Yet another PB piece

(Have just been invited to do another museum workshop event - in another city. That should be fun again. Here's another PB piece.)

TEA FOR TWO AND A FRUIT SLICE

Aidan ordered a pot of tea for two and a fruit slice. Yes, with butter. Eileen wrote down what he said on her small pad. Then she asked if that would be all. He wondered if there could be sugar on the table and a clean spoon. And if the cups could be in saucers and not chipped at the lip.

Eileen smiled and delivered the written order to Guthrie who was behind the counter tinkering with the coffee machine again.

‘So, who is she?’ she asked him.

They were in the middle of a conversation. Guthrie was telling Eileen about his visitor of the night before.

‘She used to work here. Way back. When my dad was in charge and I was just learning how to run things. She did what you do.’

‘Was she as pretty as me?’ said Eileen and she leaned across the counter so that Guthrie could see down the front of her blouse.

Guthrie blushed and pretended to be more interested in the workings of the coffee maker.

Eileen misread the blush and thought this girl had maybe meant something to him.

‘Was she perhaps an old flame?’ she teased. ‘That’s the word my mam would have used. Did you hold hands with her behind the till when your dad wasn’t watching? Kiss her in the cupboard at the back?’ Then Eileen was laughing.

Guthrie had done all of those things, but he acted as if he hadn’t heard what Eileen had said.

‘Does she have a name, this naughty girl from your past?’

‘Moira,’ he said, and her name in his mouth felt strange.

‘Moira. Moira and Guthrie. And what’s she doing back here in Port Brokeferry?’

Truth was that Guthrie had no answer to that question. He’d been asking it himself over and over. She was staying at the Victoria Hotel. Room 31. No significance in that and he wondered why she had told him. He’d walked her back to the hotel after their shared coffee. They were like teenagers at the bottom of the hotel steps, like they had gone back to how things were when they’d last been together.

‘I’d invite you up, but old Struan Courtald is on the night shift and we wouldn’t want to start any gossip, would we?’

‘It’s good to see you again,’ he said. That was it. She went up to her room and Guthrie went back to check he’d locked the door of 'The Bobbing Boat'.

Eileen put two small balls of butter into a glass dish and made sure the sugarspoon was clean and the cups not chipped. Then she took Aidan’s order to his table and laid things out as if for two.

‘You expecting someone?’ she said.

‘Could be,’ he said.