Page 62 of The Cake Fairies
Chapter Twenty-Eight
ANNABELLE
Annabelle would tell Polly today. Not the bit about the way she’d tracked Alex down to his flat share, in an attempt to seduce him while Polly sat in the lap of luxury in Fortnum’s.
There was really no need to relay the finer details. What was done was done. It was shameful and she was sorrier than sorry. Besides, it could only half count in reality. 2019 was just a stopgap, a sabbatical from the reality of 1969. So really, it’d been nothing more than a little role-play in a dream. It wasn’t as if anything they were doing now truly existed in their own time and space in any case.
She tried in vain to shrug off the hideous memory, but her early morning trance-like lie-in carried her right back to 44, Eccles Street (Alex would reside somewhere cakey, although he’d probably never savoured the old-fashioned northern goodies, being such a boundary-pushing kitchen pro). She remembered the enticing aroma of burnt sugar outside his pillar-box red door and the intoxicating bloom of the violet buddleia, sprinkled liberally with butterflies.
“Annabelle? How’s tricks? Where’s Polly? How can I…” She’d flashed open her coat, hoping to prove as much of a honeytrap as the buddleia. But he’d stood there, dumbfounded on his own doorstep, eyes vast as spaceships – and not in a good way either. “Er… I… don’t really understand quite what’s going on.”
“Oh, Al,” she’d tipped back her head with what she’d expected would be an irresistible mix of seduction and humour. “Never mind my dreary cousin. It’s pretty obvious we have unfinished business to attend to, before I leave the city,” she threw in a minxy flutter of the fake eyelashes she’d spent a bloody fortune on in the swanky beauty concession in Harrods just two hours ago, squinting at her reflection in the toilets in a bid to affix them properly. “But, of course, discretion is my middle name… which is why, when I weighed up the options of your place or mine,” she inched her perfectly sculpted pencil-thin brows ever higher. “I—”
“Woah.”
“Aw, I knew you’d like it, honey,” she flapped open her coat again, so he could admire her delicate curves in all the right places. The see-through panels of the lingerie skimming her breasts would certainly ease his imagination into the kind of things they could be doing in a very few minutes, when he opened that door wider and hauled her up the stairs to his bed, the sofa, the top of the washing machine – wherever. Annabelle wasn’t going to be finicky about surroundings.
“Will you give me a break?” He raised his hands and his head to the heavens as if he were communicating directly with God above. “And will you do that coat up already?” He looked determinedly at Annabelle’s feet. “I said woah as in STOP… not woah as in wow.”
With every ounce of her will, she refrained from letting her face fall.
“Look, I’m sorry Annabelle, because there’s little I can do to turn this on its head and make it anything but mightily embarrassing for you. You’ve got completely the wrong end of the stick! It’s your cousin I have feelings for, and, well, there’s no finer way of putting it so I’ll just come out and say it… it’s precisely because she’s the kind of woman who doesn’t go around doing stuff like this.”
He held up his right hand as a makeshift barricade between them and Annabelle felt his repulsion like a giant thud, almost causing her to fold in two at the waist.
“Fine,” she’d retorted, thrusting her shoulders back, and her bosom out as if she were Kitty Withers incarnate. “Your loss, and somebody else’s gain.”
“Oh, it will be. And you’ll meet him soon enough.” What did he know about the state of her private life? “Wait, come back! Why isn’t Polly returning my calls?”
Oh, that smarted. Like salt in the wound.
“Are you deaf as well as stupid?” Annabelle blinked back the hot tears which threatened to cascade. “She isn’t interested in your poxy invitation to afternoon tea. Get real, Alex. She isn’t interested in youat all!”
Yes. The silk black teddy and matching panties set ranked up there with the biggest, and most expensive, mistakes of her life to date.
And yes, it really had stung at first, for Annabelle’s advances had never been rejected before. The audacity! But he’d every right to say what he’d said, and she knew it. She was a tart and every version thereof in the thesaurus. As sneakily sticky as the ruby specimens they served back in Middle Ham. Not even a blanket of custard could douse her lowly act of promiscuity. Waiting for her own letter Z to manifest himself had made her utterly desperate.
