‘I find it much more attractive if someone is totally unconscious of their good looks. That’s far more alluring.’
The penny still hasn’t dropped. She feels exhausted. What am I doing? she feels like crying. I am teasing the poor man like a cat toying with a shrew. No, that’s wrong. A shrew would be all too aware it was being teased; he doesn’t even seem to have noticed. The thought hits her with the clarity of the vodka shot burning the back of her throat.
‘I need to go.’
She groups the glasses with crisp efficiency, removes the empty bottles to the bar, swings her capacious bag over her shoulder in the time he realises he may have missed a compliment.
‘Oh … night then.’ Mike looks befuddled. Perhaps he has noted the shift in mood; the tension shimmering through her sudden brisk movements.
‘Night, Mike. Sleep well.’
For a moment, she considers running a hand through his thick hair or kissing his cheek and then pausing by his lips, but the moment has passed. Or, rather, it never happened.
She congratulates herself on managing an impersonal smile and maintaining a saunter as she leaves the bar.
13
A gingerbread house is a culinary doll’s house; a world created by a baker’s imagination – and modest quantities of sugar, spices, eggs, butter and flour. Anyone can live in a gingerbread house: not just a wicked witch intent on luring children, but a kindly grandmother or a loving mother with a string of children. It is – or can be – the ideal home.
Eight in the morning and watery early-morning sunshine filters into Karen’s bedroom, illuminating her like a biblical Old Master. Inside her mouth, a mouse appears to have died. An unfamiliar bitterness, morning breath mixed with something more noxious, coats her tongue. Her teeth, tentatively licked, feel furred. Someone is tightening a thin band of metal around her forehead.
The shower is punishingly hot. Molten streams of water cascade down her back and between her breasts, scalding her torso, blanching her face. She swipes the dial to cold. The shock is immediate. She gasps, skin tingling into goose bumps, whitening. Then comes the glow of extreme cold. The water caresses her body, as invigorating as plunging into the Channel on a dank December day.
The cold galvanises her. She lathers shower gel over her body, sweeping her limbs, washing her deepest crevices, working shampoo, then conditioner, into her locks. By the time she steps from the shower the metal band has been loosened. The dead mouse has been rinsed away with icy water, but its residue remains. She picks up her electric toothbrush and scrubs at the fur. Then flosses, and spits blood.
Walking into the bedroom, she stands in front of the full-length mirror, drops the fluffy white towel to the floor, appraises herself coldly. The body she sees is lean and strong. The legs of a woman half her age; an enviably flat abdomen that fails to betray two pregnancies; breasts with nipples pointing upwards, asking to be teased. She turns. Her buttocks are toned and smooth, glutes as hard as rocks when she squats. Her back is still youthful: no tell-tale signs of wrinkling, and no excessive fat. Her feet are neat, the claret pedicure immaculate. Her hands, carefully moisturised, always French manicured, score less well: with a shudder, she notes a sprinkling of brown age spots.
She moves on to her face, forehead strained by a towelled turban. A neat nose, alluring mouth, quizzical dark eyes, but around them, the tell-tale etched lines of ageing. Stripped of make-up, reddened by a shower, naked of artifice, she sees a face that has lived through four decades – and a little more. What must he have thought of me, she recoils, recalling Mike’s confusion? Perhaps he failed to recognise her automatic, half-hearted flirtation, though Jerry, the barman, dark eyes appraising her, saw it for what it was. You’re fooling no one.
She tears the turban from her head and roughly dries her hair. Then she pulls the towel around her body and scrubs and scrubs.
* * *
‘We’re giving you a harder task today. One of Kathleen Eaden’s favourites.’ Harriet, neat in pearls and a twinset, appraises the quintet as they stand behind their work stations.
‘We want you to build us a gingerbread house, your own ideally. Let us see a little bit into your lives.
‘We do want solid constructions, though, and interesting ones: so do bear that in mind if you live in a suburban semi. You have four hours in which to build your ideal home out of gingerbread.’
