by Claire Sandy
‘It’s always open. Go on. Please. I went through the pain of childbirth – the least you can do is go out for marge.’
By the time Robert returned, the twins had wandered off, bored, to lie upside down on the sofa watching Toy Story 3 for the hundredth time. Marie met him at the door. ‘I need eggs, too. Somebody used the last one and put the empty box back in the fridge.’
Marie knew that Robert couldn’t wriggle out of that one. She knew he’d boiled eggs that morning for the twins, and they both knew he was a repeat offender at putting back empty packets.
The second time she met him at the door, however, her coy expression didn’t work. Neither did upping the ante and calling him Robbie-Wobbie. He was adamant. ‘I’m not going back to that bloody corner shop. The bloke in there will think I fancy him. I don’t care if you need parchment paper – and what is parchment paper?’
Marie had no idea, and neither did the (flattered) man in the corner shop. Robert returned, like a valiant warrior home from the wars, waving a roll of parchment paper like a spear, having been all the way to ‘the big Sainsbury’s’. ‘Have you got everything?’ he asked pointedly, settling down with his drink and his savoury snacks.
‘You’re safe,’ smiled Marie. It felt kind of sexy that such a big hairy man, with all the trappings of an alpha male, would do her bidding. ‘Right.’ She tied her apron tight and squared her shoulders. She tuned the radio to some idiotic dance music. She took a deep breath.
Step one was more like one of the twins’ art projects than cake-making. Lining the tin entailed drawing around it on the parchment (which had turned out to be, basically, tracing paper) and then bollocksing it into the greased tin: Marie’s language, not Mary’s. A few goes and it was fine. Wonky, but good enough.
‘Is that how it’s supposed to look?’ asked Robert.
‘Are you reading from A Handbook of Irritating Phrases?’
‘No. I’m a natural.’
‘Right,’ said Marie again, retying her apron and leaving margarine fingerprints on it. ‘Now it begins.’
She had never creamed before. Such a soft, billowing word didn’t do justice to the task. Without an electric mixer, Marie had to use her wooden spoon to combine the margarine and caster sugar. Round and round her spoon dashed, and up and down her elbow leapt, but the margarine and caster sugar refused to combine; they were the Israel and Palestine of cake ingredients.
Bored with their film, the twins returned and draped themselves over Robert, watching their sweating mother wordlessly, in identical outfits of spotted dresses and gravely nodding deely boppers. Marie had assiduously dressed Iris and Rose differently during their babyhood, careful to treat each daughter as an individual, castigating little Angus when he called them both ‘Twin’, and refusing to stifle their individuality. But as soon as their pudgy hands could do up buttons, they’d dressed the same, relishing the confusion it caused.
Of course, their parents could tell them apart. Iris had a birthmark, tiny and shaped like a toaster (according to Angus), just above the arch of her left eyebrow; Rose’s front teeth were slightly larger than her sister’s. Apart from that, they were identical, right down to the air of superiority.
‘Why . . . won’t . . . it . . . combine?’ Marie stopped to take a few deep breaths.
‘If at first you don’t succeed . . .’ began Iris.
‘Try, try again,’ said Rose.
‘So young,’ said Robert, ‘and yet so wise.’
‘Shuddup.’ Marie was succinct: she had to save her energy for defeating the pale slop.
‘Mum,’ said Iris, peering at the recipe. ‘Mum! You should be beating the eggs as well.’
‘And the flour,’ said Rose.
‘And the baking powder,’ they said, in creepy unison.
‘What? Let me see.’ Goddamnit, they were right. How had she managed to misread two lines of type? She could carry out a root-canal treatment while discussing East-Enders with Aileen, yet she’d already veered dangerously off-piste with a cake recipe. She upended the flour into the bowl and a pale mushroom cloud dusted them all with a fine coating, turning the twins into cute zombies.
‘You’ve ruined my wine,’ grizzled Robert, drinking it anyway. They both knew there was no such thing as ruined wine in this house.
Plop. Plop. Plop-plop. Marie dropped in the four eggs, enjoying the rude sound-effects as they landed.
‘Mu-um,’ said Iris, noting the old-fashioned font on the baking powder. ‘What’s its sell-by date?’
‘Can’t read it,’ said Marie. The baking powder had moved house with them in 1998 and had lived a simple monastic life ever since, at the back of a shelf snuggled up to some geriatric lentils.
