What Would Mary Berry Do? Read online

  ‘Not hungry, thanks.’ Angus fiddled with his zoom.

  ‘We are,’ said the twins.

  Disloyal beasts, thought Marie, as the fruit of her loins grabbed the plastic container and fell upon Lucy’s handiwork like dingoes.

  Feeling for Chloe, Marie took up the conversational baton dropped so charmlessly by Angus. ‘Do you cook, Chloe?’ With the Baking Bible throbbing in her hand, Marie longed to be alone with her new mentor.

  ‘Nope.’ Chloe wound a lock of raven hair around a finger. ‘With my mother in the house, who needs to?’

  ‘Why do you always call her “my mother” and not “Mum”?’ Iris was happy to ask the un-askable.

  ‘Because Lucy’s not her mum, stupid,’ said Rose, a skilled eavesdropper who knew more or less everything about everybody. ‘Lucy’s her stepmum.’ She looked to Chloe for verification. ‘That’s right, isn’t it?’

  ‘Sorry about these two,’ said Marie. ‘I’ll beat them soundly when I get them home.’

  ‘She always says that,’ said Iris.

  ‘She never does it,’ said Rose.

  ‘She usually cuddles us,’ said Iris.

  ‘Shut up!’ said Angus, who had never – not for one millisecond – found his sisters cute.

  ‘I don’t mind.’ Chloe’s smile revealed black lipstick smudges on her front teeth. ‘It’s true. Lucy isn’t my real mother.’

  ‘Where’s your real—’

  Marie put a hand over Iris’s mouth. ‘None of your beeswax.’

  ‘Nobody knows. Too far away to cuddle, that’s for sure.’

  They were at the corner of Caraway Close, where the road veered away on either side to form a large circle around the green in the middle. Marie’s heart filled for brave pretty little gothy Chloe, with no Mummy – just a Mother with a capital M, who spent more time perfecting her Genoese sponge than she did noticing the troubled young woman under her roof.

  ‘Why don’t you and Angus walk to the party together tonight?’ she asked. ‘The one everybody’s talking about. The cool one.’ Marie enjoyed her son’s squirming at her double whammy of pimping him out and using the word ‘cool’.

  ‘I’m not invited.’

  ‘Oh.’ Damn. ‘Well, me neither!’ Marie could have kicked herself, but not before she’d kicked Angus for failing to hide his obvious relief.

  ‘See you, Mrs Dunwoody. See you, Iris, Rose.’ Chloe ambled off round the far curve of the cul-de-sac. ‘See you, Angus.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Angus had forgotten her already, racing the girls to the gate of number nineteen (or was it sixty-one?)

  ‘Bye, Chloe. Come over in the holidays, yeah?’ Marie watched her go, then turned and raced after her children, beating them to the door, eager for her one-on-one with Mary.

  ‘Robert,’ Marie said gently, about midnight. Then, louder, but still gently, ‘Ro-bert!’

  ‘Uh? Wha—’ Robert shot upright on the lumpy old red sofa, the novel he hadn’t been reading plunging to the floor. ‘Wassenazleep,’ he slurred.

  ‘Darling, go to bed. Don’t wait for me.’

  ‘I don’t like going up on my own.’ He scratched his head, sending his hair haywire above his sleep-creased face. ‘No nice bottom to snuggle up to.’ He yawned. ‘Just one of the many advantages of having a wife built along traditional lines.’

  ‘Just say “fat”, for God’s sake,’ muttered Marie, propping her glasses back on her nose, leaning again over the book spreadeagled on the pine kitchen table. A half-drained tumbler of white wine stood to attention, its glassy depths sparkling in the kindly light shed by the lamps dotted around the kitchen. Marie had long ago decreed that the fluorescent lights beneath the cream-painted wall units were too harsh on a mature complexion. ‘“Curvy. Ample. In-and-outy.” All your different little ways of telling me I need to lose a few pounds.’

  ‘If I meant fat, I’d say “fat”.’ Robert was on his feet now. ‘And don’t you dare lose a few pounds. I love each and every one of your pounds. Especially, you know, the ones in this area.’ He pointed to his chest. ‘Oh, go on, laugh, Marie! You’ve been like the school swot preparing for an exam all evening.’

  ‘This is fascinating,’ she murmured, lost in her book again.