Vicki gives a smile. This is the sort of challenge she loves: ordered and pretty. Never wildly inventive, she thinks of the ultimate Hansel and Gretel house made more kitsch. Bedecked with scalloped white glacé icing, it will have lollipop trees and chocolate button tiles; jelly tot flowers and sugar paste – not gingerbread – children: a boy wearing a cap and Little Lord Fauntleroy britches, and his blonde, pigtailed little sister.
Jenny, working alongside her, is following the brief more strictly and will attempt a Queen Anne farmhouse, the symmetry being easy to replicate though she thinks she will ice the window panes. Melting butter with dark muscovado sugar and golden syrup, and mixing this with flour and ground ginger and cinnamon, she ponders over who should inhabit this home. Should she model a middle-aged jogger, white sugar-paste limbs protruding from red running shorts? Should she add three beautiful, grown-up daughters? Perhaps it should be just herself, holding a mixing bowl, working away in the kitchen of the house.
Claire is also preoccupied. Harriet said not to build a suburban semi so what would she make of a two-bedroomed, 1960s council flat? Should she fashion a leaking flat roof, or a concrete staircase perfumed with piss?
She thinks laterally. Harriet said create your ideal home so where would that be? By the sea. She will build a gingerbread beach hut complete with her parents brewing a cuppa on a Calor gas stove. The time she would have spent building a bigger construction will be used to fashion sugar paste shells and pebbles. A sugar paste Chloe will play outside the hut, performing handstands.
Karen will be more ambitious. Paracetamol, caffeine and, unusually for her, carbs – half a slice of granary toast spread with thick honey – have sent her hangover packing. She considers replicating her Victorian home: the gingerbread will mimic its red bricks and she is sufficiently competent with a piping tube to cope with its elegant curves. But this is a chance to create an ideal, the sort of home she would have had in another life. She will build a minimalist penthouse in the heart of the City: all unforgiving glass and sharp architectural lines. Sheets of hardened caramel will form two glass walls and she will use a protractor to ensure precision. There will be no infantilising dolly mixtures; no chocolate buttons; no kitsch. And there will be no sugar paste children. Hers is an entirely adult world.
Mike is dispensing with children as well. True, his first thought had been to build a tree house with a boy and girl at the centre of his design but he is unsure of how to fashion a sufficiently strong tree and unconvinced he is creative enough. Instead, he is going to be ambitious. In a playful reference to his old life, he is going to build 10 Downing Street. His gingerbread will be dark: made with black treacle instead of golden syrup; flavoured with cloves to replicate the blackened brick.
For four hours they work, the mid-March morning taking on the scent of Christmas: cinnamon, ginger, treacle and cloves. From early on, the front-runners are Mike and Karen, the most intelligent in their construction, producing the neatest edges, cut at an angle, to ensure the strongest gingerbread house.
Yet anyone watching, more interested in the personalities of the contestants than their skill at baking, would be drawn by Vicki, using a lip brush to paint pink flowers on the tiny girl’s dress. Her gingerbread cottage is perfectly acceptable – a textbook version of what it should be – but her interest is in the miniature figures. She scrutinises them, then bends the arm of the sugar paste boy child and puts it around his little sister. The girl’s sugar paste hair has been plaited.
Next to her, Claire is positioning her girl child with care: holding her upside down, legs splayed in a cartwheel, before icing
her to a beach.
In Jenny’s home, there are no children and no husband. But there is no Jenny, either. To position herself alone in her kitchen, as she had originally intended, would be to divulge too much. There is a curiously sterile look to her creation.
‘And … tools down.’
The four hours of intense concentration are up. Karen is surprised by how nervous she is as she places her penthouse in front of the judges. It has nothing to do with Dan’s presence, though the jolt of lust is automatic. It has everything to do with her pride in conceiving and realising this idea. If gingerbread and caramel can look architecturally edgy, she has managed it.
‘Well, I’d like to live here.’ Dan is looking at her creation – and herself – with frank admiration. ‘I think it’s fantastic. Something I’d never have thought of. A really original take on a traditional idea.’
