by kendra Smith
‘Wait till it’s really pale and doubles in size.’ Joyce smiled as Dawn whirred and blended the eggy mixture.
‘Right that should do it; now we mix those two bowls together, this way.’ She gave Dawn the chocolate bowl and spatula and told her to fold it into the eggs and sugar while she went upstairs to get changed.
As Dawn carefully mixed the eggs and chocolate, she looked at the marbled mixture in front of her and wondered if she and Eric did enough. What do we do together? Look after kids, cook, clean, garden – is that enough when you’re approaching fifty?
Suddenly she spotted a spatula being poked into the mixture, then waved around the kitchen, wand-like by Alice, who proclaimed, with a mouthful of brownie mixture in her mouth, ‘Mmmmm! Mummy, this tastes great!’ as she crammed the spatula back in. ‘Yummy!’
‘Right, I’m going out for a while.’ Joyce appeared in the kitchen doorway. Her face was fully made-up and she was carrying her aqua raincoat in her hand.
‘Where are you going, Nanna?’
‘Shopping.’ She winked at Alice.
‘Now, Dawn, if you stick to that recipe, they never go wrong those brownies, trust me. Just watch them in the oven – cook them slow and at a low temperature. My mother used to make them with me. You could have the winning recipe! Imagine that!’
Maybe. She might be able to cobble together some brownies for a cake competition at school, but finding the magic ingredient to solve her marriage problems was proving to be far harder.
61
Dawn
There were little posters up around the school: ‘Hollycombe’s Best Easter Baker! Today at twelve o’clock’. Dawn got out of the car and pulled her shoulders back. I can do this. She was really looking forward to today. Easter was only a few days away. It was late this year, right at the end of April.
The children were going to come in and try the baking. They were to be the judges with Mrs Govenor as the final adjudicator. She knew Victoria would be there, probably making a prize-winning seventeen-tier wedding cake. Dawn unbuttoned her cardigan and took it off. She was very hot all the time. If she could just remember to keep whisking those eggs – that was the secret – until they were pale, then it would come out all gooey and messy. She repeated the mantra to herself.
She had to admit that when she’d baked them again over the weekend, with no help from Joyce, they had been rather marvellous. Eric couldn’t believe that she’d actually made them and hadn’t bought them from Marks and Spencer.
‘Dawn!’ It was one of the other Baking Queens. ‘Didn’t think I’d see you here. Imagine you entering the baking competition!’
Dawn walked determinedly through the double doors, then nearly backed away. It looked like a scene from MasterChef. There were tables set out neatly with utensils, mixing bowls, one pair of electric mixers each, and laminated instructions on each place. Dear me, this is serious. She wished there wasn’t a knot growing in her stomach.
Just then, Victoria swooped in, wearing a perfectly ironed apron and carrying a wicker basket of ingredients, looking, for all the world, like she’d just stepped off a Deliciously Ella photo shoot.
‘Dawn! Fancy seeing you here! What are you making, another lemon drizzly miserable cake?’ She winked at Dawn.
Dawn wanted to ram the wicker basket over her head. Instead, she beamed. ‘No, brownies!’
‘Not very “Easter”, are they? Oh well, good luck.’
‘Hello, everyone; welcome to the Hollycombe Easter baking competition! I hope you’re all ready to bake your way to first, second and third place!’ Mrs Govenor was standing in the kitchen telling them the rules as Dawn felt a thousand butterflies land in her stomach.
After twenty minutes the kitchens were full of women weighing, sieving, blending and mixing; some people had already put their creations in the oven; Mrs Kerry, one of the Kindy mums had burst into tears and had to be taken outside; Victoria was rushing here and there; she had flour smeared on her face and she actually seemed in a bit of a tizzy. Not so ‘photo shoot’ now. Dawn smirked to herself.
Dawn stuck rigidly to her recipe, made sure no water touched the chocolate in the glass bowl, carefully beat the egg and sugar mixture until it was pale and fluffy. Then, with trembling hands, she mixed in the chocolate concoction and gently folded the two together, not forgetting to add pieces of white chocolate at the end.
