Chapter 46
At a loose end and needing to take her mind off the dinner date with Marc the following day, Lauren had decided to open Hope’s Café for a few hours.
It had been a busy morning, and she was just about to take a breather when Bella walked through the door with a stunning-looking woman in tow.
She tucked the tea towel into the waistband of her apron and gave the two of them her best welcoming smile.
‘Hi, Lauren!’ Bella exclaimed. ‘I thought I would introduce Samira here to the best café this side of Bristol. We were both feeling a bit peckish.’
Lauren laughed. ‘You’re always so kind. What can I get you?’
When Bella and Samira had chosen their drinks and a slice of salted caramel sponge cake, Lauren hurried back to the counter and began putting the order together. She found herself listening in to their animated conversation; it would have been difficult not to, in such a small space.
‘The lake house is such a stunning location,’ Samira was saying. ‘I can see exactly why you want to shoot the video there.’
‘So, you really think it’ll work?’ The excitement in Bella’s voice was obvious. Lauren lost track of the conversation as she frothed the milk for the two lattes that Bella and Samira had ordered, but as she removed her steel jug from the steamer nozzle, she caught the tail end again.
‘Yeah, it’s sad, really,’ Bella was saying in an undertone. ‘He lost his wife a couple of years ago and bought the house to be closer to Noah. His boys are adorable, but I guess having kids that age can put a lot of women off. I mean, not everyone wants a ready-made family, right?’
‘Exactly. I mean, he’s seriously hot, but the thought of having to play mummy to two boys…
’ Samira giggled, a sound that Lauren found immediately irritating for reasons she couldn’t quite put her finger on.
She tried to tune out of the conversation and busied herself with unloading the small countertop dishwasher while she waited for the coffee machine to stop chugging through the motions for Samira and Bella’s order.
The plates, still hot from the cycle, burned her fingertips and, swearing under her breath, she plonked them down on the worktop with a crash.
‘Are you okay?’ Bella called.
‘Yeah,’ Lauren replied, throwing an apologetic glance over her shoulder. ‘I’m forever forgetting to leave it a while before I get the crockery out of the washing-up machine.’
Samira giggled again, and Lauren wondered if it was at her expense. ‘Washing-up machine’ was one of her mother’s expressions – borrowed from Myriam’s favourite novelist, Jilly Cooper – and it had entered firmly into Lauren’s vocabulary, too.
Lauren took the coffee and cake over to them, and then focused on clearing down a couple of tables and serving another customer who’d come in for a hot drink and a mince pie.
She couldn’t stop thinking about what Samira had said about Marc, though, the rather superficial snap judgements – hot, but also a no-go because of the kids.
In fairness, children weren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but, having gotten to know Liam and Luca, it wasn’t as if they were terrors.
Not everyone wanted added baggage in their relationships, though.
She thought about her own situation and then felt guilty about thinking of Myriam as ‘baggage’.
Whatever hand life had dealt them, they’d made the best of it, and she was sure Marc was doing his best, too.
She couldn’t disagree with Samira’s observation that Marc was hot, though.
Then she shook her head; she’d been judging Samira for being superficial – wasn’t she just doing the same by admitting that, if only to herself?
Cursing herself for overthinking, it was a few seconds before she realised that Bella was back at the counter.
‘Sorry,’ she said hurriedly, ‘I was miles away.’
‘I don’t blame you,’ Bella quipped. ‘A sunny beach and a Pina Colada would be preferable to the Somerset mizzle! Even after living here for a few years, I can’t get used to the dullness of the winter. I mean, it’s not even as though we get that much snow.’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Lauren grinned back at her. ‘We got a proper blizzard a couple of years back. Was that before you lived here?’
‘Yeah,’ Bella replied. ‘Mollie told me the tale. She had to get out and rescue another litter of newborn kittens, and the snow was blanketing down.’ She wrinkled her nose, as if she was trying to imagine what a snowbound Lower Brambleton would be like.
‘It was so close to Christmas that she named the three kittens Balthazar, Melchior and Caspar, although I suspect they might have been changed when they got to their new homes!’
