Earthly Delights (25 page)

‘She’s really only fourteen,’ said Daniel. ‘That’s when her old life stopped. And she’s been abused. That puts bookmarks in someone’s life: Before and After. So she’s oscillating, at the moment, between about seven and about fifty. She’ll settle down. Shall we pack the chateaux collapseaux and a few glasses? And does Horatio attend these gatherings?’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘He might like to keep Pumpkin company.’

We had a very agreeable little party. The Prof had brought a bottle of bubbly (superior bubbly, of course, if not actually French) and we all drank to Cherie’s return. She divided her time between urging her father to eat and scolding him for not talking. Horatio greeted Pumpkin politely and ambled off to keep his rendezvous in the lilac bushes. I did wonder who he was meeting. Were we going to be introduced?

Trudi had recovered from her shock and was describing the spring plantings she intended to make, urging us to dig deep and pay for some very superior lilliums which she said were perfumed like heaven. She obviously had decided to stay. Kylie, a little downcast, joined us and ate three olives and an anchovy. That was binge eating for Kylie.

‘Jon’s gone to Namibia,’ she said. ‘Just when it was all cool.’

‘Never mind,’ soothed the Prof. ‘He’ll be back. Have some champagne.’

Kylie had heard about Cherie’s reappearance. ‘So, you weren’t a junkie proz on the street like they thought,’ she said. Daniel, placing a suppressing hand on her thin shoulder,
said, ‘Kylie, you really ought to eat something,’ which always guaranteed a rave on the subject of fat and its avoidance by the latest ‘famine’ diet. Gossamer nudged her into silence. The sojourn in the magic shop had changed Goss’s life, she said. Now, she wanted to be a Wiccan witch. Meroe uttered a brief invocation to the mother goddess which I assumed was devout. Goss and Kylie dragged her away to be cross-examined.

The pizzas were interesting. Teppanyaki. Sushi. Barbecued chicken. Tomato and goat’s cheese. One with every possible kind of salami. If Jason was here he would be asking me why we didn’t make pizza. How could anyone have thought that he was stupid? He was bright as a button and full of interesting ideas, though I was intending to confine him to muffins for the time being. Families, I decided, were strange. It was not a new thought and I was bored with it long before it reached its conclusion that there was nothing to be done about them.

Daniel, Horatio and I left early, dead-heating Andy and Cherie for the lift. She was scolding him for drinking too much and he was leaning against her, one arm draped around her shoulders. On his face was a blissful smile.

‘That’s a happy sign,’ said Daniel as we went into my apartment.

‘It is?’

‘You don’t scold someone unless you care about them,’ he answered. ‘Now, you need to go to bed and I need to check all these rosters before I go out later.’

I ceded him my desk and took myself off to bed. I fell asleep wondering why sex had gone off the agenda. Then realised that I had taken it off. I tried to remember what sex with James had been like and shuddered myself off to sleep. Oh yes. Like that. No wonder I had given up on it.

I woke at four when the alarm shrilled. Daniel was not there. I had only known him for a short time but his absence left a gap in my life. I fed everyone and met Jason at the door. He slipped inside for his shower and donned his baker’s clothes.

‘Miss?’ he asked me, eyes wide.

‘Corinna,’ I said. ‘I’m not a teacher.’

‘I heard … the kids told me that Big John came here looking for me and you told him I’d been here for weeks,’ he said, very fast.

‘And if he’s a friend of yours I’ve got some advice about choosing them,’ I said. ‘He tried to stomp Heckle. I near as dammit called the cops.’

‘He thinks I did something but I didn’t,’ explained Jason, hardly at all.

‘Yes,’ I said. I have commented previously on how I hate talking in the morning.

‘So now he knows it wasn’t me so he’s not chasing me and I can serve in the shop if you like,’ he said.

‘Good,’ I told him. ‘What sort of muffins are you going to make for the customers today?’

But I was missing an emotional nuance, which I often do at four am, not a good hour for emotional nuances unless one has been smoking dope. Jason shifted from foot to foot.

‘I mean, thanks,’ he blurted out. ‘Thanks for saying that. Saved my life,’ he added, and leaned across and kissed me. I hugged him heartily. He had definitely put on weight. I couldn’t count every rib anymore.

‘That’s the last lie I tell for you, Jason, so don’t press your luck.’

‘I won’t,’ he said. Meaning that he would. ‘I got this idea for a sort of plum pudding muffin. It would have spices and sultanas.’