She popped her tray into the oven and set the timer, just as Victoria dropped her bowl onto the floor with a smash and cake goo leaked all over the floor. Dawn instinctively grabbed some kitchen roll, rushed over to help her and knelt down on the floor.
‘I’m fine,’ prickled Victoria, ‘I can manage,’ she said grabbing some of the kitchen roll from Dawn and, bending down to wipe up the spilt mixture, sniffed and tossed her ponytail over her shoulders. She’d been able to keep some of it in the bowl, but it looked pretty depleted. As Dawn carried on wiping up, Victoria turned to her. ‘I really wanted to win this!’ Her face was beetroot and some of her ebony hair had escaped its tortoiseshell clip at the back. Dawn had never seen her like this before.
‘Yes, I’m sure you do.’ Dawn brushed some sugar from her hands onto her apron. ‘But we all make mistakes.’
‘Someone bumped into me! It wasn’t my fault!’ Victoria hissed back.
‘Listen, I just wanted to be useful, Victoria – to help,’ Dawn said and started to get up. She could bloody well clear it up herself. Why was that woman such a cow? Just then, Victoria stretched her arm out, balanced on it as her diamond-studded watch glistened in the kitchen’s bright lights and leaned in close to Dawn.
‘Help? Well I suggest you start with your marriage! That could do with a helping hand!’ Then she stood up quickly, smoothed down her apron and strode back to the counter.
What? Dawn wasn’t sure she had heard right and turned her head sharply back and nearly fell over from her crouched position. She quickly stood up and marched over to her. ‘What did you say?’ She leaned in to Victoria’s worktop.
Victoria was busy mixing her cake batter with fury. ‘Damn, I’m going to have to start all over again.’ Her hair was covered in cake mix. The queen of calm turning puce, how funny.
‘Victoria,’ whispered Dawn loudly. ‘What on earth do you mean?’
‘Fifteen minutes to go, ladies,’ Mrs Govenor trilled.
Victoria turned to face her sharply; she brushed her hair away with the back of her hand, but that simply meant more mixture attached to it. ‘Well, I wasn’t going to say anything, but I saw Eric last night.’ Her look of triumph was obvious.
Dear God, Eric’s having an affair with her? The Baking Queen Bee?
‘Oh? Where did you see him?’ Dawn’s heart froze as she tried to sound normal.
‘Look, maybe I’ve been mistaken.’ Victoria smiled primly at her, but there was a glint in her eye.
‘No, tell me – where did you see him?’
Victoria carried on beating and folding, clearly delighted to be holding court. Whisk, whisk, whisk. It was all Dawn could do not to grab the metal spoon and fling it across the room.
‘In London, at the Metro hotel. I was just there with Gladys, my mother-in-law. There was a talk on History of Art in the nineteenth century, and she’d kindly bought a ticket for me for my birthday – quite astonishing really, how these painters used to do it – Constable and so on.’ She beamed at Dawn.
In that single moment, Dawn knew precisely how a criminal accused of manslaughter felt in court. And what is your plea? Oh guilty, your honour, very, very guilty of murdering Victoria as she gaily detailed the exact movements of my unfaithful husband all the while smiling, telling me about landscape painters and whisking the ingredients of a Simnel cake.
‘Anyway, I bumped into Eric in the lobby. Expect he was with a client. A very attractive client – didn’t really look like the gardening type, though, especially in that dress!’ She raised her perfectly micro-bladed eyebrows at Dawn.
Suddenly Dawn’s timer buzzed
; she grabbed two oven mitts, opened the oven and carefully took out her brownies on autopilot. They were cooked perfectly. She carried them to the work surface, and upended them on to a wire rack to cool. All the while she was watching herself. Meet Dawn. She is a mother who is nearly fifty, she cannot bake, she cannot elicit a sexual response in her husband, and she has just found out this husband is engaged in presumably lots of sexual responses with an ‘attractive client’ in a Marylebone hotel. Yes, please may I have some Prozac with that vodka shot, thank you very much.
