The House of New Beginnings Read online

  ‘He was very handsome,’ Natalya said, drawing hard on her cigarette and blowing out a long plume of foul-smelling smoke. ‘Very big muscles,’ she said, flexing her own bicep. ‘Sexy. Strong face. You know? I like him.’

  Okay. Lust, then, Rosa thought, nodding in reply. Which was not the same but never mind.

  ‘It happen slowly, the love,’ the younger woman went on. ‘At first I think, he is a bit annoying. You know? He is pain in ass. Yes? But then one day . . .’ And suddenly her whole face changed, becoming more animated, and Rosa could see past the frowning and gloom and unflattering kitchen-worker clothes to a younger sweeter Natalya, the Natalya who really had fallen for this guy. ‘One night – Victory Day last year, last May, we are watching the fireworks together back home, big fireworks. And the sky is dark, and it is cold, we are in the crowd of people and I feel his body leaning against me. We have big coats on, hats on, and he is teasing me about my hat, we are laughing together, and I feel . . .’ She paused, thinking, and then came that bashful smile again. ‘I feel warm beside him. Not just my coat, not just my hat. I feel warm inside, like I never want to stop laughing, like I want to stay there with him forever, under the big sky and fireworks, like it is the best moment of my life.’ It was the longest speech she had ever made to Rosa and her face was still soft from her memories as she delivered the punchline. ‘And I think – I love him. I am surprised by that thought but it is so sudden, so sharp in my head. I love him. That is when I know.’

  ‘Oh, Natalya.’ Rosa felt touched by the story, imagining the crowd of people beneath the fireworks, the smell of gunpowder, the smoky trails in the dark sky. Natalya and her handsome young man in their coats and hats, standing close together. She hardly dare ask her next question. ‘What happened?’

  Natalya took a last drag on the cigarette and stubbed it hard against the wall, orange sparks showering to the ground. ‘He went,’ she said, shrugging. ‘He vanish. He have some enemies – politics, you know? He said some stupid things. And then one day . . .’ She turned her hands up in the air. ‘He is gone. I do not know.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘So now I do not love. I work here. I forget about him.’

  Rosa was sorry to have asked now. She felt as if she’d lifted a rock and seen all of Natalya’s pain and hurt and secrets writhing underneath. She put out a hand to touch the younger woman in sorrow, in sympathy, but Natalya was already briskly turning to go back inside.

  ‘Come. We work,’ she said and tapped her watch. ‘Is time.’

  The French-themed supper club was a great success, and Rosa followed it with a summer-inspired menu the Friday afterwards. It was becoming her favourite few hours of the week, her supper club evenings, and ever since Georgie’s glowing write-up in the Brighton Rocks magazine, she’d had a full house of diners each time, with a waiting list already underway. ‘Get some of the foodie bloggers to come along too,’ Georgie had advised, when Rosa told her this news. ‘Hey, and there’s this supper club app I’ve seen too – you need to get yourself on it. I bet that Gareth bloke would help, he’s a techie, isn’t he?’

  ‘Mmm,’ Rosa had replied, not wanting to mention the fact that she doubted Gareth would be doing her any more favours after the night of the kissing debacle. She had texted him twice since then, inviting him to the supper clubs, but he’d replied politely that he was busy each time, and she’d left it at that. ‘I might even stretch to two nights a week, if I can work around the hotel rota,’ she said instead. She was trying not to let her imagination run away with her but all the same, this was how businesses got started, wasn’t it? This was how things took off: a serendipitous review, people telling their friends, loyal customers coming back for more . . . this could really be a thing, she kept thinking to herself. An actual, proper new thing. Bea had offered to type up menus for her each time, and Natalya was helping with the waitressing now, relieved to take on some extra work where nobody threw things at her. Rosa was already thinking ahead to future weeks and how she could put together different menus for evenings to come: Moroccan, Mexican, Italian . . . perhaps a Brazilian menu to mark the start of the Olympics. A barbecue one summer night, even . . . The possibilities seemed endless.

