Bella had never heard her mother say that.
‘I grew up poor, Bella. I didn’t want that for you. I didn’t want you ever to have to worry about money. That’s why I was so pleased when you got your place to read law. The world will always need lawyers.’
Bella couldn’t help laughing at that.
‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘So long as they keep writing laws that are too difficult for anyone without a law degree to follow. But I’ll tell you what’s certain, Mum. The world will always need food. And it will always need great chefs.’
‘As your father was.’
‘As I hope to be, Mum.’
Bella took a deep breath.
‘This possibly isn’t the right time to say it but it might come up in conversation tonight and I want you to know before someone else tells you. I quit my job a couple of weeks ago.’
‘You what?’
‘I quit my job. I know it was steady and paid reasonably well and all those other things, but it was sucking the life out of me. The weeks and months and years were blurring into one long stream of police interviews and ready meals. I know you’ve always wanted me to find a nice man and settle down. Well, I didn’t even have time to date. I certainly didn’t have time to think about my creative side. Never mind my clients. I was the one facing a life sentence. Was I supposed to keep doing the same thing, week in week out, until retirement?’
‘This is all very sudden.’
‘Not for me. I’ve been thinking about it for years. The last six weeks have just shown me what might be possible and given me the courage to go for it.’
‘But what are you going to do instead?’ Maria asked. ‘How will you pay the bills?’
‘I’m going to learn to cook properly. Alex, whom you’ll meet tonight, is going to reopen Bella’s.’
‘What?’
‘I’ve decided to throw my lot in with him. He’s taking me on as an apprentice.’
Bella would tell her the rest of the story later on.
Chapter Sixty-One
It was to Maria’s credit that she agreed to walk into the community centre after that. Later she would say it was because in Bella’s admission Maria saw a flash of her poor husband Ugo’s passion and realised that while she’d been a bad wife through the lean times, she still had a chance to be a supportive mother. And Bella seemed so happy and Alex seemed so … well, lovely and handsome and nice. He welcomed Maria so warmly, that she knew she had to put her reservations aside.
While the students’ guests sat at the table, sipping the champagne that Bella had brought along, Alex, Bella, John and Liz set to work, chopping, dicing, stirring, frying, roasting, baking and generally making a mess. That didn’t matter. They all knew by now that if you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, you certainly can’t make focaccia without getting flour and semolina all over the place. Neither could you make a fish pie without getting a prawn on the floor.
‘It’s a shame Ted isn’t here,’ Liz commented.
‘Ted’s not to be encouraged to beg in the kitchen,’ Evan, Liz’s guest for the evening, reminded her. ‘Not even for what I’m sure will be a fabulous fish pie.’
‘Yes, vet,’ Liz gave him a cheeky wink.
Meanwhile, John had brought two guests. He would never have believed how quickly a situation can change. A week earlier he’d been estranged from his only son, having pushed him away when he ended up in prison for a drugs’ bust so enormous John thought he would never get over the shame. Now John’s son was sitting at the table in the community centre and next to him, John’s granddaughter, the girl he didn’t even know existed.
Madison had jumped at the chance to meet her grandfather. She’d spent almost her whole life wondering what he and Sonia were like. Until her mother’s change of heart, Madison had assumed her grandparents weren’t interested in her. She was desperately sad to have missed the chance to meet Sonia and so she was especially glad to have the opportunity to get to know John. John for his part was immediately enchanted by the young woman. She not only looked like Sonia, she had her grandmother’s ready smile and easy temperament. She was quick to laugh and soon had John eating out of the palm of her hand.
As he took his eyes off the stove for a moment and looked at the table to see Madison chatting earnestly with Liz’s friend the vet and Bella’s mother, John knew he could not be more proud. To think that he might have missed it all through stubbornness was unbearable.
Alex appeared behind John and put his hand on the older man’s shoulder.
‘Looking good,’ he said of John’s efforts.
John reached up and squeezed Alex’s hand in response. Alex didn’t yet know how much he had helped John. If it hadn’t been for that conversation after Alex’s birthday party, John might never have picked up the phone to David. Though he had felt like a hypocrite at the time, John now knew that the things he had said to Alex that night were true. Everyone deserves a second chance and it wasn’t just David who was getting one. John was getting his second chance too. He hoped that if Sonia was looking down on him, she was proud.
