Coming Home to Me This Christmas

3. Memories

3

Memories

The sign in the window said CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. Emily pulled her key out of her pocket and unlocked the teahouse door, stepping over a pile of mail on the mat inside.

She put down her bag on a table just inside the entrance before leaning down to pick up the bundle of letters and leaflets. Most of it was circulars, but she also found a couple of bills and one or two legal letters no doubt following up on her grandmother’s estate arrangements. Most heartbreaking of all, however, were the dozen or so Christmas cards at the bottom. It was only December tenth, but Elaine had been popular. They had always enjoyed counting them each Christmas, then tying them up on strings and hanging them around the teahouse until they created a decorative wall of miniature North Poles, red-chested robins, Father Christmases, and tiny nativities. Two hundred and twelve, that had been their seasonal record, the last Christmas just gone. That was the thing about Emily’s grandmother. Even as she got older, she had only become more popular.

Emily put the cards down on the table and went through an internal door into the main café area. To the left, the tables and chairs were still set up in readiness beneath the glass conservatory roof. Shadows mottled many of the tables, Emily saw, and she glanced up to see leaves scattered over the glass, something her grandmother had never allowed. One of Emily’s jobs each morning had been to get up on the stepladder and clear the leaves with an ancient, heavy leaf-blower that dated back to the early eighties. It was a relic of the grandfather Emily had never known, one of numerous ancient gardening tools and machines which populated the adjoining house, rear garage, and garden shed like abandoned robots waiting for a chance to come back to life.

She continued inside, past the serving counter with its empty glass cabinets once filled with pastries, fresh sandwiches, and homemade scones, now sprinkled with a grey dust layer. Into the teahouse kitchen, all government-regulation stainless steel but with her grandmother’s touch: frilled curtains, posies of dried flowers hanging from the wall, small animal figurines along each shelf.

Untouched since the day Elaine had died, a vase that had once been filled with bright flowers was now dry, the flowers reduced to blackened stalks which had flaked over the windowsill below. Emily, who had barely been able to enter the teahouse over the last couple of months, took the vase and emptied the remains of the flowers into a bin. Replacing the vase on the table, she retreated to the door, looking back into the main hall and through the conservatory doors onto a patio terrace with views stretching down across her grandmother’s garden then across fields and patches of forest toward Dartmoor rising in the distance.

Over the first few days, local people, who had made up the bread and butter around the waves of tourists who had come from far and wide to enjoy her grandmother’s famous cakes, had often stopped by to wish Emily well, offer condolences, and politely enquire about when the teahouse might reopen. Emily, still in the worst stages of her grief, had brushed them off as best she could, but as days turned into weeks she had found the only thing she could do was put a sign in the window and cancel all upcoming deliveries.

Of course, there had been other problems, that Emily, in her years of blissful innocence as her grandmother’s assistant, had failed to anticipate. Even into her eighties, Elaine had been business-savvy, setting up a website to take advance bookings, which Emily had only discovered when the first people began to show up, creating much confusion. Now replaced with a temporary notification of a site under maintenance, at least people weren’t showing up unannounced anymore, but Emily had further problems.

The teahouse had been her grandmother’s life for over thirty-five years, a project to pour her love into after her beloved husband had died in early middle-age. And she had been successful: even on the darkest, rainiest days of the off-season, people had still come through the doors, and on busy summer days, or during the frequent special events her grandmother had so excelled in, there had rarely been a table free. As recently as the summer just gone, Elaine had been talking about extending the outside terrace to allow extra tables.

Now, the doors closed, the orders cancelled, the website down and the part-time staff requested to look for new positions, the teahouse had become a shadow. Emily knew what her grandmother would have wanted, but here in this place where the old woman had been so alive, Emily found life unbearable without her.