  ‘You should definitely start charging more,’ Ned had advised her the week before. ‘Fifteen quid a head . . . Are you even covering your costs? You could definitely go to twenty if need be. I’ve seen supper clubs charging twenty-five pounds a head, which is still not exorbitant for a fantastic three-course meal.’

  Rosa was loath to ramp up her prices just yet, though. She wanted to build her customer numbers first, get the business established before she started going all tycoon-like and strategizing about profits. Besides, for now, it was a sheer delight to be cooking dinner for people every week, a really enjoyable novelty, having her living room full of happy diners, seeing all those scraped-clean plates . . . the money almost seemed like an afterthought. Moments of joy, she thought to herself again. Life seemed full of them, these days.

  This week, Ned and Charlotte were there, as usual, as was Georgie and a friend of hers from home, Amelia, plus ten other random strangers, all rather shy and quiet to begin with, as often proved the case, but livening up and chatting away once the wine was flowing. Jo was out on a blind date tonight apparently so couldn’t make it, and Bea too, was out for once, at a friend’s sleepover, both of which events sounded promising to Rosa.

  The weather had been warm all week and with this in mind, Rosa had put together a light, summery menu, starting with a choice of salads for a starter, one with the most delicious cured trout, followed by an aromatic saffron chicken pilaf, with a vegetarian alternative. To finish, she was serving up individual lime and mascarpone soufflés, which had taken numerous practice attempts to perfect but which she’d finally got the hang of and were deliciously tangy and moreish. That said, she was personally steering clear of any alcohol until she’d served up all fifteen of the fluffy little fellas, at which point, she would be treating herself to a very large glass of wine and a sit-down.

  The evening had started well. It turned out that two of the guests already knew each other, and so the group was soon buzzing with conversation, and everyone seemed to be getting along. This was another nice thing about the supper clubs – the number of new Brightonians she was meeting. No longer did Rosa feel completely alone in the city, she had been plugged into this whole social scene – right in her own front room. She felt like someone again, as if she had a place in the community. Dinner At Rosa’s, she imagined her website saying. Come in, all welcome!

  Enough daydreaming for now, though! She had a pilaf or two to serve up, pistachios and parsley to chop and sprinkle, and the jug of iced water needed refilling. She was just setting down the main course dishes onto the table, though, to a gratifying chorus of ‘Ooh’s, when there was a loud knocking on the door, and a rather cross-sounding female voice. ‘Hello? Are you there?’

  Frowning, Rosa wiped her hands on a tea towel and hurried to answer it, trying to think if she was expecting anyone else to arrive. The person knocking was obviously someone with a key to the front door of the building but the voice hadn’t sounded like Bea or Jo, and, as far as she knew, Margot’s flat upstairs was still vacant, after her sons had cleared out her possessions. ‘ROSA!’ came the voice again, sounding very impatient now, as she rushed along the hall. The voice – female – was familiar somehow, and reminded her of the way her mother would scream up the stairs at her in Rosa’s teenage years for playing her music too loudly.

  She opened the door – but it was not her mother standing there. Instead it was her landlady, Angela Morrison-Hulme, in a tight-fitting black dress and heels, arms folded across her chest, her fuchsia-pink lips pursed in a most forbidding sort of way. ‘Oh,’ gulped Rosa, instantly aware that this was not a social call. Aware also, and far too late, that perhaps she should possibly have floated the supper club idea past her landlady in the first place. ‘Hi, Angela,’ she croaked, feeling her skin flare red. ‘How are you?�
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  ‘How am I? Well, thrilled, naturally, to discover that one of my tenants has set up a business within the building, without bothering to ask my permission first,’ Mrs Morrison-Hulme snapped, eyes flinty. Oh God. She was practically hissing with fury. ‘How do you think I felt, discovering that you were running some kind of illegal restaurant here? Serving alcohol? On my property?’

  ‘I’m not serving alcohol, and it’s not a restaurant – nor illegal,’ Rosa tried saying but her landlady seemed in no mood to listen.

  ‘You can’t do this, I’m afraid.’ Her tone brooked no arguments. ‘I’ve a good mind to serve you with an eviction notice, it’s strictly against the terms of the contract. When I think how I treat you girls, how I look after you here – and you go behind my back like this. Did you think I wouldn’t find out? Did you think I was so stupid?’

