The Sunshine And Biscotti Club (20 page)

Jessica and Eve had sorted the paintings into piles. Ones that were too awful to see the light of day again they put in one pile and others that might possibly complement the new scheme they put into another pile, along with some old etched mirrors, their glass speckled with age, that Eve insisted would add a bit of vintage chic. There were two boxes of possible ornaments, vases, statues, and sidelights that had potential and a whole stack of other rubbish they had sorted through ready for the tip.

Jessica was filthy. Her face covered in black smears, her hair thick with dust, her top damp from the baking heat of the metal garage. Their hangovers sweated away. Outside it had gone from day to dusk without either of them really noticing. So when Eve suddenly stood up straight and said, ‘I’m going for some air,’ Jessica wasn’t as surprised as she might have been to see Miles leaning against the doorframe.

‘Hi,’ she said, pushing her hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand.

‘Hi,’ he said, walking into the dark heat of the garage.

He came right over to where she was sitting on the floor, stacking a group of paintings ready to take them into the hotel. He rolled his lips together and looked at her for a second, then sat down on an old tea chest, elbows resting on his knees as he toyed with something between his fingers.

‘The thing about throwing something into a lake,’ he said, unfolding a water-damaged scrap of paper, ‘is that it has nowhere to go. There’s no current.’

Jessica swallowed. ‘I hoped it might sink,’ she said.

Miles shook his head.

‘You weren’t meant to read it,’ Jessica said.

‘No.’ He looked up at her under thick dark lashes. ‘But I’m glad I did.’

She stared back at him, a slight sickness rising in her chest.

‘I didn’t mean what I wrote about not being sorry,’ she said.

‘Yes, you did.’ He nodded.

‘I know,’ she said, scratching her head then pushing her hair back again. ‘I didn’t know she was going to die. I can’t believe it. I’m really sorry.’

‘It was pretty difficult to read.’ He looked up. ‘Not least ‘cos it was soaked with lake water,’ he added with a half-smile.

She nodded.

The outside lights flicked on, casting them in yellow, Miles’s face suddenly sharp and outlined but the expression in his eyes surprisingly gentle. ‘But it’s OK,’ he said. ‘This shouldn’t still be hanging over you.’

And she nodded again. Almost unable to stop. Nod, nod, nodding. She stopped as soon as she realised she was still doing it.

He folded up the paper and gave it back to her. ‘Thank you,’ she said, stuffing it into the pocket of her shorts.

He stood up and walked back over to the door. ‘Thank you as well,’ he said, pausing in the doorway, ‘for last night. For coming to my rescue.’

‘It’s the least I could do,’ she said.

He shrugged a smile. ‘Call it even?’

‘I’m not sure it’s quite the—’

‘Jessica,’ he said, resolute, ‘call it even.’ Then he walked away, back in the direction of the hotel.

The outhouse was spooky late at night.

Libby had helped clear up after the evening restaurant shift and then she’d left Giulia and Dino having cigarettes out the front before they went home; she headed through the hotel, out over the terrace, and down the path to the outhouse.

Eve, Jessica, Miles, Jimmy, and Dex had gone down to Bruno’s for a drink. Half of her was jealous to be missing out, but she needed to do this and there was no other time.

It was cool inside the building, moonlit shadows of the trees dancing eerily on the concrete floor as she fumbled for the light switch in the dark. When she found it and turned it on the room was thrown into stark, electric brightness. The window turned straight to black, reflecting all the empty workstations back at her, the ghosts of their owners behind them. Eve’s watch was still next to her mixer, Dex’s jumper thrown over the back of his stool.

Refusing to be spooked, Libby went to the front and set her camera up on the tripod. Then she got a selection of bowls out. Not all the fancy ones from the cupboard but some of her normal everyday ones as well as the real beauties that she saved for camera. Then she opened the drawer in the corner and took her mirror out.

Standing it on the shelf, she stared at herself. Her eyes looked tired from the day’s renovations, a hangover, and post-restaurant shift. Her mascara and liner were smudged, her foundation had barely survived, and her lips were back to their natural pink. She looked like her father.

Or maybe, she thought, she looked like her aunt.

The idea made her smile as she reached into the drawer and rummaged through all the various make-ups for a bronzer. The camera, however natural one wanted to be, was particularly unforgiving on paleness and she figured this was better one step at a time. She didn’t want to give them all the shock of their lives.

Then she tied her hair up, all of it, scraped back from her face like she did when she went swimming, high on her head so it caught up her fringe.

