What Would Mary Berry Do?

by Claire Sandy

  TO: stargazinggirl247@gmail.com

  FROM: geeksrus39@gmail.com

  18.04.14

  11.05

  SUBJECT: Eggstraordinary

  HAPPY EASTER, SOULMATE!

  Just eaten 4 creme eggs. Feel barfy.

  Soz I haven’t emailed for a few days. Not ignoring you. Honest. I could say that I’m busy revising but that’s a bit of a lie. I am revising but hey it’s still April. I’m not you with your rotas and your schedules. I’ve been quiet cos my Mum’s right (not often I type that) I DO think about stuff too much and recently the Clones’ve been getting to me. I know I shouldn’t let them in my head but sometimes I can’t tune them out. Even tho they’re off on some stupid school trip I’m still getting texts. Too bad to show you. FFS why’s it still going on?!! It’ll be the first anniversary soon. Mum can bake a black cake with poisonous candles. Whose idea was it to have a virtual sofa afternoon? It was probably you. Me on my sofa, you on yours, both of us watching a brilliant film and messaging the shit out of it. I can’t today, tho. I’m seeing a mate. Soz.

  laters

  Angus

  A sign sat above the front door of the semi-detached house. Colinanna, it said, presumably a clunky marriage of the inhabitants’ first names. Despite their tender years, the twins knew they had journeyed to the heartland of kitsch.

  Each pair of ruffled curtains, like matching sets of frilly drawers, offered a peek at an ornament. A clown leaning on a lamp post winked from the sitting room, while upstairs a porcelain shepherdess looked forlornly for her sheep out in the small concrete front garden, colonised by a stone donkey dragging a stone barrow full of tulips.

  Iris and Rose had been disappointed about the treasure hunt, but not as disappointed as their mum evidently expected. She’d seemed insulted and relieved by their chorused ‘Never mind’ and the turning of their attention to the ever-vexed question of Coco Pops or Rice Krispies. Mum had, of course, waved a home-made granola bar under their noses, but by now it was little more than a token effort.

  The sudden cancellation had freed up the whole day and they’d looked at each other with one of those Village of the Damned flashes of empathy that so spooked their parents: time for phase two of the plan.

  A hasty tick in the exercise book and they’d set off on their bikes, promising their mum that they wouldn’t go beyond the park.

  They were beyond the park. They were significantly beyond the park, outside the address Rose had written on her palm in Mrs Ardizzone’s office, and they were about to add more fibs to the day’s balance sheet.

  ‘You do it,’ said Iris.

  ‘No, you do it,’ said Rose.

  ‘Just do it, Rose!’ said Iris.

  ‘Why should I?’ said Rose.

  ‘God!’ snorted Iris. She knew that Rose was scared, and Rose knew that Iris was scared, but admitting such things would contravene the twins’ code. ‘I’ll do it. As usual.’

  The bell’s shrill ‘Edelweiss’ brought a woman to the door.

  ‘Hello!’ The twins said it together, sunny and toothy and adorable. They knew no middle-aged woman in her right mind could be anything other than delighted to find two charming identical girls in matching hand-knits on her doorstep.

  ‘Well, hello to you!’

  Getting inside was almost too easy. Within three minutes they were on a floridly patterned sofa, clutching glasses of room-temperature squash and trying not to gawp at the collection of flamenco dolls displayed on every surface.

  ‘So,’ said the woman, settling herself on a leatherette pouffe. ‘You need my help, do you?’ She was be-permed, tan-tighted, flat-shoed: a perfect example of blameless normality. ‘Obviously I’ll help all I can. St Ethelred’s is a fine, fine school and very close to my heart. What is this project you’re working on, my loves?’

  ‘It’s about family celebrations through the ages,’ began Iris.

  Rose tagged her effortlessly. ‘We need photos showing people dressed up for parties.’

  ‘If you could let us use some of your family photos, we’d copy them.’

  ‘And bring them right back.’

  ‘We’d take great care of them.’

  ‘Because we know your daughter so well, and we really admire her.’

  ‘Do you?’ Their hostess smiled, flattered. ‘How sweet.’ She heaved herself laboriously off the pouffe. ‘Just wait there. I’ve got stacks of piccies.’

  Later, with the ten precious images stowed in Iris’s saddlebag, the twins stopped by the canal for a quick Fruit Shoot. They watched the regal progress of a supermarket trolley floating past. They didn’t catch each other’s eye.

  ‘She’ll get them back tomorrow,’ said Rose, sensing her sister’s unease.

