by Claire Sandy
Tearing her thoughts from Jonas – it wasn’t easy – Marie took down her Berry bible. She did a few knee-bends. She stretched her arms, cracked her knuckles. Said a speedy prayer.
In many respects she was completely ready for tomorrow’s wedding. Her outfit, compulsively colour-coordinated, right down to her knickers (it wasn’t out of the question for Lynda to carry out a spot-check at the church), hung on the outside of the wardrobe. New shoes stood to attention. A fascinator sat like a winged alien creature on a shelf. She’d even had her lipstick OK-ed by Lynda, who had been speaking in a noticeably higher pitch for the last fortnight and seemed to be surviving on cup-a-soup and adrenaline.
There was, however, one box on her wedding checklist that was resolutely unticked.
Time and again Marie had set aside a couple of hours to practise making the cake; time and again she’d been sidelined into messing about with the twins, hunkering down for a black-and-white movie with Robert, stalking Angus with a sandwich.
Now she could look back – with much gnashing of teeth – and admit it had been plain old fear keeping her from the kitchen – the white-hot dread of cooking something you can’t pronounce.
At ten the next morning Marie was expected to deliver a croquembouche to a four-star boutique manor-house hotel with a discount marquee squatting on its lawn. It couldn’t be an adequate croquembouche; it had to be a magnificent croquembouche. She needed to create a croquembouche that would make Gregg Wallace cry.
Steeling herself, she turned the page and faced the photograph head-on. No blinking. Like a jury member taking in a crime scene, she forced herself to linger on the details. She saw a densely packed, unthinkably calorific golden pyramid of soft pastry globes, piled on top of one another, stuck (how, in God’s name, how?) to one another, all beneath a veil of gilded spun sugar.
Deciding hastily that the spun sugar was a step too far – Lynda would have to make do with a naked croquembouche – Marie girded her loins and read through the recipe. Each ball was made with choux pastry (‘It’s pronounced shoo,’ said Iris loftily, pausing in her unstoppable consumption of Quality Street to look over her mother’s shoulder) and was piped full of sweetened cream.
The list of necessary equipment was a roll call of the usual suspects, except for one item that reared up in letters of flame. ‘A croquembouche cone?’ said Marie, horror-struck. ‘Angus!’ she shouted, ‘google something for me!’
Angus brought her a printout of an anodised aluminium wizard’s hat. The idea was to turn it upside down and use it as a mould, pressing the choux globes down into it, bound together with freshly made caramel (here she paused for an efficiently brief panic attack, before moving on) until it was full, whereupon it would be inverted and the stunning structure would emerge, proud, sticky and tall.
Mary suggested improvising a cone from cardboard. But then Mary would. Mary was a Girl Guide at heart, never daunted. Marie had been thrown out of the Guides for customising her uniform: ‘Are you trying for the trollop badge?’ Brown Owl had asked, eyeing the hemline. Today, more than ever before, Marie would have to channel Mary.
Because John and Gregg were right. Cooking didn’t get tougher than this.
It was a classic rookie mistake, one that was by now beneath her. Robert, disgruntled at going to Jo’s party without his wife, didn’t let her off the hook. ‘You were crazy,’ he said as he shrugged on his best jacket, ‘to think you could accomplish something like this in an afternoon.’
Every surface in the kitchen and the utility room and the sitting room was covered with trays of cooling choux balls. Marie had been astonished to find that choux pastry was made in a saucepan, not a bowl: she’d washed and rewashed her pan countless times before she’d even embarked on the task of requisitioning every tray, plate, board and large book in the house to accommodate the resultant spheres.
‘So many balls,’ murmured Marie, wiping shaking hands on her second apron of the day. ‘So little time.’
‘You’ll follow us later, yeah?’
‘Of course.’ For Marie this was a fairy tale: there was no longer a ‘later’. Her entire future revolved around pastry balls. The twins looked edibly cute in matching pastel dresses – her two little macaroons. Angus had changed his jeans – Marie was moved to tears by such extravagant effort. ‘Have fun without me,’ she said bravely.
‘We will!’ sang Iris, skipping to the car.
