Meet Me at the Cupcake Café

by Jenny Colgan

  Helena had stared after him down the corridor. Hex was the coolest new restaurant in London, in the papers every day. It was meant to be nearly impossible to get a reservation. Although, of course, she couldn’t go. This kind of suppliant behaviour wasn’t her kind of thing at all. Definitely not.

  ‘You do look gorgeous,’ said Issy, focusing on her friend for the first time. ‘How do you do that thing with your eyes anyway? I’d just look like I’d had an accident in the bronzer factory.’

  Helena gave a Mona Lisa smile and kept blending.

  ‘What are you doing anyway? Where are you going?’

  ‘Out,’ said Helena. ‘It’s a kind of place and it’s not your house and not your shop. Things happen there that people talk about called current affairs and social life.’

  Normally she’d have told Issy straight away what she was up to. But she was torn – partly because she felt it needed a longer conversation, but also because she didn’t want to take the teasing she would get for going against all her dearly held principles to date a nervy, sweaty-palmed, underpaid first-year junior doctor. The junior doctors had been a standing joke between them for years. They arrived in two tranches, green as grass, in February and September, and ended up so grateful for Helena and her good advice, strong leadership and magnificent bosoms that at least one of them always trailed around after her for weeks with flowers and sorrowing looks. Helena never gave in. Ever.

  ‘When you’re back in the social world,’ said Helena, ‘then you can find out.’

  Issy reddened.

  ‘Oh, don’t blush!’ said Helena, genuinely surprised she’d upset her friend. ‘I didn’t mean it! In fact, I was thinking recently of how much tougher you’ve been getting.’

  ‘Sod off!’

  ‘No, really, all this running-your-own-business stuff. You have a spring in your step, Ms Randall. You are no longer the girl I met who was too scared to go see the student med ser vice about a finger wart.’

  Issy smiled at the memory. ‘I thought they’d make me take my knickers off.’

  ‘Even if they had, was it anything to be scared of?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And now look at you! Entrepreneur! If you were a bit more annoying and a bit of a nobber, you could go on The Apprentice. If they had a cake-based task. If they only had cake-based tasks.’

  Issy raised her eyebrows. ‘I will take that as a semi-compliment, which coming from you is pretty good. You’re right, I have got boring though. I just never think about anything else.’

  ‘What about that hot scruffy bloke from the bank with the horn-rimmed glasses?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Helena. ‘It’s just good to know you’re not sitting around waiting for Graeme to come back.’

  ‘No,’ said Issy suddenly, ‘no. I’m not. Hey, I know – why don’t I come with you?’

  Helena started putting on mascara. ‘Um, you can’t.’

  ‘Why not? Shake off my working day a bit.’

  ‘None of your beeswax.’

  ‘Lena, have you got a date?’

  Helena calmly went on layering her mascara.

  ‘You have! Who is it? Tell me everything.’

  ‘I would have done,’ said Helena, ‘if you’d stopped going on about the Cupcake Café for one second. As it is, I’m late.’

  And she kissed Issy firmly on the cheek and swept out of the room in a haze of Agent Provocateur perfume.

  ‘Is it a greenhorn?’ said Issy, running after her. ‘Tell me. Come on. There must be some reason you’re not telling me.’

  ‘Never you mind,’ said Helena.

  ‘It is! It’s a baby doctor!’

  ‘It’s none of your business.’

  ‘Nice of him to take you out in between accidentally killing pensioners.’

  ‘Ssh!’

  ‘I hope you’re going Dutch.’

  ‘Shut up!’

  ‘I hope you’ve got a book for when he falls asleep at the table.’

  ‘Bog off!’

  ‘I’ll wait up for you,’ hollered Issy to her disappearing back.

  ‘Like hell you will!’ came the reply, and sure enough, Issy’s eyelids were already half closed by the end of Location, Location, Location.

  The next morning the croissant rush was just about finished, and Pearl was making up the new boxes they’d ordered. Candy-striped, with their name blazoned across the front, they fitted a dozen cakes perfectly and were then wrapped up in pretty pink ribbon before being handed to the customer. They were absolutely lovely, but it was taking a bit of time to get the hang of folding them up, and Pearl was practising to try to make herself a wizard at it.

