What Would Mary Berry Do?

by Claire Sandy

  Lucy continued. ‘He didn’t survive.’

  He. Lucy and Tod had made a boy.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Marie looked up to see the struggling, crumpled expression Lucy always used to fend off tears.

  ‘Daniel.’ She coughed to cover the break in her voice. ‘Danny.’

  ‘Danny,’ repeated Marie, gently and with wonder. ‘Danny Gray.’

  They sat in silence for a while.

  A key turned in the front door and Robert shouted, ‘Halloo!’

  As Lucy rearranged her features, dredging up a banal expression, Marie called, ‘What’re you doing home at lunchtime?’

  ‘Could ask you the same thing. Oh, hang on. The old boy’s funeral. Sorry, love, you did say you were baking.’ Robert bent and hugged Lucy. Since Tod’s desertion he’d treated her gently, as if she’d been bereaved. At some point it would have to stop, but for now they both enjoyed it. ‘I’ve come back for my tennis racket. Magda’s drawn up a league, and it starts tonight.’

  ‘Hang on, Andy Murray. You’ve forgotten we need you at home tonight. Angus is doing some after-school thing and we’re hosting Jonas’s funeral tea at the clinic.’

  ‘You never said that.’

  ‘I did. I said that. I said it loudly.’

  ‘No, you didn’t. Because – guess what – if you had, I’d remember.’

  ‘The twins,’ said Lucy, rising from the table, ‘can come to me.’ She’d caught the Dunwoody habit of fond sarcasm and added, ‘I’ll get out of here, so you two can have the row you’re both obviously dying for.’ I’m fine, she mouthed to Marie as she backed out of the room.

  ‘I don’t want a row,’ said Marie, as the front door closed behind Lucy.

  ‘Nor me.’

  They kissed lightly, chummily, but as Marie turned to attend to her cake, Robert held her back, clasping her by the elbows. ‘I can’t go on like this for much longer.’

  ‘Very dramatic for a Thursday.’

  ‘Seriously.’

  I know damned well you’re serious, but I can’t give you the permission you want, thought Marie.

  ‘Just before I left the office,’ said Robert, relinquishing her to the Swiss roll, ‘I heard myself say to Magda that Caroline’s ginger snaps are too brittle. And I added that her clocks-and-watches quarterly forecast is fundamentally flawed.’

  ‘And? Your point?’

  His voice a hiss, Robert said, ‘Caroline’s ginger snaps are mouth-watering! Her forecast is masterly! Christ, can that girl ever forecast! I’ve got to get out of that place before I turn into a prize git.’

  ‘Don’t do anything rash.’

  ‘Rash?’ Robert almost shouted the word as he reached into the garage for his racket. ‘I’ve worked there since the dawn of bloody time!’

  ‘Exactly. So you shouldn’t waste all the effort you’ve put in. For all we know, you’re worrying about nothing. Magda might not even amalgamate the departments; and, if she does, she might sack Caroline, not you.’

  ‘You’re right – I have made an effort. I’m now an expert on clocks, and an expert on vaguely shitty comments about my colleague when she’s not there.’

  ‘That’s not all you’ve been doing. You’ve been running your department at a profit, looking after your staff and coming up with a bestselling new line.’

  Robert leaned back against the fridge-freezer and loosened his tie. ‘But I’ve been doing that day in, day out, for the past fifteen years. So why, suddenly, isn’t it enough? Why do I have to bake sodding muffins to prove myself?’

  ‘Now don’t abuse the muffins, Robert,’ said Marie sternly. ‘This isn’t the muffins’ fault. And besides,’ she said, head on one side, ‘you love the muffins.’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ admitted Robert, tormented. ‘I love the muffins. But . . .’ He slammed the racket against his thigh, punctuating each word. ‘But! But! But!’

  ‘Calm down.’ Marie would hate it if anybody said that to her: calm down is possibly the least calming thing to say in any situation. Every couple knows that calm down = shut up, and she didn’t want to shut Robert up, but neither did she want to broadcast the facts she’d suppressed during their numerous late-night tête-à-têtes on this topic.

  They were harsh and pointy, these facts: Smile!’s takings were down by a quarter, and one-tenth of their patients had already defected to Perfect You. The road ahead was a slippery slope.

