a little, almost falling into Ben. Then she turns away with exaggeration as if to tell me I need to clear the air. She’s right, I am being paranoid about Ben and I’m projecting my own issues, my own feelings of guilt and uncertainly, onto him when he’s just here for a break.
‘Um, I’m sorry,’ I say.
‘About what?’ Ben asks.
‘About being so rude to you this morning,’ I say. ‘You’d been so kind teaching me all those marketing tricks for social media and I was rude when you told me where you worked.’
‘I’d already worked out that you don’t think much of coffee chains,’ he says with a smile I don’t deserve. ‘Or coffee for that matter.’
‘I’m not a fan,’ I reply. ‘But especially not of Moby’s. About a year ago they tried to buy the café off my aunt and uncle.’
He looks down into his cup of mulled wine but doesn’t say anything. I wonder if he already knew.
‘But none of that is your fault,’ I go on hastily. ‘It’s your job, that you clearly love or you wouldn’t have stayed there so long and we barely know each other so it’s really none of my business.’
‘I wouldn’t say I love it,’ he replies quietly.
‘Well I’m sorry for taking my frustration out on you.’
‘Apology accepted,’ he says. ‘Is that why you bought the café from your aunt and uncle?’ he asks, still not looking up.
‘It’s one of the reasons,’ I reply. ‘Which reminds me, how did you know my name on that first night when you arrived wanting coffee?’
He doesn’t say anything at first, he just keeps looking down into his mulled wine. After a moment he looks up at me and smiles. ‘There’s a brass plate above the door with your name on,’ he says. ‘I’m guessing you have an alcohol licence for special events and you’re the licensee.’
‘Well guessed,’ I said. ‘We do champagne afternoon teas so I need the licence for that.’
Sascha was right, he did see my name above the door and formed a picture in his mind of what Eloise Caron looked like. He doesn’t have a sinister agenda or hidden knowledge, he’s just a guy back in his childhood home for personal reasons that are none of my business.
‘So what did you imagine Eloise Caron looked like?’ I asked.
‘Nothing like you,’ he says softly and, when his eyes meet mine my stomach flips over and I realise that Sascha is right. The reason this man can upset me so easily, the reason I’m so suspicious of him but can’t keep away, is exactly because I have feelings for him.
I’m in so much trouble.
8
I wake up early on Saturday with a thumping headache right behind my eyes from the cheap red mulled wine the night before. I haven’t slept well and what sleep I have had was disturbed by dreams of my aunt’s wheelchair and a huge Moby’s coffee franchise suddenly appearing where the Model Village used to be.
I get out of bed and pad over into the bathroom where I take two paracetamol and pour myself a large glass of water, which I take back to bed with me, drinking as much of it as I can before lying down and staring at the ceiling.
The celebrations last night mark the start of the festive season in Sanderson Bay but the start of Christmas doesn’t fill me with a sense of joy and goodwill to all men like I want it to do. It fills me with a deep sense of indifference and something else, something that feels like loneliness.
Maybe it’s just the aftereffects of the mulled wine.
My first Christmas in Sanderson Bay came after my first term at boarding school. I had only just begun to settle in when we broke for up for the holidays. I’d made a few friends and had started to get used to speaking English every day and sharing a dormitory with five other girls. I hadn’t gotten used to how cold it was and the strange damp feeling of the sheets that never seemed to go away and I was looking forward to going back to France in the opposite direction to the way we’d come – driving south to Dover and crossing on the car ferry to Calais before driving again until we got to Paris. I was looking forward to being in our warm apartment, which my parents would have decorated for Christmas – my father dragging the six-foot fir tree up the narrow staircase that led to our fourth-floor home. But mostly I was looking forward to seeing Maman again, feeling her arms around me and inhaling the scent of her Chanel No.5.
I’d been both surprised and disappointed when James and Miranda came to meet me on that first day of the Christmas holidays and I’d tried not to cry on the drive back to Sanderson Bay in my uncle’s Volvo as he told me about the café they had opened and the plans they had for the Christmas holidays. I’d only met James and Miranda once before – the Christmas that I was eleven when they stayed with us in Paris and camped out on the living room floor in our tiny apartment. My mother got annoyed when the hot water ran out and my father spent more time at the university than usual and, by the end of that visit I had worked out that my mother and her sister didn’t get on for some reason and that maybe having a sibling was more complicated than I imagined. From that summer onwards I stopped daydreaming about what it would be like to have a brother or sister of my own.
And suddenly I was in a car with my mother’s sister who I barely knew, and nobody would explain to me why.
‘You can call your mum as soon as we get back to the Bay,’ my uncle had said. But when I called her my mind hadn’t been put at ease as I’d hoped it would. I wasn’t just going to stay with my aunt and uncle for a few days until Maman came to pick me up, I was going to be staying with them for the whole Christmas holidays.