  ‘You don’t have to be a domestic wonder, darling. And besides, no woman your age, living in a suburban cul-de-sac, has a nemesis.’ Robert seemed to think it was all about rivalry. ‘I mean, does Lucy have an underground lair? Is she planning to take over the world one cupcake at a time?’

  ‘Hmm?’ Deep in Mary-love, Marie was gone again, beyond even Robert’s reach. ‘Oven thermometer . . .’ she read out, wonderingly.

  ‘Goodnight.’ Robert, beaten, headed for the stairs.

  ‘Night, love.’ Busy scribbling, Marie didn’t look up. The list of things to buy in order to bring her equipment up to scratch was daunting. The cake tins and measuring cups she’d hauled out were dented and scratched or too damn old. She’d recognised a prehistoric loaf tin from her granny’s kitchen and been overwhelmed with a sensory memory of that beaming old lady enveloped by an aromatic fug of lemon-drizzle cake. Perhaps, Marie thought soppily, her granny was beaming down at her now, proud of her granddaughter’s (rather late) culinary aspirations.

  Or perhaps, she thought as she put aside the tin and wrote Silicone loaf-thingy, her granny was looking for her glasses and complaining about Terry Wogan, just as she had most of the time down here on Earth.

  Rarely up this late – dentistry is, as she often said with feeling, knackering – Marie savoured the quiet, looking contentedly around the tranquil room, but aware that the mellow lighting hid a multitude of sins. She saw everything now through the prism of Mary Berry’s expectations.

  The kitchen would have to shape up. It would have to get real. The rusted cheese grater would be chucked out; the microwave would be cleaned; she would learn how to switch on the cooker hood. It was as if, over the years, the kitchen had realised Marie didn’t take it seriously and had morphed into a room with far more emphasis on the eating of food than the preparation of it.

  Poor kitchen, thought Marie. It never stood a chance. She was drawn to recipes that proclaimed in bold print ‘express’ or ‘easy’ or ‘for the beginner’ at the top. She was a doyenne of the ready-meal, a devotee of the frozen pea, and believed the takeaway to be more beneficial to modern humanity than penicillin.

  Despite this, the kitchen was her favourite room in the house. As Mary said, it was the heart of the home. The Dunwoodys had had many lively debates in here over microwaved pie. They’d argued over fish and chips, sung songs from the shows over boil-in-the-bag curry and laughed until their Arctic roll came out of their noses.

  Learning to bake at Mary Berry’s knee would change all that. For the better. Her brood would become a family who ‘dined’ together, as opposed to sitting over pasta with the TV chummily butting in. The love she felt for them – sometimes hard to express in the hurly-burly of daily life – would blossom in her cakes and soufflés and flans and tarts and muffins and whoopie pies.

  Ironic, really, that tonight she’d slung burnt fish fingers at them in order to bury her nose in Berry. She’d packed the girls off to bed an hour later than normal, as befitted the first night of the summer hols, apologising for the lack of a bedtime chapter of Mallory Towers and appealing to their honour to undo each other’s plaits without supervision.

  After a decent interval, Robert had refilled her glass and murmured something about not wasting the peace and quiet – what with the twins in bed, and Angus out till God knows when – and did she remember what they did on the kitchen sofa that time after his nephew’s wedding?

  Marie did remember, and it was tempting (even though Iris had found her mother’s Spanx down the back of the cushions the next day while looking for a nit-comb), but she’d declined. ‘Mary’s my date tonight,’ she’d insisted, dashing her husband’s saucy hopes and surprising herself by eschewing a good seeing-to in favour of an appendix on egg size.

>   Far away, a church bell tolled two. Never audible in the day, it was crisp in the silent middle of the night.

  Partway through a recipe for millefeuille, which thrilled and terrified her in equal measure, Marie rose and went to the window.

  Beneath the table a snuffly heap, like an abandoned bath mat, stood, shook itself and followed her. Prinny was a rescue dog and there was no way of knowing his age. He was a mixture of many breeds, having cleverly bagged the scruffiest attributes of each. His ears didn’t match, and he loped like a jackal, but his heart was full to bursting with love for his owners, whose patting and stroking and adoration had done much to undo the damage left by the unguessable cruelties of his past. Greyish, brownish and terrible at fetching, he never liked to be far from a Dunwoody, so he couldn’t stay under the table while Marie was at the window.

