Page 60 of The Cake Fairies
Chapter Twenty-Seven
POLLY
Polly tried not to think about Alex, but it was impossible. Every night she’d replay their date-that-wasn’t-a-date-but-bloody-well-felt-like-a-date in her head, sleep evading her until the early hours, wondering what she had done so terribly wrong on the London Eye. Annabelle’s strange drunken probing at the Vicky Palace hardly helped.
In the end she knew it was her meltdown. Alex was simply an actor. He’d dealt with it well, and she had to be grateful that he’d given her skills she could use for future panic-stricken scenarios. That was kind. Not that she was convinced she’d remembered them properly, or else she’d surely have passed them along to a certain temporary manager of a football merchandise stall.
But, ultimately, no man would voluntarily sign themselves up for the drama of her anxiety. At least she hadn’t told Alex a thing about her past. The wound ran deep but it would heal in time… like when she was ninety and years past the blossoming of love interests. She could only hope that when she and her cousin came full circle and completed the loop of their journey back in London at the end of the summer, he’d be long gone; Copenhagen having called him.
Where he’ll shack up with a Pernille, get married, have the world’s most adorable golden-haired, blue-eyed cherubic babies, and live happily ever after. Oh, and open up an award-winning café.
Norwich did its best to distract her. But it wasn’t the Norman city’s fault that its quirky Norwich Lanes, stunning castle and cathedral, half-timbered medieval houses, and its ever-sought-after University barely had her bat an eyelid in wonder. It seemed the whole world had lost its sparkle, with the realisation that she’d never feast her eyes on him again.
At least the cake drops had been complex and epic, their construction taking up the best part of the days. But it had all got a little repetitive when Amber Magnolia had asked them to create a variety of ‘rainbow-layered beauties’ for an entire fortnight on the trot. And the crash and burn for the local inhabitants, from the vast array of E numbers involved, didn’t bear thinking about! She may not have been clued up on any of that in the late sixties, but she’d garnered from the vast amount of baking research she’d undertaken in this time and place that chemicals were the culprit for a vast amount of behavioural problems. Sure, there were weak and watered-down alternatives for blues, indigos and reds. But they’d hardly be as striking.
“Day Thirty-One.”
“Has it been that long already?” Polly interjected, as Annabelle read from the folder. Evidently her cousin was skim-reading, because she was already shaking her head in despair at the forthcoming ream of instructions.
“To create a tidal wave of change, sometimes we have to do the same thing over and over and over and over and over.” Annabelle sighed. “She’s written the word ‘over’ fourteen blimming times.”
“She’s obviously trying to make a point about something,” Polly shook her own head.
“You have great potential in this intelligent city to effect transformation like never before; the kind of change that will take care of a vast expanse of the East and all of its windmills and canals.”
“I’m pretty sure the windmills and canals of Norfolk are stuck in a healthy pre-technology bubble of their own.” Eye-rolled Polly. “The woman becomes more of a puzzle of an enigma buried deep within the layers of a set of Matryoshka dolls every day,” she said, tacking on another exasperated sigh.
“Agreed. But like you said on gin night,” Annabelle shuddered, presumably at her over-enthusiasm to try every botanical behind the bar. “What choice do we have but to go with this?”
Polly wondered for the umpteenth time how any of this hare-brained quest could ever have had a thing to do with her love life. She’d been surer than sure, that Alex was somehow The One – just in a rather extraordinary disguise. When they were together, all the common sense spouted by her head fizzled into nothingness, and her heart was unable to resist. Even now, despite the way he’d treated her so abysmally, once her initial anger had dissipated, she was overwhelmed with a sense of pining and loss.
She couldn’t possibly expect Annabelle to understand. Her cousin’s dating style had always been as clean-cut as New York cheesecake, while epitomising the casual modus operandi of the great city’s modern daters: one potential guy on the way out, one current, and one on the way in. Spin the plates. Juggle the balls. Well, the latter not literally, of course.
Polly chewed at her lip to mask her smirk, intent on following the remainder of Amber Magnolia’s goofy instructions, because at least they were semi-helping to take her mind off things. Although she cringed at the amount of scrubbing all of this happy-go-lucky food colouring would result in.
