by Claire Sandy
Not for Robert Mary’s grave and gentle ways, or Delia’s schoolmarm demeanour. The pictures of Nigella beside her recipes would distract him, and Lorraine Pascale’s sexy gap-toothed smile would render him useless. Robert needed a man, but not Gordon Ramsay. Too abrasive, too loud. Raymond Blanc’s food would be too ambitious. John Torode was too smooth.
No, Robert and Paul Hollywood were a match made in heaven. Not only did Paul bake bread – classic, unfussy, the nutritional backbone of humanity – but he was built along similar sturdy lines to Robert. They were both silver foxes, with a touch of naughtiness in their eyes.
She could hear cupboard doors slamming, and muttered oaths from downstairs. Robert was a perfectionist. When he set his mind to do something, he did it properly.
Once upon a time he’d set his mind on Marie. She’d run, not too fast, with frequent looks over her shoulder, and then he’d got her. It had taken a while to truly know the young man with the ripped jeans and the irreverent line in girlfriend-teasing. For months she’d assumed he was happy-go-lucky, impulsive, independent. When they finally surfaced for air and talked as well as kissed, she discovered, a little at a time, how his past had shaped him.
A dad who was enslaved to drink, mostly absent, but quick with his fists when he was around, until the day he walked out to buy a paper and was never around again.
A mum who fell apart, buckling under the pressure of three young children and no money and, she wailed, no future.
The man of the house since he was eleven, Robert had put his best foot forward and never cried; if he cried, his mum cried and then his sisters cried. He was, as she put it, her ‘little man’, her ‘best boy’. The apron strings had only been cut when he’d met Marie, and even now he sent Gaynor money, fixed her shelves, dealt with her paperwork.
Robert was programmed to be responsible, to take charge. Providing for his family was at the core of his self-image. If he was suffering genuine fears about his ability to do just that, Marie would have to, unobtrusively, help him find his equilibrium.
Tonight she’d let him have the kitchen. Later in the week she’d make the Victoria sponge for Sunday lunch with Gaynor, and by then Robert’s craze would have petered out. The Paul Hollywood book would be relegated to the garage, along with other evidence of past fads: the ski gear, the mountain bike, the taxidermy chemicals.
In the deep dip of the night, midway through a perfectly pleasant dream involving herself, Angus’s art teacher and no clothes, Marie was shaken awake by an insistent hand.
‘Look!’ Robert was gibbering, almost tearful, like a new Miss World. ‘Rolls! ROLLS!’
Thrust under her nose was a warm, fragrant, squat and lovely roll that smelled of Cheddar and rosemary and old-fashioned goodness.
‘Rolls!’ said Robert again.
‘Rolls, darling,’ agreed Marie, proud of him. And just the teeniest bit envious.
Dear Granny Gaynor,
Thank you for the five pounds. I will put it in the piggy bank. Rose and me are saving up for a cow. Did you like Mum’s cake? I think it was the best bit of dinner, apart from when you fell off your chair. Mum had a good time too because she said she will invite you back when hull freezes over and hull is in the north and is cold I think so that will be soon.
lots of love
Iris xxoxoooxoxooo
P.S. And Dad really did make the amazing rolls he wasnt fibbing.
AUGUST
Residents’ Association Meeting
Doboz Torte
Dear Aileen and Lynda,
Wish you were here!
Cornwall is beautiful. Long walks. Dazzling sunsets. Remote beaches.
Doing all the conventional family-holiday stuff – built sandcastles/almost split up twice on the drive down/caught crabs (with a net, not by sleeping with a heavy-metal band).
Hope the locum is working out OK. Pleeeease, Aileen, don’t do a citizen’s arrest on this one.
Lots of love
Marie xxx
‘This is the worst picnic ever in the history of the world,’ said Iris.
‘It’s worse than the one where Daddy put the tablecloth down on a horse-poo,’ said Rose.
‘Don’t be harsh,’ said Angus. ‘It’s about the same.’
In sandy swim-things, their damp hair snaking down their necks, eyes creased against the sunshine, Marie’s children knelt and pulled towels tight around themselves as they surveyed the spread she’d laid out for them while they splashed in the sea.
