The Art of Baking Blind Read online

  She resumes her kneading.

  Fat, she accepts as she pounds more vigorously in a sudden flush of anger, is something she has grown used to as her burgeoning love of baking has coincided with her expansion into middle age.

  ‘Never trust a thin cook,’ she sometimes twinkles as she folds her still neat arms beneath a bosom – it is definitely a bosom now, rather than distinct breasts – that continues to swell as she moves up each dress size. Now a size twenty, she can no longer be described as voluptuous, curvy, or even cuddly. Her thighs, which rub together when she walks, are silvered with stretch marks like the tears appearing in her stretched focaccia. Her stomach flops with the moist consistency of softly whipped cream.

  Her daughters, if they ever bothered to consider it, would assume that their mother is nonchalant about this. Jennifer looks what she is: a rosy-cheeked mother earth figure; an excellent home cook who will rustle up a dozen scones or a Victoria sponge with eggs from her own Sussex Whites if friends give her twenty minutes’ notice; the ever capable linchpin of their family.

  Only Lizzie, her youngest, who has just started at Bristol, wonders if her mother is truly as happy as she claims.

  ‘Are you OK, Mum?’ she had asked her, tentatively, at Christmas. ‘Do you mind rattling around here, just cooking for Dad, now we’re all at uni?’

  Jennifer had smiled. ‘Do you mean: what do I do all day?’

  The elder girls had been less concerned. ‘Oh, it’s what she loves doing, looking after all of us, taking care of the old grump, isn’t it?’ Kate, now twenty-three, had chipped in.

  ‘Course it is. She’s our mother hen, aren’t you?’ Emma, twenty-two, and more typically acerbic, had slipped a slim arm round her waist and squeezed her. She had felt discomfited by the sentiment, but relaxed into the hug.

  ‘Well, I do have plenty to do: there’s still loads of cooking and gardening … and the hens, of course.’ She had sought to make herself sound busy. The girls, wanting to believe the best, had laughed.

  ‘Stop fussing, Lizzie,’ Emma had bossed her younger sister. ‘You heard what she said. She’s just doing what she’s always done.’

  It did not seem to occur to them that, once, she had had a career, though, admittedly, she had stopped nursing when she had her first baby. By the time the girls were at school, nobody wanted her to work out of the home – and so she stayed there.

  Now, when she worries about her, Lizzie fires off a loving text and is reassured by a swift and cheery response. ‘Lovely to hear from you, darling. Had a glorious day in the garden and now making sticky toffee puddings. Xxx’

  Jennifer, who has agonised over getting the tone of the text just right, watches the phone, willing it to ring. It remains silent. And so, alone in her kitchen, she bakes and bakes.

  3

  When serving cake, always provide a cake fork and a napkin. And never press your guests to eat. Cake should be something chosen once you’ve weighed up the potential effect on your waistline – and decided that it is so delicious it is worth succumbing. Either give in to the seduction wholeheartedly – or savour the satisfaction of knowing you can resist.

  Karen Hammond is perched at the island in the centre of her chaste kitchen, the line between her eyebrows deepening as she examines its marble surface with disdain.

  Watery sunshine slants through the substantial roof light, picking out her copper lowlights. The cleaner is due later and a few specks of dust dance in the sunlight, bestowing a dirty halo that shifts as she grimaces.

  A smear of grease, a tell-tale thumbprint at its head, mars the island’s glassy smoothness. How could she have missed that? She reaches for the anti-bacterial spray and polishes. Her face ripples in its surface and she pauses for a moment, struck by her reflection: a study in concentration; unforgiving; tense.

  The imperfection erased, she puts the cleaning products away and surveys the room. Her fingernails, coated in Chanel Rouge Noir, click against the worktop in a minor drum roll. A call to action; a call to perfect.

  A carrot cake sits on the opposite counter, its frosting sparkling. Fat sultanas wink at her from the orange crumb: she breathes in the sugar, the spice, the egg. It teases her, this cake, like a cocksure teenager leaning against a street corner. ‘Come on. You know you want me. Just a little nibble? A taste of my icing? Tell me, darling, where’s the harm in that?’