‘Not very plum puddingy,’ I commented, setting dough hooks in motion.

‘No, but it also has candied peel and brandy. Or maybe rum. What do you think?’

‘What’s in the store cupboard?’ I asked.

‘Got the peel and the sultanas,’ he said. ‘And the spices. I checked yesterday. No rum. But we’ve got brandy.’ He produced the bottle. From that very bottle had Daniel Cohen poured a tot to recover a shocked baker when Suze had nearly died on my grate. I regarded it sentimentally.

‘So we have. You do know that the alcohol gets cooked off? You aren’t going to put anyone over point o-five with your muffins. All right. I leave it up to you.’

‘Great!’ He seemed genuinely pleased. And if it didn’t work, we would know soon enough, and we could make a batch of raspberry replacements fast. I could afford to lose a few muffins in a failed experiment.

‘Keep in mind that muffin crumb isn’t very strong, it’s not going to be able to carry anything like as much fruit as a pudding, which is a load of dried fruit glued together with suet. And it’s boiled.’

‘And it’s supposed to be heavy,’ he agreed. ‘I reckon the same proportion as the apple muffins, what do you think?’

‘Sultanas are dried, they take up moisture. You’ll need a bit more wet. But the proportions sound right. I’ll leave you to get on with them, and I’ll do the health bread.’

I mixed the crumbly stuff and got it into the oven. Then I busied myself with a second cup of coffee while all around me the yeast was working its alchemy. Heckle and Jekyll were bouncing up and down at the alley door so I opened it, even though it was still dark. The rodent count was down again. Either the cats were spending more time asleep, had reached an
accommodation with the mice, or the rodents had moved to somewhere less well defended. The Mouse Police sniffed the night, approved, and wandered out to spend more time with it.

I didn’t want to disturb Jason’s concentration so I didn’t try to talk. Time passed. The Mouse Police came back, looking smug. The first batch of rye bread went into the oven. Jason rattled his muffin tins into the hot depths and closed the door gently.

‘Ten minutes,’ he said, wiping his forehead. ‘Then we’ll know.’

He leaned on a mixing tub and watched that oven as I have seen Jekyll watch a mouse hole, willing the muffins to rise. When he crept forward to take a peek I warned, ‘Don’t do it,’ and he snatched his hand back as though he had burned it. Opening the oven to see if a cake is rising is like pulling up the radishes to see if they are growing.

The tension was getting to me. I went upstairs to get more coffee. Now that we had two bakers I ought to get a coffee machine for downstairs too, I thought. When I came back he had taken the trays out of the oven and was levering one free, desperate to find out if his idea had worked. I watched him from the stairs. He tore the muffin apart and stuffed a piece in his mouth.

And then he smiled. I let out the breath I had been holding.

‘Want to try one, Corinna?’ he asked, with really a very good approximation of cool.

I bit. It tasted wonderful. It did taste like a plum pudding too. A light, easy-to-eat plum pudding. Spicy. The texture was perfect. I said so. Jason glowed.

Then he made another batch and we got on with the pasta douro, baguettes and twists and rolls. Our bread—forgive me—and butter. I had a proposition for Jason.

‘Jason, how would you feel if I asked you to be my apprentice? It’s four years and you have to go to school as well. I think you could be a very good baker.’

He stopped dead as though I had shot him. All the joyous colour drained out of his face.

‘I … dunno,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if I could stick to it. I … haven’t ever had a real job.’

‘Tell you what. Work for me for six months. If you still like baking, then we’ll talk about it again, all right?’ Clearly I had rushed him and the poor boy was panicking.

‘All right,’ he said, relieved.

I really shouldn’t try to do anything but bake early in the morning. I always get things wrong.

Jason cheered up a little after his next batch of plum pudding muffins also came out superb. He offered one to Daniel, who wafted in about six, looking beautiful and tired. Like an angel who has been given humanity to care for, is sick of the entire species and who is about to petition God to abolish them and try again with the Neanderthals this time.

‘This is a wonderful muffin,’ he said. ‘You are a great baker,’ he said to me.

‘Not me,’ I said, pointing to Jason. Daniel slapped Jason on the shoulder.

‘You have hidden depths, Jase,’ he said. ‘That’s the best muffin I ever tasted. Can I have another one and a cup of coffee to accompany it if I ask really nice?’