The tears were coming. She went out of the teahouse, through a door marked PRIVATE, and into the two-storey connected cottage they had always shared. Here, at least, she had begun to move on. She had sorted through some of her grandmother’s clothes, assessing what she could give to charity and what was best for the bin. In a couple of extra rooms used only for junk, she had begun to pick through boxes, tossing away bags of ancient, dog-eared electric, water, and phone bills, old documents and magazines which her grandmother—a natural hoarder—had kept not through sentiment but through routine.

Standing at the bottom of the stairs, she was just deliberating whether to go into the garden and maybe rake up some leaves, or go upstairs and get straight into clearing out some junk, when her phone rang.

‘Are you all right over there?’ came Karen’s voice. ‘I kept checking my watch. I guessed you’ve been home about twenty minutes, and the sentimentality is starting to get to you, am I right?’

Emily laughed, a sound her grandmother would have approved of, even in these desperate times.

‘Have you installed me with a spy camera?’

‘No, I just know you. You’re not the type to stop by Sainsbury’s on the way home. You’re a straight home, cup of tea kind of girl.’

‘I haven’t made the tea yet.’

‘But you would have done before you did anything productive.’

Emily nodded. ‘You’re right. I would have. I was just deciding what to do.’

‘Come and stay with me,’ Karen said. ‘I know we’ve only just got back, but we’re into that holiday hangover stage, and in your circumstances, yours will be worse than any other. I’m worried about you being on your own over there.’

Karen only lived a twenty-minute drive away, but Emily shook her head. ‘I have to deal with it,’ she said. ‘I’ve been running away, trying to avoid it all. It’s just hard, you know. This place was everything to her. I can never replace her, and it wouldn’t be right to try.’

‘Perhaps leave it a while, then.’

Emily grimaced. ‘Christmas was her favourite time of the year. She used to turn the teahouse into a grotto, and the whole garden became a Christmas illumination scene. I know I should open up in her memory, it’s just … you know.’

‘Without her, it doesn’t feel right.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Perhaps take this Christmas off, then.’

Emily nodded. ‘I have to pull myself together, I know. I can’t go on like this. It’s just, the healing process, I didn’t think it would take this long.’

‘Everyone grieves in a different way,’ Karen said. ‘Just give it time. Don’t make any big decisions until your head is clear. It sounds like you still need to get out of there. You know, the offer to come down to David’s is still open.’

‘I know. I’ll think about it.’

‘We’re all heading over there on the fifteenth and staying until the fourth. You won’t be a gooseberry, I promise. There’ll be twenty people there at least.’

‘I think about it, that’s all I can say.’

Karen went quiet for a moment. ‘Are you thinking about Cottonwood?’

‘What?’

‘I know you took that letter.’

‘I—what? I don’t know what you mean.’

Karen laughed. ‘It was poking out of your jacket pocket. Are you going to go over there and see what it was about?’

Emily groaned. ‘Oh, that was a silly, childish whim. I mean, it was probably only sent as a joke. And it was sent last year. I imagine it’s a bit late by now.’

‘But it was never answered, because the letter was still there. They could still be waiting for someone to come and save their Christmas.’

‘Are you mocking me?’

‘Of course not. But if you’re going to drive down there, perhaps hunt out a Father Christmas suit before you go.’

‘It’s not funny.’

‘I know; just trying to make you smile.’

‘I am smiling.’

‘Well, that’s good then. Seriously, are you going to go over there?’

Emily considered. She hadn’t had time to read over the letter since her return, but it would be a lie to say she hadn’t thought about it. In fact, she had thought about it a lot. Whether she was someone who could make a difference or not, she didn’t know, but if nothing else it had got her intrigued. Unsigned, the letter and its reasoning had caught her imagination and was nagging at her like a frustrated child. Cottonwood was barely half an hour away by car; it wouldn’t hurt just to drive over and have a look around, maybe ask a few questions.

‘You’re wondering if you’ve got enough petrol in the car, aren’t you?’ Karen said, voice barely more than whisper.

‘No,’ Emily said. ‘I filled up on the way down.’