  But Karen resists. The kitchen implements have been put in the dishwasher; the mixing bowl, with its cloying icing, long since washed, dried and stowed away in its cupboard. For one moment, she had imagined sweeping her index finger around it and sucking the heavenly combination of mascarpone, sugar and just a squeeze of lime. Yet, even as she thought it, she knew she would never do it. Control and self-discipline are the key to everything. She has long known that the brief elation of surrender just cannot compare with the thrill of denial.

  Jake, her seventeen-year-old, half man, half boy now, saunters into the room.

  ‘All right, Ma?’

  She tenses at the public school affectation.

  He thrusts his hands into his jeans pockets, pushing them lower as he opens the fridge and surveys its contents. His T-shirt rides up and she can see the cleft between his slight buttocks. She wants to yank his jeans up. Tell him to dress properly. Instead, she looks away.

  ‘Got anything to eat?’

  The question is rhetorical. He begins to pile up cheese and ham, butter and bagels, a seemingly limitless number of calories which his six-foot-two frame can more than tolerate. She tenses as he plonks them on the surface, instantly destroying her order.

  His eyes sweep across the sterile kitchen to her latest creation.

  ‘Ah … cake. Don’t mind if I do, do you, Ma?’ he continues as he thrusts a bread knife into it and cuts himself a sizeable chunk. He eats as if ravenous. Moist crumbs sprinkle the floor and a dollop of frosting, still not set, drops from the knife.

  She cannot bear it.

  ‘For God’s sake, Jake. If you’re going to devour it, do it nicely.’

  She reaches for a porcelain side plate and a silver cake fork.

  ‘What’s that for?’

  ‘You know what that’s for. It’s a cake fork. Eat it properly.’

  He looks at her with mock incredulity. ‘God, Ma. Anyone would forget you were born in Sarf-end.’ He elongates the word in a mock Essex accent. ‘Since when did you get so up yourself?’

  His tone cuts her like a scalpel. Since my son started mocking me, she wants to reply. Since he and his sister entered a different social sphere with their rugby matches and cello lessons, their skiing trips and Latin gerunds. Since they entered a different world to me.

  But she doesn’t. Instead she contemplates her beautiful boy, his patrician features, mercifully untouched by acne, now marred with derision.

  ‘If you want to eat my cake, you follow my rules,’ is the best she can manage. It comes out fiercer than she intended. Less of a command; more of a hiss.

  He brays a laugh. ‘Chill, Ma. Calm down.’

  He looks at her as if she were from another planet then continues to demolish the cake, jaws moving efficiently.

  ‘This is good, by the way. Here, try a bit.’

  He holds it out to her, pushing it towards her lips. She recoils, suddenly fearful.

  ‘I’m fine, thank you.’ Her voice is tight. ‘I’m not hungry.’

  He gives a shrug. Goes back to finishing the cake.

  ‘What about the icing?’ he persists as he cuts himself a second, smaller, slice. ‘Here, just taste it on the knife. Go on.’ His upper lip curls as he holds it in front of her, a reward for good behaviour. It is dangerously close to her mouth but she refuses to flinch.

  ‘I said: “No.”’

  It comes out almost as a shout. He raises an eyebrow. She forces herself to soften her voice and breathes deeply.

  ‘I’m fine, thank you, darling. I just wish you’d listen to me.’

  She busies herself to deflect attention f
rom her outburst: begins to put his food back; takes a can of Diet Coke from the fridge. The caramel liquid fizzes in a crystal tumbler then burns as the bubbles run down her throat. It is her poison of choice now she has ditched the nicotine: a wonder drink that has zero calories but appears to fill her up.

  Her son is still watching her, his hands now raised in supplication. ‘I don’t get you. You make these gorgeous cakes and you won’t even taste them. What’s that about? It’s not like you’re fat or something.’

  He takes in her size eight frame: the flat abdomen and pronounced sternum; her skin taut against her cheekbones; her upper ribs radiating across her chest. He shakes his head, as if he were the parent bemused by the offspring, and ambles away.

