Christmas at Hope Cottage: A Magical Feel-Good Romance Novel(17)
‘You don’t think it’s hers, do you?’
Emma opened her mouth, but no sound came out.
Evie hesitated. ‘Your mother changed over the years. It’s partly my fault, partly her own, partly this village and what it means to be a Halloway in a place where not much has changed in over two-hundred years… you’ll learn about that soon enough, but for now all you need to know is that this was hers, and that there was a time when she wrote in this, when she liked nothing better than her life here at Hope Cottage.’
Evie opened the notebook to the back cover and approached Emma. ‘I’m just going to show you this, okay?’
Emma took a hesitant step backwards as Evie handed her back the notebook, pointing to where an old, sepia-toned photograph was pasted inside.
Emma’s mouth parted in surprise. It was a girl, close to her own age, with thick black hair, head thrown back in laughter, her arms wrapped round a somewhat younger and plumper Evie. They were standing before the same old, navy range in the kitchen. Beneath the photograph, written in childish script, was: ‘Margaret and Evie Halloway, Hope Cottage, 1974.’
Emma crept forward, her fingers tracing over her mother’s face and the Halloway name in wonder.
‘Did you know it’s a family tradition to keep the Halloway name for girls, even after they marry and have children?’
Emma looked up at Evie in surprise. She knew that lots of people didn’t understand why she didn’t have her father’s last name – her father included, who’d felt a little betrayed that his child didn’t have his last name. Officially her birth certificate said Emma Rose McGrath Halloway. It was something that always came up when her parents were arguing, when they thought she couldn’t hear them. ‘Girls are always Halloways, even I can’t go against that,’ her mother had said once when she’d had a bit too much to drink, trying to explain why she’d gone behind her husband’s back and filled in Emma’s birth certificate when he’d left the hospital for a cup of tea. He’d said she could have at least called her Emma Halloway McGrath.
‘It’s because of this,’ said Evie, pointing to the enormous book open on the table. ‘It’s the Halloway Recipe Book. It’s over two hundred years old, and filled with all the recipes Halloway women have made over the years – all our hopes, our secrets too. It’s why it never leaves this cottage. Some say if it did, well… who knows what may happen?’
Emma’s lips parted in surprise and she crept forward to see, smoothing her long red hair behind her ears. The book was enormous; the cover was made of pale blue cloth with tiny white flowers that had been faded by time to the texture of fine linen, soft as butter. It was brimming with pages that had been crammed together and stitched inside. Each page told a story, offering a window into the past: the types of foods that were fashionable in the 1800s; the sorts of spices that were favoured when King George IV was on the throne; surviving the rations and the two world wars. There were recipes from all the years in between, in times of plenty and times of lack. Some of the pages were crisp and white, others had newsprint in the margins, where old headlines and adverts rested alongside the recipes, telling them to ‘Make Do and Mend’ and ‘Keep Calm and Have A Cup of Yorkshire Tea’.
‘We used newspaper during the war years – when paper was a little scarce – we painted it white, then wrote on that. Then later, newspaper became scarce as well,’ Evie said.
There must have been thousands of handwritten recipes. Some were elaborately hand-lettered in perfect calligraphy; others were scrawled, jotted in haste. Some had beautiful watercolour illustrations to accompany them; others were in simple copperplate, with no adornment beyond the date of their creation.
The recipe names made her pause. Some were austere and rather puzzling, like one called The Sinking Ship, which spoke of turning tides and changing fortunes; others were tongue-in-cheek and made her smile as she silently mouthed the words. She looked at Evie in surprise. They weren’t like any recipes she’d ever heard of before. The ones she liked best were a little bit funny and had names like the titles of old songs, Come Together Stew, Mend Fences Flambé, Hit the Road Roulade and Just in Time Tagliatelle.
‘They say what they mean, not what they are,’ explained Evie, who had a fondness for naming some of the recipes she created after old rock ’n’ roll tunes, influenced, no doubt, by the local vintage-music station, The Old Whistle, which was always on. ‘A good recipe isn’t just about making something that tastes good, you see?’
Emma shook her head. She’d always thought that taste was the most important thing.
‘The trick to a great recipe is first having a clear intention of what you’d like to achieve. Food does so much more than feed the body, you know? It can feed the spirit too, help it to grow, if you have the right ingredients and a firm intention, that is,’ Evie said, picking up the basket and beckoning Emma to follow out the back door.
When she opened it, though, she stopped short, shook her head and sighed, raising her eyes heavenward, as if to seek guidance up there. For there, by the low garden gate, were two women, waiting with rather expectant grins.
One was plump, with pale, nearly white, flyway hair and glasses as thick as the end of a jam jar. The other was tall and stout with thick, short dark hair and the somewhat mistaken belief that riding boots complemented any outfit.