The Ballroom Café Read Free Page A

a key out of his back pocket. He clicked the gate open and watched it shudder back.
    ‘I was wondering about the house and the café.’
    ‘It is some old place all right. The old dears who live here won’t mind if you walk up the path. I am only the gardener,’ he said, before jumping back in behind the wheel. A dog scooted up the avenue after the jeep, only inches from the back wheels.

3
     
    Ella O’Callaghan watched the small dog in the garden running, sniffing, pissing as if it were in a public park. She stayed behind the curtain, easing the big leather armchair out of her way, leaning to the left to get a better view. It was a cold, sharp morning. The frost lingered in the dark, heavy corners of the rhododendron. A wagtail foraging for crumbs flew in to peck the ground closer to the house. The woman, who had followed the dog in behind the high wall and iron gates, was standing on the gravel avenue, smoking a cigarette. ‘It is a dirty habit,’ Ella snorted to herself as she looked at the stranger propping up the broken fountain, blowing smoke rings towards the house.
    Roscarbury Hall was a sight to behold: a sorry pile, three storeys high. Long neglected, it looked empty. The dirty windows were covered in a thick layer of grime. The wisteria was out of control, its gnarled stems woody and bare. The front door, with the dull, brass knocker, was covered in decades of blown dust built up and mixed with layer upon layer of dried-out, peeling paint. Leaves, trapped in the corners at the threshold, were stuck with cobwebs. It did not matter; the front door at Roscarbury was never opened any more.
    Ella shrank back from the window as Roberta came in to the room and switched on the second bar of the heater. It let out a low hum and the dry heat choked her throat. Bristling with indignation, because the heater would now pong out the place, she sighed loudly. She could not move to the back room, which was so cold there was a layer of thin ice on the far wall.
    She saw the woman, her hair falling into her eyes and her walk ungainly, trudge across the grass towards the lake. Ella moved from the window, stopping to switch off a bar of the heater on the way. She paused in the hall to pick up a red note.

     
    Order a roast beef from the butchers. We also need onions, and cream for the apple tart. Tell Iris to stop polluting the house with her filthy smoke. R.

     
    Ella’s kettle was already boiling when Roberta shuffled from the drawing room, halting her walking stick long enough to check the note had been removed and to scrunch Ella’s note into the hall bin.
    Taking down her rosebud teapot with matching cup and saucer, Ella set them on a tray. Swirling the boiling water fiercely to scald the pot, she reached with one hand for the box marked ‘Ella’s Tea’.
    Roberta stood beside her and slowly placed her kettle on the gas ring. She patted the tight bun at the back of her head, humming a tune to herself.
    Her china teapot on the tray, along with a small jug of milk and a spoon holding three cubes of sugar, Ella walked past her sister and out of the room.
    No word was spoken between the two, but this was not surprising: no word had been exchanged between the two sisters in decades. Those who knew the sisters well were aware of the hard frost, thick and deep, between them. It had, at one time, been the source of extreme speculation, but as the years went by, the interest of others in the travails of the O’Callaghan sisters receded.
    Ella, on the way back through the hall, slapped down a reply on the table.

     
    You give up the booze, I will tell Iris to give up the cigarettes. Pigs might fly as well. E.

     
    She settled back in the drawing room and sipped her tea. The hot drink warmed her and she turned off the last bar of the electric fire. She listened to her sister fuss around the kitchen, tidying up her things: each mug and plate in its place and her provisions labelled ‘R’ tidy and in a separate cupboard. She