  Lynda had taken her usual no-nonsense approach. ‘When life gives you lemons,’ she’d insisted, ‘chuck them out and make champagne.’ She’d suggested new, cheaper premises beyond Klay’s reach, but Marie was only two years into a ten-year lease. She’d suggested expanding, but Marie had no capital: ‘I seem to have accidentally spent my life savings on Barbies, pencil cases and food.’ Lynda had jogged relentlessly through a number of options until she’d arrived at ‘Murder Klay in his sleep’. Marie had thought for a moment. ‘Sounds like fun, but nope.’

  ‘Calm down?’ Robert took it badly. ‘Bloody-calm-bloody-down? Do you realise that every morning I drag myself to work, only to have my balls neatly snipped off at reception? Apart from the absurd pressure of only being as good as my last scone, I hate how the company is run. I remember when personalities were important, when our idiosyncrasies were valued. Now you move up by brown-nosing the boss and making flowcharts and multicoloured analyses. I have nightmares that statistics are crawling on my body like ants. Just because I put people first, I’m made to feel out of step, like an old, old man. Like poor what’s-his-name – poor Jonas.’

  Robert gathered his things together cantankerously, as if all this were his sports bag’s doing. ‘I’m not ready for the scrapheap. But neither am I up for another decade of competing for the boss’s favours.’ He snatched up his car keys. ‘I have to jump before I’m pushed, Marie.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Marie, ‘it’ll be Caroline who’s pushed.’

  ‘And then what? Elbow another younger contender out of the way, this time next year? What if she has a killer Bakewell-tart recipe? I want to take control of my own life. I want out!’

  ‘Don’t do anything hasty.’

  Robert made for the door. ‘Thanks for the support.’

  ‘Seriously. We have to talk before you do anything.’ Marie tailed him to the hall, calling down the path after him. ‘Promise?’ She knew him well enough to take his seething silence as a ‘yes’.

  Rolling a Swiss roll isn’t easy at the best of times. When you’ve just had words with your other half and you can’t shake off the feeling you’ve mishandled something fundamental, it’s uphill work.

  The instructions, as Marie had come to expect from Mary, were clear-cut. With her sharpest knife (gone were the days when the kids could juggle with Marie’s knives in complete safety) she began to trim the edges.

  In her determination to achieve the uniformity of Mary’s illustration, she trimmed and retrimmed until she took herself aside and gave herself a good talking to: any more trimming and the Swiss roll would have to come complete with its own magnifying glass.

  Then, following the instructions of her guru, she scored a small indent in one of the shorter edges. With no notion of why she needed an indent, Marie did this completely on trust, believing in Mary utterly, the way pagan people used to believe in the sun.

  The jam, a glistening goo the colour of spilled blood, was spread. Robert had made it, in response to Caroline’s much-praised chutney. Marie judged the amount carefully: too little and it would be stingy; too much and it would leak out.

  It was important to get this right for Jonas.

  ‘Right,’ said Marie to the empty kitchen. ‘Let’s roll.’ She flexed her fingers. ‘Right.’ She flexed them again. ‘Here I go.’ She shook her shoulders. ‘This is me. Rolling.’

  I should be able to do this by now. Marie took up the edge of the jammy sponge and whimpered with dismay as it cracked and fractured. Her instinct was to call for Lucy, but she took a few deep breaths and reapplied herself.

  The
cake folded a little creakily, but didn’t split.

  Tonight, she thought, I’ll do what I should have done a long time ago. She would lay the dental-practice books in front of Robert. She’d show him the bank statements. She’d flatten out the long credit-card bill she’d screwed into a ball.

  With tiny persuasive flutters of her fingers, Marie cajoled the cake into a coil, centimetre by centimetre. Her confidence grew, and her pace quickened.

  It would be hard to climb down in front of her husband and admit she wasn’t a superhero. Marie had always believed that women could be breadwinners: one of the reasons she’d trained in dentistry was the solid career it more or less guaranteed. Seeing Lucy scrabble and scrimp, penniless because she’d put her faith in a man, was chilling. Marie’s aim – even within a happy and sound marriage – had always been to be able to take care of them all if something happened to Robert.

  Another gentle push and the cake rocked to a halt. There it sat: fat, squat, delicious. A perfect Swiss roll.

  Jonas’s perfect Swiss roll.