‘I won’t.’ Robert leaned in for a kiss and Marie smelled the aftershave she’d given him. It was the wrong moment to be ambushed with lust for your husband, but he always scrubbed up well. Their kiss wasn’t perfunctory, and was accompanied by a soundtrack of Rose’s ‘Uuuuuuuuurgh!’ ‘Don’t be long,’ whispered Robert, with one final squeeze.
‘Just you and me now, Prinny,’ said Marie as the car pulled away.
Out on the Close, New Year’s Eve revved up.
The Gnomes’ joint was jumping, every window lit and a ‘Birdie Song’ singalong leaking out into the cul-de-sac. The Grays’ house was dark, but the crooked path to Graham and Johann’s house was lined with LED lanterns, their partly drawn curtains offering a candlelit glimpse of a genteel supper party. Marie could almost smell the canapés as she stood at her window, wine in hand, cream in hair, suicide options taking shape.
She longed to be at her friend’s party, watching her tipsy husband dance, ruffling her children’s hair, gorging on food she hadn’t prepared, wishing she’d worn lower heels, winking at Jo across the dance floor, making memories.
She rubbed her hand, the red mark there still sparking and tender. The caramel-making, at least, was over. Luckily she’d heeded Mary’s pessimistic advice to have a bowl of cold water within reach, for the dunking of burns. Now it was time to construct.
Sidestepping the splats of dropped batter on the floorboards, Marie surveyed her improvised cone. The cockeyed cardboard spire jammed together with Sellotape had a whiff of last-minute art homework about it. ‘Wish me luck, Prinny.’
The dog, a notorious mood-sponge, looked in need of a stiff drink, cowering under the table, baleful eyes following Marie. His mistress, usually a soft touch for a titbit, was strange this evening, wired and tense.
It was almost 10 p.m. There had been various texts from the party-goers.
Have you finished yet, wifey?
Mum, we miss u!
Jo’s friend is trying to get off with me. She might succeed if you don’t COME QUICK!
Mum, u hav 2 get here! We got dad 2 dance!!!!!!!!!!
Mum, for Christ’s sake hurry up and stop Dad dancing.
Marie jabbed out a message she didn’t want to send.
Darlings, have fun without me, still baking. Sorry. Love you! I’ll text you at midnight.
The silence that provoked was deafening: Marie could just imagine Robert pausing halfway through getting down with his bad self to ‘YMCA’ (or perhaps he was in Boogie Wonderland – hell, by this stage of the party he might well be Walking On Sunshine).
The dainty golden orbs, all 150 of them, had been piped full of cream scented with limoncello liqueur. Never confident around a piping bag, Marie had suffered a near-terminal case of clenched buttock throughout. Her choux balls wouldn’t win any beauty contests, but she knew from a few test-licks of her spoon that they tasted dreamy.
The mobile jerked. The message wasn’t from Robert. It was Jo, the hostess.
Seriously? You’re blowing out my party for a CAKE?
She’d placate Jo tomorrow. If tomorrow ever came. If there was a life beyond this kitchen.
As instructed, Marie propped the cone, point first, into a vase. This made it all too high to work with, so she put the vase on the floor. That was better, if awkward.
Raucous laughter and shouts that might or might not denote a fight drifted over from the Gnome homestead. Right now even that party felt preferable to crouching on her kitchen floor, a choux ball in one hand and a teaspoon dripping with caramel in the other.
‘Cover m
e, Prinny,’ she said. ‘I’m going in.’
A discreet stress-wee escaped her sous-chef.
Leaning in – the cone was enormous – Marie bedded down the first ball in the cardboard nose. Then a dab of caramel, inside the echoey cardboard burrow. Another bun, pressed gently into place. Dab. Press. Dab. Press. Dab. Press.
And so on.
And so forth.
Time ceased to mean anything, as bun after bun followed its brave comrades into the cone’s hungry belly. At one point Marie, high on croquembouche fumes, hallucinated John and Gregg egging her on.
‘She’s juggling huge flavours!’ bellowed John.
‘She’s flicking my switches!’ howled Gregg.
It was tricky to find a rhythm in such gooey, hot work. Like a coal-miner down a patisserie quarry, Marie carried doggedly on, caramel in her fringe and a tiny flicker of hope in her heart that this might work, and Lynda might be pleased, and Marie might not start the New Year in a witness protection scheme.
The moment of truth came. She wasn’t mad about moments of truth, and this one – lonely and fraught – had the potential to go horribly wrong.