She’d done the shift in a white shirt with a red vest underneath, so she took the shirt off, left the vest, and donned her white chef’s apron. Then she reached forward and turned the camera on. No rehearsals except to check that she hadn’t chopped half her head off, she
said, ‘So this is what I look like when I’ve just finished work.’ She looked herself up and down and then back to the camera. ‘I thought it was time for you to see the real me for a change. The actual, every day version, and this is she.’ She paused; laughed. ‘God, I’m actually quite nervous,’ she said. ‘I want you to get to know me for me. No more perfect staging to hide behind. It might all be a bit less slick but it will be real, and that, for me at the moment, feels like what’s important.’

She paused, unsure how to carry on, deciding whether or not to say more but then looking down at the ingredients and realising it would be best to focus on what it was all about—the cooking.

‘OK. Right. I was thinking maybe tonight, because I’m knackered, I’d just show you how to make a really simple chocolate cake.

‘It’s very easy. There’s no twist. It’s just really, really good chocolate cake. It’s the one my mum used to make.’

In a bowl she mixed her dry ingredients, explaining the measurements as she went. Then went on to whisk her eggs with a fork and melt the butter and as she did she started to chat. Relaxed and calm with the camera. No longer spooked.

‘There were six kids in our house growing up,’ she said, ‘and we didn’t have a lot, but there was always a cake on a Friday when we came home from school. Always. And we’d come in, dump our stuff,
Blue Peter
would be on the telly in the corner of the kitchen and we’d be sitting round the table ready, even before it came out of the oven. There was this restless anticipation in the air. Like we knew it was Friday which meant the weekend and we knew we could stay up later and—I mean usually the weekend meant absolute chaos but before it started, when it was just Friday night, it could be anything. It didn’t matter. Because there was this piping hot cake and mugs of tea and no homework and without fail it was my favourite part of the week.’

It was the most she’d talked of her memories in years and she found herself unexpectedly proud. Felt the lightness of honesty in her tone. For a second she worried she might well up but she was nothing if not a professional and she certainly wouldn’t be crying on camera, so she smiled and went on. ‘It’s nothing fancy, it’s nothing flash, it’s just melt-in-the-mouth rich, indulgent, chocolate heaven—exactly what you want from a cake. And if you want to make it taste even better, sit and stare at it for ten minutes as it cools,’ she added with a laugh, a genuine laugh that she promised herself she wouldn’t edit out however bad she looked.

The cake went wrong twice. The first time she didn’t mix it long enough and there were white swirls of flour in her mixture as she scooped it into the tin so she heaped it back into the bowl, gave it another quick whisk by hand and said, ‘It could possibly be
over-whipped now, and I probably should have started again, but I don’t really have time and I certainly can’t see you having time so let’s just cross our fingers.’ The second time she took it out of the oven too early and then put it back in for too long and burnt the top. ‘See,’ she said, ‘everyone makes mistakes. It’s really just looking at how you salvage them. There you go, cake as a metaphor for life,’ she said with a knowing smile. ‘I know you know there have been ups and downs in my life recently, but this blog is meant to be about us creating stuff out of nothing. It’s meant to be positive. I find baking and cooking a real haven. Somewhere I can escape to when it all gets too tough, and I think that quite a lot of you must feel that way too. I know I’ve stopped it being possible to make comments on what I do—and I really miss all your lovely comments—but it just got a bit personal for a while there and I wasn’t ready for that, because that isn’t why I do this. I will put the comments back, I promise. Very soon. But for now, I’m just going to show you me, and you can decide if you like it—then we can get to know each other again.’

She sliced the burnt top off the cake and then slathered it in chocolate butter cream icing, dipping wedges of the chopped off top into the bowl and eating them as she iced. ‘Oh my god, even the burnt bits are amazing,’ she said, as she slid her finished cake onto one of her vintage glass cake stands. ‘This is how we ate it as kids. Nowadays I tend to cover it in cherries—especially
when they’re in season, which they are now, so …’ She went over and took the camera from the tripod. ‘I thought you might like to come and pick them with me.’

It was only as she walked to the door that she saw Eve standing watching in the shadows, clearly trying to look as if she wasn’t, but with the sweetest, proudest smile on the face.

‘This is my friend Eve,’ said Libby, pointing the camera in Eve’s direction, who put her hand up to shield her face and laughed. ‘She’s going to help me pick cherries.’