  Now, something had happened to Robert. And I’m not sure we can cope without his income. The comfortable and modest kitchen, her favourite place in the world, shifted – as in a horror film – into a shadowy place full of greedy gullets, all ready to gobble money.

  The dishwasher, reprieved at Christmas but now on its last legs, would chomp up £200. The damp patch on the ceiling would devour another £200, while ninety quid or so might satisfy the cracked pane in the conservatory.

  We’ll work it out tonight. Icing sugar drifted over the Swiss roll. We’ll talk it through. Marie mustered her resolve. There was a funeral to get through, and then she’d have to tell her husband that there was no escape – not yet – from his misery.

  The head-count came to eight, and that included Marie, Lynda and Aileen. Eight mourners hovered around the sandwiches set out as prettily as possible on the reception desk.

  Five other people had turned out to celebrate Jonas’s long life. There was no wife: the delightfully named Editha had died long ago. According to the baseball-capped neighbour who’d found Jonas, he’d gone to her grave every Sunday with a big bunch of flowers.

  ‘Imagine him,’ murmured Lynda, her lovely features solemn, ‘just sitting there by her headstone.’

  ‘Arranging Editha’s flowers.’ Marie had been startled by her torrent of emotions in the church. The short, spare service had seemed horribly inadequate. Say he was lovely, she’d wanted to shout at the vicar. Say what a gent he was. She was shaky now, not quite herself, as she moved among the paltry crowd, offering glasses of the unspeakable wine that Aileen had ‘sourced’ at Lidl.

  ‘Uncle Jonas was a lovely old bloke.’ The great-nephew counted on his fingers and admitted that he hadn’t seen his great-uncle for almost a decade. ‘Time flies,’ he muttered, embarrassed, but not too embarrassed for a refill.

  ‘Lovely spread!’ The meals-on-wheels lady tucked in enthusiastically, saying through a mouthful of egg mayonnaise on brown that she liked to attend the funerals of ‘her’ people – an admission Marie found both heart-warming and creepy.

  Nobody present had really known Jonas. The great-nephew knew of a son, but there had been an estrangement over ‘Ooh, what was it now? An inheritance, I think. Or was it something to do with a mobile home? They haven’t spoken since the late 1980s.’

  It was hard, very hard, for Marie to imagine a world where an altercation over a caravan could estrange her from Angus for twenty-five years.

  ‘Cut the feckin’ cake,’ advised Aileen. ‘This mob is getting restless.’

  While disputing that eight people constituted a mob, Marie accepted that the ‘do’ had peaked. The Swiss roll sat patiently in the kitchenette, a relic of old England on its floral-patterned plate.

  The red-and-gold spiral was a throwback to when treats were modest – Hey, kids, it’s fatless sponge and jam for high tea today! – and was therefore a perfect tribute to Jonas, also a throwback to the days when gentlemen lifted their hats on passing a lady in the street.

  ‘This,’ said Marie quietly, ‘is for you, Jonas.’

  Everyone fell on the cake, drained their glasses and left. They’d have forgotten the Swiss roll by the time they got home, but they might recall Jonas once in a while, until he too faded from their memories, just a little old chap in a carefully belted raincoat.

  Closing the door on the last guest, Lynda leaned back against it and cradled her tummy. Thanks to regular newsflashes, Marie knew that at fifteen weeks the baby was the size of a pea pod and had fingerprints.

  More than that, though, the baby was a promise. It was the future. Marie, rendered super soppy by the funeral, caught Lynda’s eye and they smiled – a weary, happy smile that only happens around the big stuff, the important stuff.

  ‘Life’s strange, isn’t it?’ said Lynda.

  ‘Yup,’ said Marie. ‘And wonderful.’ She swept the paper plates into a bin-bag with one hand and texted with the other: No more talk. DO IT! DO IT NOW! Jack in the stoopid job that’s making you so unhappy! Onwards and upwards to our next adventure. xxxx

  After all, she thought, bankruptcy is a kind of adventure.

  The tiny bubble-shaped car, a bright candy-pink, made its new owner so happy that Aileen was atypically generous and offered Marie a lift home. ‘Where’s your car these days?’ she asked as they buckled up.

  ‘Sold,’ said Marie succinctly, glad that Aileen’s limited attention span with other people’s lives meant there’d be no follow-up questions; she didn’t want to break into a rant about rainy bus stops and struggling home with bulging carrier bags biting into her fingers.