  ‘No, of course not – and it really wasn’t like that,’ Rosa protested feebly, but she might as well have been talking to herself. From behind her floated the sound of laughter from her guests and Angela’s eyes sharpened as they both heard it.

  ‘They will have to leave,’ she said. ‘All of them. They will have to go.’

  ‘But—’ It was ridiculous but Rosa couldn’t help thinking of the dishes of pilaf she’d just served up, when she’d marinaded the chicken pieces in lemon juice and yoghurt so lovingly, when the vegetarian version was studded with pomegranate seeds, shining like rubies. She wasn’t sure which would be more unbearable – for all that food to be wasted, or to have to suffer the humiliation of asking everyone to leave. ‘Can’t they just finish their dinner first? Please?’ she begged.

  Angela Morrison-Hulme clearly did not like to be crossed. She was also, apparently, in such a toweringly bad mood that she would not be backing down on anything she’d said. ‘No,’ she snapped. ‘They cannot. They can go now, and you can consider this a verbal warning to you, as my tenant. Otherwise you will also have to go. You are lucky that I’m not telling you to pack your things and leave this very minute yourself, believe me.’

  Natalya must have overhead the raised voices because she had appeared in the hall by now, cheeks pink. ‘What is this?’ she asked, looking from one woman to the other.

  Rosa had to squeeze her hands very hard together to prevent herself from bursting into tears. ‘It’s over,’ she said in a small strangled voice. ‘The supper club. Everybody’s got to leave.’

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Charlotte leaned back on the spade. ‘Do you think that’s big enough?’ she asked, peering down into the hole she’d dug.

  ‘Smashing,’ her dad said, setting a bucket of compost at her feet. ‘Chuck this lot in now, that’s it, there she blows.’ He clapped her on the back. ‘Anyone would think you’d planted a tree before, kid. Nothing to it, right?’

  Charlotte smiled sideways at him as she shook the last dark clods of compost into the hole. Having resisted her mother’s tree-planting suggestions for this long, rejecting the idea as mawkish and clichéd, she had changed her mind recently. Perhaps it was her new habit of taking her lunch break out of the office on sunny days, in order to sit with a sandwich in the nearby Victoria Gardens, where she’d found herself admiring the spectacular elm trees, so majestically leafy and tall. Perhaps also it had been going out with Ned and the girls the previous Saturday for a woodland walk in Withdean and hearing the glorious shushing of branches, admiring the greenish light that fell through the leaves, and feeling the timelessness that the trees lent this place. She got it, all of a sudden, what her mum had been banging on about: the legacy of a sapling, the satisfaction to be gained from seeing it grow taller and broader month after month, year after year, changing with the seasons but with a comforting solidity.

  And so, eating her words, along with a good old slice of humble pie, she had come to Reading for the day, meeting her parents at the local garden centre in order to choose a tree for Kate. After some deliberation, she’d decided on a small pear tree, which would have gorgeous white blossom every spring, and, with a bit of luck, a crop of pears each summer, once it had been in the ground long enough to become established. Reading was where Kate had been born and died, and so seemed the right place for her tree. More to the point, Charlotte’s parents weren’t planning on moving house any time soon. The tree would be safely nurtured in their back garden for years to come, and she could see its beauty every time she visited.

  ‘In she goes, then,’ her dad urged. ‘Let’s have her!’

  Gripping the sapling’s stem, Charlotte eased off the pot, a light shower of soil pattering over her boots, then her dad showed her how to tease out the rootball with her fingers, before lowering it ceremoniously into its new home. Then they filled in the soil around it, carefully trod the earth down and gave the base of the tree a thorough watering.

  Her mum slid an arm around Charlotte and the three of them stood looking at it for some minutes: Kate’s little sapling amidst the shrub roses and the camellias, the delphiniums shooting up nearby, and the first papery poppies. A bird was singing in the cherry tree behind them. One of the cats sunned itself on the patio, its fur warm and dusty. There was a cabbage white butterfly further up the garden, Charlotte noticed, flitting a wavering path through the flowers. She looked back at the little tree and imagined it hung with frothing blossom in years to come, golden pears weighting its branches. The thought made her feel happy. Happier than she’d expected.

