‘Okay,’ I said. ‘What d’you want us to bring?’
‘Not a thing,’ said Mum nobly. ‘You spend more than enough time chained to an oven as it is. Oh, unless . . . You don’t have any pizza bases, do you, love?’
‘Of course.’ We made and froze them by the score.
‘Maybe just a couple of them, with that lovely garlic and parmesan topping. And perhaps a green salad – no. No, forget it . . . Ooh, but how about that beautiful cheesecake slice?’
I started to laugh.
‘Oh, darling, don’t bother. I’ll fling something together. You just turn up.’
‘No, it’s fine, Mum. See you at seven.’
‘You’re wonderful,’ said Mum, and hung up.
‘Pushover,’ Anna remarked.
I sighed. ‘Yeah, I know.’
Chapter 2
Rob and I were christened Robin and Aurelia but staged a joint rebellion at about the age of five, and these days most people assume that I’m called Leah and Rob is short for Robert. We don’t look much alike, although we’re both smallish and slimmish – due, Rob claims, to too many mung beans and not enough steak in our formative years. Rob inherited Mum’s blond hair and skin that tans to a smooth bronze after about half an hour of sunlight, and I got reddish-brown curls, hazel eyes and Dad’s tendency to freckle. I’m quite pretty, in an unremarkable sort of way, but Rob’s gorgeous. He actually gets approached in supermarkets by modelling scouts.
Our father, Grayson Leslie, owns a scenic but remote sheep farm in the middle of New Zealand’s North Island, halfway between Taumarunui and Whangamomona. He and Mum were married when she was twenty and he was thirty-six, thanks to extreme youth on her side and extreme loneliness on his. Dad’s first wife had absconded with a florist and left him with two teenage children; Mum was the neighbours’ au pair. The marriage lasted about as long as you’d expect, and Rob and I were eighteen months old when they separated and Mum moved us to Ratai, a place locally famous for its high concentration of flaky single mothers.
And my mother, bless her, was the quintessential flaky single mother. She wore her hair in a long plait down her back, practised yoga, made her own candles, dabbled in veganism and studied iridology by correspondence. (Neither of her children can now stomach chickpeas, tofu or any form of alternative medicine.)
* * *
At six that evening Anna left, firstly for home and thence to the House of Flake, with two uncooked pizza breads, one salad and a tray of boysenberry cheesecake. I drifted around the empty kitchen for a while, polishing the coffee machine and aimlessly rearranging the fruit bowl, until I managed to work up sufficient self-reproach to put on my running gear and let myself out into the evening sunlight.
Wonderful sport, running, I thought as I jogged down the driveway. Makes you look and feel better, and it’s free. I crossed the road and headed up a steep clay track winding uphill through the scrub, and my self-satisfaction dwindled, replaced by the conviction that since I ran up this hill twice a week it really shouldn’t hurt this much.
I paused at the top to stretch the knee I’d had surgery on several years previously, looking down over the wide, tree-fringed curve of Ratai Beach. The sea this evening was a deep, clear green, edged by a crisp frill of foam, and a lone oystercatcher trotted to and fro along the smooth pale sand. The track turned left and continued over a headland to the next bay, but leaving it I slithered down a bank, came to rest against the trunk of a huge half-dead puriri tree and climbed down its exposed roots to the top of a sand dune at the north end of the beach. From there it was three kilometres back along the sand, sharp right at the mouth of the estuary and another hundred metres along the riverbank to the bottom of Mum’s garden.
I dropped to a walk, wiping my hot face on the hem of my singlet, and let myself in through a gate in the camellia hedge. Mum’s garden covered nearly an acre, running down from the house at the top of the section to the river path at the bottom, and it seemed bigger. Paths wound through the trees between sunlit pools of lawn and garden, drawing the eye around the next corner with that deceptive skill that manages to give the impression the whole thing is completely natural and was never designed at all. It was always lovely, and now, in mid-spring, with six inches of fresh new growth on every shrub and the borders blazing with colour, it was breathtaking.