Further vicious arm actions forced the belligerent ingredients to finally combine; time now for dividing and levelling.
‘Mum, you need a . . . erm . . . spatula.’ Rose stumbled over the pronunciation.
‘What’s a spatula?’ asked Iris.
‘It’s an exotic pet that lives in your ear and eats only Camembert.’ Robert enjoyed the twins’ disgusted squeal.
‘It’s a thingy – sort of plastic and bendy,’ said Marie, desperate to divide and level, but seeing nothing like a spatula in the drawer and resorting to using her hands. It was a messy business, grimaced at by the girls, relished by Robert. ‘Right. Into the pre-heated oven.’ Marie realised she’d forgotten something and whispered, ‘Damn’.
The batter sat, divided unevenly and resolutely unlevel, while the oven warmed up. Marie used the time to dance with Iris and Rose, something she rarely did, but which scored considerable Groovy Mum points. They requested, as they always did, ‘All the Single Ladies’, and Marie wanted, as she always did, to lie down and die during the second chorus.
‘That Beyoncé earns her money,’ she gasped as she ferried the tins to the oven, setting her mobile phone to alert her when twenty-five minutes were up.
Those twenty-five minutes would live on in Marie’s memory. She would recall them as a happy time, a sunlit time, a time of tea-drinking and the prospect of a glorious future full of cake. ‘Let’s have your mum over next Sunday,’ she’d said at some point during the twenty-five rose-tinted minutes. ‘I’ll make a Victoria sponge for afters.’
‘Um, yeah, OK,’ Robert had said, double-checking her for signs of a stroke. ‘If you want.’ After a moment or two, he asked, ‘Are you sure, love?’
‘Of course. It’ll be nice to see her.’ And wipe her beak of a nose in my incredible home-making skills.
Gaynor Dunwoody had a history of bad behaviour towards her daughter-in-law. At the wedding, drowning her sorrows at losing her son to ‘an older woman’ (Marie was five weeks Robert’s senior), Gaynor, resplendent in a mint-green coat dress, disrupted the speeches by whee!-ing repeatedly down the children’s slide outside the marquee. She’d loudly given it six months. She’d told Robert he’d broken his mother’s heart. And she’d picked apart every plate of food Marie had put in front of her since.
Phone call made, invitation accepted – ‘I’ll only come if Robert collects me and drives me home. My legs have been playing me up. And my stomach. And my eyes. I’ve been downright queer for a week now. You’re not doing your lamb, are you dear? No? Good. And don’t forget my allergies: peanuts, cheese and Lucozade’ – the twenty-five minutes were up.
‘Is it springing away from the sides?’ asked Iris, reading Mary’s notes.
‘Hard to say . . .’ Marie pressed the sponge gingerly, then poked it hard. ‘It feels a bit gooey.’
‘Mary says,’ commented Iris, ‘that you should put a cocktail stick in and, if it comes out clean, it’s ready.’
A cocktail stick was duly poked in and studied.
‘Robert, would you say that’s clean?’
‘Well, yes,’ said Robert uncertainly. ‘And no.’
None of them could tell if the cocktail stick was clean. Rose discerned a tiny dot of yellowy sludge, and that was enough to send the cake back into the o
ven.
A few minutes more and Marie was still uncertain. ‘It looks very pale.’
‘It’s done,’ said Iris with certainty.
‘It’s not,’ said Robert, enjoying being so definite on a subject he knew exactly nothing about.
Back into the oven.
After double the amount of cooking time specified by Mary, Marie said, with a rasp to her voice, that surely it must be done.
Regret swept through her like a forest fire as she surveyed the cake. Why hadn’t she realised? It was over-done. The edges didn’t ‘spring back’, they cringed. ‘There are crunchy bits,’ she noted.
‘They’re always the best bits.’ Robert was optimistic, but then all he’d done was drink wine, eat Pringles and make remarks; he hadn’t put his heart and soul into the strange thing in his wife’s hands.
‘That only applies to roast potatoes,’ growled Marie. Wielding a palette knife (amazingly, already part of her batterie de cuisine), she removed the cake and watched it bellyflop onto a wire rack that she’d found in the garage behind the mower. Impatiently she began to peel off the parchment and found it clingier than her sixth-form boyfriend. Wisps of it remained embedded in the sponge.