  She is about to remonstrate – to tell him to help clear up – when he lobs his parting shot: an insult tossed so casually that, at first, she wonders if she has misheard him.

  ‘You’re fooling no one, Ma,’ he drawls as he slopes away, hands thrust deep in his pockets. And, again, under his breath, almost as a whisper: ‘You’re fooling no one.’

  * * *

  What the fuck did he mean by that? Fear powers her as she runs from her substantial Victorian house in Winchester towards the edge of the city on a forty-five-minute run that will burn a good 565 calories, she calculates, and, she hopes, extinguish her sense of shame.

  She keeps up a brisk pace: feet striking rhythmically heel-to-toe, torso erect but at ease, breath regular and even. The houses blur, their price tags diminishing as she leaves the centre of the city: Georgian town houses blurring into cutesy terraces; merging into more modern detached properties; the majority nondescript, the rare one a suburban gem.

  She has come a long way, she tells herself as she powers past the law courts, the railway and the hospital towards open countryside. She has come a long way and she is not going to let it all crumble because her son, this beautiful boy-man she often cannot believe she produced, thinks he knows something that will put her back in her place.

  Her stomach corrodes. You’re fooling no one, Ma. A general reference to the working-class roots she refuses to discuss or something more specific? What does he know? Which of her two dirty secrets has he picked up on? Or is he chancing it?

  Has he told Oliver? Still her husband, though with him spending the week at their London flat, their lives are increasingly separate. She sometimes wonders if he even cares for her, so immersed is he in his work, so completely is he drifting away. What about Livy? She thinks of her serious girl – so different from her at fifteen – and finds her fists are clenched, as if she were trying to cling on to her daughter’s innocence.

  She thinks back ten years: Jake, aged seven, scoring his first try in tag rugby, knees grazed, shins mud-splattered, pride stretched across his face. And the person he had run to for a victor’s hug wasn’t Oliver, or his coach: it was her, freezing on the touchline. ‘I love you, Mum,’ he had whispered into her neck, his arms tight around her, his voice fierce with passion. She was his world. ‘The best mum in the world – in the universe.’ The passion had continued for quite some time. So why, now, was there this contempt?

  The question niggles as the run becomes harder: a steeper incline to the crest of one of the high hills in the area. A chance to push her body. There is no pavement here and she runs on the tarmac, segueing on to a grass verge hedged with brambles when a car thunders past, spewing water at her legs.

  She glances at the running watch strapped to her upper arm. Nearly halfway. Three point one miles; twenty-two minutes; 257 calories. She surges forward. She needs to burn more, run faster; she should be able to run faster.

  Her breath is ragged and uneven now. She tries to hum, as if to block out her anxiety. Keep going, she tells herself. He knows nothing. Just keep going.

  Blood floods her head in solid waves out of sync with her iPod. Just keep going. Keep going. He knows nothing. She repeats the mantra – and wishes she could believe it.

  And then, suddenly, she is at the top of the hill and her voice comes out in a burst: a yelp of relief and a cry of achievement. Behind her, Winchester spreads: all affluence, heritage and privilege. You have come a long way, she reassures herself. You have come a long way.

  The flooded water meadows shimmer and, as she catches her breath, a ray of sunshine illuminates the cathedral and the prestigious school. She resumes her jogging, breath steadying as she runs for a while on the flat. Her pace picks up; fast and rhythmic. You’ve come a long way; you’ve come a long way; and you are going to hold tight to this.

  4

  If holding a coffee morning, always ensure that your coffee is Eaden’s finest and your biscuits, it should not need saying, are home-made. Do not allow your standards to slip even if you only offer a hot beverage. You do not want to be the sort of hostess who offers merely a cup of instant coffee.

  Three weeks later. A wet and windy February morning and Vicki is scuttling through the raindrops on the King’s Road, Chelsea, on her way to the Search for the New Mrs Eaden audition.

  Her watch says she has plenty of time – that she’s fifteen minutes early – but Vicki hates being late for anything, just as she hates being unprepared. She pulls a wicker basket tight towards her, and peeks under the gingham tea towel cover in case her home-made blueberry muffins and Emmenthal croissants should have somehow escaped. Of course they haven’t. Fat raindrops splash on her cake tin and she walks faster, readjusting her umbrella.

