The Art of Baking Blind (36 page)

There had been a long pause at the end of the phone.

‘You don't know that.' Jenny's voice had sounded unusually tight.

‘Of course I do. She was completely selfless. She gave up her career and went and lived in Cornwall to give her daughter the most wonderful childhood. You read that article, remember? She always put her family first, Laura Eaden said.'

‘Yes, but … there may have been quite specific reasons for doing that. Look, I'm not saying she wasn't selfless but her retreating, and giving up her writing, may have been more complex than we thought. We've taken it for granted that she just wanted to immerse herself as a full-time mum – but perhaps it was all a bit more complicated.'

There had been a pause while Vicki took this in. ‘What do you mean?'

Jenny had paused. ‘It's nothing important. Not in the grand scheme of things. But we make assumptions about people all the time and perhaps we did about her. We assumed her life was perfect and that she found motherhood easy but all that stuff about closing the door on a sleeping baby was written before she had a child. I'm not saying she didn't want one – she clearly did – but, to an extent, it was idealised. Perhaps the reality was more difficult. Perhaps it wasn't quite as perfect. Look, it's not something I can explain properly now. Try to make the competition and you'll see.'

Now, in the gloaming, as Vicki runs through the conversation and tries to tease out what Jenny meant by it, her phone reveals a fresh text message. Glancing at Greg, who has slept through its ping, she presses it. A fluorescent glow lights up her screen.

‘Dear Vicki, I spent thirty years putting others' needs first. Please don't make my mistake. Besides, I need you as my competition! Hope Alfie has a good sleep and I see you tomorrow. With love, Jen. Xxx'

 

 

Kathleen

She wakes to a cramp and an insistent trickle: a ribbon of blood running down her inner thigh.

James Caruthers calls an ambulance at once ‘just to be cautious'. But by the time they have arrived at St Stephen's hospital, on the Fulham Road, twenty minutes later, all caution has been thrown to the wind.

The reception area seems to be filled with people: nurses; doctors in what look like pyjamas; Caruthers himself, shirt sleeves rolled to the elbows, a look of intense focus on his face. They move briskly; placing her in a wheelchair, walking en masse through double doors; speaking of ‘theatre'; ‘paediatricians'; ‘resus team in situ'. Words that, as the pain ebbs and flows, she struggles to comprehend.

She is placed on a bed, in a private room, now – and to her horror immediately wets the starched linen. A gush of liquid, pink with blood, soaks the bed.

‘Her waters have broken,' a nurse announces to the medical staff. She tries to catch Caruthers' eye to gain some explanation but he is busying himself on the phone, speaking with soft determination. The room whirls with quiet activity.

The tightening intensifies. She watches her stomach as the skin, taut as a drum, stretches then relaxes. It feels alien; as though this part of her body has a life of its own. She tries to speak – to ask what is happening – but finds she is voiceless; silenced by a fresh crest of pain.

‘The contractions are getting closer. Every two minutes,' the nurse, plump and autocratic, says, and Kathleen finally manages an outburst of irrational fury.

‘Contractions? They're not contractions!' The idea is ludicrous. ‘This baby can't come out yet.'

A surge of pain silences her. The nurse turns aside, her lips pursed. No one looks her in the eye.

It is George who utters the truth she refuses to hear and no one else will tell her. ‘My darling, there's nothing they can do to stop it.'

37

If food be love, then baking, surely, is the most nurturing food of all. And, just as you may bake to nurture a love affair, so you may bake to nurture a child. To build them up and make them strong.

She sleeps, of course, badly. Tossing and turning on the narrow camp bed, straining at Alfie's every snuffle, marvelling at how Greg manages to remain so sound asleep.

Her boy sleeps well, though; the sleep of a child exhausted by a long and stressful day and then given an anaesthetic and a hefty dose of diamorphine. He wakes as light filters through the thin curtains at around 6 a.m.

‘Mummy, Daddy.' He gives his parents his glorious smile.

‘Feeling better, little soldier?' It is Greg, stroking his hair from his brow, smiling down at him. Vicki feels an irrational stab of irritation that he is the first to speak.