Mary’s next instruction was to choose the best sponge to form the top tier.
‘Not sure that best applies here.’ Robert looked over her shoulder at the dejected berets.
‘That one,’ said Marie, pointing, ‘is the least horrible. Jam!’ she stated imperiously, holding out a hand. Rose put a jar in it. An almost-empty jar. Without the energy for the usual witch-hunt to discover who’d done it again, Marie eked out every gory speck. Unable to spread it as directed, she dotted it along the edges of the bottom sponge and then, with immense ceremony, topped it with the other sad disc.
‘Voilà,’ said Marie, very quietly.
Another day, another mouth. Jonas Handler, the wrong side of eighty, always dapper as if perpetually ready to get married, sat back in the chair, his gob obediently open.
‘ . . . so I sez to him, I sez . . .’ Aileen was in mid-flow, bringing Marie up to date with her life. Marie could have stormed Mastermind with The Minutiae of Aileen Doyle as her specialist subject. ‘I sez, look here, you – I know your type.’ She handed Marie a dental mirror, knowing from the tiny change in her boss’s expression that she needed one. ‘I sez, stop undressing me with your eyes, ya raving perv, or I’ll separate you from your knackers with one swoop of me nail file. Sorry, Jonas. Don’t mind me.’
Jonas, luckily, was rather deaf.
‘Periodontal probe, Aileen,’ said Marie, who knew better than to stem the flow.
‘Here y’are. Now, where was I? Oh. Yeah. So he sez, excooose me, I’m a married man; and, sez I, they’re the worst, and I set off me attack alarm.’ Aileen dabbed at Jonas’s lips with a swab loaded with Vaseline, careful to keep the old man’s mouth moist while Marie investigated his gums. ‘If it saves just one other woman from his clutches, I’ll have done me job.’
‘In his defence,’ said Marie, holding out her hand for the mirror again, ‘he did just ask you for directions to Asda.’
‘It was the way he asked,’ said Aileen, the plaited buns coiled on either side of her head bristling.
Marie was treated to daily bulletins about her assistant’s battle against the perverts: the man in the post office; bus drivers; their local MP – they’d all undressed Aileen with their eyes. One intrepid degenerate had managed it over the phone. ‘There. All done. Your teeth are in fine fettle, Jonas.’ Marie carefully removed the bib from around the old man’s neck and righted the chair. ‘No need to see us again for six months.’
‘Excellent.’ Jonas looked at the floor. ‘Marvellous.’
‘Although . . .’ Aileen winked at her boss.
‘On second thoughts, we need to keep an eye on that incisor. So make an appointment with Lynda on reception, for a fortnight’s time.’
‘Bless him,’ said Lynda, cradling a mug of tea in both hands. ‘Most people put off coming to the dentist, but Jonas loves it here.’
‘He’s lonely.’ Marie slumped in her turquoise scrubs, crinkly fresh this morning, but now as creased as their wearer. She liked this time of day, when all the patients had gone and it was just the little Smile! family together in the reception area. Lynda’s desk sat in the window, and bright plastic seats sat politely around the margins of the room. It was a clean, calm space, with no posters of decaying teeth to jar the mood.
‘Jonas is a gent,’ said Aileen, raising her Coke Zero in a toast, burly knees a mile apart in white tights.
‘Surely he’s undressed you with his eyes?’ Lynda looked archly into her tea.
Intervening, Marie said, ‘Now, ladies, please. It’s too late in the day to squabble.’ Both her employees could bicker at Olympic levels. ‘Start a nice fresh one in the morning.’ Stretching her arms over her head, she let out a yeti-yawn that startled them all.
‘You need a nice evening on the sofa.’ Lynda was motherly, despite her boss’s twenty-year head start. ‘No baking for you tonight!’ She lowered her chin, her slanted dark eyes stern. Possibly too beautiful to be a dental receptionist, Lynda wore her looks lightly, as if having skin the colour of burnt sugar, eyes that came complete with natural kohl and a smile that could charm even Aileen was a meaningless fluke. ‘I’m taking Barrington to that wedding fayre in the town hall.’
‘Lucky Barrington.’ Aileen was allergic to wedding talk. Which was a shame, because since Barrington had popped the question, Lynda had just the one topic in her repertoire: her New Year’s Day wedding of the decade.