The next morning Eve was sitting with Jessica on the terrace having home-baked lemon curd cornettos and espresso for breakfast. The weather had changed overnight and they’d woken up to a thick marshmallow grey sky and a forest of fog rising over the lake. All the locals had their woolly jumpers on. With only a couple of days left, Eve and Jessica were sticking fast to the holiday feel in their flip-flops and vests; the only concessions to the chill were Eve’s jeans and Jessica’s big cotton scarf. Despite the goosebumps they pretended they were warm enough.

Eve had just put a big mouthful of cornetto in her mouth, the curd dripping out and onto her chin, when she heard a familiar voice say, ‘Eve.’

‘Peter?’ she said, looking around, shocked to see him walking through the maze of tables to get to theirs, dishevelled, travel worn, greasy haired, tired and a little grey.

‘What are you doing here?’ Eve said, standing up so quickly her chair teetered. ‘Where are the kids?’

‘With my mother,’ Peter said, rolling his hand luggage case up to the spare chair and then moving to stand opposite Eve.

Jessica dabbed her mouth with her napkin and said, ‘You know, I’ll probably just leave you two. Erm …’ She pointed towards the lemon grove and got up and left.

‘Are they OK?’ Eve asked. ‘Do they know you’re here?’

Peter nodded. ‘Yeah. They love it. She bought them an Xbox.’

‘Oh my god.’

He shrugged. ‘They like it.’

Eve sat down.

Peter sat down.

Eve pushed her hair back behind her ear. ‘Why are you here?’ she said.

‘To see you,’ he said, then picked up a spare knife and tapped the end on the table for a second or two before looking back at her and adding, ‘I missed you.’

Eve didn’t know what to say. She felt like she’d just been pushed off a ledge and was sitting startled, legs akimbo. The obvious answer was to say that she missed him too and then they would hug and kiss and all would be OK, but she had to tell him about Jimmy.

‘You look good,’ Peter said, staring at her face like he hadn’t seen it in years.

‘You look really tired.’

‘My plane was delayed on the runway for hours.’

She nodded. ‘I have to tell you something because I almost read your emails and I didn’t because you told me and I trust you and so for you to trust me I have to tell you …’

Jimmy stepped out onto the terrace with a plate of cornettos and a cappuccino. He had a newspaper under his arm and was dressed for meditation in his wide, baggy, grey tracksuit pants and black t-shirt. ‘Hey, dude,’ he said, nodding to Peter like they’d been mates for years.

Peter raised a hand in greeting and nodded.

‘I nearly kissed Jimmy,’ said Eve.

Jimmy stopped where he was.

‘You what?’ Peter asked.

‘Jimmy. We nearly kissed. But we didn’t. Nothing happened.’

Jimmy turned on his heel and walked straight back into the hotel.

Peter’s tired face fell. To Eve he looked just like Noah. Like he might cry, but without the trembling lip.

Jessica arrived at the beach as the first drop of rain fell. Lightly to begin with, just tiny circles in the lake like a million fish coming up for air.

Miles was just coming out of the water, a silhouette in the mist. He saw her as he was reaching to get his towel and he jogged over to where she was standing on the boardwalk. His hair was blacker from the water, his eyelashes clumped from the moisture, his cheekbones sharp, his expression serious. The clouds behind him looked like thunder.

‘You OK,’ he said, ‘with everything yesterday?’

Jessica nodded.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘So we can be normal?’

‘Yeah.’ She swiped some rain out of her eyes. ‘But I still feel like I should keep apologising to you, just again and again.’

‘Well that’s stupid,’ he said, towelling himself dry despite the rain. ‘It’s over, it’s past. I was annoyed with
you for a bit but, Jessica, it’s so small in the scale of things.’

She nodded. ‘I know. I just made it big.’

He watched her. The rain pattered down around them.

‘And I’m not in love with you any more. I’m really not,’ she said into the silence. ‘Just for the record. Just to clarify.’

He nodded. ‘OK.’

The clouds got darker. Over the lake they were black, swooping down on the treetops like smoke.

‘OK,’ she said, nodding her head.

‘OK,’ he said, his mouth just tilting up into a smile.

She huffed a small laugh. ‘OK.’

He grinned at her.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘Don’t apologise again.’

‘OK.’

He laughed. ‘OK.’ Then he put one hand out and squeezed her arm before jogging back up to the hotel, the rain getting steadily heavier as he disappeared into the lemon grove.

She watched him long after he’d gone. Knowing that that was as good as it was ever going to get. And she was OK with that.