‘No proper sandwiches?’ mewled Iris. ‘From the shop?’
‘No mini Scotch eggs?’ complained Rose.
‘Mum,’ began Angus, with the voice newsreaders use to announce the death of a president, ‘I can’t see any crisps.’
Marie, worn out with worry about what her bum looked like in her hastily bought swimsuit (it looked either fat or very fat, she couldn’t be sure which), snapped, ‘A simple Thank you, Mum would suffice, you ungrateful toads.’ Angus had been unusually dour this holiday, his manners barely there. ‘I agree, it’s not our usual crappy supermarket picnic. Just look at this fabulous sausage roll your father made.’
‘It’s not a real sausage roll,’ said Iris mutinously.
‘It’s got stuff in.’ Rose shuddered as if Robert had baked a rat’s corpse in puff pastry, rather than organic sausage meat and home-made onion chutney. ‘And I’m sick of Cheddar and rosemary rolls.’
‘We were wrong,’ said Angus to his sisters. ‘It didn’t blow over.’ He turned to Robert and, training his camera on his father’s face, told him sadly, ‘We reckoned this was just one of your crazes.’ Every Dunwoody summer was caught on film by Angus, before being edited down to highlights and lowlights in September.
‘I don’t have crazes,’ said Robert defensively.
Marie clamped her lips together. Best stay out of this, she thought, marvelling at how people missed the most glaring aspects of their own personalities.
‘You do have crazes, Dad,’ said Iris in a tone that didn’t invite argument. ‘And we thought you just wanted to beat Mum.’
‘Don’t go round at school saying I beat your mother,’ warned Robert. ‘It sounds wrong. And anyway, me and Mummy aren’t in competition. Me and Mummy are a team.’
The twins looked at each other. ‘Table tennis,’ they harmonised, and everybody recollected that long week at Center Parcs when Robert had faced a terrible truth: his wife was better than him at ping-pong. In her wedge espadrilles. The match on the last day – ‘Just one more set, winner takes all,’ he’d insisted nine times over – had ended with him on his knees, only conceding when Marie had shouted, ‘Robert, you’re going to have a heart attack, and it will ruin the children’s lives if their father dies in front of them at Center Parcs!’
‘This isn’t about rivalry,’ said Marie, with the air of finality that she sometimes dusted off when the children took an idea and ran with it until they were specks on the horizon. ‘It’s about living well. It’s about teaching you lot the importance of family life. It’s about good food, made with love and care, and enjoyed together.’
‘Whatever, Mum. It’s not a proper picnic without crisps.’ Still Dulux-white after a week in the UK’s sunniest corner, Angus seemed certain of his facts. ‘And by crisps I don’t mean . . .’ he thought for a moment, then spat contemptuously, ‘oven-baked potato slivers with marjoram and cracked pink pepper. I mean Walkers cheese and onion.’
Eyes meeting across the checkered cloth, Robert and Marie counted to ten in silent, well-rehearsed accord. Spread out among the hummocks of the cloth was a mouth-watering pile of Cheddar and rosemary rolls filled with local ham, a burnished sausage roll and a plump Victoria sponge filled with fresh cream and studded with wild berries, picked that morning in the lane.
‘Remember last year,’ began Iris, a dreamy look on her freckled face as if recalling a lost era of innocence and plenty, ‘when we sat in a car park and ate pasties Daddy got from the petrol station?’
�
��Happy days,’ sighed Angus.
Trudging up the track to the cottage, laden like donkeys with windbreaks, hampers, wet cossies and all the paraphernalia of a day at the beach, the Dunwoodys returned to the holiday home they’d rented each year since the twins were two pink commas in a double buggy.
Sitting contentedly on a rough path just above the dunes, the cottage’s slate roof and distressed paintwork were in perfect harmony with the beach’s soft blues and whites and golds. Marie took a moment to stand and savour it. Later the colours would darken and melt, before being reborn in a peachy dawn. She felt happy, in a straightforward way that seemed elusive back in the suburbs.
By the time she reached the front gate, Iris had kicked the door open, and the kids had dumped their burdens on the floorboards, before disappearing to their favoured nooks and crannies.