  ‘She’ll never know what we’re really going to use them for,’ said Iris. ‘She won’t be hurt by it.’

  ‘And it’s for a good cause.’ Rose cheered up at this. ‘A really good cause.’ She stood up on her pedals. ‘Race you home!’

  That, too, was strictly forbidden, but this was a day for sinning, it would seem.

  ‘I’m faintly shocked to hear myself say something so . . . blasphemous,’ confided Marie, easing herself onto one of Lucy’s chrome stools with all the elegance of a carthorse in labour, ‘but I’m sick of chocolate.’

  ‘Easter will do that to a girl.’ Lucy waved a dog-eared recipe. ‘That’s where this secret weapon comes in. I am about to out-Mary Mary.’

  ‘Don’t make me strike you.’ Marie took a sip of Lucy’s home-made elderflower cordial. It was like drinking from an angel’s slipper. No matter how much she emulated Ms Berry, Marie would never be the kind of woman who made her own cordial. But now that she had a friend who was that kind of woman, she didn’t need to be. ‘What are you making?’

  ‘Lemon meringue eggs.’ Lucy handed her a white duck egg. ‘Blow that.’

  ‘I beg your pardon? I’m a married woman.’

  Lucy showed her how, incredulous that Marie had never blown an egg before. ‘Look. You stick a pin in both ends to make two little holes. Make sure you twiddle the pin and prick the yoke so that it’s broken. Make one end slightly bigger, then put your lips to one end and blow.’ She watched her protégée. ‘No. Really blow! As if you’re playing the sax. The white and the yolk will be forced out of the other end. Oh, give it here!’

  Even blowing an egg didn’t dent Lucy’s poise; she was the Grace Kelly of egg-blowing. Marie got the hang of it, but she was red-faced and gasping when Angus appeared at Lucy’s front door.

  ‘Hi,’ he said, in the self-conscious way resulting from the belief that everybody in the world was looking at him. He hesitated. ‘Um. Chloe in?’

  It took extreme willpower for Marie not to look at Lucy, and she appreciated the effort Lucy put into not looking at her. The pairing of Angus and Chloe – a kind of suburban royal marriage of the ancient houses of Dunwoody and Gray – was a cherished mutual fantasy. They discussed it in such detail that they’d already had a verging-on-ratty conversation about beef or chicken for the reception.

  ‘Yes. Upstairs.’ Lucy helpfully pointed upwards, as if Angus might not know about stairs. ‘Revising. Or working on her health and social care portfolio. Nose stuck in a book anyway, that’s for sure.’

  ‘I’m taking Prinny for a walk.’ Angus flicked his head towards where the dog stood, with his customary shame-faced demeanour, on Lucy’s front lawn. ‘I thought Chloe might like to bring Cookie along.’

  Not only seeking out Chloe, but taking Prinny for a walk? Aliens had replaced Marie’s son with a cunning counterfeit. The women watched the two youngsters dawdle away, a dog apiece, a careful distance of three feet maintained between them at all times.

  ‘Doesn’t mean anything,’ said Marie, already planning a hat.

  ‘Chloe’s been singing around the house,’ said Lucy. ‘Has he had a change of heart?’

  ‘It would seem so.’ Marie didn’t feel equipped to speak for Angus. ‘But, boys . . . I just hope they don
’t hurt each other.’ She didn’t trust this new rapport. It was too sudden. ‘You know there’s this other girl in the mix, this pen-friend.’

  ‘Or email-friend?’ Neither women knew the correct term. ‘Maybe he has room for both of them in his life.’

  ‘Yeah.’ If Angus was anything like his dad, he was a one-woman chap. And Angus was like his dad.

  Back to business. Lucy began to saw gently around the top of an empty eggshell with a serrated knife. All the while she worried at the front of her mouth with her tongue.

  ‘Tooth trouble!’ Marie knew the signs.

  ‘Yeah, this one.’ Lucy rolled back her lip. ‘It’s a veneer, but it doesn’t feel right.’

  ‘That’s cos you didn’t need a veneer,’ said Marie.

  ‘I didn’t? But Klay said—’

  ‘Klay says a lot, but mainly he says ker-ching! I’ll sort it out. Mate’s rates.’

  ‘Really?’ Lucy looked grateful, amazed. ‘That’s kind.’ She turned shifty suddenly – it didn’t suit her. ‘I’ve been meaning to say. Sorry about not coming to you in the first place. I never thought how that would look. Were you pissed off?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Marie with bald honesty. ‘But to be honest, back then . . . it was all misunderstandings and misconceptions between us two.’

