We are. Never again xx
Ha! Till next time. Anyway, just wanted to repeat how pleased and proud I am: your baking ROCKS xx
My hangover was terrible too. I’d called Anna to tell her about my win and she’d insisted we go out to celebrate. I reminded her that we only lived in a village and of the three pubs, only one of them wasn’t usually chock-a-block with farmers, but I got dressed up and met her in Carsdale where we proceeded to toast my success and commiserate over the fact that Wilf had gone to do a shearing contract in the Midlands and wouldn’t return for a month. It had been a great, fun evening and had taken me right back to our younger days, when I’d tried to stay sensible but had quickly given in and let Anna lead me astray. The only difference was that these days my hangovers took twice as long to wear off.
Still, now I’d got an appointment with the council and in a week’s time I’d know whether or not the idea of running Hetty’s Farmhouse Bakery from my farmhouse kitchen was feasible or not. I was proud of myself for getting this far, but a part of me was still nervous about what Dan would say. The more ammunition I could get to convince him that I was serious about this, the better.
A week later I was in the kitchen waiting for Mr Lucas from the council. Ten days had gone by since I’d become a winning pie baker and it felt as if every spare moment had been taken up with making, selling or thinking about pastry.
And I’d reached a decision.
Going to London to represent Cumbria in the Britain’s Best Bites competition would be incredible. Truly unbelievable. In fact, sometimes I couldn’t believe it and had to keep looking at the email from Cumbria’s Finest to check that I hadn’t misread anything.
But it was just a day and a half in my life. And if Dan really didn’t want me to go then I wouldn’t; our marriage was more important. But my idea for Hetty’s Farmhouse Bakery, suppliers of perfect pastry pies, was another matter. I did want to do that. And somehow I needed to make it happen.
My first challenge was to sort out the kitchen. Right on time, at two o’clock, the doorbell rang.
‘Come in, Mr Lucas,’ I said, answering the front door. This door was rarely used and our feet echoed on the tiles as I led the way to the back of the house. ‘The kitchen is through here.’
I stood back to let the baby-faced man from the local council in ahead of me, pleased with the state of the kitchen.
I’d scrubbed and cleaned and polished and even piled up nice-looking logs in the grate to make the fireplace look welcoming. There was a bunch of wild flowers picked from the meadow in a vase on the window-sill and a warm pie resting on a cooling rack next to the Aga.
It was like an advert from one of those country magazines.
‘Thank you,’ said Mr Lucas. ‘It’s a lovely old place,’ he said, clutching a slim wallet of papers to his chest. ‘Very traditional.’
I put the kettle on and worried whether being traditional was a bad thing when it came to matters of health and safety.
‘Do look around,’ I said, trying to sound normal and not like someone who was worried that Birdie might have managed to sneak a dead animal in here in my thirty-second absence. ‘I use the Aga for cooking and the table for preparing and the sink … for washing up.’
Even to my own ears I sounded moronic. I mean, where else would I do the washing-up?
Mr Lucas shuffled his feet and made a sort of cough-laugh noise. ‘Mrs Greengrass …’
‘Hetty, please,’ I insisted. ‘Mrs Greengrass makes me sound like my mother-in-law.’
‘Call me George.’ He blushed. ‘And yes, George Lucas is a daft name. Before you ask, my parents are Star Wars fans. They also had a catering business in Kendal called May the Fork Be with You. So I know what I’m talking about.’
While he described the absolute essential things I needed to do to comply with the law, I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror. My cheeks were pink and my eyes were huge, but I looked like a woman with a purpose. Which was true; I’d spent the last week being very purposeful, and happier than I’d felt for a long time too.
‘So the sink,’ said George, peering into it.
I peered into it too. ‘Yes.’
‘You use it for both washing-up and food preparation?’ His brow was furrowed and I could tell this was a bad thing. ‘Because you really should get a double one.’
‘Right,’ I said despondently, wondering how much extra that would cost. ‘But there is a sink in the downstairs loo for handwashing.’
‘Good.’ George nodded and scribbled something in his notes.
Just then there was a thump on the door and when I opened it Dan blundered in, hands held aloft.
