by Claire Sandy
As she sauntered off, Lucy broke the silence with a ‘Seems like a nice girl’, with sufficient edge to her tone to suggest that she found the short skirt and nosestud a little challenging.
Tod nudged Angus and somehow the teenager’s embarrassment found an even deeper level to descend to. ‘Some-thing you want to tell us, mate?’
‘She’s just . . .’ said Angus. ‘She’s nobody.’
‘A nobody who kisses you goodbye,’ said Tod, obviously amused, and obviously unwilling to let it go.
‘I’ll . . . you know . . .’ Angus waved a hand in no particular direction and sloped off.
‘Boys will be boys,’ said Lucy.
‘Hmm,’ said Marie.
Inserting wrapped instruments into the vacuum steriliser, Marie called out, ‘Aileen!’ This was part of Aileen’s job description: Marie was, to quote her nana, keeping a dog and barking herself. ‘Get in here and take over!’
It was the first empty appointment slot in a week or so. The pessimist in Marie heard a faint alarm bell drawing attention to the damage that Perfect You would eventually do to her business. Her optimistic side (a far more likeable but unreliable beast: it was Optimistic Marie who bought jeggings without trying them on) saw it as an opportunity to do some sterilising.
‘Mmn gnf!’ shouted Aileen.
She sounded happy. And her mouth sounded full.
‘Nooo!’ Like a tigress defending her young, Marie tore out to reception in time to see one of the thirty Flakes she’d bought (and hidden) disappearing into Aileen’s mouth. ‘You’re like a truffle-hound!’ she groaned, amazed by her assistant’s cheek and, it had to be said, skill. The Flakes had been in a plain bag, right at the top of the cupboard that housed only the electricity meter and Marie’s pristine, unworn gym kit. ‘Stop!’ she barked, as Aileen reached out a hand to take another Flake. ‘Drop it,’ she ordered, crouching to take the bag, her eye on Aileen’s stubby hand. ‘Drop it! Sit!’
Aileen sat, thwarted and unhappy. ‘I love a nice Flake,’ she said sullenly.
‘And I love a nice George Clooney, but I wouldn’t just grab him and unwrap him without asking,’ said Marie, bundling up her chocolate hoard. ‘These are for my bonfire cake. For the party you have to come to,’ she ended, with a hint of threat absent from most invitations.
‘Bonfire cake?’ Lynda, who’d been contentedly googling ‘how to sue a marquee company’, lifted her head. ‘You said you’re practising my croquembouche this week.’
‘Oh, I am,’ said Marie. ‘I’ve made . . . ooh, about three now.’ She hoped she hadn’t gone red.
‘Why have you gone red?’ asked Aileen, swallowing the last of her contraband.
‘Because I’m allergic to thieves,’ snapped Marie, widening her eyes in warning.
‘It’s him!’ Lynda stood and pointed out of the bay window.
‘Who him?’ asked Marie.
‘“Perfect You” him!’ hissed Lynda.
Jumping out of his open-top sports car without recourse to the door, the white-coated man just had to be Perfect You’s owner. His whites had little in common with Marie’s baggy coverall; his were bespoke, and a touch tight. In his hand he held an extravagant clutch of red roses. With a sweeping look up and down the street, he jogged towards Smile!
‘He’s coming over!’ squeaked Lynda, stowing her half-drunk coffee in a desk drawer.
‘Bastard!’ said Aileen, her braids quivering in their tight circles.
‘Ladies!’ The new dentist in town was among them, throwing open the door as if sweeping onto a stage. Removing his mirrored sunglasses with a flourish, he looked at each one in turn. ‘You must be my deadly rivals,’ he said, adding, with what he evidently meant to be gallantry, ‘I had no idea you’d all be so beautiful.’
Wassock, thought Marie, well aware that no woman in the history of the world had been called beautiful while wearing the plastic apron and gloves necessary for instrument sterilisation. ‘We didn’t give you any thought at all!’ she responded with enormous amounts of what she termed ‘sass’ when the twins used it.
The newcomer bowed and held out the roses. ‘A peace offering,’ he said. ‘For daring to trespass on your turf.’
It would take more than roses to make up for his trespass if the clinic went down the tubes. But, hey, it was a nice gesture, so Marie took the flowers and thanked him, noticing that he was wearing a shade of fake tan best described as ‘Dirty Protest’. ‘Thank you,’ she said, graciously. ‘How’s it going over there?’
