The Tea House on Mulberry Street (7 page)

The party of twenty spent the day drinking pints of ale in the ancient bars that lined the promenade, and filling the fruit-machines with their wages. They ate fish and chips liberally doused with salt and vinegar; and every year wondered why a fish supper always tasted better with the smell of the sea in the nostrils. They consumed dozens of whipped ice creams and clouds of pink candy floss, and they bought glass trinkets and bars of sticky, seaside rock to take home to their families.

To end the day, the men held a race along the shore, and the last one to finish was borne down to the water’s edge, and heaved into the glittering waves, fully dressed, with much cheering and shouting from the women.

Daniel Stanley had never been on holiday in his life. Every year, John Anderson asked Daniel if he would be reserving his seat on the bus, and every year Daniel said no, thank you, he had other plans. He never revealed what these other plans might be. He told them nothing about himself or his background. He was a man of few words. But Daniel’s background was about to catch up with him. It was 1981, then. Daniel was twenty-nine, and a man of mystery to all who knew him.

He never told his colleagues, for example, that his beautiful mother, Teresa, had abandoned him in 1956. Daniel was four at the time, an only child, his father long gone to America. Teresa was two weeks married, and six months pregnant, when her new husband took the boat to the New World. Teresa cried for three months, and then Daniel was born. Afterwards, she put away the wedding pictures and got on with things. There was plenty of work in the city in those days. All the young people were emigrating to warmer, gentler places. She got a job serving drinks in a city-centre tavern and moved to a small house on Magnolia Street, where the rents were lower than average. Half of the street had been destroyed in the war, and it was still waiting to be rebuilt. Soon she had another lover. And then another. Most of her companions were charming, and they were all good-looking, but none of them wanted to settle down with a married woman and her little boy. One by one, they made their excuses not to see her any more.

Daniel saw his mother for the last time on a sunny day in June, 1956. He was out playing soldiers with his friends in the sun-baked rubble of the ruined houses. Daniel always had to be Hitler because he was the smallest boy on the street. The bigger lads chased him up and down the road, throwing chestnut hand grenades at his bony back.

Teresa called him inside and gave him a big slice of cake with jam and cream.

“Be a good boy,” she told him. “Keep yourself clean and tidy, and work hard, and I’ll be back for you in a little while.”

Then she took him over to the house of the lady who looked after him when she was at work, and kissed him goodbye. But she did not go to work. Teresa left a note at home on the table, saying that she had to go away for a little while. She took nothing with her when she left, except her red lipstick and a pair of new shoes.

A neighbour called in at lunch-time to borrow some tea leaves, and discovered the note on the kitchen table. Within minutes, a small crowd had gathered outside the front door, where they stood whispering and waiting for information. The children were told to be quiet and stop playing their war games. The authorities were alerted. Mrs Stanley was known to have several gentlemen friends but none of them came forward in response to appeals for information.

A priest was called to the house – the PP himself, Father Ignatius Mulcahy. He said he would pray that Teresa would regret her decision and return to her young son. He would put a notice in the parish magazine, he said. He patted Daniel on the head, and sighed, and gave him a shilling. There was nothing else he could do. These lone mothers, he thought, sadly. They all went a bit funny in the end, without a firm husband to guide them. He must preach more sermons on the importance of marriage.

A young policeman with eager, green eyes searched the house from top to bottom for clues, and found a final demand for rent on the mantelpiece, and eleven other unpaid bills in a cake-tin on the dresser. It was assumed that Teresa Stanley was overwhelmed by debt, and the balance of her mind disturbed. A crime was not suspected. The little house was re-let to a couple from Portadown, who were not superstitious about moving into a house of sadness. The street was subdued for several months, but eventually Teresa Stanley was forgotten.

But Daniel did not forget. He kept the silver shilling given to him by Father Mulcahy, and he knew that his beautiful mother would be back when she was finished with her adventure. She was not like other mothers. She wore red lipstick, she was beautiful, she sang songs from the movies out loud in the house, and she did not bother with baking bread and housework.