I made the introductions as Dan headed for the sink.
‘Hello,’ said Dan, nodding at George.
George held his hand out to shake. But Dan sidestepped him and jerked his head to the tap. ‘Turn it on for me, Hetty.’
‘Lanolin,’ I explained to George. ‘Off the sheep’s fleece. It gets quite runny on a warm day like today.’
‘Not this time.’ Dan soaped his hands, the water and bubbles spraying all over the draining board and I noticed George’s eyes sliding from side to side anxiously. ‘One of the ewes has had a prolapse. Lucky I was there to pop it back in. But I’m going to nip her over to the vet’s to be on the safe side.’
He grabbed a towel and dried his hands and then extended his right one to George.
George shook it politely and cleared his throat.
‘Right-o, I’ve seen all I need for now,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave these with you.’
He handed me some more leaflets to add to my groaning pile and headed for the door, resisting my attempts to offer him a cup of tea.
‘You’ll need to get all sorts of policies written up for things like fire hazards and provenance before you can start trading,’ he said, standing back while I opened the door for him.
On the front step, predictably, Birdie was hunched over a dead mouse, batting it with her paw.
‘I will,’ I said, surreptitiously kicking the rodent out of his eye-line.
‘And I’d get that double sink as soon as I could, if I were you,’ he added.
‘Thank you so much for coming.’ I shut the door behind him and breathed a sigh of relief.
Dan was still in the kitchen; he was drinking the tea I’d poured for George.
‘Why was that man here?’
My stomach swooped with nerves and I took a deep breath. Now was my chance to tell him the truth. But before I could formulate a sentence the phone rang. I leapt at it, grateful for the reprieve.
‘Sunnybank Farm, Hetty speaking.’
‘Hello, Hetty. This is Joe.’ There was a pause. ‘Chief executive of Cumbria’s Finest.’
I felt my insides wobble. Freya’s new boss. She’d told me about him over the phone. He’d been headhunted to revive the food group and had set them all ambitious targets to make Cumbrian produce part of the narrative about British food. Whatever that meant. His accent was local so he couldn’t have been headhunted from far away.
‘Hello,’ I said.
‘I just thought I’d congratulate you on your fantastic …’ There was a sound of rustling papers. ‘Spring lamb pie. How apt, coming from a sheep farm.’
How thorough of him to have researched our farm. But I supposed it was his job to know about such things. There was something familiar about his voice, although I was sure I’d remember if I’d met an executive.
‘Thank you, I’m delighted to have won,’ I said, avoiding Dan’s eye. ‘I normally only bake for fun – you know, for the family – I don’t do it professionally.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘Is that a problem?’ I bit my lip, wondering if I’d succeeded in disqualifying myself.
‘No, no, no. Nothing that can’t be …’ He coughed. ‘Anyway, I wanted to call and stress how much I, we – Cumbria’s Finest – really want you to be part of the delegation heading down south to the Britain’s Best Bit
es competition. It would be lovely to see you. Meet you. Lovely to meet you.’
‘I don’t think I can come to London.’ I shot another glance at Dan, who was now staring openly. ‘I’ve got other commitments.’
Joe continued as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘And of course we’ll put you up in a five-star hotel, there’s a gala dinner celebrating regional winners, that’s you,’ he laughed, ‘and there’s an opportunity to meet the best producers, like yourself, from around the country. Anyway, give it some thought. I’ll need your answer by Monday.’
Joe. It was the laugh that did it. I was pretty sure I knew this man, we knew this man. My spine tingled.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, licking my lips. My mouth had gone totally dry. ‘I didn’t catch your last name, but your voice reminds me of someone.’
He laughed again. ‘I was wondering if it might. It’s me, Joe Appleton. A blast from the past, eh? Oh damn. My other line is ringing, I need to get this. I’ll call you next week, Hetty.’
‘Joe Appleton?’ I gasped. ‘I knew it!’
‘Bloody hell.’ Dan grabbed the phone from my hand. ‘Joe? Joe? Is that you?’
But the line was dead.