‘Amaaaazing!’ The dentist widened eyes that were rather small – little more than pinpricks of blue in the sweaty Serengeti of his face. With a snub nose and a selection of chins, he was no oil painting, but an insanely high level of grooming lent him a low-grade glamour. ‘Beyond my wildest expectations!’ He waggled eyebrows of such strict symmetry that they had to be waxed. ‘I’m Klay, by the way. Klay with a K!’
‘You’re what?’ Aileen pulled a face. ‘What with a what? I thought for a minute there you said “clay”.’
‘I did,’ said Klay. ‘I said Klay with a K.’
‘Klay Witherkay?’ said Aileen.
‘Before we go completely Dr Seuss,’ said Marie, ‘let me introduce my team. I’m Marie.’
‘But of course!’ Klay clapped his hands together. ‘The boss!’
‘And this is Lynda, who keeps our show on the road.’
‘Lynda, Lynda, Lynda!’ Klay misread her completely by blowing her a kiss, and Lynda turned back to her screen with the demeanour of Queen Victoria.
‘Last but not least . . .’ Marie found herself, just this once, happily anticipating Aileen’s apocalyptic reaction to the male sex. ‘This is our Aileen.’
‘A beautiful name,’ said Klay gravely, ‘for a beeyootiful woman.’
Hunching her shoulders slightly, Marie braced herself.
‘Thank you,’ said Aileen.
Un-hunching, Marie felt the world tilt. Not only had Aileen neglected to grapple Klay to the floor, but she was smiling at him. Not an evil smile, not a sinister smile, not the smile of somebody who has stolen a Flake, just a smile. The woman was transformed and, despite the curled sausage plaits and the chocolate on her chin, she was . . . lovely.
Aileen’s eyes shone and her lips parted and two rose-coloured smudges budded on her cheeks. ‘Have a cup of tea with us,’ she said, in a voice that made Lynda look up from her gift list. It was a gentle Irish brogue, lyrical and tender and poetic. ‘Please,’ she added.
Lynda and Marie locked eyes. They’d assumed Aileen had never learned the word.
Seated with a cup – the best cup, Marie noted, although at Smile! that meant a mug proclaiming World’s Best Grandma – Klay expounded his theory about success in business. Nobody had asked him to – he was simply a natural expounder.
‘It’s dog eat dog,’ he said, tiny eyes a-glow. ‘I mean, I could have held back, found another premises when I realised there was a thriving dentist already in the area, but I believe in survival of the fittest. That may sound harsh, but I couldn’t turn down the fabuloso deal on the premises. I got it for a song.’ Fluttering his dyed lashes, he said earnestly, ‘I admire women who make it in business. I’m a feminist, you could say.’
‘Oh, Marie’s not a woman,’ said Aileen, in her new lilt. ‘She’s all balls. Like a bloke.’
A misguided compliment, but a sweet one, particularly in the wake of Klay’s condescending nod to feminism. ‘You don’t have to explain yourself to us, Klay.’
Raising his mug, Klay toasted her. ‘May the best man – or woman – win!’
‘How long,’ asked Aileen, her eyes travelling up and down Klay as if he were an untended mint Magnum, ‘have you been in the old dentisting game? Are you like this fool here?’ She jerked a thumb at her boss. ‘Wanted to do it since you were a kiddie?’
Left to her own devices, Marie didn’t usually share her childhood dream to be a dentist. It was a conversation stopper, as nobody else seemed to have poked a
round in their teddy’s mouth with a cocktail stick or begged their parents to lie on the sofa and say Oooh, me wisdoms.
‘No.’ Klay looked faintly appalled. ‘I wanted to be a pop singer. With a name like Klay Keaton, you feel you should be famous. But I grew up and realised there was good money in dentistry, so I qualified and now my ambition is to have a Perfect You franchise in every major conurbation in the UK.’
‘Ooh, conurbation,’ murmured Aileen, as if the word was an aphrodisiac. She dipped her head and looked up through her lashes at Klay.
‘It takes a while to build up a patient list,’ pointed out Marie. ‘It takes time to nurture those relationships.’
‘I’m a dentist, not a shrink,’ laughed Klay. ‘Patients will come if my prices are right and there’s a funky vibe in reception.’
‘We’ve never had a funky vibe,’ said Lynda frostily. And irrelevantly – the Ribena-stained cushions made the point for her. ‘And we do all right.’