‘Is there any point going to a fayre?’ asked Marie, putting her legs up awkwardly along two of the padded plastic seats bolted to the wall. ‘Surely you’ve organised everything already.’
‘Are you kidding?’ Lynda was scandalised. ‘I haven’t even nailed down the bridesmaids’ thongs.’ She scowled, disappointed. ‘Do you two even listen when I talk?’
‘Of course we do,’ said Marie.
‘Obviously not,’ said Aileen. ‘And, just for the record, I refuse to wear a thong.’ It had surprised both Aileen and Marie when Lynda had asked her co-worker to be a bridesmaid. ‘I’m a bridesmaid, not a lap-dancer.’ Evidently, beneath the day-to-day scrapping and the ceaseless bickering, some sort of bond had formed between Marie’s staff.
‘Let us know if you find a nice bridesmaid’s thong at the town hall.’ Marie was certain she’d never said that sentence before. ‘As for me, I’m afraid I have to bake. The Victoria sponge needs to be perfected by Sunday. Robert’s mother is coming over.’
Crossing herself – she’d met Gaynor – Aileen’s eyes narrowed. ‘Make Robert bake the feckin’ cake. She’s his ma.’
‘That’s not the point. I’m on a journey.’ Marie turned her head to the side in an enigmatic pose, to show she was joking. (She wasn’t joking.)
‘Journey, my arse,’ said Aileen, with all the poetry for which the Irish are famed. ‘A cake’s a cake.’
‘Not when it’s a home-made cake.’ Marie pitied Aileen, marooned in the land of the ready-made and the shop-bought – a land from which Marie herself had only just emigrated. Half an hour in a locked room with Mary Berry would sort her out. ‘Love is the added ingredient.’
‘She’s right.’ Lynda was inspecting the back of her hair using two hand-mirrors and a great deal of bobbing and weaving. The impressive Afro needed so much care and attention it qualified as a pet. ‘I mean, I’m looking for somebody to bake my wedding cake, because I want to know what goes into it. And I want it made with love.’
Aileen had an idea. This rarely happened, and when it did, nothing good ever came of it. ‘Get this eejit here to make your cake,’ she suggested, gesturing with her thumb in the direction of the woman who paid her wages.
‘Oh, er . . . well . . .’ Marie sat up, startled.
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Lynda, patting her hair fondly one last time before slipping the mirrors into her bag. ‘I w
ant a proper baker. No offence,’ she said, as an after-thought.
‘None taken. I’m only a beginner. I couldn’t tackle a wedding cake.’ Especially for the type of perfectionist bride who had demanded a menstrual forecast from her maid of honour. ‘At the moment I’m baking for the family. Well . . .’ She recalled the kids’ robust refusal to taste last night’s effort. ‘For Robert, really.’
‘Why bother baking for him, when any minute now he’ll have an affair and break your heart?’ Aileen was sorry to break the news. ‘It’s a fact: 102 per cent of married men leave their wives for a younger woman.’
The cheep of her mobile interrupted Marie’s defence of her husband’s morals. She read out a message from him: Won’t be home until 9.
‘See? Having an affair.’ Aileen was smug.
‘He’s at his monthly staff meeting.’
‘Having an affair at his monthly staff meeting.’ Another cheep. ‘Eh?’ Puzzled, Marie read out: Good God! Caroline is sucking
‘Having an affair and live-messaging it.’ Even Aileen was taken aback at how low men could sink.
‘Who are you texting?’ Despite Caroline’s statement shoulders, strong perfume and really big Big Hair, she’d somehow managed to sneak up behind Robert as they took their seats in the meeting room.
‘Just the wife.’ Robert hoped his colleague hadn’t read her own name. Watching her suck up to the Chief Buyer yet again had made him forget that he needed to keep his wits about him in the meeting room: it was a jungle, and he was a hunter. Or maybe he was a wounded gnu. He’d forgotten which. (Robert tended to over-dramatise his job.)
‘The wife?’ Caroline repeated it loudly, making sure all the buyers and buyers’ assistants heard. ‘You’ll be calling her “the little woman” next.’
‘Her indoors!’ laughed Jerry, the linens buyer, who had a stye and had disliked Robert since they’d been tied together in the sports day three-legged race and lost to two work-experience girls.