by Poppy Dolan
‘How lovely!’ I manage to squeak.
‘And we’ve brought apple cake,’ Bee says proudly. ‘We know how much you like cake, Ellie. I was just looking for the plates.’
‘Er, I’ll get it all out Dad, you just take a seat.’ Pete herds Bee out of my sacred space; he just needs a white suit and net visor to complete the look.
‘Sorry,’ he mutters through clenched teeth when his parents are out of earshot, poking about in the living room. ‘I really had no idea. They just appeared. You don’t mind, do you, Smells?’
Pete’s eager eyes can always sooth the Hulk. ‘Course not. It’s … a lovely treat. And cake too. Lovely. Really lovely.’
We sit down and politely and thoughtfully chew our slices (not too heavy, could have done with some more cinnamon and maybe just a pinch of salt for contrast). And pretty soon The Agenda becomes clear: Skye and Rich are going to get married. Quickly, so they have the marriage certificate filled out before the birth certificate, but also because they’re madly in love. Marie and Bee have volunteered to have it at the farm, in the big barn with hay bales up against the walls to keep everyone toasty.
‘Always wise to count against a warm British summer.’ I nod as I finish off my cake.
‘Oh, no, darling. January. They want to get married on New Year’s Day. Start the year with a bang. The time of birth, new life, things beginning. So it might be a bit cold.’
‘Right,’ says Pete, his eyebrows lowering. I can hear the abacus sliding about in his brain, calculating catering, Portaloos, outdoor heaters, booze costs versus lack of earnings while his parents run the wedding and not the business. The weeks left before then and now: less than four.
‘Gosh,’ I say, as any good Englishwoman should when she has no idea at all what to say.
But Pete is obviously one step ahead, ‘So how can we help out?’
And then Marie and Bee rumble through their side of things: they have offered to carry the cost as Rich and Skye save every spare penny for the new baby. So they’d like Pete’s help in moving some money around, freeing up some cash from somewhere, finding the funds. What we all know, and what’s hidden in their embarrassed mumblings, is that there is no money to be moved, no cash to be set free, no fund to be miraculously found under the sofa cushions. Their business keeps things going, but only because their mortgage is so small – and Pete has always strong-armed them away from getting another. Pete is either going to have to perform an accounting miracle, a serious bit of embezzlement, or find the money from his own sofa cushions.
He looks at me. I give him a wide-eyed look and a half-smile, which he’ll know – being the ultimate codebreaker of my expressions – means ‘I’m OK with this if you are.’
Pete laces his fingers together and lets them drop into his lap. ‘We’ll have to think about it.’
This wasn’t what I was expecting and I can see by Marie’s blinking that it wasn’t what expected to hear, either.
‘Of course, Sunflower!’ Bee chirrups, breaking the tension. If they ran a hippy commune version of Butlin’s, he’d be the perfect red coat. Or tie-dye coat, I suppose. ‘Take all the time you need. Well, maybe just a few days, seeing as we need to start organising this shebang!’ He chortles harmlessly.
Marie also recovers her serene smile, like it is a chiffon scarf that has just slipped from her shoulders. ‘Yes, yes, of course. Give me a tinkle in a few days. Do you know, darling,’ she turns to Bee, ‘we should really get this caravan on the road if we’re going to drop in on the twins too. Tell them the exciting news! Unless there’s anything you two need to talk to us about?’ Marie’s pursed lips and the intent with which she scans my slumped form on the sofa make it very clear she’s sniffing for baby news. Maybe if they hadn’t wrecked my slutty seduction tonight there might be more chance of something to tell …
‘No, no,’ Pete says politely but firmly. He stands up, collecting the cake plates in a stack and looping tea mugs on his long fingers. No surer sign of ‘You are dismissed. Please leave the building.’ And so with hugs and backslapping, they trundle off.
‘Ooh, I do love a wedding,’ I say in the Yorkshire accent I randomly adopt when there’s an awkward silence. I don’t know where it comes from: the nearest I’ve been to Yorkshire is the tea.
Pete has his hand at his chin, looking at the closed front door.
‘Pete?’
‘Hmmm?’
‘What are you thinking? About the money, I mean? We could dip into the house fund. It’s not ideal, but then how often does your brother get married? Well, three times, I suppose, with you having three brothers.’