  Just stop being so nervous, she tells herself as she spies Eaden and Son’s flagship store, with its elegant lettering and all-glass frontage. Look, you’re here now. Just enjoy this. This is what you wanted: a chance to bake; to excel; to do something outside the home.

  Oh, but will Alfie be all right? She feels her habitual twinge of guilt at the thought of his tear-streaked face as she left him at Ali’s. He was just putting on a show for your benefit, her rational, teacher-voice reassures her. But was he? Perhaps he was coming down with something and she hadn’t noticed? Why else would she have to pull away from his grasp?

  For a moment she considers ringing Ali again, just to check, but she has already texted her since leaving Sloane Square station and she fears looking neurotic. Her phone pings in her pocket. A text from Ali: ‘Of course he’s fine. Now go and enjoy yourself!’

  She grins – given permission by another mother – and, with a lighter heart, almost runs the last few steps to the store. There. She is not a bad mummy. Not really. She is just seizing a rare opportunity to shine.

  Walking into the store, it actually feels incredible that she is here, summoned to the audition. She only applied right at the last minute, on 31 January, the entry deadline. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to do it. The advert, cut from Eaden’s Monthly, had been pinned to her fridge since early December, fighting for space among Alfie’s potato cut prints and stick drawings. But she had dithered: reluctant to commit to something that meant time away from her boy. And then there had been one particularly lonely morning and she had realised, somewhere between tidying up the train track and the Lego, the play-doh and the farm set, that, if she didn’t get out more, she would combust with bad temper, or go quite quite mad.

  And so she is here. Hardly the most intrepid destination and yet this feels thrillingly exciting. Trepidation replaces anxiety as she takes in the table by the entrance, arranged with bottles of Prosecco and elaborately beribboned boxes of truffles, and breathes in the scent of freshly baked pain aux raisins.

  Everything in Eaden’s flagship store looks perfect: the apples, piled in pyramids on reproduction market barrows, are without blemish; the cavolo nero dark and prolific; the bread – sourdough flutes wrapped in artfully ripped brown paper – looks as if it has been crafted in the early hours by an artisan baker. The butcher’s counter boasts vast hunks of topside, generous fillets of sirloin: rich, succulent, vermilion. The sea bass and langoustine shimmer on a mound of crushed ice.

  Even before 10 a.m., the shop hums with contented shoppe
rs as they select their fresh produce and deliberate over their espresso coffee, their fair trade tea bags, their 85 per cent cocoa chocolate, their organic oatcakes, their cantuccini.

  The wide aisles can easily accommodate two trolleys and Vicki watches three middle-aged women negotiate the space. As one squeezes past, there is no tension, no rancour, just an apologetic smile and a gracious nod of acceptance. This isn’t the sort of supermarket where customers swear at one another, ram trolleys into heels or try to beat fellow shoppers to the checkout. Eaden’s embodies old-fashioned values such as good taste, quality, refinement. Above all, it stands for courteousness.

  There’s no one here to greet her now, though, and so Vicki makes for customer services, glancing at the baking aisle as she does so.

  An elderly gentleman is peering at the flavourings. Mustard cords; cravat; a tweed jacket that has lasted forty years and will see him out; a face that is markedly florid. He looks distinctly lost.

  ‘May I help you, sir?’ A slim young assistant smiles in concern.

  ‘Looking for fresh vanilla pods. My wife insists she needs them. Damned if I can find them.’

  ‘If you just come this way, sir, I can show you.’ She holds out an expansive arm behind him but does not touch him. ‘There you are: three choices but, if I was baking, I’d choose this one.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Less expensive but grown on the same plantation so the same quality.’

  ‘How extraordinary…’

  ‘May I help you with anything else?’

  ‘No … No, that’s fine. Thank you.’

  Leaving him to scrutinise the withered black sticks in their minute test tube, the girl melts away.

  ‘Vicki … Vicki Marchant?’