The Art of Baking Blind

by Sarah Vaughan

  She places the dough in a bowl, covers it with clingfilm, rinses her fingers and moves towards him to placate him. It strikes him that she is using the same reasonable tone and distraction technique she would use on their three-year-old. But it’s unnecessary. When she looks at him like that, he is putty in her hands.

  ‘I can’t sleep now. I’m too wide awake.’ He grins at her, all innocence.

  She smiles up at him, reaches cool fingers up his inner thigh inside his striped cotton boxer shorts. ‘Who said anything about sleeping?’

  She knows him too well. Much as he would like to resist – to make some statement about being irritated at being woken up – there really is no point. He is incapable. They kiss: a chaste kiss of contrition that morphs into invitation, her tongue probing his mouth, her hands caressing his neck. He reaches for her buttocks, naked, he discovers with a thrill under the hastily thrown-on sweater. The discovery excites him more than he would have thought possible and, with something of a stumble, for she is nearing ten stone now thanks to the extra baking, he lifts her on to the counter. Her bottom pushes through the soft sprinkling of flour. She pulls away; then gives a giggle as her thighs are coated with the white powder.

  ‘Don’t.’ He wants to freeze this moment. To preserve it, untainted by humour.

  She looks at him, taking in his expectant face, softened by desire.

  ‘There are far better things to be doing at five in the morning than baking,’ he mutters, embarrassed to admit to his need for her.

  And she reaches down and begins another rhythmic dance.

  15

  Most of the time you will need to be firm with your dough. You will need to control this changeable, organic substance: working it; determining how much it should expand; knocking it down at the correct time; and knocking it into shape. You will need to behave, in other words, like a clever wife who knows the secret to marital happiness lies in educating her husband to appreciate her needs.

  Nigel Briggs is naked in his en suite bathroom – a former dressing room – performing his morning routine. Eyes heavy with sleep, he stands in front of the toilet taking a boyish satisfaction in the hot hiss of his pee as it strikes the cold toilet bowl and his ability to aim it in different directions. Urine drips from the end of his penis as he gives it an affectionate flick and lands on the granite floor in a neat, sticky circle. It does not occur to him to wipe it up. Jenny will follow with the Dettol spray.

  He turns to the basin and begins the process on which he lectures his patients. Floss; brush with an electric toothbrush, spit splayed in concentric circles; swill with mouthwash, rinsing the plaque away. A shower – brief; cold; invigorating – comes next. And only then, once he is alert and can concentrate properly, is he ready for the main event.

  Naked again, he stands on his wife’s raspberry-coloured digital scales experiencing a frisson of excitement as the display fluctuates, raising then dashing his hopes, determining his weight. Eleven stone, 8.9 pounds. Better than yesterday’s eleven stone, 9.2 but still not good enough. He gives a moue of dissatisfaction and wonders, for the umpteenth time, how much difference it would make if he’d had a shit.

  A towel around him now, he wanders back into the bedroom and jots down his weight in the small notepad. Once dressed, he will add it to a spreadsheet on his laptop to be translated into a graph detailing his consistent weight loss over the weeks. Yet there is no need for the memory jog. Eleven, 8.9 will be branded at the front of his mind throughout the day, governing his food choices, determining how far he should run that evening. He does not need a graph to tell him that, at six foot, he is still nine pounds off his target weight.

  ‘I’m still a long way off my target.’ The information is barked at Jenny, who, fully dressed, has entered the room with a cup of breakfast tea for him. It does not occur to him that she might not find this information interesting.

  ‘Hmm?’ She shows a modicum of interest, fine-tuned over twenty-five years of marriage. Sufficient not to rankle yet some way short of the level of enthusiasm he would like.

  ‘My target weight? I’m a long way off it. For a six-foot man, running a marathon, I should be under eleven stone – 15 to 20 per cent less than your average six-footer. I’m eleven, 8.9; that’s only about 10 per cent less than the average. I’ll have to check my spreadsheet for the exact figure. Seb Coe was more than 20 per cent.’