‘I’m not sure,’ he says slowly.
‘It’ll set us back a little bit but I’m OK with it, honestly, if you are. What’s another six months compared to your brother’s lasting memories of his big day? We can’t let them have ASDA sandwiches in a freezing cold barn, we just can’t. Especially when Rich spent eight hours making confetti cones for our wedding, and then we totally forgot to even hand them out.’
Pete shrugs. My own enigma machine at decrypting his little twitches is a bit jammed. I can’t read him at all. So I might as well put the kettle on.
Five minutes later I’m lost in a daydream of a snowy, wintery wedding with hot toddies for the guests, holly in the bouquets (though very hazardous, depending on the average age of the bridesmaids) and – most vitally – the cake. White icing is going to do a lot of the thematic work, sure, but there’s so much to play with: lovely red and green velvet ribbons around the outside, maybe fondant snowmen? No – better! A snowgroom and a snowbride, holding twig hands! That wouldn’t be hard to do. I could even volunteer to make it, save a bit more expense for Marie and Bee. My Christmas cake would be perfect as the base layer – and I’d have the extra time to make it super boozy. Cake flavour of their choice for the smaller tiers (it is their wedding after all. And I should remember that), but fruit cake is the best option for the load-bearing foundation.
I grab a biro and have a little sketch – the two snow people, some little pine trees, maybe those ones you get in model railway towns. Would a robin be too twee? Would making the snowbride preggy be going too far? I’d have to practise my icing writing, in case they wanted some lettering on it.
‘What are you doing?’
Pete catches me miming icing ‘Congratulations’ in joined-up writing with an imaginary piping bag full of brandy butter frosting.
‘Ha!’ I wipe my hands on the back of jeans, to get off the invisible icing sugar. ‘Thinking about cake, of course!’
He’s not smiling. ‘Eleanor, we need to decide what we’re going to do.’ Whoah. Use of the full name. He’s not a jolly sausage. I bring the tea into the living room, trailing him.
I sit down, but he doesn’t. Instead, he paces back and forth by the coffee table, like he’s impatient to start a game of charades. ‘We have to think carefully about this. Not because it’s money – I’d give them anything they needed, you know that – but because of what it means to us, right now. This money we’ve saved is for our future house, for our future lives, and if we give some of it away that will mean … a longer wait.’ He looks hard at me, not blinking.
‘OK.’
‘OK? OK in what way?’ Still the hard look, the blank face.
‘I get that it’ll be a longer wait for a house, but I think it’s worth it. For Rich and Skye, and the whole family, really.’
Pete doesn’t move. This is the weirdest game of charades ever. I’ve already said I’m happy to lend them some money. We love our flat; it won’t kill us to stay here and keep saving for a bit longer. As long as we have our contingency money for the ‘what if one of us breaks a leg or loses an eye and can’t go to work for a month?’ disasters, I can sleep easy at night.
Pete laces his fingers again. ‘OK. OK. I’ll tell Mum yes. I’ll work it out.’ He walks slowly towards the bedroom, to power up his laptop.
There’s a weird feeling in the flat, as if it’s overheard
us talking about the shiny dream of a mortgage and now feels betrayed and cheap. Somehow, I don’t think it’s the moment to put some more lipstick on and try and get Pete interested in naughty late fees. So I Google ‘winter weddings’ instead and text Rich for Skye’s email address.
Chapter Thirty-One
Result. Skye is happy to let me do the cake! Asking her made me all sweaty and nervous, like an auditioning actress in Chorus Line, but now I’m all full of gleeful excitement, like a successful actress in Chorus Line. I have a legitimate excuse to pour over the Lakeland catalogue, become obsessed all over again with the wedding blogs I loved as an engaged lady, and generally eat all my mistakes along the way. Plus, it has distracted me from baby thoughts for eight whole seconds. It’s like all my Christmases have come at once, and early.
But the gravity of the task has definitely hit me, too. I mean, no one needs to tell me that the cake is the heart of any wedding, and I will not let this one disappoint. It’s going to be gorgeous AND delicious AND not break the bank – the holy trinity of wedding cake ideals.