  The doorbell went and Pearl glanced up at the railway clock; just a few minutes’ peace before the 11am sugar rush kicked off. She wiped her brow. Boy, it was lovely to be busy, but it was full-on too. Issy was downstairs, trying to make the world’s first ginger beer cupcake. The scent of cinnamon, ginger and brown sugar filled the shop, and smelled absolutely intoxicating; people kept asking to try one and then, when told they weren’t ready, camping by the stairs. One or two were striking up conversations with each other, which was nice, Pearl thought, but really right at the minute she needed everything cleared out of the way, so she could get to the leftover coffee cups. The duck-egg and teal had been joined by a very pale yellow as they’d got busier, and she wanted to stack the dishwasher. A delivery of eggs had just arrived fresh from the farm, with feathers still on them, and she had to sign for that, pick the feathers off and put them away downstairs while still serving the ongoing queue, which she couldn’t because she had no cups, and ‘Issy!’ she yelled. There was a clatter from downstairs.

  ‘Ouch! Ooh, hot hot hot!’ shouted Issy. ‘I’m just going to run my finger under a tap!’

  Pearl heaved a sigh and tried to look patient as two teenage girls kept changing their minds in an agony of cake-related indecision.

  Suddenly the door banged open. It was raining outside, a steady spring downpour, but still the tree was tentatively, nervously budding, tiny, furled-up little shoots just showing on its branches. Pearl occasionally sneaked some coffee grounds out and spread them round its base; she’d heard they were good for trees, and she felt quite protective of this one. Into the shop crashed someone she recognized immediately, and her heart dropped. It was Caroline, health-food Nazi of Louis’s nursery, original bidder for the Cupcake Café.

  Caroline marched straight to the front of the queue. As she got closer, Pearl noticed she wasn’t her normal immaculate-looking self. Her blonde hair had greyish roots showing through. She wasn’t wearing make-up. And she had lost weight, taking her always very slender form into the realms of extreme thinness.

  ‘Can I speak to your boss please?’ she barked.

  ‘Hello, Caroline,’ said Pearl, trying to give this incredibly rude woman the benefit of the doubt in case she just hadn’t recognized her.

  ‘Yes, hello, em …’

  ‘Pearl.’

  ‘Pearl. Can I speak to your boss?’

  Caroline glanced around the shop, wild-eyed. On the sofa were camped a group of young mothers cooing over each other’s babies while clearly preferring their own; two businessmen with laptops and papers spread everywhere were having a meeting near the big window; a young student reading an old grey Penguin Classic was having trouble concentrating on it and was instead eyeing up another student by the fireplace, who was scrawling notes on a pad while tossing her long lusciously curly hair over her shoulders, presumably on purpose.

  ‘Issy,’ bellowed Pearl down the stairwell, with such force it made Issy jump. She came up the stairs sucking her burnt finger. Caroline propped herself against the wall, tapping her foot anxiously.

  She leaned in towards Pearl. ‘You know, my son is going to school in September. He’s got all these cast-off clothes I was just about to get rid of, but I wonder if your wee chap would like them? He’s about the right age, and it’s nice stuff – lots of W
hite Company, Mini Boden, Petit Bateau.’

  Pearl recoiled behind the counter.

  ‘No thank you,’ she said stiffly. ‘I think I can clothe him, thanks.’

  ‘Oh, OK,’ said the blonde, completely unperturbed. ‘Just thought I might save myself a trip to Oxfam! Not to worry.’

  ‘I don’t need any charity,’ said Pearl, but the woman had turned to see Issy coming up the stairs, and her hands erupted in a flurry of nerves.

  ‘Oh … oh, hello!’

  Issy wiped her hands warily. Caroline and Kate hadn’t been back to the café since that first day; Issy had taken it rather personally. Still, local business was local business.

  ‘You know,’ said Caroline. ‘Uh, you know when I didn’t get the site?’

  Pearl went back to serving the other customers.