  ‘Prinny,’ Marie cooed with the special soft voice she saved for their daft dog. His true title was Princess Mister Coochycoo – as good an illustration as any of why six-year-olds should never be allowed to name pets.

  The kitchen, part of a side extension, looked out on to Caraway Close. The lady of the house stared at the boxy modern shapes of her neighbours’ homes; like the Dunwoodys, most neighbours had added a room or two, or had carved windows into the roof. There was a basic similarity to each tidy dwelling, yet the owners had stamped their individuality on each property, from the peonies that turned number two into a riot of purple and pink, to the crazy-paving number twelve was so proud of, and the LA modernism of number nine, where every surface was arctic white and there was no evidence of human existence.

  Marie and Robert had moved here when she was just about to pop with Angus. She’d had cravings for cheese and clotted cream. Robert had asked to be excused the duty of carrying her over the threshold ‘in case I put my back out’. The kitchen had been a galley at the back, overlooking a playing field, which was now another estate of similar homes.

  The Close’s daytime technicolour was now toned down to night-time’s nostalgic black-and-white. Marie shooed away a jabbing finger of anxiety. Yes, sure, 2 a.m. was late for a fifteen-year-old to be out. But fifteen-year-olds were different these days: at that age she’d never tasted alcohol, been on a plane or cheeked her dad. And her own fifteen-year-old was particularly different. Angus was trustworthy, steady and – it could be admitted in the dead of night – a little odd.

  When Angus had announced (or muttered, rather) that he’d been invited to Lauren’s party, his parents had been surprised. They knew Lauren by sight; everybody did. The wild-child niece of a school governor, she ruled the roost at St Ethelred’s and managed to get away with a nosestud, a tattoo and a skirt rolled up so high it could double as a belt.

  Despite all the usual party fears – booze, cigarettes and worse – Marie was glad. So long a nerdy outsider, Angus was going to a party. No, the party of the year. And, she’d said to Robert as they chewed it over, things can’t get that out of hand at the home of a school governor.

  Marie was that rare creature: a mum who wished her teenager would get out more. She worried that Angus was too much of a loner. That he was too studious, too introverted, too wrapped up in the small world he composed carefully through his viewfinder. She also worried that he wasn’t getting enough vitamin C, that he had his granny’s legs and that the world might end in nuclear Armageddon before he reached twenty-one. In short, Marie worried about Angus (and the twins) more or less non-stop, with the occasional break to worry about Robert. She’d started worrying the moment her period had failed to materialise sixteen years ago; it was what mothers did. But right now she refused to fixate on the fact that Angus was late home, and resisted images of police cells, hospital beds and ditches.

  Wrapping her baggy, only-around-the-house cardi tighter, she wandered back to the table and picked up her glass. Life was approaching a phase that she dreaded.

  Bonds must be loosened.

  Chicks must be drop-kicked out of the nest.

  Just thinking this made her want to tug on her coat and rush off to locate Angus and squeeze him to her. Marie took a reassuring glug of wine. You let them go – so said those who’d already done it – and they do a big, wide circle and, eventually, come back.

  But how, how, how do you stand and watch the back of their head as they walk away?

  Marie put down the wine. You are a false friend, she told it sternly. One more sip and there would be tears. She was racing to meet her troubles halfway, a habit that always made Robert roll his eyes. If he was here instead of snoring upstairs, he would remind her that Angus was a sensible boy, a trustworthy boy – their boy.

  Yawning, stretching, Marie knew it was time for bed. She should slip between the covers and drop off to sleep, without neurotically listening for a key in the door.

  Just another page or two with Mary and she’d retire.

  TO: [email protected]

  FROM: [email protected]

  27.07.13

  3.09

  SUBJECT: oh no

  U awake? Bet youre not. I hope u r having nice dreams. Just gotin. Bit pised. God. Tonight. shit. Sorrry for swering. House is mad. Mum asleep at kitchen table. Dad asleep with rose between teeth. Twins asleep with plaits still in which is STTRICTLY AGAINST THE LAW.