Dan and I stared at each other. His best friend had vanished from our lives fifteen years ago.
And now he was back.
Chapter 12
Joe Appleton from Carsdale, last seen on A level results day, at least by us, his closest friends, had resurfaced as the chief executive of Cumbria’s Finest and wanted me to go to London with him. It was too bizarre for words.
‘I don’t believe it.’ Dan replaced the phone on the cradle.
‘Me neither.’
I sat down at the table, stunned. I couldn’t wait to tell Anna; she’d be amazed.
‘And what’s he got to do with this …?’ Dan flapped his hand. ‘This pie business?’
‘He’s taken over the running of the food group recently,’ I said with a shrug, secretly annoyed with the hand flap. ‘That’s all I know. Freya said that she had a new boss who’d been tasked with raising Cumbrian produce to new heights. I had no idea it was Joe.’
He looked at me as if to say ‘Who’s Freya?’ and I supressed a sigh. Sometimes I wondered whether he listened to a word I said.
‘Joe clearly knew who I was. He let the conversation run right until the end before telling me his name,’ I said thoughtfully. Why would he do that? Why not come straight out with it? I had so many questions. ‘Shall I try to ring him back?’
Dan shook his head. ‘Get it up on the laptop. Let’s do a bit of digging first.’
I searched for the Cumbria’s Finest website. The home page was filled with news of the competition winners, done in a grid, with a photograph and a description of the winning entry for each category, me included.
‘I’m famous, look!’ I was pleased with that picture of me; Poppy had taken it. I was standing behind my kitchen table, with my apron on, smiling at the camera while I sifted flour through my fingertips.
‘Hmm,’ said Dan, scooting closer to me to read the screen. ‘Click up there.’
There was something about that hmm that made me wonder if he had a problem with me being in the limelight but I didn’t want to get into that now, I was too intrigued to know more about Joe.
He pointed to the ‘About Us’ tab and sure enough the first picture on the page was of Joe and underneath it was a summary of his career. I zoomed in to enlarge it and we both fell silent while we read.
Joe had always planned on joining his family bakery, Appleton’s in Holmthwaite, but after he disappeared without a word, Dan went to visit Joe’s mum and discovered that he’d taken a management trainee job in Lancashire at one of Britain’s biggest bakeries instead. Dan left his mum a message to give him but Joe never got in touch and after a year of trying to contact him Dan had given up. I’d never been able to understand that; I was sure that Anna and I would never lose touch. In our small community, friendships were intense; the bonds people made as children usually remained strong for the rest of their lives. But whenever I broached the subject with Dan he dismissed my concerns, saying that it was different for blokes and if Joe wanted to move on without us, he could.
And it seemed he had. According to his bio, he’d risen swiftly through the ranks and had a series of high-flying jobs ever since. I wondered what or who had drawn him back to Cumbria.
I looked at his photograph again and a warm feeling trickled through me. He’d aged, of course, hadn’t we all? But he still had the unruly sandy hair, gentle brown eyes and cheeky smile. He was wearing an open-necked shirt and jacket in this shot; I think, with the exception of the leavers’ ball, I’d only ever seen him in jeans and sweatshirts.
‘So he’s always worked in the food industry,’ Dan marvelled, shaking his head. ‘Just like he said he would. I wonder whether he ever married.’
‘Probably,’ I said fondly. ‘He’s ringing back on Monday for my decision on going, so we’ll find out more then. I’ve always wondered what happened to him that summer.’
Dan frowned. ‘Let bygones be bygones, Hetty. Don’t go raking all that up again. Be polite, obviously, let him down gently about London and—’
There was a knock at the kitchen door. Dan and I looked at each other and he groaned.
‘Damn.’ He shoved his chair back roughly, scraping it across the tiles, and rushed to the door. ‘That’ll be Cameron, I told him to get that ewe in the trailer ten minutes ago to take her to the vet’s. I’d forgotten about it. I’d better go.’