Great efforts were made by several charities in New York to trace the father of the unfortunate boy who sat quietly in his Aunt Kathleen’s parlour, on the Carlisle Circus in the north of the city. Months went by. But the father of the young child proved impossible to find in such a huge city, and eventually custody was awarded to Kathleen. Although Kathleen and Teresa were sisters, they were as different as two sisters could be. While Teresa was beautiful, wild and romantic, a daydreamer and a flirt, Kathleen was plain and practical. A no-nonsense sort of woman. A hard ticket. That’s what they called her.

“Look after the pennies,” she used to say to young Daniel, at least ten times a day.

“And the pounds will look after themselves,” he used to answer quietly, just as she had taught him. It was the only thing they said to one another. The only closeness they shared.

Kathleen wasted nothing, not even the string from parcels, or the smallest piece of soap. She was single, and worked in a cigarette factory. She was not used to children, and did not speak to Daniel very often, except to say, when he asked for a bicycle or a bag of toffees, that it was a hard station to be lumbered with Teresa’s child. Kathleen did not waste her hard-earned money on fresh flowers for the parlour and tortoiseshell combs for her thick, brown hair. She did not hanker after shop-bought cakes and slices of cooked ham. She did not buy toys for her miserable nephew, either. Such extravagance, she used to say, was the finish of poor Teresa.

Daniel became thin and withdrawn, and he grew up with the dusty smell of the charity shops on his clothes and the shame of poverty in his heart. He thought of his mother often, and prayed that someday she would come waltzing up the street to take him home, and buy him treats, and spoil him. But his prayers remained unanswered.

When he was a teenager, his aunt got him a place in the technical school, to study for a career in the catering trade. He slaved for many long hours in various eateries throughout the city, having learned the lesson early on that the only sure way to success was through hard work, and plenty of it. By the time he was twenty-four, he was a chef in one of the best hotels in the city, and well-respected by everyone who knew him. When his aunt died suddenly, leaving her home and a small fortune to the Catholic church, Daniel had already closed his heart to the world. He buried his aunt without the distraction of flowers or a headstone. It was what she would have wanted.

He moved into rented rooms and busied himself with his career. His dedication to the job earned him promotion and a modest pay increase. However, no matter how many extra shifts he worked, and no matter how hard he saved, he never seemed to have enough money in the bank. He began to economise. He gave up his tiny flat on Eglantine Avenue, and rented an unheated room in the student quarter. The Holy Lands, as the area was known, was not quite as pretty as Eglantine Avenue. The students who lived there didn’t bother themselves with keeping curtains neat or gardens trimmed. He missed the two-storey houses and the chestnut trees and the bay windows of Eglantine, but he reminded himself that such things were not as important as financial security. He walked everywhere, refusing to take the bus, even on freezing winter mornings. On his rare days off, he read library books, and went strolling around the Botanic Gardens, sometimes sitting in the Palmhouse to keep warm. He gave up cigarettes, newspapers, fish suppers, and anything at all that was not essential. He hurried to the bank each Friday to deposit his wages, and he hid his account book under a loose floorboard in his room. He did not bother with women. Women were unpredictable creatures with expensive tastes, and were known to disappear suddenly on sunny days.

One day, when he was hunting through the storeroom for some peppercorns, he came across a crate of supplies for the hotel beauty parlour. There, packed carefully in the wooden container, were sweet-smelling potions and lotions of luxury quality. Almost without thinking, he reached into the crate and took out a bar of soap and a bottle of shampoo.

He smuggled them out of the building that night, with his heart pounding as he said goodnight to the doorman. They were only little things for his own personal use, he told himself. A little perk of the job, as it were. To make up for the low wages and long hours that were the scourge of all hotel workers. It gave him a good feeling, a rare feeling of power in his otherwise humdrum existence.

As the weeks went by, Daniel kept his eyes open for more opportunities to help himself to hotel property. Cupboards left unlocked, deliveries not yet counted. He took bundles of paper towels and a tin of shoe polish from the caretaker’s cupboard. He took handfuls of tea bags, packets of chocolate biscuits and individually wrapped portions of Cheddar cheese from the staffroom tea-bar. When the barman’s back was turned, he took wings of cooked chicken and bottles of orange lemonade, hidden under a tea towel. From the bedrooms, he took a luxury bath towel, some fitted sheets and a kettle.

