has zero chill,’ he complained. ‘I just wanted to see if he was cute.’
‘Well, I saved you the bother,’ Mattie said, inching the nippy little Nissan forward so she could park in the far corner of the mews, next to the derelict row of abandoned shops, which Sebastian kept talking about redeveloping. ‘You’ve already met Tom so you should know that he’s not cute. He’s the anti-cute and I have plenty of chill, thank you very much.’
Guy exchanged a look with Mattie’s friend, Pippa, who’d also come along to help. ‘If you say so.’
‘Come on,’ Pippa admonished. ‘I’ve told you this three times already, but it takes teamwork to make the dream work.’
Mattie tried not to roll her eyes. Pippa worked for Sebastian (it was how Mattie had come to hear of the then-vacant tearooms, and how Pippa had wangled a couple of hours off) as a special projects manager, which meant she had great organisational skills and was a big fan of a stirring pep talk stuffed full of inspirational quotes.
‘I do say so,’ Mattie said because she was chilled and also because she would rather die than let Guy have the last word. Besides, she could bicker with Guy, her older brother by all of two minutes, without so much as breaking a sweat. In fact she could do all sorts of things with minimum fuss. She could multi-task the lunchtime rush, a special last-minute order for a birthday cake and wrangling Jezebel because Cuthbert had slipped out for five minutes, without getting pink in the face or swearing or mucking up a customer’s order for a macchiato with almond milk and no foam. There were only two men who brought out the unchill in her and Tom was one of them, which didn’t make him special, it just made him really, really annoying.
The three of them got out of the car at the same time that Tom descended from his van, which was now blocking the entrance to the mews, because he might have a PhD but he had no common sense.
In honour of the Afternoon of Moving Many Things and the need for manual labour, Tom had ditched his bow-tie and cardigan and was wearing a moth-eaten jumper over his shirt in a very unattractive fawn colour. And he hadn’t come alone … he’d brought some people with him. Unlike their tweedy BFF, Tom’s friends (were they really his friends, though?) favoured tight jeans and tight, plunging T-shirts revealing lots of muscled he-vage. They all seemed to have tribal armband tattoos and a lot of product in their hair. More product than any hair really needed. Mattie didn’t want to stare but Guy was already striding over.
‘Tom!’ Guy and Tom had met several times before at various Happy Ever After events, including the opening of the tearooms. Now they shook hands and Guy grinned because he was having no truck with the blood of thine enemy etc. and also he could never resist trying to get one up on Mattie. ‘Shall we help Very and Posy move stuff out so we can move in sometime before midnight?’
‘I was just going to suggest the same thing,’ Tom said, which Mattie sorely doubted. ‘After all, the light’s already fading. It’ll be dark soon.’
‘I’ll make coffee,’ Mattie decided, because what with Guy and Pippa, who was already consulting the spreadsheet she’d put together to achieve a favourable and time-effective outcome to moving all of Mattie’s goods and chattels, and Tom and his three … helpers, nobody needed her to heft heavy boxes. Also, Mattie couldn’t risk injuring her whisking hand.
‘I’d rather have a tea,’ Posy called out from one of the benches in the middle of the mews where she was best situated to supervise things. She was wearing a huge puffa coat and had a travel blanket tucked around her, though for a late-November afternoon, it was actually quite temperate.
‘Why do you need tea? Are you cold? You should have said!’ Sebastian Thorndyke was at his wife’s side in an instant. ‘I did say there was no need for you to come, Morland.’
‘And I said that I wasn’t going to give you an opportunity to cart my treasured collection of Chalet School books to the nearest charity shop,’ Posy replied. ‘And I don’t want tea because I’m cold, I want tea because I’m thirsty.’
Sebastian dropped to his knees in front of his wife, uncaring that he was wearing a suit that probably cost more than Mattie earned in a month before tax. ‘Are you dehydrated? Are your kidneys hurting? Is the baby pressing on your kidneys?’
Posy patted his hand fondly. ‘I can be thirsty just because it’s about an hour since my last cup of tea.’
‘I’ll go and put the kettle on,’ Mattie said and though she found Sebastian quite overbearing, he did dote on Posy and seemed to make her ridiculously happy. He also wasn’t even dressed remotely appropriately for the occasion. ‘I wouldn’t have thought a suit would be practical if you’re lugging boxes of books about.’
Sebastian’s haughty face looked even haughtier. ‘I don’t lug,’ he said, as if Mattie had accused him of a little light breaking and entering. ‘I pay people to lug. In this case, Sam and his young friend, the unfortunately named Pants.’
Right on cue, Sam and Pants emerged from the shop laden down with a big box each.
‘They have a free lesson last thing on Wednesdays, so it’s all worked out rather well. You’re doing a great job, boys,’ Posy called out encouragingly and Mattie hurried over to the tearooms to provide refreshment for the labouring masses.
By the time the last box of books was carried out, she’d made a second round of tea and a quick batch of chocolate chip and hazelnut cookies, which she brought out as Verity left the flat for one final time with her most prized possession. In a special carrier, mewling unhappily, was Strumpet, her immense British blue short-hair cat. He might be going to live in five-bedroom splendour in Canonbury with a massive back garden, but that couldn’t even begin to compete with living round the corner from a fish and chip shop and a Swedish deli with its own smokehouse for curing salmon.
‘You’re an ingrate, Strumpo,’ Verity said, as she struggled under the weight and heft of her enormous feline. Her boyfriend Johnny hurried over to relieve her of her precious burden.
‘I’m sure he’ll settle in once we get back to mine.’ He paused. ‘Not mine. Ours. When we get back to our house.’
Generally, it could be quite hard to read Verity unless she was going through the petty cash receipts, in which case it was clear that she was very stressed indeed and it was best to leave her well alone. But now she smiled up at Johnny, with his ridiculously chiselled good looks like he spent his spare time modelling for Burberry.
‘Not our house,’ she corrected him. ‘Our home.’
It was all very lovely and heart-warming, Mattie thought, but her heart refused to be warmed. It stayed just where it was, beating out a steady rhythm, which in itself was miraculous, considering all the traumas she had endured.
‘I hate to spoil the moment,’ Pippa said bluntly, because there was only so long that Verity and Johnny could stand there making googly eyes at each other while everyone else was on a clock. ‘But according to my spreadsheet, you two should have been out of here twenty-seven minutes ago.’
Of course, by this point Tom and his friends had all disappeared, leaving their van blocking the entrance to the mews, so Verity and Johnny and Posy and Sebastian couldn’t get out. After several texts from Posy, he eventually reappeared with his little posse, all of them clutching breakfast paninis from the Italian café round the corner, even though it was now gone five on a Wednesday. Mattie clenched her fists.
‘These are