He sat down and the Mouse Police planted themselves on him. Heckle on his feet, Jekyll on his lap. He looked like he belonged. When Jason brought him coffee and another muffin he ate and drank as though he was very hungry and thirsty. He didn’t seem to want to talk so Jason and I completed the baking. I still didn’t know anything about
him. But did I care? Probably not. My mind had decided that he was a good guy. I didn’t know what he had been doing to get so tired, and I didn’t care about that either. I had it bad.

‘What about trying a caraway seed muffin?’ asked Jason. ‘In that book it said that they used to make caraway toffee in the old days.’

‘How would you reproduce the toffee flavour?’ I asked.

‘Dunno. Maybe burn some sugar, and use that to flavour the milk and water?’ he suggested.

‘Interesting. Or you could make some toffee and cool it in threads. There’s a confectionery slab over there. The marble one. Then you could put some on top of every muffin. Nice thought. Try it later today with a small batch. I’ll give you some money to buy more caraway seeds.’

‘All right,’ he said.

‘Now, can I leave you to take the rye bread out when the bell rings while I lead Daniel up to a convenient couch? I don’t want him to fall asleep on that chair. I’ve done that and it takes days to iron out the kinks.’

He nodded. I de-catted Daniel and led him up the stairs, arranged him on the couch and draped my mink blanket over him. I don’t think he was actually awake during any part of the journey and he was certainly asleep as I laid him down and took off his boots.

He had a hole in the toe of his left sock and I had to fight down the urge to peel it off and darn it. Whatever I had, it was acute.

I did a few household things, listening to Daniel breathe. When I went down again, the sun was up, the baking was complete, and Jason was making calculations on a piece of paper and wondering aloud if we had a sugar thermometer.

We had, as it happened. I’ve no idea why. I have a theory that kitchens, once they reach a certain level of complexity, attract new gadgets into their orbit, like planets. Only this can account for the fact that I own two melon ballers.

We checked off the waybills and stacked the loaves, stocked the shop, and opened the shutters. I left Jason to deal with the carrier and occupied myself supplying the early-to-the-office with breakfast. The poor bastards. They were already sniffing at the Christmassy scent of the plum pudding muffins and they went leaping joyously off the trays.

Jason reported the carrier had come and gone. Then he appeared in his premiere role as baker’s boy. I watched him carefully but he gave correct change, didn’t offend the customers and even smiled at some of them. When Goss wandered in at nine, full of her Wicca lore, she sniffed at him but didn’t say anything.

She took his place at the counter and he surrendered it without comment. He went back into the bakery to start cleaning and I, for the first time in years, didn’t have anything to do. It was an odd feeling.

My first impulse was to go upstairs and spend the morning watching Daniel sleep, always a rewarding occupation. But perhaps I shouldn’t leave my staff without supervision. I’d never had a staff before. I was new at this.

What did I really hate about supervisors? The way they walked around and poked their noses into things. There wasn’t a lot of room in Earthly Delights to do any major pacing so I thought I would take a plum pudding muffin to Meroe and ask how she had gone with her newest recruit. I checked. Jason washing out the mixers in the bakery. Goss behind the counter in the shop. Horatio in his usual place. All present and accounted for. It was probably safe to leave them for a while.

Meroe had a headache. I knew because she was drinking her headache tea, which smells like new mown grass. Her shop smelt of incense, not of metho. Belladonna reposed in the window, batting idly at a Celtic talisman for courage.

‘I’ve brought you a muffin made by my new apprentice,’ I said.

She lifted her head as though the light hurt her eyes. ‘May you have good fortune with him,’ she said. ‘Better, perhaps, than I will have with mine. My only consolation is that she will get bored very fast and take up something else. Buddhism, say. They are supposed to be terribly patient.’

‘Anyone who makes sand gardens has to be patient,’ I agreed. ‘Goss gave you a hard time?’

‘They both did,’ said Meroe, smiling bravely. ‘And if, when my head feels better, I hop on a plane to America in order to assassinate the scriptwriters of “Charmed”, I must ask you not to be surprised.’

I promised a complete lack of astonishment. I could imagine what those two had put Meroe through. ‘When do I get to do love spells?’ would be the beginning, and ‘How do I summon a demon, they’re really cool’, would be next. I comforted her with the hope that they would definitely get bored when they worked out that Wicca didn’t travel on the left-hand path, and went back to Earthly Delights.