He was caught up in the excitement of it all. It was so easy to do and the hotel was so busy that no-one noticed him slipping along the corridors. Once, he walked through the crowded lobby with a cut-glass rose-bowl balanced on his head, underneath his crisp new chef’s hat. Even when he stole a travel-clock belonging to Mrs Constance Delargy, one of the guests, and the police were called in, his pockets were not searched. He was above suspicion of any kind.

He began to gain confidence in his thieving ability, and rarely left work without some little item on his person. Within six months, his room was piled high with supplies, and then he hit on the idea of selling them on to the public. He travelled to outdoor markets all over the north, selling bits and pieces out of a suitcase. He was sure that no-one would recognise him, as long as he stayed out of Belfast. The money came rolling in. At last, his bank balance began to look healthy.

Daniel’s crime spree seemed perfect in every way. An everlasting supply of hotel stock and wealthy guests to prey upon; and his market customers were all too eager to pick up some good bargains, even if they were of dubious origin. But it could not last forever. As Kathleen once said: all good things come to an end. It was on the occasion of his thirtieth birthday when he lost all self-control, and lifted a mediocre watercolour of Portstewart Strand straight off the wall of the conference room. He took it home wrapped in his cashmere coat (bought second-hand from Oxfam).

The owner of the hotel, a Mr Ivor Tweedy, noticed the disappearance of the painting at once, and instructed the staff to look out for light-fingered guests or possibly even one of their own. A security guard was hired to stand in the lobby, and all the remaining paintings were fixed to the walls. Mr Tweedy laughed with his guests and smiled broadly at everyone he met, but he was a man who despised theft of any kind, on any scale, and he was watching.

Daniel’s career in the hotel-catering business came to an abrupt end two months later, when he was finally seen selling canned fruit, linen tablecloths and assorted crockery at a market in the neighbouring seaside town of Bangor. It was a dull Monday morning in September and the sharp-eyed witness was John Anderson, the head waiter, himself.

John Anderson did a double-take when he saw Daniel handing over two tins of pineapple slices to a woman in a green coat. The woman held out some coins and Daniel checked the amount and then dropped the coins into his pocket. At first John thought his eyes were deceiving him, but there could be no mistake. Daniel Stanley, it certainly was, with his jet-black hair combed straight back off his tanned forehead. Watching from across the crowded harbour, John realised his old friend and colleague was a thief.

The head waiter ordered a double whiskey in The Anchor Bar while he pondered the situation. It was hard to betray a fellow worker. Very hard indeed. Maybe the poor fellow was in some sort of financial trouble, and the wages at the hotel were criminally low. He might be in debt to a bookmaker, a pawnbroker or even a loan-shark. On the other hand, if the hotel was losing money, all their jobs were at risk. John Anderson smoked a couple of cigarettes, and ate a shepherd’s pie. Then, with a heavy heart, he telephoned the owner of the hotel from the payphone on the bar counter.

Mr Tweedy’s face flushed crimson with rage when he took the phone call, a roast beef and mustard sandwich suspended halfway to his open mouth. He ordered Daniel’s locker to be forced open by the hotel handyman, and it was found to contain forty tins of Canadian salmon, twenty teaspoons, one hundred bars of lavender-scented soap and a silver-plated gravy boat. An investigation was launched, and the accounts were examined. It was concluded that Daniel Stanley had been stealing from the hotel for more than a year. The information buzzed through the building with feverish excitement. The female staff were nearly hysterical when they heard that Daniel Stanley was nothing more than a common criminal. They rushed home after work to tell their families all about it. Mrs Doherty, from the laundry-room, said that she always thought there was something fishy about the head chef. Nobody’s that perfect, she said, wisely.

Mr Tweedy had to sit at the bar and drink four brandy and ports to steady his nerves. His right eyelid twitched violently when he thought of the lovely painting of Portstewart Strand and Constance Delargy’s little clock, and God only knew how many tins of best Canadian salmon – all whisked away from under his large, purple nose by a man he would have trusted with his life.