The glow starts in her stomach, spreads through her chest, suffuses her face.
‘Thank you,’ Karen says, and, for the first time in the contest, she gives an honest smile.
Bread
Tell me your favourite scent. The smell of a baby’s neck? The aroma of fresh violets?
To my mind, there is none so delicious as that of freshly baked bread.
The French may have their baguette, the Italians their ciabatta, the people of the Middle East their flat breads. But the good honest loaf is still the staple for most British families. And there is nothing to beat the taste, or the smell, of your own bread as it emerges piping hot from the oven.
First, a little science. The raising agent that bread uses is yeast, a living organism that requires gentle warmth. It also needs food, which it gets from flour, and moisture, from water. A culinary miracle then takes place. Bubbles of carbon dioxide form, which produce the bread’s light and airy texture. It is most important not to hurry this stage – the proving – and, once complete, to remember to knead lightly. You want a crumb that’s light and the loaf, topped with a golden crust, to be bouncy and soft.
Many people tell me they do not have time to make bread. And why, they argue, should they bother when commercially baked loaves, such as those made by Eaden’s, are so good and so widely available?
I agree that bread takes time and may not be the bake of choice for the busy housewife, still less the career woman. But, with good time-management, a home-made loaf is within the capability of all who pride themselves on producing good cooking. And when you see the look of rapture on your husband’s face, or the delight of your small children as they smell the fresh warm bread and slather it with butter, you will know it was all worth while.
Kathleen Eaden: The Art of Baking (1966)
Kathleen
The cramps start as she writes: a nagging clutch that grabs at her womb and squeezes it tight so that she has to bend over, head thrust towards her knees. She knows at once what it is. No period pain but something far more brutal. Something destructive. A vicious wrench that leaves her grasping the side of the desk, fingers whitening against the oak, pen weeping where it lies discarded. She begins to straighten before being felled by another gasp of pain.
She tries to breathe deeply, fighting now against pure panic. This can’t be happening. This can’t happen. It can’t be like the last time.
Her womb clutches even more tight.
Then, she had barely allowed herself to believe she was pregnant. Just a late period, she continued to tell herself. Delayed for four weeks by the stress of writing her first column. But the amount of blood had told a different story.
And here it is again. There is a whoosh – and she has soaked knickers. Has she had an accident? She touches the top of her thighs above her stockings and feels the stickiness, warm and wet.
Her fingers are painted crimson and she stinks of brine. Frantic, she wrenches down the nylons. The blood runs down her inner thighs; thick, vibrant, unstoppable. Where does it keep coming from? she wonders, though the answer is obvious.
Somehow, she gets to the bathroom. Every ten or so minutes there is another gush: the blood turning deep crimson and clotted; dense with guinea-sized clumps. She dreads something larger coming. I can’t let him come out like this – into the toilet. I can’t let him get dirty, and she hauls herself up, padding herself with a towel.
The bathroom floor is cold but she shakes more from shock than the chill of the tiles. Her teeth chatter like a cartoon character’s. Pull yourself together. Pull yourself together. Her words come out as a sob.
Try to breathe. In for two, out for five; in for two, out for five. Oh, how can that help? She stops trying to be rational and dabs at the floor, desperate to banish all evidence. It’s a losing battle. Every time she wipes the checkerboard tiles, there’s another smear, or gush, or trickle. She moves, and sprinkles blood.
Cocooned in towels, she curls into a ball and waits for what she now knows is inevitable. She thinks she is – she was – twelve weeks pregnant. Yesterday, she had still felt nauseous. Today the sickness had gone and she had felt such intense relief. She had spent the day baking, watching the dough rise and imagining her stomach growing, stretch marks forming like the tears on its surface. And she had kneaded the dough without dreading the rising bile.
Now, she would do anything for such sickness. For such proof that a baby was growing inside her; lengthening by the day; preparing for life.
George will be so disappointed – and as for herself? Children are what her family does; what they expect and what they – what her father – would have wanted.