Alfie nods. ‘I'm hungry.'

They laugh, and Vicki's possessiveness dissipates as Alfie holds out his uncast hand, and Greg puts his arm around her.

‘That's got to be a good sign, hasn't it?' She smiles.

‘I'd say so. Definitely.' Her husband gives her a squeeze.

The perennial NHS solution of tea, toast and marmite is dispensed. More painkillers will come later.

‘The surgeon will do his ward round at about eight forty-five but I should think this little fellow will be able to go home.' The paediatric sister smiles.

‘What – he won't have to stay in for observation?' Greg is surprised.

‘Well, if there are no complications you don't need to be here. We'll need the bed for someone else.'

Vicki does a rapid calculation. If Alfie is discharged this morning, will he need her at home? Could she make the Mrs Eaden final? She is supposed to be in the competition kitchen by ten but is confident they could delay the start if she said she was coming.

‘Well, if you're sure? That's fantastic, then, isn't it, little Alf? You can have a nice gentle day with Mummy snuggled up on the sofa.' Greg smiles from his son to his wife.

His smile fades. ‘What's up, Vicks? You look worried. I'm sure they wouldn't discharge him unless they thought he was ready. But we'll get a second opinion when the consultant comes round.'

‘It's not that. I just … if he's being discharged, I could get to the final of the competition.' She twists her hands as she talks, aware that she is pleading.

Bewilderment crosses Greg's face. ‘Really? Is that really what you want to do?'

‘Yes. You don't mind, do you?'

He shakes his head in bemusement. ‘No, of course not. And of course you must go. Absolutely. But are you sure that Alfie will be OK?'

‘He'll be fine,' she hears herself echoing her mother. ‘It's for one day. He'll miss me but he'll have you. He won't suffer. I'm sorry, Greg, but I need to do this.'

*   *   *

Leaving little Alf had been a wrench. No, that was an understatement. She had felt as if she were deserting him.

Greg and her mother had been left to pack together his things; to settle him into his car seat; to drive home to London after the consultant had pronounced him well enough to leave hospital. And she had raced out, without a small hand to clasp, without the requisite bags crammed with childish clobber. She should have felt giddy with excitement. Instead, she felt like the world's biggest bitch.

It didn't help that the only other time Alfie had been in hospital was when he was born – and, then, they had been so very much together. Leaving hospital, she had not been able to take her eyes off him. This red, squished bundle with its surprise shock of dark hair cosseted in a snow suit and strapped into a portable car seat. This little person who had been hidden tight inside her just the day before and who, now, was very definitely a separate individual. And whom she was now being entrusted to take home.

She had felt overwhelmed with love – and terror. She remembered looking up at Greg and seeing the same look of shock and awe as he stared at the car seat cradle.

‘Can't quite believe we're allowed to take him away,' he had ventured.

‘I know,' she had admitted, incredulous. ‘What do we do with him?'

Now, there is no infant with unsmiling eyes to stare at her intently. No little boy, his eyes now smiling, to tug her along, small feet scuffling. She walks faster, boots clattering along the hospital floor, heart lifting as she reaches the concourse, with its newsagents and cafeteria, its smell of fried breakfasts, coffee and disinfectant.

She sees the sign for the exit and rushes to escape the cloying warmth. A couple of patients, clad in pyjamas and dressing gowns, and attached to their drips
,
stand just outside the entrance drawing on their first cigarettes of the day and she breathes in the nicotine fug. The promise of sweet air dissolves into a smoker's cough.

Minutes later, she swings out of the hospital, and heads for the ring road and the M40. A quick call to Cora, and Eaden and Son are reassured that their fourth contestant is on her way. As she eases her car through a local high street, her guilt at leaving Alfie is tempered with apprehension. She grips the steering wheel and tells herself to focus on the competition. To concentrate on the passion that has driven her for the past three months, since she received the call inviting her to Eaden's headquarters for an audition that dismal February day.