‘Of course you do,’ cooed Klay. ‘But I want to do more than all right. I want to go mega.’
‘Wow!’ said Aileen.
‘But you love it, right?’ Marie couldn’t imagine getting up close and personal with people’s gums all day without an evangelical drive to improve their health and relieve their pain.
‘Love it?’ Klay considered. ‘Does anybody?’ he laughed.
The door clanged and a woman weighed down with shopping bags waddled in, bringing Marie and Aileen to their feet.
‘I must rush. You’re busy,’ said Klay, banging down his mug. ‘Well. Busy-ish!’
‘Come again,’ said Aileen.
‘Sure!’
‘When?’
‘Oh . . . well . . .’
‘Tomorrow. Come tomorrow,’ said Aileen urgently.
Marie felt the need of a rolled-up newspaper to bop her assistant on the nose, a tactic that always worked when Prinny was over-familiar with guests. ‘Thank you for the flowers,’ she said.
As the door banged behind him, Lynda said, ‘What a creep! Those roses are going in the bin.’
‘Feck right off! I’m taking them home.’ Normal Aileen service was resumed. She swiped them from Marie and cradled the blooms like a baby. ‘In a way, Klay’s given them to me now.’
Marie pep-talked herself. You can do this. She glanced at the book open by the bowl. Mary has every faith in you.
Messing with Mary’s recipe was playing with fire. For a disciple as adoring as Marie, this was heady stuff.
To fortify herself, she recalled the date-and-nut squares she’d made at the weekend. ‘Yeah! They were delicious, if I do say so myself. Thanks for reminding me, Mary,’ she said to her invisible mentor. ‘Although . . .’ Best not to tell Mary that Iris had said, ‘Urgh, healthy rubbish!’ and that Robert had covered his in Nutella.
The point was that Marie had made huge strides in her quest to be a baker. Four months of her year-long run-up to the next show-stopper had passed, and an awful lot of cake batter had flowed under the bridge. She could cream. She could mix. She was no longer frightened of millilitres. Ergo bastardising a sponge cake into a bonfire cake was within her powers. You can smash this, said Mary in cut-glass tones from the cover of the book, her blonde bob dripping with chocolate.
Beating vigorously, Marie wondered where Mary had picked up such language, and called through the hall to Robert, crouched by the shelves in the sitting room. He was alphabetising their CDs. This was a bad sign. Robert only alphabetised when stressed. Time to resume their occasional joke. ‘Mary Berry could take Paul-so-called-Hollywood by icing him while he slept.’
‘Yeah,’ Robert agreed absent-mindedly. ‘She probably could.’ After a moment he shouted, ‘Did you buy Coldplay? I didn’t buy Coldplay.’ He put Coldplay to one side, irritated with it for being among the Rs. ‘Bloody bed-wetting music,’ he grumbled.
‘R,’ he said to himself, trawling the narrow spines. ‘R for Robbie Williams. R for Roxy Music.’ Robert sat back on his heels. R for redundancy.
It had begun. Above his level, a few strata over his head, Campbell & Carle was being restructured, modernised, trimmed. Certain company stalwarts had taken early retirement. There was resistance, and so far the reorganisation was moving with the pace of a glacier, but the speed would pick up and soon the floor beneath his feet would show the cracks.
Robert reapplied himself. R for Red Hot Chili Peppers.
In the kitchen Marie stared at the back of his head for a while. Time to focus on The Husband for a bit. The twins had needed her the past couple of days, but now that their sore throats had cleared up and the searing injustice of missing a school trip to the Natural History Museum had dimmed, she could get back to the male Dunwoodys.
Nobody had warned Marie about the many skills she’d need when she’d signed up for motherhood. (Not that she’d literally signed up – the process had been far more fun and had involved a long night, a bottle of tequila and a libido that, along with a flat stomach, she’d left behind in the 1990s.) She’d guessed she’d need patience, resourcefulness and funny voices for livening up bedtime stories, but nobody had mentioned the juggling.
One or another of her charges (and Robert was in that category, whether he liked it or not) always needed her. Their levels of need changed, and that’s where the juggling came in, as she bobbed and weaved, keeping all her balls in the air, keeping all her loved ones as happy as lay within her power.
Trailing home from parents’ evening last week, she’d tried to probe Angus, amiably, about Lauren. ‘So,’ she’d said in a light, breezy, painfully-bleeding-obvious way, ‘is Lauren your girlfriend?’