A little later than expected – there had been a lot of banter between the guests and the trainee chefs – the first course of that evening’s meal was on the table and Alex took his place at the head of it. Before he invited the people gathered there to tuck in, he asked if he might say a few words. Everyone agreed that he should.
‘I’m not a religious person,’ said Alex. ‘I haven’t said grace since I was at school, but sitting here with all of you today makes me feel incredibly grateful. When I took on the beginners’ cookery course, I thought it would just be an easy way to make some money while I waited for the opportunity to do something more interesting. I looked forward to passing on some of my knowledge but I had no idea of the things that I would learn along the way. I had no idea that as well as some cash and CV points, I’d make some wonderful new mates. Mates I hope will stay in my life for a very long time.’ He looked at Liz, John and Bella in turn. ‘For that reason, I’d like to raise a toast to Bella, John and Liz. May tonight be the first of many fantastic dinner parties for the three of you. Not just my students but my teachers and my friends.’
Chapter Sixty-Two
Birthday Cake
Four eggs, eight ounces caster sugar, eight ounces self-raising flour, eight ounces margarine, 2 tsp. baking powder.
Break eggs into mixing bowl and add sugar, flour, baking powder and marg. Mix until well combined. Divide mixture between two tins and bake for twenty-five minutes at Gas Mark 4. Remove from oven. Inspect. Despair. Discard.
Evan pronounced himself extremely impressed with Liz’s cooking skills and he volunteered himself to be guinea pig when Liz next attempted a fish pie. It had come out during the graduation dinner that Liz’s fish pie had ended in disaster for both her and Ted. However, much as she was pleased that Evan wanted to taste her cooking again, Liz had a much more important critic in mind for her next foray into the kitchen.
A week after the graduation dinner, it was Saskia’s sixteenth birthday.
Since Ian had been forced to come clean about his true feelings (or not) for Brittney (and by extension for Liz), the London weekend that Saskia had been looking forward to so much was no longer on the cards. Liz told Saskia that she could go to the blog awards if she still wanted to, but Saskia said it no longer felt like the right thing to do. Brittney wanted to put Ian behind her and having Saskia there at the blog awards with her probably wouldn’t help.
‘In any case, Mum,’ said Saskia, ‘I’d prefer to spend the weekend with you.’
Result! Liz was not going to have to waste that expensive spa weekend after all. Saskia was very much on for two days of lolling about in a bathrobe, eating salad and getting her nails done now.
The spa would be all about detoxing, of course, but Liz planned to sneak in one particular piece of contraband – that birthday cake she’d promised herself she’d create for Saskia’s big day. The one that would make up
for fifteen years of shop-bought cakes from Marks and Spencer.
Alex provided Liz with what he described as a ‘fool-proof’ recipe.
‘You really can’t go wrong,’ he said.
He still didn’t know Liz that well.
Liz’s first attempt at the cake came out exactly as her last attempt fifteen years earlier. It was as flat as a cow pat. It didn’t seem to have risen at all.
The second attempt was just as woeful. Liz must have put the tray into the oven slightly wonky because that cake came out two inches deep on one side and just half an inch deep on the other.
The third attempt was burned. Liz got distracted by a phone call.
The fourth attempt was just like the first.
Liz phoned Alex. ‘Are you sure baking skills aren’t passed down in the genes? My mother definitely didn’t have them.’
Alex encouraged Liz to keep trying. Add another egg. More baking powder. Whisk the mixture for longer. Nothing seemed to work. And within an hour Saskia would be home. They were supposed to head straight for the spa as soon as she changed out of her school clothes.
Liz faced the prospect of having no cake to take on their special weekend. She’d run out of ingredients and patience.
Liz stood in front of the cupboard where she kept sugar and flour and looked for emergency supplies and inspiration. She hoped to find a forgotten box of pre-prepared cake mix. What met her gaze was a box of icing sugar, a packet of sponge fingers and a tube of Smarties.
Liz and Saskia were very good on their first day at the health spa. They ate a clean breakfast and did two back-to-back exercise classes (which was more than Liz had done since Saskia was born). In the afternoon, they both had manuka honey facials, full body exfoliations and got their nails done. Liz went for a delicate nude shade. Saskia went for black. It was quite pretty though.