  Bombarded with this flurry of statistics, Jenny tries to work out a response that will sound informed but reassuring.

  ‘Are you sure you should be comparing yourself with a double Olympic gold medallist?’ is the best she can manage. It does not have the desired effect.

  ‘Of course I’m not comparing myself with an Olympian.’ He splutters as if the idea is preposterous. ‘Nor am I comparing myself with a middle-distance runner. I was using him as an example of an elite athlete. And yes, actually, Jenny, that’s what I’m aspiring to be.’

  He looks incandescent, and faintly ridiculous, as he stands in his socks and boxer shorts, rifling through his wardrobe. Despite his lean physique and dark good looks, he remains a middle-aged man – one who should have been working on his fat ratio three decades earlier if he wanted to join the athletic elite.

  He continues chuntering as he searches for a favourite shirt, spurning the three she had ironed the previous evening, and she sidles out of the door, keen to escape the disdain that accompanies much of his comments these days. Head in the wardrobe, he seems to sense her departure, and calls her back, like an owner bringing a dog to heel.

  ‘Jennifer.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I asked you a question. Did you confirm the Paris hotel booking for the marathon weekend?’

  ‘I haven’t but I will.’

  ‘April 14-15. Don’t forget.’

  ‘April 14-15.’

  As she repeats it, she realises there is a problem. Now three weeks away, April 14-15 is the weekend when they will be making pies and pastry. Feather-light home-made puff pastry is her baking signature. Making pies is her forte. Missing this – missing out on the chance to shine in the competition; effectively to drop out – is not a possibility.

  It is not the ideal time to bring it up but she forces herself to do so.

  ‘Nigel. I won’t be able to join you, darling.’

  His face forms a question mark.

  ‘It clashes with the pastry stage of my competition. I can’t miss that. I’m so sorry.’

  The look on his face changes from incomprehension to derision. If eyebrows can sneer that is what his are doing.

  ‘April in Paris versus pies in Buckinghamshire?’ His voice drips with sarcasm. ‘Your choice, my love, your choice. I would have thought you would have welcomed a romantic break away – quite aside from the opportunity to support your husband. But no, you go back to making pastry.’

  A hard ball of fury forms in her chest. She wants to scream at him; to puncture his self-righteousness, and point out that he could support her for a change. It is on the tip of her tongue to suggest that Gabby Arkwright might be partial to April in Paris but she cannot bring herself to go there. Instead, she takes a deep breath and wills herself to be calm. When her voice emerges, she is surprised by its steeliness.

  ‘I do support you, Nigel, of course I do. But I need to do this.’

  Her tone remains firm; no hint of beseeching here.

  ‘I am not going to give this up even though I won’t be able to cheer you over the finishing line. I’m very sorry but I do need to do this.’

  The silence goes on far longer than she would have expected. Derision has drained from his face and his expression is one of incomprehension once more.

  Jenny walks from the bedroom feeling visibly taller; her head raised high, her footsteps brisker than usual. It is only once she is in the sanctity of the kitchen that she notices her hands are shaking.

  * * *

  ‘I can’t believe you’re not going to be there to support him.’ Emma Briggs, ever opinionat
ed and forceful, is summoning as much indignation as she can muster when Jenny phones her to tell her she won’t be going to Paris to cheer on her father.

  ‘It’s not like it’s a local 10K run, Mum. This is the Paris marathon. A big event. And we were all going to meet there, weren’t we?’ Her voice, on a mobile phone line from Montpellier, is as insistent as if they were standing in the same room.

  Jenny feels exhausted. With the self-righteousness that comes with being twenty-two, her middle daughter is managing to convey extreme disappointment in her mother while being oblivious to her petulance. Her voice goes on and on; hectoring, questioning, challenging in her self-appointed role as Nigel’s advocate. Jenny lets the barrage wash over her, keeping half an ear open for when her daughter mentions Mrs Eaden. It is a long time coming.

  ‘And what is this baking competition, anyway?’

