‘I’m all done.’ Cassandra took off her rubber gloves and placed them on the gleaming steel worktop.
‘How about a coffee before you go?’ Stevie asked. ‘I’ll let you have a piece of that marble cake,’ she added, enticingly.
‘Oh, don’t. That damned cake bypasses my stomach and plasters itself all over my behind. Do you realise how much weight I’ve put on since I started working here?’ Cassandra slapped her ample rump. ‘And most of it is because of that marble cake.’
Stevie patted the seat of the chair. ‘Come on, you know you want to.’
‘All right,’ Cassandra sighed, resigned to her fate, ‘but just a normal Nescafe for me, none of that fancy latte stuff with a shot of caramel, or whatever rubbish people stick in their coffees these days. I don’t need the extra calories.’
Stevie laughed. ‘That’s like ordering a burger with extra fries, and a diet Coke.’
Cassandra narrowed her large, dark eyes at her boss. ‘Careful, or I might swap this job for one at McDonald’s.’
‘Yeah, yeah.’ Stevie handed Cassandra her cup and cut her a slice of cake. ‘Enjoy.’
‘Oh, I intend to,’ Cassandra mumbled, her mouth already full of her first bite of the cake.
Stevie sat down at the small table she’d installed in the kitchen. As much as she could, she tried to separate work life from home life, although that wasn’t so easy, she conceded, when she lived in the same place as she worked. But since she’d taken Cassandra on, she’d developed a routine of preparing everything the afternoon before if the ingredients allowed, so she was able to stack it all in the ovens or the fridge to cook fresh first thing in the morning. While her ovens were busy, she would concentrate on other things, like chopping copious amounts of salad, washing berries and whipping cream, and the smells of cooking would gradually permeate the tea shop, mingling with the aroma of freshly ground coffee. Stevie wished she could bottle that particular mixture of scents – it was mouth-watering.
Seeing Cassandra shovelling marble cake into her mouth, wearing one of the tea shop’s pinnies and with a cloth draped over her shoulder, Stevie found it hard to envisage Cassandra in her old life as a personal assistant to the managing director of an engineering company. She wondered what had happened to the power suits Cassandra once wore: Stevie thought she probably used them to mop the floor, knowing her. There was no doubt Cassandra had gone native when it came to embracing her new lifestyle, although the couple were a long way from becoming self-sufficient. Stevie, selfishly, was glad they weren’t, because otherwise Cassandra wouldn’t be working here and Stevie didn’t know how she’d ever managed without her.
‘How’s the house coming on?’ Stevie asked, when she no longer had to compete for Cassandra’s attention with a slice of cake.
The waitress wiped her mouth on a napkin. ‘I don’t think the roof leaks any more,’ she replied, brightly. Whenever there was even the slightest hint of Welsh drizzle, Cassandra and Aiden had to rush around with assorted buckets and bowls to catch the drips. ‘Do you remember I said I wanted a wet room? Well, I didn’t mean I wanted one in every room in the house,’ she added.
Stevie laughed, imagining her friend’s dilapidated three-bedroomed cottage with a state-of-the-art shower. Hell, the couple barely had hot and cold running water.
‘Actually, it’s becoming quite habitable,’ Cassandra continued. ‘If Aiden manages to finish that commissioned piece he’s been working on for the past one hundred years, then we will be able to afford to buy the new boiler.’
Aiden had found a newly-discovered ability to carve wood, and was busy making interesting woody things to sell to supplement their income. Stevie had bought a couple of large ladles from him, and they hung from hooks behind the counter, ready for when she offered soup for sale.
Cassandra scrunched up her nose. ‘I can’t face another winter here with a fair-weather boiler. And we’ll need proper heating, especially if…’
She trailed off. Stevie knew how much Cassandra wanted a baby, and she and Aiden had been trying since they moved to Tanglewood.
Stevie smiled sympathetically. ‘Your body is probably waiting until you have got that damned house fit for a baby. Unless, of course, you actually want the baby to be born in a barn.’
‘Ha, ha, very funny. The thing is,’ Cassandra said, becoming serious, ‘if we wait for the right moment, we’ll never get pregnant. There’s always something that needs to be done – the house is a wreck, Aiden’s business is not established enough, we can’t afford it. Anyway, I want a baby now! I’m thirty-four. I can’t wait much longer: all my eggs will have gone off.’
‘Ugh. That’s not a very nice thought.’ Stevie paused, then she said softly, ‘I can’t imagine what it must be like to want a baby so much.’
‘You’re young yet, twenty-six isn’t it?’
Stevie shook her head. ‘Nope. I turned twenty-seven not long after I bought this place.’
‘You’re still a baby, yourself. Anyway, this is the way it generally goes; first you get your man, then you want the wedding thing, then there’s this house you’ve simply got to have, and then you want a baby. Some women do the dog or cat bit in between the house and the baby, and some skip the house, or even the man part, entirely. But the odds are Mother Nature will get her way and your hormones will start playing up. The only thing that can quieten them down is to get pregnant.’
‘That is so not going to happen to me!’ Stevie declared, with total certainty. ‘For one thing, I’m nowhere near finding a man, and more to the point, have you seen the men around here?’
‘There are quite a few nice ones, if you could be bothered to look.’ Cassandra began ticking them off on her fingers. ‘There’s William Ferris, Lord Whatshisname’s son, out at the Manor. He’s not married and he’s rich, or he will be when his daddy pops his clogs. Then there’s the guy who owns The Furlongs but unless you’re a horse, he probably won’t notice you. And there’s—’
‘Enough, already!’ Stevie laughed. ‘OK, so there are some eligible ones floating around, but I haven’t met any of them yet and it doesn’t look like I’m going to. Hang a sec, did you say “horse”?’
‘Yeah, Nick Saunders is quite a famous show jumper. Have you heard of him?’
Unbidden, his face flashed into her mind. She hadn’t seen him since she had tried to get served in the men’s bar at The Hen and Duck. So that’s what he did for a living. But still, he never should have been riding one of those animals on a main road. Being a show jumper was no excuse.
Maybe she should pay the pub another visit…