‘Well, you never know, perhaps we’ll get lucky again this year.’ Lauren grabbed her icing sugar shaker and sprinkled some on the new batch of mince pies that she’d taken out of the oven an hour ago, which were sitting under the glass cloche.
Bella laughed. ‘I hope so! I’m not sure anyone was ever inspired to write a song by the mizzle!’
‘Maybe you could be the first.’
‘I suspect we’ll be adding snow to the video in post-production,’ Samira called out from where she was still sitting at the table.
‘It must be so exciting to be releasing a new song,’ Lauren added as she popped the cloche back over the mince pies. ‘Are you nervous?’
‘Not really, but I will be when it’s finally out there.’ Bella smiled. ‘Until that point, I can pretend that the song is mine, but once I let it go out into the wide world… then it becomes everyone else’s.’
‘You’re very brave,’ Lauren said. ‘I’m not sure I’d like to be judged like that.’
‘I just don’t read the reviews!’
‘Which are, of course, going to be amazing!’ Samira had joined them at the counter. ‘I’d better get back to the office, Bella, but I’ll be in touch.’
The two women said goodbye, and as Samira walked out of the café, Bella hovered a little longer inside.
‘She seems nice,’ Lauren offered, wishing there was something on the counter she could fiddle with, but – efficient as she was – everything was clean and tidy and waiting for her next customers.
‘She is,’ Bella sounded a little less than convincing. ‘It’s just… oh, I don’t know, I suppose I’m being silly…’
‘You can tell me if you want to,’ Lauren said gently. ‘I won’t tell anyone.’
‘It’s been nearly fifteen years since I released a single.
And although I know that this song is the best I’ve written in a long time, I still can’t help wondering if I’m doing the right thing by putting myself out there again.
People loved my old stuff and I’m doing quite well from the royalties from the streaming services.
What if I put it out there and everybody hates it?
What if I’m just setting myself up for a massive, epic fail?
’ She shook her head. ‘The record company is taking such a risk on me. What if I end up just being a massive loss maker for them as well?’ She shook her head.
‘It’s one thing being confident in front of the people who are marketing you, but I can’t stop worrying that this is all a mistake. ’
Lauren paused before answering, and from the look on Bella’s face, she realised she should have jumped in a bit quicker. ‘That woman you were with, Samira, sounded as though she loved your song, and she loves Marc’s house as a location.’
‘Yeah, but she’s paid to be enthusiastic,’ Bella muttered. ‘I’m not daft enough to think that someone like Samira isn’t well able to talk the talk when she needs to. She might hate it, but she gets paid to pretend she likes it.’
‘Even so,’ Lauren persisted, ‘they wouldn’t have taken you on if they didn’t think they could make an awful lot of money out of you.’ Lauren didn’t know anything about the music business, but she could see that Bella was wobbly about the steps she was about to take. Lauren’s heart went out to her.
‘I know it’s not quite the same, but when Mum and I went to the bank to get the business loan to start this place, we were both absolutely petrified.
If the bank hadn’t agreed to lend us the money, then I’d have spent my life being worried every time I left for work that Mum would have a mishap, and I wouldn’t be around to help.
This place, even though it might seem small, wasn’t just my dream, it was a safe solution for both of us.
And in the end, it all worked out for the best.’
‘And it’s such a lovely place,’ Bella looked around at the tiny little café, with its festive table decorations, cottage-core decor that included, for the season, red and green bunting on top of the small dresser by the bay window, and the perfectly hung and framed pictures that Myriam was showcasing.
‘You must be so happy to have achieved that dream. Thank you for the pep talk. I know it’s just “the yips” as sportspeople would say.
I have to learn to trust the process, and Samira probably does really like the song. ’
Lauren nodded. She supposed she was lucky.
But as Bella said goodbye and left, probably to pop a couple of doors down and fill Noah in about the meeting with Samira, she was unnerved.
She had Myriam, and she had the café, but something was still missing.
And as Marc’s face flashed into her mind again, she had to admit that what she missed was a pair of arms around her, and someone to love.