The Art of Baking Blind (34 page)

‘Yes, I was, wasn't I?'

The reminder seems to weigh against Vicki as Frances contemplates the extent of her generosity.

‘I know I'm mucking up your plans, Mum, and I wouldn't ask unless I was absolutely desperate. But this is the final. It's a really big deal, and, to be honest, I'm panicking a bit about it.'

She decides to go full out and opt for flattery.

‘I just need to be totally focused and prepared. Isn't that what you always taught me? Well, I ignored you, didn't I, in the run-up to my A-levels. But now I see you were right. Think of this as my A-level equivalent: my chance to shine.'

Silence.

Frances gives an irritated cough. ‘I'm not sure that's a good comparison.'

‘Not academically, no, of course not.' Vicki realises her mother disapproves of the analogy but refuses to backtrack completely. ‘But inasmuch as it's an assessment of my skills then it is comparable, yes.'

There is another pause. I can do no more, thinks Vicki. I have virtually begged her. How else can I persuade her? She thinks of the nuclear option – the issue that can never be discussed – but knows she cannot raise it. And, even if she could, she knows from experience her mother is resistant to a full-on guilt trip.

‘All right.' Frances's tone is dry. ‘But this will have to be a one-off. I told you when Alfie was born that I wasn't to be relied on for lots of childcare.'

‘No, of course not. Well, there's no competition after tomorrow so of course it will be the last time.'

‘And you'll bring him to me?'

Vicki looks at the clock. Ten fifteen. Her day is being eaten away but she has no choice.

‘Yes, yes, of course I will.'

‘OK, then.' Her mother is brisk. ‘That's fine.'

Vicki feels wrong-footed and forces herself to smile down the phone. ‘Thank you, Mum, thank you so much. You're a star!'

There is a sniff.

‘Yes,' says Frances. ‘I rather think I am.'

*   *   *

Two and a half hours later, and Vicki is back in her kitchen having hared up the M40 to Oxford. She had spurned the offer of a coffee and given Alfie the most peremptory of cuddles, kissing him fiercely and whispering another apology in his ear.

‘Don't leave me, Mummy. Alfie play with Mummy,' he is sobbing as she flees from her mother's small terrace, smiling reassurance. She finds it hard not to fixate on the look on his face.

As she drives back, she comforts herself with the advice of his key worker at nursery: that he is just crying for her benefit. Is that really true, she wonders or a white lie told to appease the consciences of mothers escaping from children's centres as they take advantage of their government-funded fifteen hours of childcare a week?

She texts her mother at a set of traffic lights: ‘Is Alfie OK now' but doesn't receive an answer. What should she read into this? That her mother will not respond because she has omitted the obligatory please and thank you, and the grammatically required question mark? Or that her mother has lost her phone again? Ambiguity festers. That is the problem with texts.

The kitchen is in chaos but, in the quiet, she works more calmly, writing a list of the six recipes she wants to get through and ticking them off systematically. Her phone chimes with a text and she checks it to see if it is from Frances. Instead, it is from Jenny.

‘How are you doing? Feeling really nervous and can't believe the final's tomorrow! Are you still practising? Xxx'

She sends an effusive one back, surprised not that the older woman is nervous but that she is being so open about this. That's a bad strategy for a competitor, surely? But then the contestants have never been aggressively competitive. A gentle courtesy has coloured their dealings with one another, growing into a genuine friendship. Vicki will miss this solidarity: the feeling of working alongside others who appreciate the joy of creating something delicious and do not see it as sheer indulgence.

The oven timer pings and she switches off her phone to shut down distractions, and inspects a fresh batch of pastry for her millefeuille.

*   *   *

In Oxford, Frances too is seeking to rid herself of distractions – or, more specifically, a single, albeit noisy, distraction in the form of a three-year-old boy. It is mid-afternoon and she feels she has performed her grandmotherly duty for long enough. She has made boiled egg and soldiers, read him a story and tried to interest him in jigsaws – though the ones she has picked up from Oxfam are too advanced for her small grandson and frustrate him. It seems he cannot manage a one-hundred-piece jigsaw, after all.