Prinny was asleep by now, trembling his way through doggy dreams. His legs quivered, much as his owner’s did as she placed the white cake-board on top of the filled cone and gingerly turned the whole thing upside down.
The weight of it took her by surprise. She hadn’t thought that bit through. She wondered if Mary, far away at some dignified gathering, could feel a disturbance in the force as the board tilted, the cone’s Sellotape flaps fluttered open and choux balls bounced all over the kitchen.
Prinny came to and lunged, all his maddest fantasies come true, as cake rained from the skies. With a shameful impulse to save and reuse what she could, Marie lunged too, and her heel skidded on a glob of the cream mixture that she’d made so lovingly an hour earlier. Down she went, as if a sniper had picked her off.
Head versus cupboard door is an uneven contest. Marie’s skull throbbed as, groaning on all fours, she took in her kitchen to a soundtrack of Prinny’s hysterical slobbering.
Only a small clot of buns adhered to Lynda’s painstakingly chosen board: a godforsaken parody of a croquembouche. The rest – the sum total of Marie’s toil, the reason she’d pissed off her oldest friend and packed off her family without her – dotted the kitchen as if shot from a scattergun.
Her MasterChef boyfriends evaporated: this was too gigantic a disaster even for their hysterical vocabularies. With no Plan B, just the prospect of calling the bride at dawn to say there’d be no wedding cake, Marie sat and wept.
The tears came thick, fast and noisy. She cried with the unselfconsciousness of a child, slumped on the cream-flecked floor, jammed up against the fridge-freezer, legs splayed out in front of her. When Prinny, with a gentle doggy harrumph, nosed his head under her hand in empathy, Marie just cried harder. This wasn’t the Mary Berry way – she’d been bested by a fancy bake.
Weary, spent and riddled with feelings of worthlessness, she sank even further into her bespoke pit of despair when a tap at the window announced Lucy. That symmetrically pretty face was creased with photogenic concern. You all right? it mouthed from the darkness.
As stupid questions go, it was a doozy. Marie had never felt less right. From the very end of her toes she dredged up sufficient stamina to smile – ghoulishly – at Lucy, as she jerked to her feet like a puppet on sadistically yanked strings.
Going to the window, she pushed it open, its creak echoing her own joints. Marie felt older than the moon. ‘Hiya!’ she said jauntily, as the frigid night air rushed in. Nothing to see here – move along was what she wanted to say, but politeness forced her to wipe her eyes with the backs of her hands and turn the state of her kitchen (not to mention the state of her mental health) into an anecdote. ‘Having a teensy bit of a problem-o, as you can see!’
Evidently the desperate gurn didn’t convince. ‘Let me in,’ said Lucy, tugging down the hood of her Barbour.
‘Honestly, I’m fine.’ Marie shrugged, as if the devastation around her and her conspicuous anguish were neither here nor there.
‘Go to the door,’ said Lucy clearly, as if addressing a mass audience of village idiots, ‘and let me in.’
Marie sleepwalked to the hall. Her immediate future – clearing up, crying, telling Lynda, crying forever – was so horrible that adding her adversary to the mix made little difference. The person she needed to see on the doorstep was Mary Berry, fragrant and crisp in a clean apron exuding eau-de-can-do. She would sob in Mary’s arms for a while, and then Mary would snap her wrinkled fingers and all would be well.
What actually stood on the doorstep was the person she liked least, dripping with sympathy-lite; all the better to nose around my misery, thought Marie.
A tiny thing by Lucy’s foot, a scrap of beige fluff, jumped and growled and startled Marie.
‘That’s Cookie,’ said Lucy briskly. ‘New chihuahua. Present from Tod.’ She was talking in clipped snatches, a housewife sergeant-major. ‘Ignore her.’
It was tricky to ignore a bad-tempered dustball, but Marie tuned out the self-important yaps as best she could.
‘Just popping New Year cards through doors.’
Well, of course you are.
‘You look terrible.’ Lucy stepped into the hall, unasked, uninvited. ‘What on Earth’s happened?’
Too weak to resist this house invasion, Marie shuffled to the kitchen and gestured with a what-am-I-like? shrug at the defeated huddle on the cake-board. ‘That,’ she said, ‘is meant to be a croquembouche.’
