Chapter 6
After a busy day, Lauren wearily wiped down the tables in the café and checked over the coffee machine, ready for the next day.
Ever since she’d introduced a takeaway service, her trade had doubled, and she had spent a lot of time that afternoon preparing warm drinks and to-go mugs for locals and tourists alike.
She might have only had room for twenty people in the inside of the café, and even that was a squeeze, but many more than that visited daily.
She was glad; times were difficult for small businesses and that had been brought home to the whole of Lower Brambleton last year when Mollie Wakefield had nearly lost the lease on the Purrfect Paws charity shop.
Pausing in front of the bay window that looked out onto Lower Brambleton’s small main street, Lauren took a much-needed moment to regroup before she shut up shop for the night. Hope’s Café was her shield against the world, and it was also the place where she felt happiest.
Moving away from the window, she ambled through the dividing door that separated the café from the rest of the house and locked it up behind her.
There was a cottage pie in the fridge and a couple of slices of leftover fruit cake for pudding, which would do for dinner.
Flipping the knob on the oven to the right temperature, Lauren called up the stairs.
‘Hey, Mum!’
‘All right, love? I’m up in the studio.’
That was a good sign. Her mum being in the studio meant a good day, and they’d been too few and far between since the days had been getting shorter.
Smiling, Lauren climbed the first flight of stairs to the bedroom level of the maisonette that formed the living portion of the building.
Then she scuttled up the shallow concertina staircase that gave entry to the converted attic, a space that covered the entire floor space of the house and had the most glorious light, to allow her mother to work on the canvases that were such an important part of her life.
‘How’s the latest one coming along?’
‘Come and see for yourself.’ Myriam Hope, greying blonde hair tied back with a vibrant blue and yellow scarf, clad in dungarees and an oversized shirt that were more paint than fabric, glanced over her shoulder and gave Lauren a quick grin.
Lauren smiled back. She couldn’t claim to understand much of her mother’s more abstract work, but every so often Myriam would produce something she could get a sense of.
Thankfully, her current output was a touch more conventional than the Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon inspired abstracts that formed much of her oeuvre.
This was mostly because Lauren had wanted to hang some of the pictures on the café walls, to give her mother’s work more exposure, and to generate extra income from the sales that might result, but Lauren appreciated her mother’s nod to the more mainstream if it meant she could keep herself in paint.
‘Mum, that’s awesome!’ Lauren couldn’t keep the enthusiasm out of her voice. ‘You’ve really captured the essence of the place. This one’s got to go on the wall in the café.’
‘Let me finish it first, before you go making wild promises like that.’ Myriam glanced over her shoulder. ‘I know you’re not always so keen.’
Lauren grinned. ‘I love it already.’ She moved closer, looking at the details on the eighteen-by-twelve-inch landscape canvas.
Myriam had chosen the small row of Lower Brambleton’s shops as her subject.
Lauren smiled at the detail her mother had picked out in the shop windows – the playful way she’d painted a teddy bear with golden fur and a red ribbon around its neck sitting sedately in the corner of Purrfect Paws; the contrasting green and gold lettering that made up the banner sign above the window of Noah Hathaway Country Estates; the red and yellow of the Post Office and Stores, and then, on the end of the row, the pink, blue and white board over the window of Hope’s Café.
She could make out the beginnings of the table complete with a red and white gingham cloth, and she blinked, yes, a figure at the back of the window in a blue and pink striped apron.
‘I could do without you putting me in there!’ Lauren giggled.
‘Nothing doing. You’re the heart of Hope’s Café, and you’re staying there.’ Myriam’s firm tone brooked no disagreement.
‘Well, I’m going to get dinner sorted,’ Lauren said. She hurried down the stairs and soon had the pie in the oven.
It had always been just her and her mum.
While she was at art school in Manchester, Myriam had fallen pregnant with Lauren.
She was nineteen years old, and Lauren had been the result of a short-lived relationship with an exchange student, who’d left the UK at the end of his course without realising Myriam was carrying his child.
