A Very Big House in the Country
Page 33
JULY
School Fete
Show-Stopper
Dear Iris and Rose’s mum
Thank you so much for agreeing to bake the show-stopper for the school fete. Every penny made by the fete will go to the PSA and will directly benefit our pupils.
Best regards
The PSA
Their shoes squeaking on the gym’s waxed floor, hordes of parents rifled bric-a-brac, lucky-dipped and bought one-eyed hunchback teddies from the craft stand.
Over at the cake stall the show-stopper was attracting attention. Of the wrong kind.
‘I’m sorry, girls.’ Marie took in her daughters’ crestfallen faces, both so perfectly alike, with their ski-slope noses, their confetti freckles, their grave brown eyes just like their dad’s. ‘Next year . . .’ she began, but went no further. She’d made the same speech last year: her annual promise to be the mum they deserved.
Angus – video camera, as ever, grafted to his hand – zoomed in on his mother’s contribution.
‘Darling, don’t,’ pleaded Marie. The world didn’t need footage of her show-stopper. With minutes to spare she had had to rely on the petrol-station minimart. The realisation that just-on-their-sell-by-date French Fancies were as good as it would get had made her want to lie down among the chilled wraps and weep. She’d bought the lot, hoping to make them look . . . well, abundant;but, huddled bleakly on a tiered cake stand, the dozen battered fancies looked . . . well, shop-bought.
‘It doesn’t matter, Mum,’ said Rose.
‘Nah,’ said Iris.
But they kept sneaking looks at Lucy’s cake.
Lucy Gray. Mild-mannered mum of one, neighbour and nemesis. As if constructed especially to shame Marie, the woman was birdlike, a petite and neat counterpoint to Marie’s more-than-adequate bosom/bottom arrangement. Her house, the largest on Caraway Close, boasted hanging baskets, gleaming windows and a perfect front lawn of neon emerald; across the way, Marie’s house number hung upside down (transforming them from number nineteen to sixty-one) and the twins’ bikes copulated in the porch, tripping her up each and every morning.
Lucy baked show-stoppers every other day, ‘just for fun’.
Wearing a flowery tea-dress, without a speck of make-up on her wholesome face, and simpering with false modesty at the compliments raining down around her, Lucy stood proudly by her cake.
And what a cake it was!
It was a supermodel of cakes, an Alfa Romeo, a Crufts Best in Show. A multi-storey sponge high-rise, plastered with the softest buttercream and festooned with hand-made fondant roses that could deceive a bee, it came complete with its own theme tune of tinkling harps.
First published in 2015 by Pan Books
This electronic edition published 2015 by Pan Books
an imprint of Pan Macmillan
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ISBN 978-1-4472-7624-1
Copyright © Just Grand 2015
Cover Images © Shutterstock
The right of Claire Sandy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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