Christmas at the Beach Cafe (2 page)

I crawled gingerly forwards and manoeuvred the box past a couple of old trunks, a broken Victorian hatstand and another box helpfully marked STUFF. Oof, it was heavier than I’d
expected.

I heaved the box all the way back towards the hatch, then lowered my legs down the ladder, fumbling to get a foothold on a rung. Then I braced myself, arms around the box’s cardboard
sides. Okay. Got it. Now for a slow, careful descent . . .

The slow, careful descent didn’t turn out quite how I’d hoped. Halfway down, my big toe became hooked in one leg of my slightly-too-long pyjama bottoms and I stumbled, losing my
footing. The box fell with an ominous-sounding thump, and I tumbled down after it, barking my shin on the last rung as I landed.

‘Ow! Bollocks!’

Ed emerged from the bathroom with just a towel around his waist to find me hopping around in pain, clutching my scraped leg.

‘What the hell . . . ? Are you all right? What are you doing?’ he said.

‘I just – ’ I began, then broke off as I saw, to my horror, that the box of precious Christmas decorations had fallen heavily on its side, the cardboard buckling at one corner.
I stopped hopping and rushed over to right it, then pulled open the cardboard flaps, and plunged my hands in amongst the reams of tinsel, faded paper chains, baubles . . . Where was my angel?
Please let her be okay.

‘Oh no.’ I slumped against the box as my fingers found her. Scarlet beads of blood appeared on my fingertips where the broken glass had pierced my skin. ‘Oh shit. Look, Ed.
She’s ruined. The last angel – I just smashed her.’

‘We might be able to glue her back togeth . . .’ Ed started saying, but his voice trailed off as he saw just how beaten-up the angel looked. She was now in at least four pieces, with
a crack splitting her beautiful head and both wings missing. It was obvious that even a squad of professional supergluers would be shaking their heads apologetically at the prospect of any kind of
mending attempt.

I could feel my bottom lip quivering – delayed shock and pain from the fall along with a pang of terrible guilt that I’d let Jo down. It wasn’t as if I had all that many links
to her left . . . and now I’d just broken a really special one. It felt as if Christmas was spoiled before it had even begun.

Before I could stop myself, I’d dissolved into tears. ‘I’m such an idiot,’ I wailed, sobbing into Ed’s shoulder. ‘I’ve ruined everything!’

Three emergency Advent-calendar chocolates later, as well as an enormous nose-blow and quite a lot of deep, hiccupping breaths, I managed to pull myself together. I swept up the
shards of glass and dumped them in the bin with a heavy heart. No use crying over smashed angels, I told myself sternly.

‘Fancy cracking on with the recipe book today?’ Ed asked, once the box of Christmas decorations had been pushed into the spare room safely out of sight.

‘Good idea. How about mince pies? Now that it’s December and all.’ I felt a glimmer of a good mood returning at the thought. The first mince pie of the year was always a moment
to celebrate, wasn’t it? And if ever one was needed, it was now.

The book had been one of my so-called brainwaves a few weeks ago: a way of thanking all my customers and new friends in Carrawen Bay by giving them a compilation of Jo’s best recipes. Ed,
of course, was doing the honours in the kitchen (I was a woman who couldn’t boil an egg, after all), while I took photographs of each finished dish to go alongside the instructions.
Recipes From The Beach Café
was going to be sheer class.

Back when the idea first popped into my head, I thought I was on to a total winner, already imagining the smiles of gratitude and cries of delight from the recipients as I pressed beautiful
little books into their hands. I had allowed myself to get carried away with visions of a display in the windows of the local bookshops. I might even be asked to
sign
copies for interested
tourists, I had daydreamed. It could happen, couldn’t it?

The only problem was, when it actually came to
making
this happen, it wasn’t quite as easy as I’d hoped. Originally I had (rather ambitiously, admittedly) envisaged us
pulling the whole thing together over a weekend, but it was turning out to involve way more work than that. Ed – of course – was acting like a total perfectionist, fussing about every
dish he produced and rejecting anything that had even the titchiest flaw. Secretly, it was starting to drive me nuts. Secretly, my patience had become stretched extremely thin.

Take the apple tart, for instance, the week before. He’d baked a mouth-watering, golden-pastry delight which looked absolutely perfect to my eyes – but no, he’d said it
wasn’t good enough to be photographed for the book because there was a scorch mark on the crust. A scorch mark, let me make clear, that was so small you practically needed a microscope to see
it. ‘I’ll just turn it round so it’s not obvious in the photo,’ I assured him. ‘Or use some Photoshop magic to even out the colour. No one will notice.’