She walked in a trance out the kitchen’s back door into the herb garden to get some fresh air. The kitchens were stuffy and she felt drained, more than drained – she searched for the right word. Defeated. She had not just lost the battle, she had lost the will to fight any more.
Once outside, she sat on a stone wall. She could feel the cold bricks underneath her; it felt good, it felt real and solid and she shivered, tried to make sense of what Victoria had told her. The air was chilly for April but the sun was trying its best shine through.
Looking up she watched the pansies nodding in the breeze, their cheery, sunny faces bobbing up and down, mocking her. Here you are baking brownies when your husband has probably been screwing some woman in a London hotel. She stared at those delicate yellow and purple flowers for a long time. She thought about pulling them up, yanking out their bobbing, happy faces from the ground.
‘Dawn!’ She jerked her shoulders back. It was Juliet, with a hand on her arm. Dawn was surrounded by her powerful Chanel perfume again. ‘There you are! Listen, I’ve popped your brownies on the table. We all need to be in there now, at the judging tables. You need to hurry up!’
Once she came back in, Alice was in the kitchen beaming with a few other children whose parents were there. Keep it together for the kids. They had gathered round the table with the winning bakes on them. Dawn looked over and saw her brownies with a little flag stuck into them.
‘Mummy, you came second!’ Alice rushed up to her, grinning, and grabbed her around the waist. ‘Well done, Mummy, I knew you could do this. I’m so proud of you!’ She gave her a big squeeze. ‘Your cakes are dreadful, but these brownies are yummy!’
As Dawn left the school, she clutched the remains of her prize-winning brownies as an uneasy feeling settled on her heart. She had thought many things about Eric over the years. He was older than her, he was tired, but he was unfaithful? How could it be? She never thought he’d actually do this. She felt a pang. Was it anger? Yes. There was definitely jealously there, but she wasn’t going to do what other wives might do. She wasn’t going to confront him; she wasn’t going to go through his pockets any more. No. That was boring. Predictable. Maybe, the test of all tests, would be to play him at his own little game… She knew she didn’t want to lose Eric – did she? They had been married for twenty years… but she knew exactly who she was going to flirt with to make Eric a little jealous.
A little splinter formed in her heart. Perhaps a touch of his own medicine might be in order from this perimenopausal mother of two. If she could make him realise what he’s got, what he’s got to lose – then – then what? She wasn’t sure but it seemed like a plan to calm her racing heart. She watched the number plate VIC2 whoosh through the school’s gates – probably on speakerphone right now to the other Baking Queens to tell them: ‘Guess what’s happened to Dawn Hughes this time…’
62
Suzie
‘Rex!’
‘What is it, sweetheart? Have you had a nightmare?’ Rex yawned and rolled over towards Suzie. It was 11 p.m. He’d been dozing next to her in bed. She had been reading her iPad and was drawn to an old news piece about a surrogate mother who had decided to keep her baby. His face was eerily lit by the white light of the iPad. The piece outlined that the surrogate felt the IPs – Intended Parents – were violent and only wanted the baby as ‘a toy’.
‘Oh Jesus, Rex, what if Charlie changes her mind?’ She tapped the screen noisily with her red painted fingernail.
‘She won’t, darling, she needs the money.’
‘Yes, but she’s been really funny with me whenever I’ve popped in.’ She almost felt a physical pain in her chest when she said it.
‘Well of course she has been, Suze, she’s carrying it for us and must feel an attachment. Maybe you should back off a bit. Relax.’
‘But what if the attachment grows too strong? Remember the shop, the rabbit?’ She stifled a sob. ‘We need to apply for the parental order, Rex – it’s May.’ She knew she was gabbling. ‘Make sure we start the legal side of…’ She broke off unable to speak any more as tears welled up. Rex rubbed his eyes and sat up in bed, then put his arms around her.
As she lay next to him she couldn’t shake all the memories, the damage she might have done. The years of not bothering much with contraception, thinking she was lucky. All the stories about morning-after pills, ripped condoms. She never seemed to have to worry. She went through her twenties without being touched by all that. Until one day, she’d felt very, very ill and her colleagues all joked that she was pregnant. Later that afternoon when she’d gone home and done a test, her knuckles had turned white holding the test sick. Positive. A baby.