I outlined my entire cake design ethic to my mum on the phone the other night, as well as breaking it to her gently that my boozy dried fruit stewing in a bowl at the top of the kitchen cupboards would now not be eaten by our clan on Christmas day. There was a mild humph, but then she sheepishly admitted she had already baked ‘a spare, just in case’. I knew it! Sometimes, even though I now have my own career, a husband, a home and a sensible pension plan (not to mention my Magimix), my mum still sees me as that clumsy six-year-old who, in the middle of an Art Attack, spilled plaster of Paris all over the new hallway carpet and then tried to cover it up with newspaper.
But Mum also mentioned that she hadn’t iced it yet, and wouldn’t it be nice if I came and helped her? Yes, this is indeed international mum speak for ‘I haven’t seen you for a while and you JUST had Pete’s parents over for tea.’ Doesn’t matter that the visit with the in-laws was involuntary, oh no, it still counts in the endless balancing act that is parental visits when you’re in a serious relationship. And actually, icing a cake with Mum would be genuinely really fun. She’s such a meticulous, skilled cook and baker that there’s still loads I can learn from her and my decorative doodahs for this wedding cake will have to be tip-top in time for New Year. Oooh, it’s like having my very own Great British Bake Off skills test! Now and then, bubbles of excitement hit me and I can-can round the kitchen a bit, my less-than-dainty footsteps prompting Pete to come out of the bedroom and ask, ‘What the hell is going on?’ So today I’m sodding off to my mum’s on a last-minute day of holiday time. Martin barely rolled his eyes when I put the request in via our online system at work – I think he’s already entered his festive constantly-half-cut season. Well, it is the fifth of December. Which reminds me, I still haven’t nailed down Pete’s present idea. Or Lydia’s. Hmmm.
On the train, I’m killing time on my phone, having left Marian Keyes on the bedside table. Lyds has emailed about plans for Thursday night – she’s being oddly but refreshingly organised and not disappearing into the lusty mist that usually spirits her away when she has a new bloke. It’s nice. And so now I’m entertaining myself by deleting emails, a job that really only gets done on train trips to the Shires if I’m honest. A lot of Amazon Daily Deals go, as do quite a few John Lewis furniture sale alerts (ah, if only) and some random night club in Clapham that I’m really sure I’ve never been to but that insist on telling me about their EPIC!!!! Hawaiian themed under-35 nights. A tiny tremor runs down my spine as I realise I won’t be allowed in to enjoy such cheesy delights much longer. I mean, I don’t want to go; but I want to choose not to, rather than being barred for being too crinkly and old. Sheesh. I think of the sixth-form Ellie again, the one that had those big dreams of being thirty. She probably thought I’d be out at clubs every night, downing Manhattans and then postponing my private training session in the morning. Yet more ways in which I’ve let her down.
I’m about to clear my junk mail when I spot something odd. From BBC Audiences. Oh God, have I got Strictly tickets?! Ohmygodohmygod! Who will I take with me? I think this calls for a King Lear-style competition over who loves me the most, but hopefully it won’t end up in a big pile of dead bodies at the end. If it did, it would still be worth it: because this is Strictly we’re talking about here.
But there’s no glitterball in the email design – just a golden wooden spoon, randomly. As my skim reading picks up the words ‘lucky contestant’, ‘signature dish’, ‘exciting prize’ it clicks that this isn’t the chance to see Tess’s svelte, spangled form in the flesh or see Bruce do his odd little shuffly dance. No bare, fake-tanned chests of the male professionals glinting under TV lights for me. Bums. But this is something else; it looks like a new cookery show. Oh, maybe it’s Joe’s one! I don’t remember applying for tickets but maybe they’re offering them round to their database, to drum up some interest. It would be amazing to go along and give Joe a whoop of encouragement; Hannah could be my wingman if it’s not on a school day. I scroll back up to the top to check the date and time – 19th December. Should be school holidays by then. Bonus. I’ll just drop her a wee text and set a reminder to book another day off tomorrow. Hey, wait – Crumbs should probably be covering this show. Maybe I could wangle it as a work day if I took notes. I am getting crafty as I approach my ancient post-thirty-five years of age.