Although she’d tried to contact him for some time after she’d discovered she was pregnant, in those pre-social-media days, it had been nigh on impossible.
In the end, Myriam had resigned herself to raising Lauren alone, albeit with some support from her parents, who’d paid her rent in the early days, which had allowed her to finish her course when Lauren could go to a nursery.
It hadn’t been easy, and Lauren had vivid memories of being chilly at night when her mother couldn’t afford to put the heating on, but the one thing she’d never lacked was love.
When Lauren was eighteen, Myriam had embarked on her long-desired ambition to study at postgraduate level, and, through sheer hard work, had begun to make a name for herself on the British art scene.
Just as she was about to break through, having been exhibited alongside the likes of Tracey Emin and Banksy, disaster had struck.
Myriam had been involved in a road traffic accident that had left her in a coma for several weeks.
When she woke up, because of the brain injury she’d sustained, she’d lost a great deal of fine motor function in her hands, and doctors weren’t hopeful that she’d be able to paint again.
It was at this point that Lauren had put her own plans for further education on hold.
She’d intended to go to catering college, but her mother needed full-time care.
An inheritance from her parents meant that Myriam could afford a change of scene, moving from North Manchester down to a tiny bungalow in Somerset, and Lauren had uprooted and gone with her.
For more than a year after the accident, Lauren had, with the help and expertise of dedicated nurses, been her mother’s principal carer.
Then, as her mother’s condition began to improve, Lauren started working part-time in a local nursing home, Everscombe Hall.
Her ability to cook soon brought her to the attention of the care home’s owner, who deployed her in the kitchens, baking all kinds of tasty treats for the residents.
The work fitted in well with her caring responsibilities, and soon she was increasing her hours.
It was only when her mother suffered a fall that Lauren realised she needed more flexibility than the care home could give her.
After three extremely rewarding years, she handed in her notice.
Myriam had been cross with her: she’d lost none of her spirit after the accident, but Lauren was adamant – they’d work it out somehow.
It was then that Myriam had taken matters into her own hands.
She’d received a substantial payout from the insurance company after the road traffic accident that had covered a great deal of her rehabilitation and allowed herself and Lauren to pay off the mortgage on the bungalow.
Selling it at a good time meant that they could take on the property in the row of shops in the village, which was already partly renovated.
The property comprised the maisonette with a decent attic, and a tiny retail space, its footprint no more than forty square metres.
With a little imagination, and Lauren’s excellent cookery skills, Hope’s Café had been born.
Now, with the aid of a stairlift, which Lauren had forcefully insisted upon, Myriam used the attic space as a studio, and they both shared the rest of the house.
It had been a lot of work to get Hope’s Café up and running, but it meant that Lauren could stay close to Myriam and keep an eye on her, and Myriam had given Lauren the chance to develop her catering skills closer to home.
Sometimes, Lauren wondered what it would have been like to leave home, to pursue her dream of going to catering college, to see a little more of the world.
But having her own business was more than enough compensation, and, with her tendency to be a worrier, it set her mind at rest that Myriam was nearby if anything like another fall ever happened again.
She knew that her mother hated to think of herself as vulnerable, especially because she was only in her early fifties, but Lauren couldn’t imagine the thought of life without her.
Myriam might be cantankerous and impatient sometimes, but she was also funny, caring and had an all-encompassing heart and a smile that could power the National Grid.
There were worse ways to end up, Lauren always thought.
And at least she and her mum would always have each other.
As Lauren was about to check the pie in the oven, she suddenly remembered the small pair of gloves that she’d found.
Worried she’d forget all about them if she didn’t return them quickly, and aware that a small boy was likely to need them if the family were out and about during this cold spell, she turned down the oven.
‘I’m just popping out, Mum,’ she called up the stairs. ‘I’ll sort supper out when I get back.’
‘All right, love,’ Myriam’s voice drifted back to her. ‘See you in a bit.’
Grabbing the gloves, Lauren jumped into her car, an ageing red Peugeot 206, and made her way towards the lake house.