Escape From Evil - Cathy Wilson [86]
The only saving grace was that he didn’t bother me sexually. It had been a crushing blow to my confidence when he rejected me night after night while I was pregnant. I was big, four stone heavier than I had been – I’d put on fifty per cent of my weight again. Despite my ambivalent feelings towards him, I still had physical needs, needs which he refused to meet. I think pregnancy even heightens your sex drive, but he refused to touch me. I thought it would be different when the baby was born, but thank God it wasn’t. The second my head hit the pillow, there was only one thought in my mind: sleep.
In my waking hours, though, another thought began to plague my zombie-like state. Grandpa and Peter might have shared similar views on childcare, but with my grandparents that was part of a package: Granny raised the kids, Grandpa brought home the bacon. That’s where the similarities with Peter ended. Not only was he not lifting a finger around the house, he didn’t seem to work much either. There was certainly no money coming in that I could see.
I didn’t like it. As a fourteen-year-old I’d held down three jobs and sold cigarettes on the side. I was used to having money because that was what bought you independence. It might have been okay for Peter to drift along, maybe even for me to go along with him for a while. But I was a mother now. It wasn’t good enough.
What could I do though? I was so tired and any sort of proper job was out of the question until Daniel was much older. Then, one day, I picked up the local Argus paper again and began to look for cars to trade.
It was a lot harder doing it with a newborn strapped to my front, but the money was good for fairly straightforward work. I did it for about three months and I would have done it for longer. But my self-preservation gene, dormant for so long, had well and truly kicked in and I had a plan.
Peter announced one day that we had to leave the cottage.
‘Why?’
‘The hotel wants it.’
He still called it a ‘hotel’, even though I knew the truth.
‘But what about your job?’
‘What job?’ he said. ‘I haven’t worked there for ages.’
Talk about a bombshell. If he wasn’t working there, then where the hell did he go during the day? Where was his money coming from? It was always questions with that man, but I was too focused on my own project to dwell on it. If anything, it just made me more determined to proceed.
Peter had tried to take my car-sales money off me to ‘look after’, as he put it, like he’d always done. This time I said no. I needed it to pay rent. On a tea shop.
I don’t know where the idea had come from. Desperation drives you in odd directions. I needed an income, I needed a new roof over our heads and I needed something I could do with a young baby in tow. This is what my brain came up with.
I found premises in Portslade comprising a little restaurant space with a flat at the back. It was perfect for what I wanted and, on a peppercorn rent, it was affordable. I found a shop fitters from which to buy the counters, tables and chairs and took myself down to Southampton for the actual stock. I figured that if you want to sell tea, don’t go to a middleman – get it at source. There was a wholesaler at the docks who took everything as soon as it came in off the ships, so I strolled around sourcing pots of exotic-sounding herbal teas, Earl Grey, and everything else I needed. This was years before fruit teas became trendy and there was a strong chance it wouldn’t work. People might just turn their noses up at anything that wasn’t PG Tips. But I was sure I’d identified a gap in the market and I wanted to exploit it. I even bought extra tins of tea leaves and teapots and cups, so customers could actually buy the tea I was serving them and the crockery it came in.
When The Olde Tea