Her house was much less lovely; a sprawling, rundown place previously owned by a retired farmer. Uninterested in fishing or golf, he had occupied his twilight years with DIY building projects. He was a much keener starter than finisher and he never altered anything that was already there, so the house was full of random steps, unnecessary bits of hall and electrical cables that ran around the edges of the skirting boards rather than being hidden tidily inside the walls. Mum had bought it with her divorce settlement, but, as her income came solely from cleaning holiday homes and any (rare) spare cash was automatically diverted towards the garden, she’d never been able to afford any further alterations.
I found her in the kitchen, standing on the table and reaching for a large pottery jug that was kept at the top of the hot-water cupboard. In a green silk wraparound skirt and a lacy yellow blouse, with her hair loose down her back, she looked like a more colourful version of Stevie Nicks.
‘You look nice,’ I said, crossing the room to run myself a glass of water from the tap. ‘Like a daffodil.’
‘Thank you, darling,’ said Mum. She handed me the jug and climbed stiffly down off the tabletop. ‘I feel about a thousand years old after that yoga class. Come and help me pick some flowers for the table.’
She rummaged in a drawer for her secateurs, and led the way outside to the big apple tree, frothy with pink-tipped blossom and knee deep in bearded irises, white and powder blue and deep, shadowy purple.
‘Gorgeous,’ I said, throwing myself down full-length on the lawn to admire them.
‘They only last a fortnight,’ Mum said. ‘But what a fortnight.’
‘What’s for tea? I’m starving.’
‘Roast lamb,’ she said, felling irises.
‘Mum, you legend.’
‘Peter Marshall gave me a lovely shoulder roast, bless him. I’ve got it all ready; I just need to pop it in the oven.’
I looked at my watch. It was five to seven. ‘Awesome. It’ll be ready by about eleven.’
‘You do exaggerate, Aurelia,’ said Mum. ‘It will be ready in an hour and a half, and in the meantime we’ll have something to drink and a few nibbles.’
She led the way back into the kitchen and lifted the lid of the roasting pan on the bench to peer at the large, raw, semi-frozen joint inside. It was studded with rosemary sprigs and garlic cloves, smeared with mustard and dusted with salt and pepper, and it would, if roasted very slowly for most of a day, undoubtedly be delicious.
‘Mum, for goodness’ sake,’ I said.
She sighed. ‘It won’t be ready, will it? Oh well, we’ll proceed to plan B.’
‘What’s plan B?’
‘It will come to me, I’m sure,’ said Mum vaguely.
‘Steak? Fish? What veggies are we having?’
‘I hadn’t decided. Let’s go out now and raid the veggie garden – we might be able to find a few new potatoes. I’ll just put the flowers in water first.’
Before I could wring her neck the others arrived in a body, and she hastened to the door.
‘Mike, how nice to see you!’ she said. ‘Come in – Lia and I were just conferring about dinner.’
‘There isn’t any,’ I said through the kitchen window.
‘Of course there will be. We’ll pop the pizza bread into the oven now, for a start. Rob, my love, how about taking a bowl and digging some new potatoes?’
Ten minutes later Rob was scraping potatoes in the sink and I was seasoning frozen chicken drumsticks. Mum had bundled the irises into a glazed earthenware pot, where they looked like props in a photo shoot for House and Garden, and was sitting at the kitchen table in a pool of evening sunlight, her silken s
kirts shimmering in a most beguilingly Oriental fashion. My mother is a peerless delegator, and she’s so damned charming that it hardly ever occurs to you to mind.
‘Mike, it’s far too long since we saw you,’ she said. ‘Have you been doing anything exciting?’
Mike considered. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he said.
‘It’s a dreadful question, isn’t it? Guaranteed to make your mind go instantly blank. How’s the farm?’
‘Good.’
‘And your father?’
‘Pretty much back to his old self,’ said Mike.
‘When wasn’t he his old self?’ Mum asked.
‘Well, that heart attack slowed him down for a month or two.’
‘What?’ we all cried.
‘He’s fine. Honestly. They put in a couple of stents, and he’s a box of fluffy ducks.’
‘And when was this?’
‘June, I think. Yeah, must have been. We were fencing in the cabbage tree paddock.’