At the evening meal, Liz and Saskia chose from a menu of extremely virtuous calorie-counted options, which were all delicious.
‘I feel like I’m missing something,’ said Saskia as they walked back to the room they were sharing.
‘It is your birthday,’ said Liz. ‘Are you missing a cake?’
‘You haven’t got me another one of those caterpillar things from Marks and Spencer have you?’ Saskia asked in a way that suggested she’d been over those a great many years ago.
‘Something much better,’ Liz promised.
‘Traffic lights!’ Saskia exclaimed when Liz opened the Tupperware box. ‘Oh, Mum.’ She bit one in half right away.
‘Hang on,’ said Liz. ‘I was going to put a candle on one of them and sing “Happy Birthday”.’
‘Please don’t sing, Mum,’ Saskia said.
Liz was crestfallen.
‘Only joking,’ Saskia said. ‘But Mum, this is the best kind of birthday cake ever. They remind me of Grandma,’ she added, wiping a burgeoning tear from her eye. ‘Grandma couldn’t cook but she was the best at giving hugs. Like you are. Traffic lights were her signature and now they’re yours. When I have kids, I’m going to make these instead of a birthday cake.’
And just like that, a culinary tradition was born.
Epilogue
A year later Liz was still cooking and growing more adventurous with every meal. Particularly since Saskia had decided that she wanted to learn to cook too. She’d given up on her acting and instead enrolled in the same course that Liz had taken at the community centre. Alex wasn’t teaching the course any more but a young chef called Daniel was. Saskia and Georgia had terrible crushes on the poor bloke who spent the lessons pretending he was oblivious to their teenage fervour.
Ted, too, was keeping up the good work. He was still hovering at his target weight, having finally come to understand that Liz would no longer be expressing her love for him through the medium of Marks and Spencer’s ready-cooked cocktail sausages. Instead, he had to settle for her praise and a tummy rub, which turned out to be just as nice. Exactly as Evan had always said.
Liz and Evan were taking things slowly but Liz had come to appreciate Evan’s quirky ways. She understood that his love for animals did not preclude him from loving another person at all. He’d just needed to find the right kind of person. Someone who wasn’t scared to occasionally bark orders in his general direction. And Liz finally told Evan the true story of the cake-mix debacle over three Aperol Spritzes at Bella’s.
Alex and Bella were making a fantastic job of running the little café that was soon the place to be for Newbay’s trendy crowd, who dropped in for aperitivi on their way home from work.
John was also a regular customer. He brought his son David, who had moved in to live with him. Sometimes they were accompanied by Madison, who aced her A levels and won a place at Exeter University, which brought her much closer to her father and granddad.
Meanwhile, Ian moved back in with his old girlfriend Kat, the one from Totnes. Twenty years apart had changed their relationship for the better and Ian even suggested to Saskia that Miss Totnes might be the one to help him get over his fear of commitment at last. Liz found to her surprise that she wished her now ex-husband well, despite all the trouble he’d caused her. And Brittney.
Well, Brittney’s Bites did win an award at the grand blogging conference in London. With ‘best health and sustainable fashion blog’ all over her headers, Brittney was going from strength to strength with her combination of home-made health food, fashion bargains and made-up Dalai Lama quotes. Those misattributed quotes still drove Liz nuts, but she did appreciate the sentiment of one of them, which said:
‘Great love is like great home-made food. They’re both much better shared.’
Did the Dalai Lama say that? Probably not. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t a quote worth living by.
Acknowledgements
For their professional support, their friendship and their love during the writing of this novel I’d like to thank: super-agent Laetitia Rutherford and Megan Carroll of Watson, Little Ltd. Uber-editor Emily Kitchin, and Thorne Ryan, Alice Morley and Jo Myler of Hodder and Stoughton. Copyeditor Gabby and illustrator Emma Block. Fellow writers and fabulous friends Victoria Routledge, Alex Potter, Bernie Strachan, Amanda Brookfield, Michele Gorman, Lauren Henderson, Serena Mackesy and Mike Gayle. My old school pals, Jane Wright, Helena Cutler and Jo Medcroft. My beloved family, Mum, Kate, Lee, Harrison and Lukas. And last but not least, Mark, my dearest dear. Thank you all from the bottom of my heart.
The Worst Case Scenario Cookery Club Page 29