  Jenny has to remind herself that her daughter is living a far more interesting life than hers in a different country. While the competition is of huge interest to bakers who shop at Eaden’s, it has not reached the radar of the average student: certainly not a third-year enjoying an academically light year in the south of France. Of course, Jenny has mentioned it but Emma persists in feigning ignorance as if to suggest she has better things to do with her time than look at YouTube clips of middle-aged women making shortbread biscuits. As indeed she has. Jenny refuses to be riled.

  She takes a deep breath. ‘You know what it is, darling. It’s the Search for the New Mrs Eaden – you know, the competition that I told you was being judged by that rather attractive baker, Dan Keller. It’s going on for three months and, at each stage, the winner and runner up are filmed demonstrating their baking on YouTube. We appear on the Eaden’s website and we’ll be in their magazine, too.

  ‘The winner’s just chosen by the judges though. If I win, I’ll get a big enough cheque to help write off uni debts for the three of you – and I’ll get the chance to write about, and advise on, baking.’

  ‘So, it’s quite a big deal then?’ Her daughter still sounds bolshie.

  ‘Yes. Look, I know I’m letting Dad down, and that he’s disappointed, but I can’t give this up to watch him from the sidelines. I want to be doing something for me.’

  There is a pause, so lengthy that Jenny wonders if Emma has lost her mobile signal.

  ‘Emma? Em, are you there? Say something.’

  She hears her middle daughter give a sigh plump with disappointment, and she knows she’s in for an emotional ride.

  ‘I just think it’s a shame. Put like that, of course I understand. But Daddy’ – Emma resorts to the name she used as a child to convey her loyalty – ‘has put so much into this and it’s just a bit sad you won’t be there to support him.

  ‘It’s no one’s fault’, she continues, adding a dose of martyred magnanimity. ‘But I can see why he’s so disappointed about it – especially as we were all going to meet up, and make it a family celebration.’

  The idea of a cancelled family reunion – already mythologised – obviously rankles. Jenny is just wondering how to atone for this when Emma mines a different emotional vein.

  ‘You’ve put me in a bit of a quandary now. I don’t know who I should support.’

  Her mother, familiar with her daughter’s skill at manipulation, recognises her cue. ‘Oh my darling, it’s not a competition but you must support Daddy if that’s what you feel you’d like to do.’

  ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ Emma can afford to be conciliatory now that her Paris weekend is no longer in jeopardy. ‘You won’t feel that I’m not supporting you, or that I’m taking your place?’

  ‘Of course not, darling.’ She too can be magnanimous now that the aggression has been defused. ‘In fact you’d be doing me a favour, and making me feel much less guilty. You go and have fun.’

  16

  To make two basic white loaves, take strong white flour; yeast; warm water and a smidgeon of butter, sugar and salt. Time, a little skill, and the wonder of nature are then all that are required.

  Sunday morning, late-March, and Mike Wilkinson is as close to happiness – or what constitutes happiness, post-Rachel – as he is likely to be.

  Pippa and Sam are sprawled on the floor next door, watching a slapstick TV game show, and chortling with the infectious laughter unique to very young children. Not for the first time, he wishes he could remember how to laugh like that and wonders at what age they will lose their capacity for sheer glee.

  He pokes his head round the door. Heads close together, all bickering is forgotten as they delight in the misfortune of the competitors, slipping down slides, splashing into water, wading through mud.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ Like the permanent outsider, he is keen to be in on the joke.

  Sam, for whom the forbidden words bum and poo can still provoke manic giggling, can barely contain himself. ‘The man … the man … got hit by a…’ His red face creases with the effort of getting a sentence out, and convulses as a fresh wave of giggles rises up from his belly.

  ‘Idiot,’ his sister joshes him. At eight, Pippa likes to think she is above such unrestrained hilarity. A second later, her behaviour undermines her.

  ‘Look … Daddy, did you see that one?’ She gives a squeal, her exquisite face flushed with excitement as she turns towards him. ‘He fell all the way down!!!!’

  Mike reckons he has forty minutes of peace, tops, and, for once, feels justified in sticking them in front of the telly, their remote parent. He has just taken them on a four-mile bike ride and their mud-splattered legs will be aching – though he knows that, after lunch, he will have to run them round the rec.