Mum has all her best tools laid out on the sparkling worktop: she’s always been methodical, calm, and in another life she would have made a great surgeon. Another life where the sight of blood didn’t make her gag. When Mike split his head open as a kid, doing a BMX trick on a homemade ramp, and we took him into A&E, Mum had to be admitted to the next bed along as she couldn’t stop hurling.
But now as a retired civil servant, she’s got lots of time and energy to approach everything with her trademark vigour and list-making excellence. I think Dad has kept on working not just so they can keep having the larger luxuries of holidays and two cars but also so it will afford him the smaller but more significant luxury of not becoming one of mum’s next ‘projects’. She’s already got a Zen garden, a handmade tapestry rug and enough pickled walnuts to last us all through the apocalypse. He’d find himself with a new haircut, no more red meat for dinner and taking golf lessons in a flash, should he accept that golden carriage clock from his firm.
I love my mum’s kitchen. It’s big, for starters, which no one could accuse my kitchen of being. At home, I can touch one wall with one finger and the opposite wall with my big toe. It’s like a Grand Designs-meets-Saturday Night Fever way of measuring rooms, but ideal if you don’t own a proper tape measure. My mum also has all the utensils you could ever wish for, like she’s ram-raided the John Lewis kitchen department and committed the perfect crime. It helps that she’s had decades of Christmas and birthday presents from loved ones that reflect her love of cooking. She’s probably the only person to have been genuinely pleased to be given a lemon zester for her fifty-seventh birthday. Though to be fair, it’s a really nice zester. It goes perfectly with her whisks, measuring spoons, porcelain juicer, electronic scales, and assortment of pastry brushes. She’s like the Q of the baking world (which I think makes me Bond. Yesss.) and I fully expect her to present me with a kitchen timer that doubles as an explosive device. When I got married she baked heart-shaped ginger snaps for all the guests and iced everybody’s initials on them, as the most delicious name cards you’d ever see. Or eat. They were a triumph, and only gave her a teeny tiny RSI.
So the heavy marble rolling pin is out to produce a lovely thin blanket of royal icing, we have warm apricot jam on stand-by to be our culinary glue and – prized of all the baking accessories – Mum’s tiny and much-cherished holly-leaf cutters that can turn out the sweetest (literally) little green fondant icing leaves. Add in a tiny, rolled lump of red icing the size of a pinhead and you will have Delia green with yuletide envy.
I am allowed to watch as Mum does the actual ici
ng of the whole cake – lumpy folds of icing around the side would definitely, categorically ruin Christmas and without the twins it’s going to be borderline miserable for her anyway. I’ll try and look cute as I open my presents but, let’s face it, cuteness diminishes with age and I am a long way off four and hardly angelic-looking. The odd strands of grey in my hair could be described as nature’s tinsel, but not by Nicky Clarke I’d guess. Now that the cake is one perfect mound of flawless white, we can arse about making the decorations. I’m trying out some snow couples but I am not happy with them – too dumpy by far and the carrot noses are too pointy. The result is pretty witchy looking and definitely not romantic. I want them to have a sort of cute-ish The Snowman vibe, but it’s basically the cake decoration you’d choose for Tim Burton right now. But the good bit with icing is that I can angrily mutter ‘Wrong!’ and smush the creation with the palm of my hand, roll it out and start again. While my mum tsks next to me.
We don’t need to talk, both lost, such as we are, in busy baking delight. Making something with my hands brings an instant air of calm to my very core and I’m pretty sure it’s the same for Mum. I think we must have our genetic roots in a tribe of cottage weavers or cheese makers: there is intent and drive in what we do, but also a real happiness from making something useful and delicious. It’s only the ache in my back that prompts me to look at the clock. Eeeek. We’ve been fiddling for nearly two hours.
‘Bloody hell, time for a cup of tea,’ I say, flipping on the kettle.
Mum places the forty-third holly leaf onto a greaseproof-lined tray and stands back. ‘I think you’re right. I might just have enough by this point.’ She sits down at the kitchen table with a soft exclamation of ‘Ooof.’ I believe the instruction to do this arrives with your bus pass. ‘So how were Marie and … Bee?’ she manages.
‘Oh, fine. In their usual good spirits. They want us to help with Rich’s wedding, actually.’
