Then Honor stepped forward and enfolded him in a great big hug, somehow recognising that, beneath the façade ofadulthood, the heart beating was still that of a child. ‘Please stop bothering Ru because we don’t want to have to hurt you. If you want to earn a drink and a cake by doing half-an-hour’s washing up, there’s plenty.’ She stepped back to gauge his reaction.
Frog’s jaw was suitably dropped and the tips of his ears had gone red. ‘Earn?’ he repeated.
‘Sure.’ Encouraged, she linked her arm in his and turned him towards the tearoom. ‘We’re real shorthanded so you’d be doing me a favour. You wash up this load that’s waiting and it’ll be worth a drink and a big cake. What do you say?’
Frog paused. Then said, gruffly, to the Tadpoles, ‘Catch you later.’
In the kitchen, he surveyed the stainless steel sink full of steaming water, a stack of plates ready beside it. ‘Two cakes,’ he stipulated.
She sighed. ‘Well, OK. Just this one time. Because I have to make more strawberry slush.’
He looked at her and laughed. ‘OK, Yankee Doodle, how much do I have to do to get a cheesy potato?’
‘A lot.’ She gave him an apron and began to rinse more strawberries in the other bowl of the sink. Then, seeing that Ru had come into the kitchen to stare, ‘And you have to get along with Ru while you’re here. Rufus, Toby is going to be helping us this afternoon, as we’re shorthanded.’
‘Frog,’ said Ru.
‘Freak,’ said Frog.
‘Whatever. Just play nice.’ Honor switched on the blender.
* * *
After showering out a head full of hair wax that, in his view, had been totally unnecessary on a windless day, but the hair stylist had ‘wanted definition’, Martyn emerged from the all-white hotel bathroom with an all-white towel hooked around hiships, and checked his phone. He’d become a compulsive checker on this trip, greeting every text with a skip of anticipation in case it was from Honor.
But this one was from Ru. He read and reread it, half-convinced that Ru must be suffering from hallucinations. Electing to go straight to source, he dialled Honor. ‘Ru tells me that you beat Frog up, again.’
Her laugh was little more than a breath down the line, raising the hairs on the back of his neck. ‘I didn’t! It was a satisfactorily non-violent intervention. I suddenly didn’t want Ru to prove that violence breeds violence.’ She yawned.
His eyes ran over the text again. ‘So you tipped ice down Frog’s boxers? And then hugged him? Are you bonkers?’
She yawned. ‘I guess you had to be there.’
Laughter bubbled up from his chest. ‘I can’t tell you how much I wish I had been. You’re something else, Freedom Lefevre.’
Chapter Twenty-Six
Honor, not due at the Teapot until ten, was drifting in an agreeable somnolence of half-dreamed dreams when her cell phone rang. She scrabbled it somehow to her ear and groaned, ‘Yeah?’ discouragingly.
Ru sounded diffident. ‘Mum and Soppy only got home about six this morning and they’re in bed, wrecked. Shall we open up? Or stay closed?’
Honor kind of wanted to snap, ‘Stay closed!’ But, sometimes, her conscience just insisted that she live up to the name her father gave her. And she hadn’t slaved and contrived for the last three days to keep the Teapot running just to have Robina come home and mock all her efforts by leaving it shut. The tearoom was meant to be open. So she would make somebody open it. She swore. ‘I’ll be there in thirty minutes.’ She was beginning to totally appreciate why waitresses wore their hair in tight knots or braids. It wasn’t hygiene. It was so no one could tell they had unwashed, unbrushed, unstyled hair because they hadnotime for all that.
She banged into the Teapot like a child in a snit, where Ru was already scrubbing potatoes. ‘Come on,’ she snapped. ‘Let’s get your fu — your mother up.’
Ru, who hadn’t put his hat on yet as the Teapot wasn’t open for business, grinned through his curtain of hair. ‘You won’t wake her.’
‘You just watch me.’
‘Love to.’ Ru let her in the door in the side of the building. Honor stormed up the two flights of stairs to the bedrooms. ‘Which is your mother’s? This one?’ And burst into the room.
She paused to let her eyes adjust to the gloom.
A giant yellow caterpillar lay on a double mattress and the curtains swayed lazily in the breeze from the open window.‘Robina.’ Honor addressed the sheeted caterpillar, politely. ‘You need to get up and open the tearoom. You need to bake the cakes.’
The caterpillar lay still.
Honor cranked it up a notch. ‘Robina,you need to get up and open the tearoom. You need to bake the cakes!’