  Forty minutes gives him time to whack his casserole in the oven, put on the mashed potatoes and crack on with his bread-making. The bread stage is next but Mike, a realist who knows he is not going to win the competition, is not intent on practising. He is going to make bread for the sheer joy of doing it.

  Late last year, he had been baking one Sunday lunchtime while indulging in one of his unashamed middle-class fetishes: listening to Radio 4’s The Food Programme. As he’d begun his gentle kneading, folding the dough towards him then pressing down with the heel of his hand; turning the dough around and repeating the process, the programme – in one of those rare moments of coincidence – had described what he was doing. More to the point, it had talked about making bread as therapy. Veterans of Afghanistan who had set up a bakery were interviewed, as were victims of torture who met for a bread-making session every week. The rhythmic kneading of dough was a means of soothing and calming when intrusive thoughts and memories threatened to overwhelm them, explained the charity organiser. And the smell, taste and texture of bread transported them back to happier times – baking bread with their mothers, perhaps – before their trauma.

  Listening to the programme, Mike found he had tears running down his cheeks, not just for the torture victims – refugees from Iran, for the most part – but for himself as he tried to achieve some sort of equanimity after Rachel’s death. He hadn’t seen his bread-making as therapeutic, but he suddenly realised he could date its start from the week after her funeral, when grief, initially staved off by adrenalin, engulfed him. Pounding the dough – rather than lightly folding and gently punching it as the books advised – was cathartic; a means of distracting himself when he had felt overwhelmed with anger, just as more active men might go for a run or pound a punch bag in a gym.

  Now, making bread is a regular weekly fixture and has become not just therapeutic but creative. Where he once used it as an acceptable means of releasing his anger, he now views it as something more positive: a means of creating something unique, of providing for his children in the most basic way. He also loves the sense of continuity it gives him: even the Anglo-Saxons made bread, he is fond of telling his pupils, and, as hunters rather than farmers, had been so terrified of wheat growing and dough swelling that they cast spells at every stage of their bread-making. Bread is intrinsic to British culture a
nd language, he tells them. Think of the phrases taken from milling: grist to the mill; nose to the grindstone; and the colloquialisms: make some dough; earn a crust; upper crust. Even Jesus – and here he is on shakier ground, having been agnostic even before Rachel’s death – recognised its centrality to human existence, describing himself as ‘the bread of life’.

  His enthusiasm for bread-making and its place in British culture has led him to experiment in a way he avoids with cakes or puddings. He bakes with spelt or rye flour; sprinkles poppy and sunflower seeds; adds olives and rosemary, pancetta and caramelised onions, blue cheese and walnuts. And yet his trademark loaf remains a standard bloomer, slashed three times across the top to allow for satisfying gashes in the crust, and a basic wholemeal. He knows he will have to shine in the competition; to demonstrate that he can make naan, or bagels, or challah loaf. But, for today, in his warm kitchen, for his hungry children, it’ll be his bog-standard farmhouse white.

  * * *

  Claire Trelawney is also baking – in her case hot cross buns, saffron bread and tea loaf – as she works alongside her mother and daughter.

  Her hands move lightly but her jaw is set as she flings the dough down on to the worktop and stretches and rotates it. Chloe’s father, Jay, has been in contact and she always makes bread rather than more delicate cakes and pastries when this happens, reaching for the strong white flour, just as other women might launch into a flurry of obscenities; open the vodka; light a cigarette.

  ‘Easy, love.’

  Claire looks up to see Angela raising an eyebrow.

  ‘Sorry.’ She smiles and takes in grandmother and granddaughter: two generations united in the simple pleasure of mixing a handful of ingredients – flour, yeast, water, salt and sugar – and witnessing culinary magic take place.

  ‘Am I doing this right, Mum?’ Chloe, ever keen for parental approval, is struggling with the sticky bun dough, which clings to her fingers.

  ‘You want a little more flour – not too much.’ Claire’s voice rises to a squeak as Chloe tips a mound of strong flour on to the surface.