‘What!’ He’d reacted as if she’d Tasered him. ‘God, Mum! No!’
That was, of course, the only possible way for any teenage boy to answer such a question. ‘I wouldn’t mind, love.’
‘It’s not about you minding!’ Angus was still high-pitched. He’d coughed himself down to his normal gravelly tone. ‘Me and Lauren – it’s complicated, OK?’
‘OK.’ She’d acknowledged the slamming door. ‘Romance, Angus,’ she’d said gently, ‘is supposed to make people happy. Yeah?’
‘Mum, please.’
So she was still juggling Angus, but her touch wasn’t so sure these days. A thought ambushed her, leaping out from the bags of flour and sugar and the box of eggs. Who would juggle her, if it came to it? Did anybody have their eye on her, watching in case she fell? Marie looked again at Robert, supposedly ensuring that Shakira came after the Scissor Sisters, but now rubbing his eyes in a tired way.
Bip-bip!
Marie smiled, lifted a floury hand and waved through the kitchen window at the sound of Tod’s car horn. It was a habit now, this nightly salute as he pulled up. She saw Lucy come out of the front door like a greyhound at the start of a race.
‘Here you are, Mum.’ Iris, hair wet from the bath, all snuggled up in a polka-dot dressing gown, came in and plopped a naked Action Man on the windowsill. ‘Why’d you want him?’
‘Don’t worry, I won’t hurt him.’
The pain in Action Man’s eyes told Marie that nothing scared him any more. After years of active service being dropped out of windows, thrown onto the roof and drowned in the bath, he’d been filched by the girls when Angus grew out of playing war. Nowadays, Action Man’s life was a nightmare whirligig of endless doll games. One day a Dad, next day an Evil Burglar, occasionally a satin-knickerbockered Prince. Today it was his fate to be Guy Fawkes, with a felt-tipped moustache and a jaunty hat, legs splayed on top of the ‘bonfire’.
Ah yes. The bonfire.
Marie could see the finished article in her mind’s eye, but how she would encourage flat cakes to rearrange themselves into a conical triangle she wasn’t sure. Hoping for divine intervention – or more usefully Berry intervention – she would then daub the whole thing with chocolate buttercream and cover it with logs, aka the twenty-nine remaining Flakes. A small-hours trawl of the Internet had inspired her to create realistic lickin
g flames from melted boiled sweets. In the light of day, this seemed psychotically ambitious.
The Bake Off contestants were to blame. Nursing a cup of tea on the sofa, she’d watched them create cakey wonder within the weekly sixty-minute format and thought I could do that. She envied them their relationship with Mary, trembling when the great lady herself nibbled their macaroons, and she sighed with cosy pleasure at the thoughtful, truthful, but warm critique that was Mary’s stock-in-trade.
The end of the series – the crowning of another winner (Marie had almost turned inside out with envy) – had left a gap in Marie’s week that couldn’t be filled with miniseries or romcoms. Here, in the kitchen, was the only place she could commune with her leaderene until next summer.
In the nick of time Marie remembered to add red food colouring to the cake batter. She hoped for a communal intake of breath when the cake was sliced and the interior was revealed to be a fiery red. Marie was frugal with the little bottle of cochineal, wary of ending up with abattoir hands.
Drip. Drip. Drip. That should do it. The colour bled and swirled through the mix, before it finally gave in to Marie’s insistent spoon and turned a deep, consistent red.
Unwrapping twenty-nine Flakes turned out to be surprisingly tedious work – repetitive and fiddly, with no chocolate to compensate her for her time. Mary was clear on the ‘No picking!’ rule, and Marie took heed.
‘Is this a long one?’ Robert stuck his head around the door, a CD in each hand.
‘As the actress said to the . . .’ Marie tailed off. Robert wasn’t in the mood. ‘’Fraid so. Why?’
Robert sighed. A world-weary sigh suggesting that the fate of the Western world lay with him, and she’d just ruined everything. ‘Because I have to get my biscotti in the oven tonight. Never mind,’ he said irritably, sounding as if he minded very much, and dodging out of the room with a dip of his head.
Raising her voice slightly (not as far as Full On Row levels, just to Hang On There a Cotton-Picking Minute, Mister), Marie called, ‘You should have told me you needed the kitchen. We could have worked something out.’