Christmas At The Cupcake Cafe (23 page)

This martini, on the other hand, was pure alcohol and, frankly, rocket fuel. She put it down spluttering, her eyes watering.

‘Ooh, got ourselves a party girl,’ said Merv approvingly, as the rest of the table looked on superciliously. Issy thought she heard the director’s wife mutter something about ‘British drinkers’.

‘Actually, Isabel runs her own business,’ said Austin.

‘Oh, really? Doing
what?’ asked the other man.

‘I make cupcakes,’ said Issy.

‘Oh, that’s so
cute
,’ said Candy. ‘I wanna do that, Merv.’

‘Course you can, darling,’ said Merv.

‘Oh, wow, it must be so much fun, you must just have such an awesome time!’ said Candy.

‘Every second,’ said Issy. She glanced at Austin, glanced at the table, and determined to finish the entire drink, even if it did taste like very expensive petrol.

‘What is it?’ hissed Pearl. ‘Ben, you’ve got to give me some warning when you come round! It’s not right. I’m just about to put Louis to bed. He’s got school tomorrow.’

‘I know,’ said Ben. ‘Ssh. Come see this.’

He dragged her closer for a kiss, and she could smell hash on his breath. Her heart sank.

‘You been eating chicken?’ he said. ‘Got any more? I’m hungry.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘What is it, Ben? You haven’t been by in weeks.’

‘Yeah, but look.’

He beckoned her out in the freezing wind – she wished she’d grabbed her coat – to a beat-up old van that wasn’t his, as far as she knew, and flung open the back door.

‘Ta-dah!’

Pearl peered inside, lit only by the street light. At first she couldn’t quite figure out what it was. Then she realised. It was a huge box. The writing on it became clear.

‘A monster
garage,’ she breathed.

‘I told the little man I wouldn’t let him down,’ said Ben.

‘But … but … I mean, have you been working?’

She knew what she meant by this. If he was working, he was meant to give her some money. That was the deal.

‘Oh, just a bit, here and there …’ said Ben. He couldn’t quite meet her eyes.

‘Do you mean working properly, a proper job? Where? Was it cash in hand? With Bobby or who?’ demanded Pearl.

‘Oh, well, I thought you’d be pleased,’ said Ben, cross now. ‘I thought you’d be happy that we got the little man the one thing he wants more than anything … thought we could wrap it up too, you know, with a big bow, the whole works. Maybe I’ll just throw it away, huh? Just set it on fire because I haven’t got my P60 and a receipt and everything else …’

‘Ben,’ said Pearl, desperate not to start a fight. ‘Ben, please. It’s just it’s so expensive …’

‘I know how much it is,’ said Ben, his handsome face set like stone. Pearl swallowed. She wanted to believe he had a job, she did, but why couldn’t she get a straight answer out of him?

She didn’t say
anything more. Ben cursed quickly under his breath then turned to go.

‘Don’t you want to come in and see Louis?’ Pearl said, a little reluctantly.

Ben shrugged, then slouched past her in through the door of the little ground-floor flat.

‘DADDY!’ Louis’ shout of joy, Pearl reflected, could be heard halfway down the street.

Pearl never swore. She thought it showed an uncontrolled mind. But she got extremely close to it right then. She looked around. Someone had built a snowman from the dirty leftover snow of a few days ago. Someone else had taken the carrot off its nose and put it where a penis would be. Pearl sighed, and went back indoors, out of the freezing cold, feeling very far away from wishing goodwill upon all men.

‘So, Austin,’ Merv was saying, sitting back in his banquette and grumbling, presumably not for the first time, about the fact that he couldn’t smoke his cigar indoors. ‘What would you say our prospects are vis-à-vis …’

Issy had realised that frankly there wasn’t a single thing she could contribute to the conversation – Candy was playing with her phone, like Darny would have been doing, and the director’s wife, who was called something like Vanya or Vania or something that sounded like it might be a name but wasn’t really, was making a massive point of differentiating herself from Issy and Candy by insisting on joining in with the men’s conversations in a highly technical and competitive way.

Candy yawned every
so often quietly behind her hand, but then would lean in and stroke Merv’s thigh in an affectionate manner. Issy realised that a charming waiter was refilling her glass every time she took so much as a sip of the ambrosial white wine, so she kept at it. Since neither Vanya nor Candy ate at all, Issy went at the bread basket in an almost passive-aggressive manner. Meanwhile Austin was talking about Europe and money and futures and micro-trading and other things Issy hadn’t even heard of in a way that was completely beyond her and very impressive.

She wondered what Austin thought about her job – he saw her at work, she supposed, making coffee and baking cakes and handling the customers, but she didn’t think he found it very impressive (she was quite wrong to think this; Austin thought what she did was amazing). Meanwhile, here he was, eating a very rare steak and explaining why the future of Europe was as luxury-goods merchants to roaring emerging economies, whilst everyone nodded sagely and listened to everything he said. Suddenly Issy wished Darny were there to wind Austin up and say something cheeky.