  Her mum gave Charlotte a squeeze. ‘There. Didn’t I say it would be a lovely thing to do?’

  ‘You did, Mum. And you were right.’ She hugged her back, feeling a rush of affection for both her parents, and laughed. ‘If only I’d listened to you in the first place, eh?’

  ‘Exactly,’ her mum said, ruffling her hair as if she were eight years old again. ‘Come on, let’s go and have a cup of tea.’

  The good feeling stayed with Charlotte for the rest of the day, all the way back to Brighton. She liked thinking of the tree, Kate’s tree, slowly unfurling its root capillaries, stretching them tentatively into the new soil and drinking up the water. Was it too fanciful of her to admit that it reminded her of her own slow unfurling, sending out hesitant roots, shyly turning herself to the sun again? Perhaps. But her own new roots, here in Brighton, were definitely becoming more entrenched by the day. By the night, too, she thought with a secret grin as she let herself into the house.

  ‘So is it serious, then, this new fella?’ her mum had asked over tea and biscuits. She waggled her eyebrows in a jolly way but Charlotte knew it was only her way of covering up her anxiety.

  ‘Well . . .’ Charlotte didn’t quite want to admit to him having stayed over for the first time the night before, but knowing her, it was written all over her blushing face anyway. Perhaps there was no need to spell it out. ‘I like him,’ she said demurely.

  ‘And he’s got two little girls, did you say? And that’s okay?’ Again, her mum asked the question as if it was of the utmost casualness but the fact that she’d accidentally added three spoonfuls of sugar to her tea rather than her ordinary two gave away her true feelings.

  ‘Mum, it’s fine. He’s great. They’re adorable. It’s really – honestly – fine.’

  Her words came back to her now as she grabbed the pile of post from the hall table and leapt up the main stairs in a sudden burst of energy. Her and Ned, it was way better than ‘fine’ and ‘okay’, frankly. Look at her, bounding up the stairs like a gazelle! He had done that to her. Look at her, singing in the shower that morning after she’d kissed him goodbye. He had done that as well. That twinkle in her eye? The song hummed under her breath? The joy bubbling through her veins? Him, all him. She hardly dare even say the word out loud in her head but it had been popping up in her mind all day, shining and bright, festooned with hearts and flowers and fairy lights. Love. LOVE. Love.

  I’m falling in love with you, she kept imagining saying to him. I’m falling in love. Words she had never expected to say again, emotions she’d never expect
ed to feel, but there they were, brimming to her surface once more, making her giddy with their rushing intensity. If grief had been like the initial stomach-churning plummet of a sky-dive, being in love was more like the immediate aftermath of the parachute opening: the sensation of floating, suspended like a bird in the blue, the adrenalin immediately turning to euphoria and breathless exhilaration. She wasn’t sure she ever wanted to come back down to earth.

  Everything about last night had been wonderful. The girls had been staying at his sister’s for a sleepover with their cousins, and so, with the knowledge that she potentially had Ned to herself all night, once back from work that afternoon, Charlotte had cleaned her flat from top to bottom, smoothing on fresh bed linen and putting a box of condoms in the drawer of her bedside cabinet. (She had been a Girl Guide, Charlotte, and liked to be prepared, although she was pretty sure there wasn’t actually a badge to be earned in Contraception Skills.) Then she had showered, plucked, moisturized and put on her best underwear, before spraying perfume liberally around the place. (Afterwards, coughing and spluttering, she’d opened the windows as wide as possible, fearing that the poor man would be asphyxiated on Jo Malone Red Roses the moment he walked through the door.)

  She’d met Ned for a drink in the Regency Arms, around the corner, and then they’d gone on for dinner at Rosa’s supper club – or rather, that had been the plan anyway, right up until Angela had turned up and ruined everything. Poor Rosa! In had marched the landlady, practically breathing fire, and proceeded to order everybody off the premises, while Rosa frantically made up foil parcels of food so that they could take something with them, simultaneously refunding half their money, pushing their half-drunk bottles of wine back into their hands and apologizing profusely, hands wringing.