‘You’d think he might have mentioned it in passing, wouldn’t you?’ Rob said.
‘Oh well, you know Dad,’ said Mike.
‘Has it at least made him slow down a bit and look after himself?’ Mum asked.
‘Not that you’d notice, no.’
She sighed. ‘Heart attacks run in that family, too. Gray’s father and one of his uncles both died in their fifties.’
‘Thanks for that happy thought, Mum,’ I said, hunting through her pantry for likely-looking herbs and spices.
‘Darling, a history of heart problems in the family isn’t a death sentence, it’s just a reminder to take care of yourself.’
‘True. Have you got any paprika?’
‘Almost certainly,’ said Mum, tweaking a fold of her skirt straight. ‘It’s just a question of finding it.’ It didn’t seem, however, that there was any question of her finding it.
‘Your garden’s looking very nice,’ Mike told her.
‘Thank you! Robin and Anna are going to be married in it, you know. Come on out and have a quick look around before dinner.’ She stood up, wincing. ‘Good gracious, I’ve strained muscles I didn’t know I had.’
As she and Mike crossed the lawn, Rob set the potato pot on the stove to boil and turned to open the fridge door. He took out a big glass jug of dark brown liquid, sniffed the contents and took a cautious sip from the side. Rob always has been brave to the point of recklessness.
‘God, that’s foul. Must be the newest health kick,’ he said, putting it back and continuing the search.
‘I think it’s worm tea,’ I said.
‘Mum wouldn’t kill a worm.’
‘Worm urine. No worms harmed in the making of.’
‘Excellent. Aha!’ He extracted a bottle of wine and closed the fridge door.
‘Better ask first, in case your mother’s saving it,’ said Anna, exiting the pantry with a box of paprika and passing it to me.
‘I think we’ll just consider it payment for making dinner. You having one, Lia?’
‘Hell yes,’ I said.
‘Not that you deserve it, after last night,’ he added.
‘True,’ I said, mixing paprika, garlic salt and oil in the bottom of a cup. ‘But on the bright side, if you’re going to make a total dick of yourself it’s nice to do it in front of someone you’ll never see again.’
‘Hmmph,’ said Rob. He handed Anna a glass of wine and put one down at my elbow.
‘Thank you, by the way,’ I said, kissing his cheek.
‘Just don’t say anything to Mum, for Christ’s sake.’
I would no sooner have encouraged our mother’s belief in the psychic powers of her offspring than I would have taken to speaking in tongues, but I felt he had earnt – temporarily – the right to be superior and condescending, so I said meekly, ‘I won’t.’
* * *
We had a particularly nice evening, and it was after ten when Rob and Anna dropped me at the café on their way home. I unlocked the back door, waved goodnight and went inside, and as I shut the door behind me my heart sank like a stone.
I stood still in the hall, wondering why, and then the phone began to ring and it all became clear. Isaac. Bugger.
Isaac was my most recent ex-boyfriend, a stocky young man with soulful brown eyes like a spaniel. I tried quite hard to repress the memory of our time together, and might have succeeded had he not called several times a week. I was seriously tempted to ignore the phone – after all, if I’d come home thirty seconds later I’d have missed it quite legitimately – but I would only be delaying the inevitable. Might as well get it over with. Be firm, I told myself as I went into the dark kitchen to answer it.
‘Hello?’
‘Hi, Lia,’ Isaac said. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m good, thanks.’
‘That’s good to hear.’
There was a pause, while he waited for me to ask after his health in return. I didn’t.
‘Café going well?’ he asked at last.
‘Not too badly at all,’ I said briskly, feeling my way along the wall for the light switch. ‘What’s up?’
‘I miss you.’
I said nothing. Firmly.
‘All the time,’ he added.
I slid down the wall to sit on the kitchen floor. ‘Isaac, don’t.’ Melodrama is contagious, and I very nearly added, ‘Don’t do this.’ But this was bad enough without both of us talking like a soap opera, so I bit my lip instead.
‘I can’t help it. I can’t think about anything but you.’
‘It’ll get better,’ I said. ‘Things do.’
‘I’m sorry, Lia; I know you just want me to go jump off a cliff . . .’ He paused again, in an expectant sort of way.