After he’d gone, I glanced at the clock; there was an hour before Poppy was due back from school. I sent Anna a quick text to tell her about Joe, although she wouldn’t be able to reply until the end of school. I knew she’d be on the phone as soon as she could. Until then, I had just enough time to rummage in the loft for my old sixth-form yearbook. I was in the mood for a cup of tea and a slice of nostalgia …
I found it in a box along with my old maths books, a stripy teddy bear with ‘Good Luck!’ embroidered on its tummy, which Mum had sent me before my exams, and a faded copy of the estate agent’s house details which arrived on the day of my last exam when the family home had gone up for sale.
I carried the yearbook downstairs, made some tea and settled in the armchair, tucking my feet underneath me.
Holmthwaite College: The class of 2003
I flicked past the introduction by the principal and turned to the first page of students whose surnames began with A. I laughed when I saw Joe’s picture halfway down the page: his pose for the camera was identical to the one on the Cumbria’s Finest website. His hair had been almost strawberry blond but he preferred to call it ‘sandy’. He’d been like a big gentle bear, the butt of Dan’s jokes a lot of the time, but so easy-going that he never rose to the bait. He’d been desperate to grow a moustache in that last term, but could only manage a covering of soft blond hair. Dan, on the other hand, had been having a full shave since the age of sixteen and by the time we left sixth-form, he had a hairy chest too. Joe had been really jealous of that.
I turned the pages to get to kids whose name started with ‘C’, Anna Croft was the last of them. Her big blue eyes leapt out from the page, she was slightly side-on to the camera and she was staring at the lens with a knowing look. She’d had dark hair extensions put in underneath her natural blonde (I’d been super jealous of them at the time), and she was in her velvet tracksuit top. I smiled as a memory came back to me of the two of us lusting over Juicy Couture tracksuits in Cosmopolitan. They were wildly out of our budget, but we’d found some cheap and nasty knock-offs at the market and wore them till they dropped to bits.
Next came Dan. My heart flipped at the sight of his face; I’d forgotten how handsome he’d been as a teenager. He was the oldest in our year, born on the first of September, and I was the youngest, born 364 days later. I peered more closely at the checked shirt he was wearing and laughed to myself; that shirt was still hanging upstairs in his wardrobe; he nev
er threw anything away if it still had life left in it. Last, right at the back of the book, was me: Hetty Wigglesworth as I was then, a name which I’d thought made me sound about eighty. I smiled at my photograph. Why had I always thought I was plain? I’d been lovely: fresh-faced and freckly, bright-eyed and full of the-world-is-my-oyster optimism.
We’d been so young: eighteen – well, almost, in my case – and on the brink of our adult lives. I was head over heels in love with Dan and still remembered how deliriously happy I’d been when he’d said ‘I love you’ for the first time. Joe was single at the time and Anna didn’t have anyone serious, but they got on well as friends and at the start of that summer the four of us had been inseparable.
Which had made it all the more inexplicable that Joe had suddenly decided he didn’t want us in his life any more. I’d found his desertion hard, even more than Dan had seemed to. But then he’d been grieving his father and adjusting to his new life as a farmer, so perhaps there simply hadn’t been any room in his head to process the loss of Joe too.
I took a sip of my tea and closed the book on my lap, feeling my eyelids grow heavy in the warmth of the sunlit kitchen.
And as the sun’s rays shifted their way effortlessly from one window to the next, and my tea stopped steaming and eventually cooled to the point of being revolting, and my legs grew stiff underneath me, I let my mind drift back to that summer. When everything, and it seemed everyone, changed for ever.
Throughout May and June, we’d worked really hard, revising for our exams. Joe was probably the most studious, even though he’d been adamant that he didn’t want to go to university like the rest of us. He reckoned he didn’t need three years of studying and getting into debt just to end up at Appleton’s Bakery where he was guaranteed a job. Academically, Anna was the brightest. She’d been predicted straight As and was confident she’d get a place at medical school. Dan hadn’t waivered in his dream of becoming a vet and despite their disappointment that he didn’t want to join the farm, Viv and Mike had been proud that their son had set his sights so high, the first one in the family to go to university. Naomi, although just as smart as Dan, had never wanted to go; she’d been a buyer for a supermarket until the twins had come along and, like Joe, didn’t see the point.
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