  Glad Mum’s asleep cos of the pissed thing but also cos I don’t want to talk to anybody about what happened tonight except you. Why is life so difficult, Soulmate? especially love is hard and sex. Do you mind me saying this stuff? you are the only person i can say it to.

  my life is officially over. Tonight will come back to haunt me. The Clones will get me.

  laters

  Angus

  AUGUST

  Sunday Lunch

  Victoria Sponge

  Dear Granny Gaynor,

  I am good. How are you? Rose says hello. Shes at piano. I am not at piano because I don’t go to piano. Mum said you are coming to lunch next sunday and I am glad because you always give us money I miss you. Rose and me are top in English and almost top in maths and french. Mum is making a victorian sponge for sunday. Dad says when he divorces Mum he will name Mary Berry as the other man. I don’t think he means it. Do you really drink falling down water or was that a joke when Dad said it?

  lots of love Iris xoxoxoxoxo

  ‘A little wider, Mrs Blyton.’ Marie was peering into the open mouth of a librarian, but all she could think of was cake. ‘Lovely. Your gums have settled down nicely. Using an electric brush at last?’

  ‘Gnnn uf boom.’ Mrs Blyton waggled her eyebrows for emphasis.

  ‘Good, good,’ murmured Marie, thinking of cake. ‘Aileen!’ Her assistant was staring into space, shaking her bottom to the Michael Bublé track oozing out of the radio.

  ‘What? I’m ready.’ Dubliner Aileen waved her pencil, affronted. A spherical five-foot-nothing in her white overall, she was broad of accent and narrow of mind. Sarcasm flowed in her veins and she saw no reason – ever – to hold back. An excellent assistant, she had been with the clinic since Marie had opened Smile! a decade back; Marie loved her dearly, but sometimes it could be tough to recall why.

  ‘Cavity upper-six distal,’ said Marie, thinking of cake.

  ‘Ooh, a cavity.’ Aileen loved cavities. ‘Naughty-naughty, Mrs B. Somebody’s been at the sweetie jar.’

  ‘Ignore her, Mrs Blyton,’ said Marie. Thinking of cake. ‘Cavity lower-one-four mesial.’

  ‘We’ll have you in dentures if this carries on,’ giggled Aileen.

  ‘Have a rinse,’ said Marie, thinking of cake.

  ‘How’s the baking going?’ Aileen approved of little, but she approved of cake.

  ‘It’s . . . not as easy as I thought.’ Marie selected a slender instrument with a hook on the end.

  Mrs Blyton gulped.

  ‘Open wide,’ said Marie, thinking of her first attempt at cake, the night before.

  Eager to get cracking, she had ignored one of Mary’s mantras; she was not prepared. A shopping blitz
was scheduled for the weekend – the list had grown until it curled to the floor like Rapunzel’s hair – but Marie’s fingers twitched with the desire to create cakey splendour. Her path to next year’s show-stopper started here.

  And stopped here, when she realised she didn’t own the requisite loose-bottomed twenty-centimetre tins.

  ‘Damn,’ she said, as Robert leaned against the fridge, making sundry poor jokes about loose bottoms. ‘You!’ She pointed at the nearest twin. ‘Iris! Go and ask Mrs Gray if she’s got two I can borrow.’

  ‘Ooh,’ said Robert, opening the fridge and extracting a friendly little bottle of sauvignon. ‘Sending your poor, defenceless daughter into the enemy camp.’

  Marie, trying to look as if she was washing up, watched Iris pick her way along the winding front path (Iris never, ever walked on the grass, literally or metaphorically) and trot over to the Gray house.

  ‘Why is Chloe’s house the enemy camp?’ Rose, sitting beneath the table with Prinny, made Robert jump and spill some of his precious Daddy Evening Juice.

  ‘That was just a silly joke, darling.’ Marie flashed Robert a punitive pas devant les enfants look – a look that les enfants had understood since before they could parler.

  Soon Iris was back, cradling two shiny tins and chewing ‘the most gorgeousest fudge ever – and Mrs Gray made it!’

  Mrs Gray can fudge off, thought Marie, as she waved her thanks from her kitchen window to Lucy’s house. ‘Right.’ She put her hands on her hips.

  ‘Somebody means business,’ said Robert, happily settling down at the table as if front row at a show.

  ‘Are you going to make stupid comments the whole time?’ asked Marie, running a finger down the ingredients list and stopping, with a start, at margarine.

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Robbie,’ wheedled Marie, using the nickname she used only when begging a favour or eliciting sex. ‘Could you pop to the corner shop for me?’

  ‘It’s hardly popping,’ said Robert, holding the tube of Pringles he’d just opened to his chest like a baby. ‘It’s not really on the corner. It’s three streets away. We just call it the corner shop. And it probably isn’t open this late.’