‘Croquembouche?’ Lucy lit up. ‘I made one for my wedding.’
Only a minute under her roof and Lucy had prompted her second Of course you did. ‘I’m guessing it was nicer than this one,’ said Marie.
‘A little.’ Lucy’s voice softened and the Pathé-news diction fell away. ‘Has it been a nightmare?’
The question flicked a switch in Marie’s frozen brain and, with Cookie goose-stepping about their feet, licking greedily at microscopic full stops of cream missed by Prinny, the story poured out. Compulsively she spilled every sad and sorry bean, holding nothing back. It felt good to purge, even if Lucy would surely file tonight as further proof of her own superiority.
‘It’s Lynda . . .’ Marie ran her fingers through her matted hair. ‘I keep imagining her face. I mean, she’s going to go ballistic of course, but I can take that. I can even just about take facing her at work every day, when I know she’ll be thinking wedding-ruiner every time she looks at me. What I can’t take is . . .’ Flinching, she approached the summit of her unhappiness. ‘She’s been driving us mad for months, planning this wedding. She’s thought of nothing else. At times I’ve wanted to hang myself with a lace garter rather than hear one more newsflash about the top-table centrepiece, but I’ve indulged her because she’s been my receptionist for almost ten years and she’s got a huge heart and her mum died and . . .’ Marie was gabbling. Time to sum up. ‘I love the girl. I just love her, and I can’t bear to let her down.’
Lucy looked down at the chihuahua. ‘Sit!’ she said. ‘Stay!’ To Marie she said, ‘I’ll be back in two minutes with my croquembouche cone.’
Accustomed to the slacker help that a woman gets from a husband or the people she gave birth to, Marie was astonished at how quickly the kitchen was put to rights with both of them on the case. As Cookie effortlessly manoeuvred Prinny under whatever it is that chihuahuas have in lieu of a thumb, her owner did much the same with the epic mess. Dog and woman had different methods: Cookie sat on Prinny’s face; Lucy behaved as if the kitchen belonged to her.
‘Right.’ She slapped down a weighty book on the newly gleaming worktop. ‘We’ll use Delia’s recipe.’
‘Oh.’ Marie stiffened. The anti-Berry cook right here at the heart of number nineteen, her Mona Lisa features on the cover promising Everything will be fine, as long as you never ever dare to disagree with me. ‘I used a Mary Berry one . . .’
‘Ah.’ The air thickened. The books sat side by side, seeming to throb. ‘Mary Berry?’
Too tired to analyse Lucy’s tone of voice, Marie nodded. ‘Mary,’ she said and then, with what she hoped was a don’t mess with me intonation, but might have been a frazzled squeak, ‘Berry.’
‘Okey-doke.’ Lucy’s capitulation was both immediate and sunny. ‘Ooh, limoncello!’ she murmured approvingly, scanning the recipe. ‘How are you for plain flour?’
‘Almost out.’ The shame of it! The hot, burning shame of it.
‘Eggs?’
‘Down to my last two.’
‘Righty-ho. Back in a min. I’ve got loads of everything at my place.’ She pointed at Cookie, farting contentedly in Prinny’s bed. ‘No widdling, you,’ she said, and Marie could have sworn that Cookie nodded. Half-turning, Lucy stopped and reached up to Marie and wiped a gobbet of cream from her forehead. ‘There,’ she said, ‘that’s better.’
And it was.
The tender touch with a damp cloth was the pivot on which the night turned. Plus a lot more besides.
When Lucy returned, laden with eggs and flour and a giant vat of double cream, the kitchen began to hum again, with the expectant, contained buzz of backstage an hour before curtain up. Watching Lucy move deftly, with the assurance of an expert and the focus of a zealot, Marie dared to believe that she could come good on her promise to Lynda.
‘I’ll do the pastry, you do the filling,’ said Lucy, colonising the kitchen with the same Napoleonic ease with which her minuscule animal had occupied the dog-bed.
She paused, as if remembering where she was. ‘Unless . . .’ she held out the pan, ‘you want to do the pastry?’
‘I have choux post-traumatic stress disorder. I’m on cream. And music.’ Marie turned on the radio and a moronic dance tune spurred them on with its insistent sss-sss bass-line. ‘I’d assumed you’d be off somewhere fancy-pants tonight,’ she said over the music and the mixer.