Her womb contracts and, in a rush of blood, she expels what would have become her child.
14
Baking is much like having a husband: there will be times when you must pay attention to your dough and show it some sensitivity.
It is the thump that wakes Greg. A muffled thudding. Far more gentle than a bang, and rhythmic, as if someone were counting out bars of music in a softly shuffled 4/4. He glances at the clock radio: 5.13. That frustrating no-man’sland time, too close to his 5.45 a.m. alarm call to allow him any sleep, yet – in the chill of late-March – too early for a dawn chorus to justify the end of night and herald a new day’s start.
There’s the thump again. Half awake, he rolls towards Vicki, hoping to luxuriate in her warmth, to snuggle up and siphon sleep from her soft body. His arm stretches over tepid sheets. Her side of the bed is empty with only the faintest residue of warmth.
He looks back at the clock, properly awake now: 5.14 a.m. It is, he realises with increasing frustration, Saturday, the one day he can get some sort of lie-in, Sunday morning being taken up with Alfie’s ridiculously early swimming lesson in which the small child just screams and clings to the side of the pool. Saturday is the morning when he can curl up to Vicki and fantasise about the possibility of early morning sex – though it’s rarely achieved thanks to the clockwork wake-up call provided by Alfie at around six thirty. At 5.14 a.m., it’s a possibility though, if only Vicki were around.
Lying back against the pillows, it occurs to him that the rhythmic thudding probably has something to do with her absence. Disgruntled, he swings his legs out of bed, grabs a hoodie, and stumbles for the door. The faint sound becomes more persistent as he reaches the bottom of the stairs and follows the light filtering from the kitchen across the stripped oak floorboards. Thump, shuffle, shuffle, shuffle; thump, shuffle, shuffle, shuffle; thump, shuffle, shuffle, shuffle. Thump.
Vicki, wearing an oversized jumper, bare legs and an apron, is flinging dough on to a granite worktop. Entirely absorbed in her work, there is something ritualistic about what she is doing: throwing the glutinous mass, then kneading it, then folding it in a repetitive dance. A smile plays on her lips. For someone so controlled in her daily life, so concerned with the pursuit of perfection, she seems to be relishing such casual brutality. Pushing her dirty blonde hair back from her eyes with the back of a floured hand, she flings the dough down with a particularly solid thud.
‘Vicks … What are you doing?’
‘It’s five in the morning. On a Saturday. You’ve woken me up.’
Concern floods her intelligent eyes.
‘Oh, my love, I’m so sorry.’ She approaches to hug him but her hands sprinkle flour.
‘I’m making bagels. I thought you could have them fresh for breakfast. Don’t worry: I’m coming back to bed now because I need them to prove for an hour and a half before I shape them and then boil them. I’ll do that at seven. You’d be having them for lunch if I hadn’t started now.’
Characteristically perky, it all appears to make perfect sense to her. But Greg is incredulous.
‘You got up before five so I’d have them fresh for breakfast? Why would I want you to do that? I’m not married to a baker.’
She grins. ‘Ah, but you see you are.’
‘No, I’m not. I’m married to someone who’s become obsessed with a cooking competition. Well, that’s great. I’m pleased for you. And I know you want to practise. But you’re taking authenticity too far.
‘You don’t need to bake in the middle of the night. You need to sleep like normal people. Or perhaps you need to think about making a baby. I thought that was what you wanted?’ Exasperation clouds his even features then begins to dissipate as he takes in the bizarre image of his wife standing bare-legged and dusted with flour in the middle of the kitchen in what still counts as night.
Despite himself, he begins to stir. There is something surprisingly sexy about her doing all this baking. She rubs her nose, depositing flour, and he notices smudges of tiredness below her eyes. She is pushing herself and he realises for the first time just how much she wants to win this competition. A wave of tenderness subsumes him. Seeing her, blinking under the harsh halogen spotlights, love mingles with desire.
‘Well, let’s go back to bed then.’
The Art of Baking Blind Page 11