  ‘It was like we spoke different dialects of the same language. Everything I said came out wrong,’ said Lucy. ‘I went to Klay because it was simpler, somehow.’

  ‘I’ll fit you in tomorrow,’ said Marie, rueful that she could offer this so readily.

  ‘I heard you and Robert having a . . . debate this morning.’

  ‘You heard our screaming match? Blimey! You were up early.’

  ‘Power-walking with Hattie. I feel sorry for her. Going round and round the Close like a trapped bluebottle.’

  ‘You’re too nice, that’s your trouble.’ Marie took the knife and an empty eggshell and gingerly beheaded it. It wasn’t as neat as Lucy’s, but it would do. ‘I hope our debate didn’t put you off your stride.’ She took up another egg. ‘The headline reason for the row was missing the treasure hunt to ponce about with Magda, but if I’m honest, it was the nastiness that got to me. He’s pleased Caroline’s kitchen is knee-deep in sewage. The row staggered on to other topics, of course. Whatever we start to row about, it always seems to come down to his mother and the bins.’

  ‘Wish Tod and I could argue like that.’ Lucy sounded winsome, as if wishing for world peace. She was becoming more real by the day, able to let rip with the odd ‘Bullshit!’ and to pout if she was feeling down, instead of wearing the perma-grin that had once alienated Marie.

  ‘What would you argue about?’ Marie was curious. Lucy found it so hard to criticise her husband.

  ‘That’s just it!’ laughed Lucy, unable to bear the carnage any longer and taking egg and knife out of Marie’s hands. ‘Tod’s bloody perfect.’

  ‘Nobody is.’ Marie was adamant. ‘If Tod’s perfect, why did you throw one of my plates at him on Bonfire Night?’

  A flush crept up Lucy’s neck. ‘Oh, that,’ she laughed. ‘I was being silly.’

  ‘You’re never silly.’

  Lucy laughed fondly at her new friend’s automatic defence of her. ‘It was the inevitability of it, I guess. The hitting on you. The always hitting on any women in my orbit. There’s no harm in it, obviously. Your virtue was safe. No worries on that front with Tod. None at all. None. Oh.’ She held up the shattered shell. ‘Whoops!’

  Spirited denials like this had convinced Marie that Lucy suspected her husband of infidelity. She watched as Lucy assembled lemons and sugar and unblown eggs. ‘This is Delia’s curd recipe, I guess?’ she queried.

  ‘Of course,’ said Lucy, with the serene certainty that Marie used to mistake for smugness.

  Since seeing Tod throwing his leg over Erika’s fence on St Valentine’s Day, Marie had seen him do it again. Only once more, admittedly. Not enough to build a court case. I put it to you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that the accused has been getting his leg over, in all senses of the word. And yet, how often did Cookie escape? The pygmy creature was a furry Elastoplast, its days and nights spent glued to Lucy’s side.

  The leg-overs were too flimsy to bring to Lucy’s attention. But Marie’s memory of Tod’s expression on St Valentine’s night – a cocksure, calm You know, and I know, but you can’t prove a thing – made her uneasy about keeping it from her.

  The hot cross buns were Great British Bake Off quality. Robert arranged them just so on the gold platter he’d borrowed from Lucy’s vast stash of decorative bits and pieces. After some initial uncertainty about Lucy – how could a nemesis become a BFF overnight? – Robert had welcomed her homely, comforting presence and never baulked at finding her, yet again, in his kitchen with his wife. She was a constant, quiet sort of person, who crinkled her eyes at his jokes and gave thoughtful praise to his baking.

  Tod, though . . . Robert couldn’t get a handle on the man. His instinct was to dislike Tod with a sort of low-level antipathy, possibly because Marie obviously fancied him rotten. There had been rebuttals and many an incredulous Oh, for God’s sake!, but a husband can tell.

  Robert rearranged the buns one last time. The brainstorming had been stormy, but not particularly brainy. There had been showing-off, there had been scribbling on whiteboards, there had been excruciating animal role-play, but there had been no good ideas.

  Possibly – and this was heresy – that was because good ideas happen when you sit down and think hard, not when some berk from Accounts is pretending to be a cat.

  Hoisting the platter aloft, Robert walked back to the boardroom, his soles slapping with a noisy echo in the almost-empty building. Magda, he thought, will die at my simnel cupcakes.