Merging on to the M40, she tries to focus on the last remaining stage of the contest. The theme is a celebratory tea and Harriet has warned them that the bar will be raised for the final. Her head throbs. Even the thought is exhausting.

She suspects they will be asked to create exquisite mouthfuls of sponge and pastry: éclairs, painted with melted chocolate and oozing crème patissière; barquettes glossy with summer fruits; millefeuille, sandwiched with raspberries; bubble-gum pink fondant fancies. The lightest of scones and a cake slick with ganache or teetering under increasingly decadent layers.

She wonders, not for the first time, what prompted Kathleen Eaden to become so interested in, no, so fixated on, baking. The photos show a svelte figure so she clearly didn't gorge on the food. Indeed, she was brought up during the war and rationing so gluttony wasn't an option. Perhaps, like Vicki, she was simply a perfectionist.

Oh, but you make it all look so easy, she tells her. It doesn't look as if you need to practise or to try to be perfect.
‘Simply take, whisk, place, ice…'
you write, as if it were as natural as ‘simply breathe'. When you make bread and butter pudding, you delight your husband. When you bake bread, your children are in raptures, yet again.

Something about that last thought is wrong. It takes a while for her to register what it is. She checks her mirror, indicates, and overtakes a particularly cumbersome lorry that belches black smoke as she glides away.

‘
When you bake bread, your children are in raptures.
' But Jenny said you didn't have children when you wrote that. What else did you say about children? ‘
Close the oven door as gently as on a sleeping baby; biscuits your little ones will love to shape; a milk pudding your children will devour; a birthday cake for a special child…'

What was it Jenny said? That we made assumptions about why you gave up your career. That your life may not have been perfect. And that you may have found aspects of motherhood difficult. Well, what were they?

What caused you to give up your career? Were you hiding something? And why wasn't your life as perfect as we – no, as I – assumed it to be?

She puts her foot down, barely conscious of the flow of cars as she ploughs down the middle lane. Questions crowd her head, pressing out the drone of the traffic, and an alternative reality emerges with a single twist like the shifted prisms of a child's kaleidoscope: not Kathleen Eaden, willingly jettisoning her career for motherhood; Kathleen Eaden, compelled, for some reason, to give up her career.

She moves into sixth gear and speeds into the outside lane, the speedometer soaring to eighty-five as she drives with a new urgency. What did Jenny mean? The sense that she has somehow done Kathleen a disservice grows intense.

Perhaps, she thinks, we have got it all wrong and there should never have been a search for a new Mrs Eaden. Perhaps we should have been looking for the real Kathleen Eaden.

 

 

Kathleen

The pain is excruciating now and there is no way she can halt what is happening. Her body seems to have been taken over: reduced to an animal that cries involuntarily and tries to writhe on the floor.

Thank God George can't see me like this, she thinks, as she is forced back on to the bed. Another wave picks her up and she squawks in panic; then another, more turbulent. She begins to shake like a marionette performing a grotesque, uncontrollable dance.

What is happening to me? she wants to scream as a nurse places a nozzle over her mouth and tells her to breathe deeply. And what's that woman doing? How dare she touch me? She feels light-headed then woozily nauseous as the entonox does its work.

‘Good girl, good girl,' the nurse tells her and she wants to bat her and her patronising platitudes away. Good girl? How ludicrous. She is a bad mother – or not even that. A bad would-be mother; someone so inept at motherhood – so inept at the basic function of being a woman – that she can't even keep her baby in her womb.

‘Good girl,' the nurse still seems to be saying, as if she hasn't a clue what is happening. ‘There, there. There's a good girl.'

Nausea swells through her, carrying her up on a fresh crest of pain. She spews forth a flame of vomit then begins to shake manically.

‘I want this to be over,' she begins to wail. Then: ‘She has to stay inside me. She HAS to stay inside me.' Someone is shouting and it seems to be her.

‘There, there,' says a nurse, silencing her with the nozzle. ‘You're doing so well now. It won't be long before it's over.'

Another wave of nausea. Someone is telling her to push and she wants to scream at them to stop being so stupid; to stop saying that.