The Art of Baking Blind

by Sarah Vaughan

  ‘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.

  Why is everyone telling her how to behave, all of a sudden? Why does everyone always do that? Stay in bed; rest; relax; do what’s best for baby. Don’t write; don’t bake – but do be Mrs Eaden. Smile; pose; nod: nod, smile, pose.

  She can’t do it any more – or this. But first she needs to explain: this baby needs to stay inside her for six weeks longer. It really has to, though it seems to have a will of its own.

  She groans then feels a slither as a hot, warm weight slides through her legs, caught by Caruthers and whisked away immediately. The pain has stopped but an awful silence fills the room.

  The men in pyjamas are huddled around what must be the resuscitation trolley. The silence stretches out indefinitely. Her arms ache to hold her child.

  I have failed, she thinks, as stars crowd her sight and she risks slipping out of consciousness. She fights against the dizziness. She needs to hold on. That woman is saying something important to her.

  By her side, the nurse, looking at the resus trolley where the baby remains silent, mutters her judgement.

  ‘She’s looking very blue.’

  38

  Gingerbread men make the simplest of treats. Children love them the best but, if you have none, you may still indulge yourself. Fashion hearts, or large families.

  Bradley Hall, 9.45 a.m., and all involved in the Search for the New Mrs Eaden are waiting for Vicki’s Freelander to surge up the drive. The tension is palpable. Harriet and Dan are hovering in the lobby; Cora is checking her phone needlessly and repeatedly, desperate for the final to run to schedule; Claire, perched on a chintz sofa, is rifling through her texts. She re-reads those from Jay – ‘162,000 hits altogether!’ – then double-checks a love letter from Chloe, her passion etched in painstakingly neat joined-up writing. ‘You’re the bestist mum and the bestist baker in the werld!!!’ The pink pencil has pushed into the paper, as if to emphasise her certainty.

  It is a glorious day. The former stately home is doing its best to look merely eccentric not architecturally grotesque and the weather is conspiring to help. Early morning sunshine bathes its golden stone, softening its ornate arcading. Lilies of the valley fringe it in white and green. The lush lawn sparkles. The marquee has been erected and, later, the contestants will shiver like guests dressed in summer regalia for a spring wedding.

  Jenny stands in the bay window, looking less like the matronly cook she may have appeared to be at the start of the process and more like the lady of the manor. There is a serenity about her in contrast to the agitation that whirls around her. Head up, eyes peering down to the end of the drive, she is poised and still. She seems to have shed some weight but, more than that, she has shed some of her inhibition. She is a picture of self-possession.

  As Vicki’s car sweeps over the gravel, however, she moves into action, gliding to the door to take her friend in her arms.

  Vicki is all of a fluster. ‘I’m so late, so late … Thank you for waiting for me … Has it held you up massively? Can I just go to the loo and grab a drink before we start? Where’s Harriet? Are they angry? Oh, Jen, I feel so guilty for leaving poor little Alf…’

  ‘Calm down.’ Jenny smiles, and envelops her in softness. Her body is more compact than Vicki had imagined: she does not sink into a duvet of flesh but is cushioned in comfort. She feels Jenny’s surprisingly strong arms around her, breathes in her clean, neutral smell. This must be what it feels like to be held by your mother, she thinks. What it would feel like if Mum just let herself hold me. Utterly secure.

  Her friend releases her.

  ‘Poor you – poor Alfie. How is he?’

  ‘OK. Well, he will be.’ Vicki smiles, relief obscuring exhaustion. ‘I can’t bear to think about him though, to be honest, or I’ll just leave immediately. I’ve got to try to focus – just to get through today.’

  ‘Well, that’s good news.’ It is Harriet, who has bustled up. ‘Great that your little one’s feeling better and fantastic that you’re here. See you in the kitchen in twenty minutes?’ And, imperious, she rushes off.

  ‘So this is it then.’ Jenny smiles again. ‘Ready?’

  ‘Not really, no.’ Vicki is apologetic. She draws Jenny aside as Cora, Claire and Mike begin to move to the kitchen. ‘I keep obsessing about Alfie and what you said last night about Kathleen. That we’d all made assumptions. That her life wasn’t perfect. What did you mean by that?’

  ‘Oh, it’s not important.’ Jenny, gathering her cardigan and handbag, avoids looking her in the eye. ‘Not in the grand scheme of things.’

  ‘You said that last night, but it is to me…’

  Jenny stops collecting her things, and looks at her. ‘I can see that. Are you sure you want to discuss this now, just before the competition?’

  ‘I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t!’ Vicki’s frustration comes out louder than she intended. ‘I’m sorry…’ She is quick to apologise. ‘I just can’t stop thinking about her. I feel as if we’ve somehow done her a disservice.’

  The look Jenny gives her – cool, quizzical – is disarming. Slowly, she puts down her handbag and rifles through it. She finds what she’s looking for: a sheaf of blue-grey Basildon Bond, inscribed in cobalt-blue ink, neatly folded.

  She hands it to Vicki.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘A letter: I found it in one of Kathleen’s cookery books. I’m not sure she ever sent it, but just read it.’

  ‘A private letter? I’m not sure I should do that. How did you get hold of it?’

  ‘I
borrowed it.’ Jenny blushes. ‘I thought you needed to read it. Look, I’m going to take it back once you’ve done so. Please, take it: it just makes sense.’

  As if sleep-walking, Vicki takes the letter from her, carefully unfolds it, and begins to read.

  Little Haven,

  Trecothan,

  15th June 1972

  My dearest Charlie,

  Wonderful to see you yesterday. To have you down here to help celebrate Lily’s sixth birthday. It may seem ridiculously formal my writing but I wanted to stress how grateful we are for you making the effort – and for treating her just like any other child.

  She loved the kite. What an inspired choice! We tested it out this morning, at low tide, on the flat sands of Constantine. We took down the wheelchair equipped for sand – the one with the massive wheels you hate carrying – and attached the line handles firmly, in case it should blow away. Then she held the lines and, with George pushing behind, they raced the length of the beach as if pulled by this glorious kite that swooped and soared in the sunshine. I wish you could have heard her peals of laughter. She sounded so infectiously happy. Squealing with excitement and for fear that her fantastic new toy would blow away.

  Needless to say, it didn’t. George had tied it on too tight for that – can you imagine the tantrum if he hadn’t? – and we must have spent a good hour and a half flying it. I thought George was going to have a heart attack, he was so out of breath from the exercise, so I took over. And I am so glad I did.

  It was the closest I’ve ever come to taking her hand and just running with her – and your kite enhanced that sense of freedom, sprinting ahead of us, up in the blue, like some unencumbered sprite.

  Later, we tried another first; and I am so proud of this. I got her to make gingerbread men – a whole family. And she made them herself. Well, she needed help with tipping the ingredients into the bowl but she managed to bind the dough and to roll it and to press down the cutters to make shapes. She may not have been standing on a chair next to me but who cares? We were baking together properly, just as I’d always imagined I would with my daughter. At one point she asked: ‘Am I doing this right, Mummy?’ I tell you, I almost cried.