‘Of course I don’t,’ I said weakly.
‘I just don’t know how I’m ever going to get over you.’
I took a deep breath. ‘Look, I’m really sorry you’re unhappy. But ringing me doesn’t help.’
‘I can change. I can be whoever you want me to be, I’ll do anything, I –’
‘Stop it!’ I said sharply.
He began to cry.
‘Stop it!’
‘God, you’re such a bitch.’
Well, at least that was progress.
‘No, you’re not. You’re perfect. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry . . .’
‘Isaac,’ I said, ‘listen to me. We are not going to get back together. It’s not going to happen. Don’t ring me any more; it just makes you miserable and I’m not going to change my mind. I’m sorry. Goodnight.’
I hung up the phone, and unplugged it for good measure. Then I went to bed to stare at the ceiling and feel bad. Less bad, however, than I would have felt if Isaac had been there too. It’s always good to keep these things in perspective.
Chapter 3
Cutting a thin slice of the warm Dutch apple cake on the butcher’s block the next morning, I divided it precisely into two. ‘Right,’ I said, passing one half to Anna on the point of the knife. ‘The moment of truth.’
She took a very small bite. ‘Not bad.’
‘For six eggs and three hundred grams of butter it should be spectacular.’
‘It’s not.’
‘I agree,’ I said, finishing my bit. ‘Pleasant, but dull.’
‘It’ll be alright with cream and lemon honey,’ said Anna, although she undermined this endorsement somewhat by tossing the rest of her cake into the compost bucket as she spoke.
I was finding this new one-bite-only method of dieting reasonably hard to watch, but I knew better than to say anything. Getting out a bowl I silently started to make a marinade. Soy sauce, Worcestershire sauce, tomato sauce, crushed garlic . . . Serious foodies will tell you that you lose ‘those lovely top notes’ when you cook with pre-crushed garlic, but unless you’re in the habit of taking your garlic neat I find it hard to believe you’d tell the difference.
‘We should put another recipe on Facebook,’ Anna said after a few minutes.
‘Okay.
’
‘I was thinking custard squares. They photograph well.’
‘Our recipe’s the one out of the Edmonds cookbook,’ I said. ‘They’ll sue us.’
‘They will not. Anyway, our icing’s different.’
‘Fine. Whatever.’
‘What’s up?’ she asked, pouring coffee beans into the side of the machine. ‘You’re not your normal chirpy self.’
‘Isaac rang last night as soon as I got in and sobbed down the phone at me,’ I said.
‘Ah. That’d do it.’
‘It was awful.’
‘What did you say to him?’
I added a spoonful of plum jam to my marinade. ‘I told him not to ring me again.’
‘Did he listen?’
‘Probably not. I just won’t answer the phone.’
‘Oh, really?’ she said.
‘Really.’
She snorted.
‘I’ll use you as my role model, and be cruel and heartless.’
‘Yeah, you do that,’ she said, picking up the phone. Anna may not be cruel and heartless, but she’s very good at mocking disbelief. She pressed a button and frowned. ‘There’s no dial tone.’
‘I unplugged it last night in case Isaac rang back. Sorry.’
‘Now that’s a marvellous way to run a business.’ She reinserted the plug into its socket.
‘I thought it would make us seem more exclusive if no-one could get hold of us. It’s my cunning new marketing plan.’
‘Brilliant,’ she said.
‘Or we could go completely the other way and dress in fishnets and suspenders.’
‘You don’t think that might give the wrong impression of just what it is we’re selling?’
‘Possibly,’ I admitted.
‘Sounds like a great idea to me,’ said Monty, suddenly putting his head around the kitchen door. Monty lived over the road and had a disconcerting habit of wandering over and appearing in the kitchen without warning – but then he also had a habit of bringing fresh crayfish with him, so it seemed petty to object. He owned the garage in town, which he ran in a haphazard fashion, not bothering to open if the fishing looked promising. He was large and cheerful, with wispy grey hair and a face as round as the moon, and once you managed to track him down he could fix almost anything.
The Pretty Delicious Cafe Page 2