Abandoning him in a rush, Vicki had failed to bring the usual boxes of Lego or Playmobil, or his football. ‘Can you just get him to do some drawing? He loves that,' she had shouted over her shoulder at her mother as she had virtually run out of Frances's house and back to the sanctuary of her car.

Frances had tried to oblige but refuses to be enthusiastic about seemingly indiscriminate scribbles and the profligate waste of paper.

‘Alfie, please, this is terribly wasteful,' she had chastised him as he had produced a flurry of scrawled masterpieces, scattering sheets of her best printing paper across the table like an unfavourable hand of cards.

‘Alfie needs more, Nana.'

‘No. No you don't, Alfie, and it's not Nana, that's your other grandmother. It's Frances, remember.' She had given a shudder.

He had looked at her with his almond eyes, fringed with obscenely long lashes, and smiled at her.

‘OK, Nana.'

Now she is at a loss as to what to do. He does have Dog, his bedraggled and distinctly smelly teddy bear whom he insists on clutching. But Frances's attempts to engage her only grandchild over his favourite soft toy have fallen flat.

‘And what's teddy's name?'

‘Dog.'

‘Really? He's not a dog; he's a bear, isn't he.'

Alfie had shaken his head emphatically.

‘Not bear. Dog.'

‘I'm not going to talk to you if you're not going to be sensible.'

He had smiled beatifically then pulled his eyes and mouth aside in imitation of a clown. Jiggling up and down he had laughed nonsensically. ‘Okey-dokey, okey-dokey, okey-dokey.'

She had left the room in exasperation.

The trouble, she thinks as she switches on the kettle for a cup of camomile tea, is that she seems to have forgotten how to play with small children. A frisson of anxiety runs through her as she tries to remember how she kept Vicki entertained. Perhaps she didn't need to: she was such a good girl, until her late teens. The thought that Vicki might have liked a little more attention niggles. I didn't play with her as she does with Alfie, she thinks with sudden clarity, and I could have done so. I should have done so.

The kitchen fills with steam and the memory of the Battenburg surfaces. Vicki's face with its look of apprehension – or was it fear? With a sudden flick, she throws her tea bag in a mug and returns next door. Alfie is talking to Dog but breaks off when she enters, as if he doesn't want her to hear.

She bends down, her smile becoming less tentative as an idea forms. ‘I know what we should do,' she says. ‘We should search for insects in the garden!'

His face breaks into a beam, and he jostles her as she wrestles with the key to the back door.

‘Come on, Nana.'

‘… Of course, Alfie.' She bites her lip.

Being outside in the sunshine makes everything better. He reminds her of a lamb as he careers around the small patch of lawn, running aimlessly, enjoying his freedom. She sits herself down with her tea and a newspaper, provides him with a bucket and small spade, and suggests he start looking for worms.

For a few precious minutes they coexist happily. All that is required of Frances is that she looks into his bucket every so often and feigns enthusiasm; all that is required of Alfie is that he does not trample on the flower beds but stays on the small handkerchief of lawn. Behind her newspaper she watches: intrigued by the care with which he speaks to the worms, curling in the bottom of his bucket, concerned at the amount of grass he keeps showering them with. ‘Here you are, wormies, lots of food.'

But then he reaches for one of her purple-headed fritillaries.

‘Alfie!' She cannot stop herself.

‘Sorry, Nana.' His bottom lip protrudes; his voice is tremulous.

‘And I told you: it's Frances; not “Nana”.'

‘Yes, Nana.'

The mistake is automatic and he recognises it immediately. His huge eyes threaten to fill with tears.

‘Hello, Frances – having fun?'

It is Julia, Frances's earth mother of a neighbour, who has popped her head over the fence between their gardens. Relaxed, good-natured and distinctly alternative, Julia is the sort of woman Frances would normally shy away from, and yet she cannot help but like her.

Her enquiry, for instance, could rankle, but Frances knows it is not meant maliciously. Indeed, in Julia's world, where four children run riot, a grandmother left alone with a grandchild could not fail to be enjoying herself.

‘Does Alfie want to come and play with my lot? They've just got back from school and the big girls would love to play with another little one…'

Alfie turns to Frances, his eyes gleaming. ‘Please, Nana.'