She’d inwardly screamed. She couldn’t believe it, not now. Not when she was about to be promoted to assistant advertising manager. When she finally had accepted it, and taken herself off to the doctor she found out she was fifteen weeks pregnant. She was told she could have an abortion. Abortion. She could barely even say the word in her head. How could she have done it? Knowing what she knew now, how could she have taken that little life, ripped its roots from her uterus? She’d been so sure, back then, that she had many fertile years ahead of her, that there would be many more chances.
She could feel the tears rising in her now as she remembered the clinic, the humourless nurses. How many times have I blamed myself, blamed my infertility on that? Even though every Harley Street doctor had reassured her that it had nothing to do with her current ‘unexplained’ infertility, she knew damn well what it was: she was being punished.
‘Sweetheart, don’t worry,’ Rex interrupted her thoughts. He tucked a little wisp of hair behind her ear as images of a very pregnant and smiling Charlie clutching her belly filled her brain. ‘Listen,’ he said, turning around and rearranging his pillows, ‘I’ve got some news. It’s not finalised yet, and I wanted to be sure before I told you, but it’s looking like things might be back on track with work.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, I almost can’t believe it, but they’ve got evidence that Martin has been logging on as me at work. They’re just doing the final checks.’
She rubbed her eyes. ‘You’re kidding? Martin? But you trusted him.’
‘I know. The bastard. All the time he was “shadowing” me, he was really getting close to all my clients, finding out my passcode, looking at my sales, and basically, when they pointed the Libor finger at me, it had been him all along. I’m just waiting for a final email from work, to tell me my job’s safe – and it will all be sorted, so there’s no need to worry – and we can pay Charlie what we owe, when we need to. Everything will be OK,’ he soothed, lying back down on the silk pillows and exhaling deeply.
What a wonderful husband Rex is, she thought. I mustn’t push him away. He’s been through a lot. Why am I not more grateful? Will everything be OK? As much as her heart wanted to believe it, she just couldn’t let herself – not yet.
63
Charlie
The last few weeks have stretched into a couple of months, where I’ve felt so much better – no sickness and a lot more energy. I’ve watched the progress of nature in my own back garden, while a tiny life has been blossoming inside me. I’ve noticed the perfect buds on the cherry blossom start to burst into life in April, giving me the best view from my bedroom window of the fluttery pale pink petals – like a ballerina doing her own private dance in the wind. And now, they’re marshmallowy pink blooms, blousy, p
ast their best, most of them scattered like confetti on the grass, some blossoms getting brown and wilting. Wimbledon is over and it’s July. And it’s humid. Today is one of those freak days where it seems to be hotter than Spain, or so Good Morning Britain told me earlier. I’m lying on my bed with the window open, hoping for some breeze.
Ramone is an angel: pops in once or twice a week since the car accident, gives me lifts, and everything is a little easier. The house is spotless – the cat even seems to be behaving. The kitchen’s immaculate and he makes me and Tyler the most amazing food. I could really get used to this. It’s such a relief to know that there’s a casserole made when I come back from my ‘light’ cleaning – just a few shifts a week. Suzie insisted I cut down more.
I haven’t heard a jot from Daniel, not since just after the accident – he sent flowers, that’s been it. I know he must be mad at me, sad at what I’ve become – he probably thinks it’s a sordid way to make money; I guess he thought I’d be more than this, would amount to more than this. We had such a bond together, before he found out – then it all seemed to change in an instant. His silence has hurt my heart more than he’ll ever know. I would rather he rang me up – shouted at me – anything but this. When I last saw him and he said he didn’t really want to teach me to drive any more, that we should ‘give it a rest’ till after the baby was born. It was one of the hardest things to hear.
It’s almost a physical ache. I want so badly to touch him again, for him to hold me, to have his warm arms around me, to feel safe in his embrace. I had just started to think I could have that with a man, that I could trust him. But I deceived him. And yet, something is niggling at me, that there might be more. I daren’t get in touch; his silence is sending me the message loud and clear.