LITMIR.BIZ

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said and she wasn’t going to let this go. She was twitching with curiosity, so Mattie took pity on her and told her about the Banter Boys: they’d been quite nice, actually.

      ‘Really? I thought you’d have shut them down in five seconds flat.’

      ‘I don’t shut down every man I meet.’

      ‘Most men. So, you and Tom living together …’

      ‘Are you going somewhere with this?’ Mattie asked, turning to Posy, knife in her hand. ‘Because Tom and I … in fact, there is no Tom and I. There is me having to share living space with Tom under sufferance, and neither of us is happy about it, and his friends insisted that he give up the big room, so he’s much more unhappy about it than I am.’

      ‘But if in the course of living with Tom, sorry, living in the same space as Tom, you were to find out some personal details about him, you will let me know, won’t you?’ Posy’s eyes were gleaming with the prospect of finally having any nugget of information that might explain the enigma of Tom, her colleague of five years about whom she knew nothing.

      ‘Posy, just listen to yourself! I’m not Tom’s biggest fan, but you know as well as I do that there are rules about sharing living space with someone, and I’m not about to go rifling through Tom’s underwear drawer or steaming open his post,’ Mattie exclaimed as she grated nutmeg into her pork and apple mix. ‘I, and you, have to respect his privacy.’

      ‘Of course, of course,’ Posy said quickly. ‘Absolutely, but if you were to find out something, even if it seems quite mundane, like where he was living before, or if he has parents, then it would be perfectly all right to share that with a friend.’

      ‘It would be information that was in the public domain, as it were,’ Verity pointed out when she came calling to discuss the Christmas decoration budget for shop and tearooms, which turned out to be just a flimsy excuse. As was her not-at-all casual enquiry as to whether Mattie had chanced upon a stray pair of socks that Verity couldn’t find. What Verity really wanted, like Posy before her, was intel on Tom. ‘And if you don’t have intel at the moment, you can still gather intel in the general course of day-to-day living with him. And then you could share that intel with me.’

      ‘Isn’t there a commandment about that?’ Mattie asked. She sprinkled flaked almonds on her cherry frangipane loaf cakes that she was just about to put in the oven, because it was now after lunch and soon the afternoon tea crowd and the four o’clock energy slumpers would be in, wanting something sweet to get them through the rest of the day.

      The reminder of Verity’s father’s calling worked like a charm, as ever. She huffed a little, said, ‘Well, if those socks do turn up, I’d like them back, please,’ then flounced back to her office.

      After Mattie turned the tearoom sign to ‘Closed’ that evening, the machinations of her colleagues made her hesitate as she moved towards the stairs up to the flat. That flat that she shared with Tom. The flat where she would now have to spend the evening with Tom. What had seemed so straightforward was now giving her pause for thought, so it came as a huge relief when Tom came thundering down the stairs.

      ‘I’m going out,’ he said shortly. ‘And when I do get in, I’ll be quiet in much the same way that I hope you’ll be quiet tomorrow morning.’

      Mattie wasn’t sure she’d ever known such sweet relief tempered with spitting indignation. ‘It’s not my fault that you’re obviously such a light sleeper,’ she said, but Tom was already gone, slamming the shop door behind him and leaving Mattie home alone.

      After that, she wasn’t even a little bit tempted to rifle through Tom’s belongings. He hadn’t made good his threat to put a padlock on his bedroom door – she’d be mortally offended if he had – but there was no way that Mattie was going to invade his territory. She liked to think that she had a strong moral code, even though life had taught her that very few people shared her sense of ethics. Anyway, the thought of Tom returning the favour and going into her bedroom when she wasn’t there, made her go hot and cold.

      Not that Mattie had anything to hide, but it was her space, her stuff. The idea that Tom or anyone might look through her underwear drawer was bad enough, but there were some things that were far more personal than underwear.

      Like her little collection of Paris snowglobes: the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the Moulin Rouge windmill, all trapped in a winter wonderland under glass. They were neatly packed away in a box that had once stored the most delicious sablés au beurre, because Mattie could hardly bear to look at them.

      Or her framed graduation certificate from L’Institut de Patisserie and the framed graduation snap of Mattie and her classmates, all of them in chef’s whites and toques, smiling happily, while Mattie stood off to the side, her lips compressed thinly, a haunted look in her eyes. That was packed away too, along with all the other painful reminders of her other life, her Parisian life; the very idea that Tom would pick through them with a sarcastic inner monologue cut Mattie to the core.

      She was sure that Tom didn’t have the same souvenirs of heartbreak – she wasn’t even sure that Tom had a heart to break – but if he did, then it would be just as agonising for him to have someone go through them with careless fingers.

      So she wasn’t even tempted to gather intel. Not even a little bit.

      But as she had the whole building to herself for once, Mattie gave in to the temptation to wander around the empty shop. Usually the little series of anterooms on each side of the main shop were places Mattie passed through to get to the office to speak to Verity or for one of Posy’s dreaded brainstorms, like the imminent Christmas showdown where they’d discuss the possibility of life-sized reindeer for hours. In fact, the anterooms on the right, on the opposite side of the shop to the tearooms, were uncharted territory.

      At night, lit softly by the spots above the counter, Happy Ever After was full of shadows and ghosts. But they were kindly ghosts and the empty shop had a peaceful feeling. The main room had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on either side with an old-fashioned rolling ladder, and in the centre were three sagging sofas in varying stages of decay grouped around a display table. On the table was a selection of books: everything from Jilly Cooper’s Riders to Pride and Prejudice, as well as ten or twelve other titles, ranging from familiar classics to books that Mattie had never heard of. There were also velvety-smooth, pale-pink roses in a chipped glass vase and a black-and-white photograph of a young man and woman standing behind the counter of the shop decades earlier. The woman was gazing up at the man with an adoring smile on her face and he was gazing down at her with tenderness in a way that Mattie could never imagine. But then, according to everyone who’d known them, Lavinia, the former owner of the shop, and her husband, Peregrine, had had eyes only for each other.

      There was one other item on the table, a notice printed on fancy card:

       In loving memory of Lavinia Thorndyke, a bookseller to her bones. On this table is a selection of Lavinia’s favourite books; the ones that brought her the greatest joy, that were like old friends. We hope that you may find the same joy, the same friendship.

       ‘If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading at all.’ – Oscar Wilde

      Though she kept it on the downlow (mainly because she’d never hear the end of it), Mattie’s preferred books were cookery books. She’d tried once to explain to Posy that when she curled up in bed with How To Eat A Peach by Diana Henry or Nigel Slater’s Kitchen Diaries or even her treasured copy of her own grandmother’s handwritten recipe book, she was as transported as Posy was with one of the Regency romances that she could bolt through in an afternoon.

      Mattie loved to imagine all those recipes, all those meals that she’d yet to eat; loved how they inspired her, were a springboard to creating new dishes of her own. With a cookery book open in front of her, Mattie had travelled the world. She’d visited Italy with Elizabeth David, India with Madhur Jaffrey and the Middle East with Yotam Ottolenghi. She’d found comfort in the recipes of Delia Smith and Julia Child,

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