  ‘Yes,’ said Issy. ‘Have you … did you find anywhere else?’

  ‘Um, well, obviously I weighed up lots of offers. It’s like totally an idea whose time has come …’ said Caroline, her voice trailing off.

  ‘Oh. Right.’ Issy wondered where this was leading. She needed to get back down to check on that ginger beer cupcake. ‘So, nice to see you again,’ she said. ‘Would you like a coffee?’

  ‘Actually.’ Caroline lowered her voice as if this was a terribly funny secret of some kind. ‘No. Er, OK. Well, here’s the thing. Ha, I know this will sound absolutely crazy and everything but …’ Suddenly, her haggard but still beautiful face seemed to crumple. ‘That bastard. My bastard husband has finally left me for that stupid bint in the press office – and he’s told me that I need to get a bastard job!’

  ‘No way,’ said Pearl afterwards. ‘No no no no no.’

  Issy bit her lip. Of course it had been an unorthodox approach. But on the other hand, without a doubt Caroline was a smart cookie. She had a degree in marketing, and had worked for a prestigious market research outfit before giving it all up for the children, she’d sobbed bitterly, while her husband nobbed some twenty-something publicist. But once she’d stopped bawling, over about a pint of tea and some hazelnut tiffin, it transpired that she did in fact know loads of people in the area; she could turn the café into the place to get your baby-shower cakes, your birthday icing; she could work just the hours they were looking for, she lived round the corner …

  ‘But she’s horrible,’ Pearl pointed out. ‘That’s really important.’

  ‘She’s maybe just a bit wrapped up in herself right now,’ said soft-hearted Issy. ‘It’s awful when someone leaves you,’ her voice tailed off momentarily, ‘or things don’t work out.’

  ‘Yes, it makes you really rude and selfish,’ said Pearl. ‘She doesn’t even need the job. It should go to someone who needs it.’

  ‘She says she does need it,’ said Issy. ‘Apparently her husband told her if she wants to keep the house without a fight she needs to get off her arse and start working.’

  ‘So she wants to swan about here being snobby to people,’ said Pearl. ‘And she’ll want to introduce wholemeal flour and raisins and wheatgrass juice and talk about BMIs and yap on and on all day.’

  Issy was torn. ‘I mean, it’s not like we’ve seen loads of wonderful candidates,’ she argued. ‘No one we’ve had in has been right at all. And she’d be covering a lot of your time off, it’s not like you’d have to see her that much.’

  ‘This is a very small retail space,’ Pearl said, darkly. And Issy sighed and put off making the decision for a while.

  But things didn’t ease off – which was fantastic, but also brought its own problems. Now it was phones constantly ringing, and lists, and Issy falling asleep during dinner, and Helena being out all the time, and she hadn’t seen Janey since she’d had the baby, and Tom and Carla had moved into their new place in Whitstable and she hadn’t even made it to their housewarming, and God, when she had five minutes she was still missing Graeme, or even just missing someone, anyone, to hold her hand occasionally and tell her that everything was going to be all right, but she didn’t have time for that, didn’t have time for anything, and everything was just building up and up.

  She pushed her feelings back down inside herself and worked even harder, but the day Linda pushed her way through the door, she was very close to her wits’ end.

  It was a lovely Friday in late spring, and the warm air gave out the promise of a summery, light London weekend to come. People were thronging the streets looking cheerful, and they were doing a roaring trade in boxes of light lemon-scented cupcakes with a velvet icing and a little semicircle of crystallized fruit on the top; workers wanted to spread a little of the lovely day around their offices. Issy, though half bent over with exhaustion, was also taking huge pride in watching the enormous pile of cakes she’d started so early that morning – a mountain so big she couldn’t believe they would possibly all be sold by the end of the day – steadily diminish in sixes and dozens. And people were buying more cold drinks too, which took pressure off the coffee-making routine. Even though Issy could now make a flat white or a tall skinny latte with effortless grace and speed (the first nineteen times she’d usually spilled something), it was still more time-consuming than grabbing some elderflower juice from the fridge. (Issy had stuck to prettier drinks rather than fizzy ones. They fitted better, she felt, with the ethos of the shop. And also, Austin had pointed out, the profit margins were better.)