  Robert was insanely proud of his simnel cupcakes; he suspected they were his own invention. Pity they were ‘cupcakes’ – he felt faintly Julian Clary for making such a thing – but perhaps they could be renamed? Mancakes? Hmm. He couldn’t see it catching on.

  His hand on the handle of the boardroom door, Robert suddenly saw himself as if through a long-distance lens. He saw a man who had memorised Hello Kitty! wall-clock sales figures for the period 2011–12. A man who had rehearsed a short speech casually dissing a co-worker for ‘playing hooky’ in her sub-aquatic kitchen. A man who’d baked (nay, invented) goodies for his family, but was sharing them with the people he usually avoided at work.

  Robert preferred the bloke who let his assistant take the rest of the day off when she was stricken with period pains; who told Geoff to cry it all out when his budgie died; who bought the Christmas tinsel out of his own pocket.

  ‘I’m a monster,’ he thought, turning the handle and returning to a world where bank holidays meant team-building exercises instead of lie-ins. ‘I’m a monster who knows a hell of a lot about clocks.’

  By the end of Easter Saturday, every Dunwoody was full of chocolate, sick of the stuff and desperate for more. Lazy and inert, they lay around the house like abandoned mattresses.

  Peeling herself off the sofa, Marie shut herself into the conservatory to ring her dad, a call she preferred to make on her feet, so that she could walk off her jittery anxieties as she loudly repeated herself over and over, trying to gauge his state of health by his muttered, fractured conversation.

  ‘Bye, Dad!’ she said.

  ‘Bye, Margaret,’ he said.

  Margaret was Marie’s mother’s name. Marie stared at the phone’s little screen for a while, aware she was holding it too hard. Her father was the same age as Mary Berry, an extraordinary fact, given that lady’s energy and sparkle. Marie fervently hoped that when she was of their generation she’d still be part of the action like Mary, and not tidied away like a once-loved toy at the back of a cupboard.

  In their mother’s absence from the sitting room, Angus dumped his revision as if it was hot.

  The twins stood between Angus and the television.

  ‘What?’ he said, suspi
ciously.

  ‘Will you help us with a school project?’ said Iris.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Please,’ said Rose. ‘Pretty please.’

  ‘No. Get out of the way. This is the bit where he says “I’m Spartacus”.’

  Iris turned off the television. Rose goggled at her, shocked and thrilled at such daring. ‘We need you to make a short film. Like those brilliant ones you make of the holidays and stuff.’

  ‘Put the telly back on. Don’t make me turn you upside down.’

  On a nod from Iris, Rose laid photocopied images on the carpet at Angus’s feet. ‘We want you to make a montage of these. Animate them, or something.’

  Fanning out the images, Iris said, ‘You need to put it to music. “Who’s That Girl?” by . . .’ She faltered.

  ‘The Eurythmics,’ said Angus. He leaned down to inspect the photos. ‘What are you two up to?’

  ‘It’s for school,’ said Iris.

  ‘That’s all you need to know,’ said Rose.

  ‘Are you being evil?’

  ‘A bit,’ said Iris.

  ‘I hate it when you bring the laptop to bed.’ Marie turned grouchily away from her husband. The screen’s harsh bluish light sucked all the gentle tones from the low-lit room and destroyed its sanctuary vibe.

  ‘Talking of computers, do you remember when we—’

  Marie cut him off. ‘Yes, I remember. And that subject’s off-limits.’ She cringed. The inspiration for their bedroom home-movie had been found at the bottom of a fourth bottle of wine, and Marie still suffered flashbacks that stopped her in her tracks in the chilled-goods aisle. It was barbaric to witness one’s own arse from that angle, and the soundtrack – not unlike a Wimbledon final, with all its grunts and exclamations – was seared into her brain. ‘What are you doing, anyway?’

  ‘Brushing up on clock facts.’

  ‘And here was me thinking it might be something dull.’

  ‘And,’ added Robert loftily, ‘working on a document about how to merge the departments without doing away with either me or Caroline.’

  ‘But then you’d have to work even more closely with her.’

  ‘Yeah, well, if it saves my job . . .’ Robert tailed off. He tapped a key, then another, lost in his task, oblivious to the relief surging through his wife. Bracing herself for an announcement from Robert that he was giving in, taking voluntary redundancy, starting afresh, she had been barely able to breathe these past weeks. A feminist to her fingertips, Marie would be happy to be the breadwinner, but, realising that she’d misjudged his mood – that what she’d taken to be a mid-life crisis was just a blip – she allowed herself to unclench a little, to unfurl and admit how relieved she was not to have to take the wheel.