But as the days and weeks sped by, they had the uncanny knack of rolling her ‘little white lie’ into a giant diamond white snowball of momentum; one she was increasingly reluctant to let go of, even if she’d been brought up to know right from wrong.
Anyway, Norwich had led them to Cambridge, Cambridge to Coventry, and Coventry to Chester. This week they were in Manchester, a place that would have felt like an alien landscape even back in ‘69. Here in 2019 it was a little like being on Mars, but thenCoronation Streethad only aired for the first time in 1960. Had the cousins watched it loyally, why, they’d have benefitted from a fair few decades to translate the northern inflexion.
And yet, she loved this part of the UK already. In much the same way as London, it was another beautiful melting pot of culture. And there was so much going on. She couldn’t even predict where Amber Magnolia would have them dropping their very first cake.
Nigel drove with his usual impervious speed up the motorway, a vast stretch of concrete linking the great cities and towns that she and Polly still couldn’t quite wrap their heads around. For in the late sixties only small sections of the M5 were being constructed in Somerset, and back then all they’d been able to do was gawp at the newspaper updates. And now here they were, cruising along, and it all seemed remarkably normal to everyone around her, and increasingly so to Polly. Yet the catapult in progress only made Annabelle pine all the more fiercely for home.
Their temporary quarters in Manchester couldn’t have been more unconventional if they’d tried. Nigel, sworn to secrecy by Amber Magnolia, pulled up beside a canal. Annabelle would be lying if she claimed her first thought wasn’t to panic and peg it. Maybe he’d had enough of ferrying them both about. Then he pointed at a barge. “Here’s home from home then,” he announced. “I struck it lucky this time, so I’ll be off to the purple palace,” meaning his beloved Premier Inn, with its homely indigo logo and its sleepy moon and stars. She could only hope their rustic – and hopefully stationary – boat would be half as comfortable. “You’ve the rest of the day off, but you’d best be ready for your first drop by 2 p.m. tomorrow. In fact, you’ll be early morning baking for the duration of the stay, I’m reliably informed.”
Would the conundrums never stop?
Polly led the way, shivering in the northern gusts as she wheeled her case up the wooden ramp and onto the cosy canal boat. They didn’t even bother to ask questions anymore. If it wasn’t a hotel, the kitchen would always be magically stocked up with goodies and baking paraphernalia in whichever form of rental Amber Magnolia had cherry-picked for them. Just as it had been in Leicester, Birmingham and Sheffield, as they’d zigzagged their way upcountry scattering giant gingerbread men (and women) cakes, cheesecake towers, and multi-tiered ‘doughnut deckers’ in cinemas, offices, ice skating rinks and bookshops. Heck, they didn’t even need to bring their folder, since a replica would always be waiting on a table, open and ready to announce their daily duties. It was funny how quickly they’d got used to it all. Annabelle would say it was akin to a far-fetched movie or a fantasy novel, but she doubted any onlooker would believe that any of this was feasible, even in dream form.
“So, this is a little bit regimented compared to last time,” Polly supped her coffee and let out a little moan of delight. Yes, it was official. Her cousin was a coffee bean convert. Hardly recognisable at all from the Doubting Thomasina who’d have dithered over whether to spread her toast with jam or marmalade back in the last century. Polly used to lap up all things regimented, too; heart soaring at the pleasure of a predictable pattern. Not any more, it seemed.
“Well, don’t stop now. Read it out. Let’s get my weary head wrapped around the latest venture.” Annabelle grimaced as she sipped at her infinitely more palatable cup of tea.
“Oh, gawd,” Polly cried, evidently (selfishly) reading ahead, which was ever-so-slightly hypocritical since, when it was her turn to narrate, Annabelle usually did the same.
“Oh gawd, what?” she replied in a hoity-toity voice, taking the mickey out of Polly’s almost neutral-sounding accent which seemed to be losing its Somerset twang a little more each day.