  Then, best of all, at 4pm, just as they were calming down, the door pinged open to reveal Keavie, pushing her grandfather in a wheelchair. Issy rushed up and flung her arms around his neck.

  ‘Gramps!’

  ‘I don’t think,’ the old man said, heavily, ‘you quite know what you’re doing with a meringue.’

  ‘I totally do!’ exclaimed Issy, affronted. ‘Taste this.’

  She set in front of him one of her new miniature lemon meringue tarts, the curd so thick and fondant it sank right into the thin pastry. You could scoff the whole thing in two seconds, but the memory of it would stay with you all day.

  ‘That meringue is too crunchy,’ pronounced Grampa Joe.

  ‘That’s because you have no teeth!’ said Issy, indignant.

  ‘Bring me a bowl. And a whisk. And some eggs.’

  Pearl made a hot chocolate for Keavie and they looked on as Joe and Issy gathered together the ingredients, and Issy sat on a stool next to him. With her dark curls next to his wispy pate, Pearl could see instantly how they must have looked together in her childhood.

  ‘You’ve got the elbow action all wrong,’ said Gramps, even at his age cracking the eggs one-handed without even glancing at them, and separating them in the blink of an eye.

  ‘That’s because …’ Issy’s voice tailed off.

  ‘What?’ said Gramps.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s because I use an electric whisk,’ said Issy, blushing, and Pearl laughed out loud.

  ‘Well, that proves it,’ said Gramps. ‘No wonder.’

  ‘But I have to use an electric whisk! I have to make dozens of these things every day! What else can I do?’

  Gramps just shook his head and carried on whisking. At that moment the ironmonger passed by the window, and Joe beckoned him in.

  ‘Did you know my granddaughter uses an electric whisk on meringues? After everything I’ve taught her!’

  ‘That’s why I don’t eat here,’ said the ironmonger, then when he saw Issy’s shocked face, he added, ‘Apologies, madame. I don’t eat here because, lovely though your shop is, it’s a little out of my price range.’

  ‘Well, have a cake on us,’ said Issy. ‘One without meringue.’

  Pearl obediently handed one over, but the ironmonger waved it away. ‘Suit yourself,’ said Pearl, but Issy pressed it on him till he relented.

  ‘Very good,’ he said, through a mouthful of chocolate brownie cupcake.

  ‘Imagine how good she’d be if she hand-whisked,’ said Gramps. Issy smacked him lightly on the head.

  ‘This is in
dustrial catering, Gramps.’

  Grampa Joe smiled.

  ‘I’m just saying.’

  ‘Stop just saying.’

  Grampa Joe handed over the bowl of perfectly crested egg whites and sugar, standing up stiff and glazed.

  ‘Stick it on some greaseproof paper, give it forty-five minutes …’

  ‘Yes, I know, Gramps.’

  ‘OK, I just thought you might be putting it in the microwave or something.’

  Pearl grinned.

  ‘You’re a hard taskmaster, Mr Randall,’ she said, leaning down to his wheelchair.

  ‘I know,’ said Grampa Joe in a stage whisper. ‘Why do you think she’s so brilliant?’

  Later, after they’d eaten Gramps’s amazing meringues with freshly whipped cream and a spoonful of raspberry coulis over the top, Keavie had taken Gramps – and a huge box of cakes for the residents – off to the van, and the cleaning up was finally done.

  Issy could feel a solid bone-weariness deep down, but there would be wine tonight, and they didn’t open till 10am on a Saturday, which felt like a huge lie-in, then early closing and the whole of Sunday off, and maybe it would be warm enough to push Gramps into the garden in his wheelchair (even though he was always cold, these days), and she could lie on a rug and read him bits of the paper, then maybe Helena would be around for a curry later on and a good natter. She was enjoying this little dream, and the way the late afternoon sun came through the clean panes of the windows, the ever-dinging bell of fresh customers and the happy faces of people on the brink of cake, when the door burst open, once more, in a panicky way.