‘Oh, well, I really don't want to put you out, Julia…'

‘It's not putting me out at all. I'll just be getting on with cooking dinner. They'll only be in the garden so you'll be able to hear him. I expect they'll just be bouncing on the trampoline.'

As if on cue, squeals emanate from her side of the fence as her daughters, Saffron and Maisie, scramble on to a trampoline and compete to bounce the highest.

‘There they are now. Can you hear them, Alfie? Would you like a go?'

‘Oh, well, if you don't mind. I am rather exhausted…'

‘Then it's sorted. Are you going to lift this little man over or does he want to crawl through the hole in the fence?'

‘Oh … well, I suppose it makes sense for him to wriggle through it.'

‘Come on then, Alfie.'

Julia disappears only to call from the bottom of the garden. Delighted, Alfie runs from his grandmother into a less constrained, more fun-loving world.

Frances sits back with her paper, overwhelmed with tiredness, and allows herself a little doze.

36

At moments of stress, baking can prove most therapeutic, the baker easing her anxieties as she kneads her dough or makes her butter cream. There will be times when it is not practical to bake, but remember: you can always return to it.

The cry, when it rends the air, shortly after four o'clock, barely sounds human. In fact, Frances first thinks of the squeal of a piglet, so ear-piercing is it, and so high-pitched.

On and on it goes, destroying the calm of the afternoon; disturbing the neighbours. Then come the cries of children, frantic, hysterical – ‘Mum, Mum, something's wrong with him' – and the heavy footsteps of an overweight woman lumbering up the garden, shouting reassurances.

‘It's OK, I'm coming. It's OK, it's OK…'

It dawns on Frances, wrenched from her sleep, that the horrific sound comes from next door where she sent Alfie. She rises from her garden chair, inadvertently knocking it over and runs to peer over the fence.

Alfie is prostrate on the trampoline, and the terrible noise seems to be coming from him. Julia is bent over him, her vast bottom blocking him from view.

‘Julia? What's wrong, what's happening?'

The younger woman is curt, all lackadaisical good nature gone. ‘He's broken his arm, Frances.'

She moves aside and gestures at the three-year-old who is writhing in agony, his arm bent like a banana. His screams go on and on.

Frances is in denial. ‘He can't have. You were looking after him.'

Incomprehension turns to blame.

Julia turns to face her, her normally florid face drained of colour.

She spits the words out. ‘We need to get him to hospital. Just look at him.'

Frances obliges though the sight makes her feel sick. Alfie, his forearm snapped so that it protrudes at an unnatural angle, is white, his eyes dark smudges in the pallor. He looks so very small and vulnerable.

‘Mummeee, Mummeee,' he screeches, then gulps great noisy sobs. ‘Want Muuuummmmmeeee.'

‘I know, darling, I know,' she seeks to reassure him, constrained by the fence and the trampoline net. She adds a lie, conflating her sense of impotence. ‘And Mummy's coming.'

*   *   *

The landline rings three times before it dawns upon Vicki that someone really wants to get in touch with her and perhaps she should answer. It is a quarter past five. The optimum time for someone in Delhi to claim she has been mis-sold a mortgage. The time she is usually making tea for Alfie and anyone who is close to them knows it is pointless to ring.

She has far more important things to do. She has ticked off four of her six recipes and is about to embark on choux pastry – hoping to perfect the technique she abandoned earlier when she lost her temper with Alfie. Re-reading
The Art of Baking,
she had noticed that Mrs Eaden was particularly partial to a choux bun or mini éclair, and so she is convinced one or other will feature in tomorrow's final.

Which is it going to be? she asks the photo. Kathleen Eaden smiles back, poised and enigmatic as ever. Well, that's a fat lot of use, thinks Vicki, but she smiles, even-tempered. As ever, preparation has calmed her; boosted her confidence once again. You are going to help me, aren't you, she tells the photo: and it is less of a request, more of a conviction. I've done all the hard work. Now I am going to channel your inner calm and bake like you: creatively and effortlessly. Perfectly.

The phone rings again. Bloody hell. It can't be her mother because she'd ring her mobile. A horrible thought occurs to her. She switched it off after texting Jenny. She runs to the phone and picks it up just before it clicks on to the answer machine.