‘Nope,’ he’d replied. ‘I’ll make another one.’

‘Oh, but Ed – ’

‘Everyone will know it’s my cooking, Evie. And we’re promoting the café here, remember. I just want everything to look good.’

‘But this
does
look good!’

‘Not good enough. Standards, Evie, come on.’

Standards. Right. Before I’d known him, Ed had owned a fancy restaurant in London, where he’d cheffed to
very
high standards, by all accounts. Fair enough. But this was the
Beach Café, and a home-made recipe book – we weren’t exactly talking Michelin stars here. Well, I wasn’t, anyway.

But what did I know? Another apple tart had to be baked before Ed was satisfied while I escaped to the beach, a safe distance from the café, and let out a long, ear-splitting scream of
frustration. (Nobody was around, thankfully. Although having said that, the villagers were all used to me by now, and wouldn’t have batted an eyelid if they’d seen me screeching into
the wind like a banshee.)

Add in the often-illegible scrawl of my aunt’s recipes, which resulted in transcription problems, and the growing realization that, actually, you needed quite a lot of recipes to make a
decent-sized book as opposed to a pathetic little pamphlet . . . and my brilliant brainwave was fast turning into an enormous brain-
ache
. So far, we had completed pages for Idiot-Proof
Scones (the first – and pretty much last – thing I had ever baked in the Beach Café kitchen), Jo’s Legendary Fruity Flapjacks, Apple Tart Extraordinaire (second time
lucky), Best Bacon Butty (Ed’s recipe) and Triple-Decker Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting. That made a paltry five pages in all, with at least another twenty to go. I was starting to
wish the stupid idea had never occurred to me in the first place.

But I was nothing if not an optimist. Besides, having already told quite a lot of people about the project, I kind of had to go through with it now. That would teach me to go shooting my mouth
off, wouldn’t it?

Probably not.

‘Mince pies, here we come,’ I said now, rifling through the folder where Jo had stuffed all her recipes over the decades. Many of them bore evidence of their years of service, with
faded handwriting and oily fingerprints on the paper. A couple even had speckles of flour on their surfaces. I loved the thought of these treasured instructions being passed on to Jo’s
friends and customers. If Ed could just chill out on the perfectionist front we might even finish the damn book in time for Christmas, too . . .

‘Whoa, whoa, whoa,’ he said at that moment. ‘Aren’t you jumping the gun a bit? We need a mincemeat recipe first, remember.’

‘A what?’

‘Well, you need mincemeat to make mince pies,’ he said.

‘But . . .’ My shoulders sagged. ‘I thought we could just . . . buy that? Maybe?’

Oh God, who was I trying to kid? Like he’d go along with buying a jar of mincemeat when he could spend hours making it himself. Like he was ever going to ‘chill out on the
perfectionist front’!

‘Joking,’ I mumbled as he opened his mouth to argue. ‘Of course we should make the mincemeat first. I was just joking.’

I was not ‘just joking’, if you’re in any doubt. Moreover, I was starting to wish that Jo had included a recipe for managing pernickety chefs in her collection:
Take one
large
spoonful of patience and add to simmering rage. Grit teeth for at least ten seconds before opening your mouth. Most importantly, try to resist taking your heaviest frying pan to your
chef’s head . . .

‘Ooh, these are good. Did Ed make them?’

I grinned at Annie and rolled my eyes. It was the Girls’ Night In that evening and the café was buzzing with twenty or so women from the village. ‘Of course Ed made
them,’ I said. ‘I was just Muggins, the dried-fruit-weigher and washer-upper.’ I dabbed a finger to catch the last crumb of pastry on my plate and popped it in my mouth.
‘Bloody tasty though, aren’t they?’

‘They’re lush,’ said Martha, Annie’s daughter. ‘I hope you’ll bake some more for the Christmas Eve bonfire.’

‘Already on my list,’ I assured her. ‘Which is just as well, seeing as Ed made so much mincemeat, we’ll probably still be eating it next June.’

It had taken way longer than I’d expected for the mince pies to even get into the bun tins, let alone into my mouth. First, the combined mincemeat ingredients had to stand for twelve
hours, before being gently cooked for a further three the next morning. This was not a recipe for an impatient type of person.

