Page 79 of The Cake Fairies
“So? How did that impact your parents?”
“C’mon, Annabelle. You remember my mother. Dawdy, inelegant, frumpy… and totally besotted with my father. Do you know she only ever baked cake for him? The rest of us were forbidden from eating it. Like joy was exclusively his.”
Polly laughed pitifully.
“The irony being he didn’t have a remotely sweet tooth, so her efforts would often lie abandoned in the tin, getting staler by the day. George helped himself to a slither of plum and marzipan cake once, but even he wasn’t crafty enough to get away with it; left the sides all uneven, crumbs littering the worktop. I’d never seen my mother so furious. She got out the rolling pin and flew at him. Father was dressing the wound on his backside for weeks.”
Annabelle yelped and they sat side by side in stunned silence and knocking back hearty gulps of their coffee and tea.
“But I have such wonderful memories of cake feasts at your place.”
“Me too. But don’t you find it strange how they were always with a gaggle of significant others; scores of extended family grown-ups? Those crystal cake stands only got to twinkle when we had guests. It was all for show.”
“Now I come to think of it, I guess so, yes. There was never cake on the go when I came to play.”
“Exactly. We’d be lucky to get our hands on a shop-bought Rich Tea biscuit.”
“Whereas my mother made a never-ending supply of Madeira cake, likedeja vuon repeat.”
“She stuck to what she knew – even if she had never visited a tropical island. But she shared it, Annabelle. That’s the difference. She still does.”
“Oh, don’t! You’ll start me off again,” Annabelle sniffed.
“That’s why I threw myself into baking whenever my mother vacated the kitchen. I guess I’ve been playing mother hen to my brothers for a very long time.”
Yet there was more to it than that. She’d wanted to share that elation with everyone. Even the likes of Kitty Withers. That’s the real reason she’d opened the village bakery.
“They were never a match of the heart, my poor parents,” she reminisced. “I can’t help but feel sorry for them both – just in very different ways. Sadly, the jigsaw puzzle was too complex for it to be anything but. If the farm and my father’s so-called inheritance unravelled…” she fell silent, perusing that dreadful thought, “and so the only way for him to keep it all was to agree to the marriage.”
“Flippin’ heck.”
“I loved them both. But when you find out the way you were created was duty-bound… let’s just say from that day forth I better understood my brothers and the way they’d turned out. It hit us all hard. It wasn’t just that my parents were unconventional, that mother was so frosty, father off-hand at best.She loved him more than she loved any one of us children.Sounds dramatic, but it’s the painful truth. And that’s why they both died that day. Father was foolish, for sure. He should have properly secured his ladder. More to the point, he should have known better than to attempt to patch up roof tiles during the opening blusters of a gale force storm. And he definitely shouldn’t have entrusted Ray with his life. I’ve seen it over and over in my mind’s eye, Annabelle. At least… Ithinkwhat I saw was Ray walking away. I was some distance away myself in the orchard at the time. And yet I’m almost certain he let go of the ladder. Of course, he blamed it all on the approaching ninety mile per hour winds, didn’t he?”
Annabelle looked like a goldfish; no doubt wondered why Polly hadn’t gone to the police. But who would have believed her? Ray was friends with half the local police force for starters. Many of them were the Williams brothers’ cider-loving customers. Even if she did feel she had law on her side, family virtues were as thick as blood. She’d have been homeless if she’d grassed Ray up for his supposed crime. Ironically, a mobile phone with an inbuilt camera would have been put to good use in the tragic turn of circumstances that day. Not that Polly ever wanted to witness what happened again.
And now Polly had started her story, had dared to spill the awful secret that had been weighing her down for so long. She couldn’t stop if she wanted to.
“Yep. My younger brother. I’m sure Dave and George have their suspicions too… deep down inside. He probably killed my father.He probably killed his own father.The runt of the litter, desperate for some motherly love. Only fate has a funny way of doing whatever the hell it wants.” Polly inhaled deeply, holding her breath until she couldn’t keep it to herself anymore. She exhaled and blinked the tears from her eyes. “Mother was up in the eaves, watching from the window, panicked that she’d lose the love of her life when she saw him hanging by a thread, the ladder crashing to the ground… and she stupidly clambered out of that tiny window to attempt to play heroine, sliding and crashing to her own tragic fate as he fell to his. Meanwhile, I watched on helplessly, trudging buckets of apples from the orchard, their hazy figures becoming clearer with every lurch forward I took, until I shed my load and ran.”
“Families,” said Annabelle after a lengthy pause, dabbing at her sodden eyes with her cardigan sleeve, turning to embrace Polly for the second time in as many days, only this time it was her turn to instigate tea and sympathy. “There’s not one that’s normal.”