In customary holiday garb of T-shirt and truly awful shorts, Robert was stooping to pick up what his children had dropped, with a murmured ‘Gee, thanks, guys’. His tan had deepened. His back no longer twinged. He was shedding years with each day of the trip. Perfecting Paul Hollywood’s sausage-roll recipe was another reason for the spring in his flip-flops. ‘Fire tonight?’ he asked as Marie shouldered the big old beach-bag into the hall.
He always asked this, and Marie always said yes. The thickness of the old cottage walls meant the interior felt a touch too cool after the relentless warmth of the day, but the real reason was the cosy romance of crackling driftwood.
Not to mention that Robert loved making a fire and would sulk if Marie said no. She liked her husband’s inner caveman, and its need to make fire to protect his tribe.
Her nose itchy with sunburn, her bottom scritchy-scratchy with sand, Marie gravitated to the small, higgledy-piggledy kitchen. She felt pleasantly sleepy, but roused herself with a strong cup of tea in the misshapen earthenware mugs that lived in the cottage cupboards. There was work to be done.
The minimal kitchen apparatus supplied with the rental cottage had been supplemented by a battalion of kit that Marie, a seasoned over-packer, had decanted from a small suitcase on wheels. Last of all, out came Mary Berry’s book, now with a couple of pages turned down and a smear of batter across its cover.
Robert had rolled his eyes, watching Marie unearth her favourite mixing bowl, her lucky wooden spoon and her electric hand whisk. (How, she liked to ask herself, HOW had she lived without this item, before Mary showed her the error of her ways?) When Marie had held up Robert’s own lucky spoon, saying I’m sure I didn’t pack this, the eye-rolling had ceased.
Snatching it, Robert had said that maybe, just maybe, he was going to attempt rough-puff.
‘Sometimes,’ Marie had smiled at him, ‘it’s like I don’t even know you any more.’
‘I’m starving, Mum.’ Iris was suddenly beside her, filling the small, square, whitewashed space with childish energy and hunger.
‘There’s all manner of unholy rubbish in the fridge,’ said Marie, knowing this was what Iris wanted to hear. The picnic had been an experiment; she wasn’t radical enough to make her kids go cold turkey on processed foods all at once.
And besides, Marie would kill for a late-night Ginsters.
‘Yessss!’ Iris poked her nose into the fridge and punched the air. ‘Cheese triangles!’ She greedily ingested half a packet, before turning to notice Marie weighing flour on the scales she’d brought from home. ‘Oh, are you cooking?’ She sounded flat again. ‘We want you to watch The Sound of Music with us.’
Her daughters’ enthusiasm for Julie Andrews baffled Marie. ‘I’m practising a cake to take to the Residents’ Association meeting, darling. Daddy will watch with you,’ she said evilly, as Robert, in a fresh pair of truly awful shorts, entered the kitchen.
‘Why are you suddenly so keen on the Residents’ Association?’ Robert pilfered a cheese triangle from his daughter. ‘You usually make me go on my own and you say, and I’m quoting here, I’d rather make sweet love to a tramp than listen to speeches about planning permission for sheds. What’s with the sudden enthusiasm?’ He didn’t wait for Marie to stop cracking eggs, but carried on, ‘Oh, hang on. This is about your nemesis, isn’t it?’
‘What’s a nemesis?’ asked Iris, own-brand quiche crumbs all down her front.
‘I don’t know, and Lucy isn’t one,’ said Marie hurriedly.
‘Nice save,’ said Robert.
‘Shut up and get out!’ said Marie, never at her best when separating yolks from whites.
Ignoring her, Robert pulled the Mary Berry book to him and peered at the recipe. ‘Doboz Torte?’ he read. ‘Sounds like a Venezuelan hooker. What is it?’
‘You’ll find out later.’
Checking that Iris was otherwise engaged with E-numbers, Robert asked, under his breath, ‘Is it . . . sexual?’
‘I refer my learned friend to my earlier Shut up and get out.’ Marie was anxious about this cake. It was a level up from a standard sponge, another step on the path to next year’s show-stopper, but she’d neglected one of Mary’s commandments – Read the recipe right through before you decide to make it – and she paid the price.