Cosy in the warm restaurant, drinking quite a lot of wine and eating her food without saying very much, Issy had felt herself start to slightly drift off when she heard her name.

‘It’s like Issy’s
business model,’ Austin was saying. ‘High-end products, immaculately made and presented, not mass-market. That’s the future, because everywhere else we can’t compete.’

The table turned towards Issy, who felt very fuzzy in the head.

‘What?’ she said.

‘Is that true, Issybel?’ asked Merv. ‘Are you the future of commerce? When you’re awake?’

Everyone laughed as if he’d said something funny, and Issy blushed bright red and couldn’t think of a single word to say.

‘Well?’ said Merv.

‘Do you think your model is going to drive European-zone regeneration?’ snapped Vanya, as if they were in court or something.

‘Ha, well, hem,’ said Issy. She was bursting with embarrassment and bright red. Austin hadn’t told her this was a bloody job interview for her too. Even worse, because she hadn’t been following the conversation, she didn’t have a clue what to say. And even if she had, she didn’t know what the right answer was anyway.

‘Well, gee, it’s nice to have a hobby,’ said Vanya with a large fake smile, turning back to her salad and mineral water.

Austin took Issy’s hand under the table and gave it a sympathetic squeeze. This made things worse as far as Issy was concerned; she didn’t need his sympathy: she needed not to be put on the spot. The conversation moved on to real-estate prices, but Issy still sat there, burning up with crossness and feeling stupid and inferior.

Finally, when the
pudding menu was coming round and Vanya and Candy were holding their hands up against it as if it were a list of poisons (which, Issy reflected, taking it, was probably exactly what they did think), Issy was ready. She launched in.

‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘if you make stuff that’s really good, people realise it’s a superior product. Well, most of the time. They still sell lots of squirty cream in cans. Anyway, that’s not important. The important thing is that even if people have less money, they’ll still buy themselves small lovely things as a treat. Sometimes even more because they’re staying in a lot, trying not to buy too much, so they’ll have a little reward …’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Vanya, sounding bored. ‘But what does that mean on a macroeconomic level to you?’

Issy spluttered. ‘It means … I’ll tell you what it means,’ she said, drunker than she’d realised, and suddenly sick of being patronised and talked down to and ignored and treated as the uninteresting dumpy girlfriend of the brilliant and fascinating man by these stupid, annoying glamorous Americans. ‘It means I wake up every day and I do a real thing. I get my hands dirty. I create something from scratch, with my bare hands, that I hope people will love, and they do, they really do; and I turn out something perfect and beautiful, that is meant to be enjoyed, and people realise that, and they do enjoy it and they pay me money for it and that is the best job in the bloody world and we should all be lucky enough to do something like that and that’s where we should be focusing our efforts. What did you create today, Vanya? Did anyone pick up one of your reports and smell it and give you a big smile and tell you it was absolutely bloody amazing?’

She paused to savour
the open mouths round the table.

‘No, I didn’t think so.’

She turned to the waiter.

‘Does the gateau de fôret noire come with fresh cherries or marinated? Tell the chef fresh if he can, it’s far better; the acidity balances out the sweetness instead of making it cloying and overbearing. Of course, I’m sure he already knows that. On a macro level. So I’ll take it.’ And she shut the menu with a triumphant snap.

The party headed out rather mutedly, except for Merv, who had suddenly found Issy a bit of a one and asked her lots of cake-based questions and whether she could make a decent kugel, which actually she’d never heard of, then described his grandmother making it in their little Long Island kitchen and complaining that she couldn’t get kosher sugar and that the base wasn’t right, and Issy tried to talk him through it to see if she could figure it out.

No one else spoke
to her at all; even Austin seemed stiff, and Issy, through her slightly drunken haze, started to worry that in fact rather than putting her point in a cool and measured way, she had perhaps shouted at everybody else at the table completely unnecessarily. Oh well. She couldn’t worry about that now.

As they got to the door, the beautiful waitress brought them their coats. Issy shrugged herself into Caroline’s now even tighter ridiculous white jacket. Candy stopped short. Then she leaned closer.

‘Oh. My. God,’ she said, the first direct thing she’d said to Issy all night. ‘Is that … is that the new Farim Maikal?’

Issy didn’t have the faintest clue who it was, but the name definitely rang a bell. And actually, now she thought about it, Caroline had gone on and on about the coat when it had arrived and been really smug about it and how she’d got one over on her friends and this would show them and all sorts of other stuff that Issy hadn’t really understood. But Farim she thought she remembered.

‘Hmm,’ she said non-committally.

‘It IS!’ breathed Candy. ‘Can I touch it?’ She held out her hand, reverently stroking the ridiculous white fur and collar studs. ‘Wow, the wait list at Barneys for this was like … wow.’

Even Vanya was
looking at it with a touch of jealousy.

‘Shame they didn’t have your size,’ she said.

‘Oh man, that doesn’t matter, she looks amazing,’ said Candy. ‘Anybody would who got their hands on one. This is THE hot coat this winter.’

Issy bit her lip and suddenly felt a terrible wave of homesickness.