Dearest Mary Jane. Бетти Нилс

      CHAPTER ONE

      IT was five o’clock and the warm hazy sunshine of a September afternoon was dwindling into the evening’s coolness. The Misses Potter, sitting at a table in the window of the tea-shop, put down their teacups reluctantly and prepared to leave. Miss Emily, the elder of the two ladies, rammed her sensible hat more firmly on her head and addressed the girl sitting behind the tiny counter at the back of the room.

      ‘If we might have our bill, Mary Jane?’

      The girl came to the table and the two ladies looked at her, wondering, as they frequently did, how whoever had chosen the girl’s name could have guessed how aptly it fitted. She looked like a Mary Jane, not tall, a little too thin, with an unremarkable face and light brown hair, straight and long and pinned in an untidy swirl on top of her head. Only when she looked at you the violet eyes, fringed with long curling lashes, made one forget her prosaic person.

      She said now in her quiet voice, ‘I hope you enjoyed your tea. In another week or two I’ll start making teacakes.’

      Her customers nodded in unison. ‘We shall look forward to that.’ Miss Emily opened her purse. ‘We mustn’t keep you, it’s closing time.’ She put money on the table and Mary Jane opened the door and waited until they were across the village street before closing it.

      She cleared the table, carried everything into the small kitchen behind the tea-room and went to turn the notice to ‘Closed’ on the door just as a car drew up outside. The door was thrust open before she had time to turn the key and a man came in. He was massively built and tall, so that the small room became even smaller.

      ‘Good,’ he said briskly. ‘You’re not closed. My companion would like tea...’

      ‘But I am closed,’ said Mary Jane in a reasonable voice. ‘I’m just locking the door, only you pushed it open. You are not very far from Stow-on-the-Wold—there are several hotels there, you’ll get tea quite easily.’

      The man spoke evenly, rather as though he were addressing a child or someone hard of hearing. ‘My companion doesn’t wish to wait any longer. A pot of tea is all I am asking for; surely that isn’t too much?’

      He sounded like a man who liked his own way and got it, but Mary Jane had a lot to do before she could go to her bed; besides, she disliked being browbeaten. ‘I’m sorry...’

      She was interrupted by the girl who swept into the tea-room. No, not a girl, decided Mary Jane, a woman in her thirties and beautiful, although her looks were marred by her frown and tight mouth.

      ‘Where’s my tea?’ she demanded. ‘Good lord, Thomas, all I want is a cup of tea. Is that too much to ask for? What is this dump, anyway?’ She flung herself gracefully into one of the little cane chairs. ‘I suppose it will be undrinkable tea-bags, but if there’s nothing else...’

      Mary Jane gave the man an icy violet stare. ‘I do have drinkable tea-bags,’ she told him, ‘but perhaps the lady would prefer Earl Grey or Orange Pekoe?’

      ‘Earl Grey,’ snapped the woman, ‘and I hope I shan’t have to wait too long.’

      ‘Just while the kettle boils,’ said Mary Jane in a dangerously gentle voice.

      She went into the kitchen and laid a tray and made the tea and carried it to the table and was very surprised when the man got up and took the tray from her.

      In the kitchen she started clearing up. There would be a batch of scones to make after she had had her supper and the sugar bowls to fill and the jam dishes to see to as well as the pastry to make ready for the sausage rolls she served during the lunch-hour. She was putting the last of the crockery away when the man came to the doorway. ‘The bill?’ he asked.

      She went behind the counter and made it out and handed it silently to him and the woman called across. ‘I imagine there is no ladies’ room here?’

      Mary Jane paused in counting change. ‘No.’ She added deliberately, ‘The public lavatories are on the other side of the village square on the road to Moreton.’

      The man bit off a laugh and then said with cool politeness, ‘Thank you for giving us tea.’ He ushered his companion out of the door, turning as he did so to turn the notice to ‘Closed’.

      Mary Jane watched him drive away. It was a nice car—a dark blue Rolls-Royce. There was a lonely stretch of road before they reached Stow-on-the-Wold, and she hoped they would run out of petrol. It was unlikely, though, he didn’t strike her as that kind of man.

      She locked the door, tidied the small room with its four tables and went through to the kitchen where she washed the last of the tea things, put her supper in the oven and went up the narrow staircase tucked away behind a door by the dresser. Upstairs, she went first to her bedroom, a low-ceilinged room with a latticed window overlooking the back garden and furnished rather sparsely. The curtains were pretty, however, as was the bedspread and there were flowers in a bowl on the old-fashioned dressing-table. She tidied herself without wasting too much time about it, and crossed the tiny landing to the living-room at the front of the cottage. Quite a large room since it was over the tea-room, and furnished as sparsely as the bedroom. There were flowers here too, and a small gas fire in the tiled grate which she lighted before switching on a reading lamp by the small armchair, so that the room looked welcoming. That done, she went downstairs again to open the kitchen door to allow Brimble, her cat, to come in—a handsome tabby who, despite his cat-flap, preferred to come in and out like anyone else. He wreathed himself round her legs now, wanting his supper and, when she had fed him, went upstairs to lie before the gas fire.

      Mary Jane took the shepherd’s pie out of the oven, laid the table under the kitchen window and sat down to eat her supper, listening with half an ear to the last