Despite the unbearable waiting around, there was no getting away from the fact that the resulting jars of mincemeat looked gorgeous, especially when I’d put red gingham covers over their
lids and tied them with string. ‘That’s a row of Christmas presents right there,’ I said, lining them up on the scrubbed pine table and photographing them for the book.

The finished mince pies looked even better. We found recipes for two different varieties in Jo’s folder: star-topped pies and frangipane ones, made with almond pastry. Ed baked both sorts,
so that added up to three new recipes in all for the book. Hurrah! Progress at last.

This was going to be the last Girls’ Night In of the year and I knew there would be a good turnout, so I’d piled up two big platefuls so that everyone could sample them. The
Girls’ Night In was now a staple event in Carrawen Bay. I had started it back in the summer, basically because I was lonely and knew nobody in the village, and had issued an open invitation
to any women who wanted to come along, preferably with a bottle of something and a plate of nibbles to share. We usually had twenty or so people turning up for gossip and a drink, and I now counted
all of these ladies as firm friends – from teenagers like Martha, right through to silvery-haired, retired ladies such as Florence. Blonde, smiling Annie was my chief cake-maker, who’d
supplied us with her creations throughout the summer months. Hawk-eyed, no-nonsense Betty owned the grocery shop in the village and had terrified me initially, but was an absolute pussycat when you
got to know her. There was pink-haired Mags, the mobile hairdresser; well-spoken Elizabeth who ran the local book group, and many more.

‘Now I feel properly Christmassy,’ Betty said, munching her way contentedly through a star-topped mince pie. ‘These are the business. Couldn’t touch a shop-bought one now
I’ve tried yours. Not that I’ll be going
near
any shops for a while, other than my own.’ She gave a self-satisfied smirk. ‘Finished my Christmas shopping this
morning, didn’t I?’

‘Finished?’ I yelped, half-admiring, half-panicked. ‘Blimey, Betty, I haven’t even started mine yet.’

‘What are you going to give Ed for Christmas?’ Florence asked, eyes twinkling. She was a big fan of romance and had become the group’s unofficial agony aunt over the months.
She’d certainly been instrumental in making me realize my feelings for Ed.

‘Hmm,’ I said. Good question. ‘I don’t actually know yet.’

Betty looked appalled. ‘You haven’t started your shopping and you haven’t even thought of what to buy your boyfriend?’ she said. ‘Come on, lass, shake a leg. Only
three weeks to go now, you know.’

‘Three weeks and two days,’ I replied, correcting her. ‘And I’ve got tons of ideas for his stocking anyway. It’s just his main present I’m a bit stuck
on.’

Of course, they all took this as some kind of cue to suggest gifts for Ed.

‘How about buying him a nice watch?’ said Betty.

I hesitated, not wanting to offend her. ‘Maybe,’ I said politely. ‘But I was hoping to give him something a bit more . . . exciting.’

‘What about some decent thermals and a hot water bottle, then? He’ll need them if you two are staying here all winter,’ Wendy suggested.

‘Wendy!’ I pulled a face. ‘That’s the most unsexy idea ever.’

‘She’s got her own ways of keeping him warm, right, love?’ put in Mags, nudging me and winking.

‘You could knit him a jumper.’ That was Annie’s idea.

‘I could not,’ I replied.

‘Well, what does he like?’ Martha asked. ‘What’s he into?’

I leaned back in my seat while I thought about it. What did Ed like? ‘Surfing. Coffee. Seeing the sun rise. A glass of wine at the end of the day. The view from the cliffs out over the
bay.’

‘These are a few of my favourite things . . .’ Elizabeth warbled with a giggle.

‘The perfect bacon sandwich. Me. Surfing – oh, I said that already. Um . . .’ I thought frantically. ‘Dogs. Roast dinners. Er . . .’

‘Get him a new surfboard,’ Martha suggested.

‘I did look at some boards but they’re so expensive,’ I replied glumly. ‘Hundreds of pounds. I think that would be a bit OTT, don’t you? We’ve only been
seeing each other a few months, after all.’

‘Buy him a dog, then,’ Elizabeth said in the next breath. ‘He loved walking Helen and Rob’s dog, didn’t he, when he was house-sitting for them?’

‘He’d love a dog,’ I agreed, ‘and I would too, but we’re meant to be going off to India for a month in February, which wouldn’t really be fair on the poor
thing.’ I shrugged helplessly. ‘What have you got for your husbands and boyfriends, then?’ I asked, feeling as if we were grinding to a halt on good ideas.