“I want you to make it up as you go along in Norwich,” Annabelle continued, and Polly wondered if that was the only random bit she’d missed, her mind trailing off again. “Spontaneity can’t be overlooked in the new millennium. Just make sure your rainbow bakes are different every day and cast yourselves liberally across the city, so you mix up cake deposits with a lovely cross section of the demographic. Toodle-pip.”
Polly almost sprayed today’s outfit with a mouthful of coffee.
This would be in stark contrast to the pristinely pre-scripted Tunbridge Wells drops. It was a place where gentry and royalty had once hobnobbed, and it was still upmarket now. The Pantiles, and more to the point, its esteemed clientele, weren’t really in any great need of gin and toniccroquembouchetowers – not when its regulars found it perfectly affordable to shell out up to a thousand pounds on one of those flouncy modern baby reveal cakes, a smidgen less on a shamefully wasteful ‘baby smash’ creation to celebrate their little prince or princess turning one; or a more modest five hundred on a unicorn coming-of-age cake for their tween’s milestone eleventh birthday.
Eighteenth, twenty-first, and wedding day celebrations probably rivalled a mortgage.
Polly knew that price and ethos had evolved, but even for the year 2019, this kind of opulence seemed a tad extortionate, when there were homeless people sleeping nearby on the streets. Then again, this trip in time had opened her eyes to charity and benevolence like never before. A kind soul she may have been in 1969, but she could hardly profess to have visited a soup kitchen, much less engaged in any real philanthropy. Aunt Jemima and Uncle Bert got the bakery leftovers – and only then if the hens didn’t queue-jump; some things hadn’t changed since she was in nappies.
At least the cakes that wended their way to Tunbridge Wells’ numerous industrial zones had had slightly more deserving recipients waiting to dispose of them. Polly couldn’t help but feel sorry for the workers, beached like whales in their endlessly uninspiring grey units, stacked together as if they were Stickle Bricks, doing whatever it was that they did inside those vast containers. It made her realise how much she missed the uplifting views of London. Which brought her back to the beginning of the very vicious circle; the hoop she was hopelessly trapped inside: it made her realise how much she missed Alex.
She grabbed furiously at her desperately-in-need-of-a-trim-hair, piling it atop her head and securing it with a large clip. Enough!
With that deft change of style, she determined to shape-shift into a changed woman.
He was history. Just like Napoleon and Drake and Darwin. Except here was a guy she couldn’t possibly label with their level of world-changing importance. Even if his cake was the stuff of champions.
After two weeks of whipping up their own cakes in The Vicky Palace’s miniscule kitchen, tripping over the chefs to get to the oven, it was a relief to find themselves in a cute city-centre Tudor cottage in Norwich with an even titchier workspace, but a workspace of their very own; the kind of property that leaned to the side so much that you wondered if it would still be intact when you returned from your daily errands. Nigel was even staying in the slightly wonkier example of medieval architecture next door, as opposed to the comfort zone surroundings of the cheapest Premier Inn, and oh, didn’t they know it:
“S’like being put up inside the leaning tower of Pisa,” he grumbled, ferrying them to and from their various drop destinations as the fortnight played out – with the exception of the gloriously pedestrianised London street and its hubbub of retail therapy. Although Polly made a mental note to herself to steer Annabelle well clear of that. She still wasn’t convinced about the posh charity shop explanation for her cousin’s sudden accrual ofprêt-à-porterfashion. Once again, though, there was barely a minute to rake through her thoughts about that with their current – and rather ludicrous – challenge.
“At least you’re on holiday,” Annabelle snapped, after a week of Nigel’s complaints. The slight irony of that remark being that today was the day both Cake Fairies had deemed it time they rewarded themselves with the icy bottle of pink champagne that’d been waiting in the back seat of the limo for weeks now. Annabelle raised her glass to their driver through the partition. “And at least your fingertips aren’t stained grass-green and sky-blue. Although, while we’re on the subject, you could offer to help us out in the kitchen. You might even learn something new.”