A Doboz Torte was a daunting, labour-intensive thing of beauty. At heart it was a sponge filled with oozing chocolate buttercream. But when Marie read on, she found that the top layer of sponge had to be cut into triangles, which then sat in the buttercream at an angle, like the blades of a windmill. In between each blade she had to pipe a single immaculate buttercream rosette, before anointing the whole thing with caramel. Home-made caramel. It was a whimsical delight, all the more glorious because it had to be eaten quickly, according to Mary, before the caramel seeped into the sponge and the whole thing collapsed.
Marie knew how it felt. ‘Good God!’ She cast her eye over the page. ‘It doesn’t even need cake tins. You bake the sponge layers straight onto parchment. And you make six of them!’ She looked at Robert and he read the message in her eyes. Within moments there was a glass of wine within reach. ‘Now run,’ she said to her husband and daughter. ‘Save yourselves.’
Every fifteen minutes the face of a twin – or occasionally a Robert – would poke around the kitchen door and plead for her to join them.
‘It’s the best bit,’ cajoled Rose at one point.
The best bits of The Sound of Music were indistinguishable from the worst bits in Marie’s opinion. ‘Later, darling. When I’ve finished.’
Marie liked the optimism of that when. It felt more like an if as she peeled the thin, delicate sponge circles from the parchment paper, poking her fingers through them and growling at her own clumsiness.
Lavender dusk deepened to sooty night beyond the small, deep windows as Marie embarked on the caramel. Her new sugar thermometer stood ready and waiting as she gingerly heated sugar and water, aware of the dangerous temperatures these two innocents could reach when they ganged up.
In front of the fire in the sitting room the other Dunwoodys sang ‘Climb Every Mountain’ as Marie climbed her own personal mountain in the kitchen. It was tough to withstand twinnish pleading; Marie was keenly aware that they wouldn’t always crave her company. Few pleasures gave her keener happiness than slouching on a sofa with Rose snuggled up on one side of her and Iris cosied up on the other, but the challenge buried in the pages of the Baking Bible couldn’t be ignored.
Even a woman who adores her husband, loves her children, appreciates her career and cares about her workmates can feel that life is a hamster wheel. With Mary, Marie stepped off the wheel. Learning to bake was a shiny new venture in a life that threw up the same old problems day in, day out, like a home-movie version of Groundhog Day.
Yup. Groundhog Day on a hamster wheel. That, essentially, was modern woman’s lot. A pang at her own disloyalty made Marie pause as she stirred the caramel. Was this passion for baking a way for her subconscious to flag up some deeper problem, some basic boredom with her life? Robert, she felt certain, never had such dark thoughts.
Moving her spoon through the sweet,
sluggish tar, Marie shooed away such treason. There was no deep dissatisfaction with life behind her new-found passion, just the joy of a few hours in a warm, scented kitchen, busy with something that was hers, all hers.
As she carefully poured golden caramel over one of the cooled cakes, enjoying the sensual schlurp as it sank into the sponge, Marie felt a connection, right in the centre of her being, with women who’d stood and done just this through the centuries. Generation after generation of women standing stirring by a stove, their wooden spoons drawing gentle circles in food that would feed the hungry bellies around them.
It was a proud tradition. All those strong, generous daughters, sisters and mothers bringing their creativity and their application to a room as humble and as mighty as the kitchen. And what’s more, thought Marie happily, this is my choice. For years, women had no say in whether they cooked or not, but as a twenty-first-century bird, she could both go out to work and cook.
Or not; later Robert would be dispatched to fetch fish and chips.
It took two hours, some freshly minted swear words and a lot of faith in Mary, but the Doboz Torte was ready to serve after the sublime haddock and chips Robert brought back from the village. Nothing like the picture in the book, the cake would need to be prettied up for the meeting of the Residents’ Association.
‘That,’ said Iris, licking her fingers, ‘was almost as nice as a Viennetta.’
Tears crowded Marie’s eyes. You really couldn’t say fairer than that.
‘It’s lovely,’ said Marie, her face raised to the sun, eyes closed, so relaxed that she could barely get it together to form words, ‘when we’re all together, isn’t it?’
‘Mm-hmm.’ Robert, prostrate on an adjacent towel agreed, his voice heavy with sun-induced apathy. ‘But even lovelier when the kids are out at sea.’