  The car smelled of newness. Where Aileen saw gleaming bodywork and white leather seats with modish black trim, Marie could only see a hire-purchase agreement. There were other practices, plenty of jobs for a skilled assistant, but who else would employ a woman who had arrived on time only once (they celebrated the anniversary every year) and referred to her boss as Droopy Drawers?

  Ready to jump out when the car slowed, Marie stayed put when Aileen yanked on the handbrake and turned the key in the ignition. Relaxing, Marie said, ‘Makes you think, a funeral.’

  ‘Makes me think I hate feckin’ funerals.’

  One of Aileen’s unexpected virtues was her ability to sit in companionable silence without the need to rush in and fill the conversational void.

  Dusk had fallen over Caraway Close. The Gnomes were already hunkered down for the night, their television flashing silver around the edges of their drawn curtains. Graham and Johann’s lights were on, but nobody was home; while they mooched around the art galleries of Amsterdam, a timer operated their lamps and uplighters. Erika’s house was lit as if for a ball, but the next-door house was dark and empty and a For Sale sign had sprouted in the front garden where Hattie had once practised her tai chi.

  Offering Marie a Rolo from the glove compartment, Aileen said, ‘Klay’s given up.’

  ‘At last!’ In the wing-mirror Marie saw Chloe turn into the Close, dragging her feet, swinging her school bag, mired in thought. Fresh, no doubt, from visiting her dad.

  ‘I tried to tell you the day Jonas died, when I said he’d finally left something interesting on me answerphone.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Jonas’s death kind of took over, didn’t it?’

  The garage door yawned open and Angus shot out on Rose’s tiny bike, arms and legs preposterously long for his child-sized transport.

  ‘Klay was sobbing and yelling. The usual owld guff. This is goodbye, he yowls, like a big pansy. You’ve broken me heart and trampled it into the ground.’ Aileen tutted. ‘All this fuss over a little bit of sex! Sure, people have sex every day.’

  Angus’s knees sliced wildly up and down as he swooped down the short drive and past the pink car, pedalling frantically.

  ‘But people really like sex.’ Marie stuck up for poor old sex. ‘Some people like it more than . . .’ She thought and took another sweet. ‘More than R
olos.’

  Angus circled Chloe, who’d paused, keeping her eyes cast down, only peeking up now and then at the loon veering around her in erratic loops.

  ‘He said I’d ruined his life.’

  Finally giving in, Chloe bent at the waist and belly-laughed. Candy-striped streamers flapping from his handlebars, Angus cycled harder on the minuscule bike, in ever-decreasing circles.

  In a flash, Marie saw the sort of man he’d be.

  Able to laugh at himself. Male, but not macho. Just like his dad, he’d do anything to cheer up his favourite girl. Marie watched Chloe trail slowly up Lucy’s path, peeking over her shoulder as Angus trundled over the Dunwoody gravel and was swallowed by the dark interior of the garage. Could people find each other, so young? Angus would have to act, because Chloe didn’t have the confidence to make a move, but she’d make things easy for Angus if he only had the courage to take that first step.

  ‘. . . so he’ll be gone by the end of the month.’

  ‘Sorry? What?’ Marie turned to Aileen again. ‘Who’ll be gone?’

  ‘Am I wasting me breath or what? Klay, Droopy Drawers, Klay. According to the message, he can’t cope with seeing me every day and not being able to touch my – what was it now? – oh yes, me alabaster breasts. It’s a living hell, apparently, and there was a lot more about me boobs, which you don’t need to hear, but the bottom line is he’s fecking off.’

  Loath to take this too seriously, Marie said, ‘But he’s usually drunk when he leaves messages. Is it a trick to get you back?’

  ‘He’s given the staff notice. I checked on the Internet and the lease is for sale. Reckons he’s going to Spain.’

  ‘Spain!’ Alongside growing glee at the magic wand that was returning the landscape to a pre-Klay era, Marie found time to respect Aileen’s technique: when that woman broke a heart, it stayed broke. ‘That’s an awfully long way to go after just one night of passion.’

  ‘What can I say?’ Aileen was complacent as she lovingly twiddled a moustache hair. ‘He did mention something else, about some woman suing him. He took out all her teeth and there was nothing wrong with them, and he replaced them with implants and her gums exploded or something. But mainly he’s closing down his business because of my irrepressible sexuality.’