The Last List of Mabel Beaumont(36)

It’s brave, I think. She’s brave. Going it alone with no family around her.

‘Did you think about going home?’ I ask. ‘To America, I mean.’

‘I did, but I wasn’t all that close to my parents, and they didn’t approve of me moving here in the first place. I didn’t want to go home, pregnant and asking for help. I didn’t want to give them that opportunity to say they were right all along.’

Is that stubborn, I wonder, or stupid? Either way, she’s still brave.

‘So who was he, the father?’ Julie asks. ‘Was he famous?’

Patty goes a bit red and doesn’t answer, so it’s clear that he was. But then I forget all about it because we’re at our stop, at Hammersmith, and it’s me who notices this time, and Patricia takes my arm and laughs and says we might have ended up at Heathrow if it had been left up to her, what with her getting lost in the past, and then we’re out in the fresh air, on the street, and we’ve done it, this journey I’ve been fearing.

‘Now,’ Julie says, finding us a bench to sit on while we make our plan. ‘How are you feeling, Mabel? Remember we’ve got the journey home to do, too. I don’t want you to do too much.’

I feel fine. I feel alive and excited and scared, too, but not tired. I think of my armchair, of Olly wandering the rooms of our little house on his own, of how easy it would have been to stay there and not do this. Of how pleased I am, that I did. Still, I’d hate to overdo it and curse myself. ‘Let’s get a taxi,’ I say. ‘I’ll pay.’

I took cash out at the supermarket yesterday especially for this. Erin had seen me counting out the notes and asked whether I was off to a casino.

‘Nonsense,’ Patricia says.

And I think about her modelling, strutting down a catwalk, having lots of money now because she was beautiful and tall. It’s a funny old world.

Julie hails a cab and we get in, give the driver the address. He nods, says nothing, and we’re there in a matter of minutes, back out on the street, after a brief argument over who was paying, which I managed to win.

We stand on the street, looking at the building. It’s a shop, like Kirsty said. There’s a row of them. A newsagent, a betting shop, a charity shop. And the one with the address written in my old book is a cake shop, with big buns and pastries in the window. I look up to the flat above, and the frontage is pebble-dashed and there are two small windows with white paint flaking off them. Was she here, Dot? Did she stand here, and go through that door and up some hidden stairs? Did she work in the shop? And was it even a cake shop, then?

‘Are we going in?’ Julie asks, and I realise I’ve gone off into my own world, there on the street. People are bustling past. And Julie is holding my arm, and her voice is gentle, and I feel lucky to have her.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Of course we’re going in. We didn’t come all this way just to stand on the street outside, did we?’

A little bell sounds when we go through the door and a man behind the counter looks up from his telephone. The shop is otherwise empty. He’s in his thirties, this man, and he looks like he might have Mediterranean heritage. Spanish, possibly.

‘What can I get you?’ he asks, and his voice is all London.

‘Oh, we’re not here for cake,’ Patricia says, and then Julie says, ‘Speak for yourself,’ and we all laugh, but the man doesn’t.

‘Is there still a flat above this shop?’ Patricia asks.

‘Who’s asking?’

‘Well, I am. My friend Mabel, here, is trying to track down a very old friend. And we believe she used to live in the flat upstairs from 1961.’

He looks at us, no expression.

‘So we wondered,’ Patricia goes on, ‘whether you know anything about previous owners.’

The bell rings again and we all turn to see a pretty young woman coming into the shop.

‘What can I get you?’ the man asks.

‘Hold on, you were in the middle of talking to us!’ Julie says.

‘Lady, this is a shop, and this,’ he gestures at the young woman, whose face goes pink, ‘is a customer. Customers come first.’

Even Julie doesn’t have anything to say to that.

The woman’s doing a cake run for her office and spends ages choosing different doughnuts and eclairs, and it makes me smile because she’s so slim she looks like she’s never eaten a cake in her life. I go over to the wall, lean back against it. It smells sweet in here, like icing sugar. I remember Dot and me making a cake once, for her mother’s birthday, the fine mist of icing sugar that hung in the air, that we tried to catch on our tongues.

‘Do you need to sit down?’ Julie asks. She looks concerned, her brow furrowed.

‘You look older when you do that,’ I say.

She laughs.

‘That’s better. I’m fine, just needed to lean for a minute.’

When the woman is gone, Julie steps up to the counter. ‘Well? Can you help us at all?’

‘Look, lady, I took this place over three years ago. It was a cake shop then. Before that, I haven’t got a clue. I wasn’t even born in 1961. Hell, my mother wasn’t even born in 1961!’

‘And the flat?’ Julie asks. I admire her persistence.

‘Flat comes with the shop. I live up there. It’s a bit of a shithole, to be honest. Might not have been back then, of course.’