Meet Me at the Cupcake Café (52 page)

‘The insects?’

‘The rose growers.’ Carole sniffed. ‘I slave over the minutes for them.’

‘I know what that’s like,’ said Issy sympathetically, but Carole didn’t seem to hear her.

‘Do they all still love you in the office, darling?’ she cooed to Graeme. Graeme grunted and indicated that he was trying to watch the television. ‘He’s ever so popular there,’ she said to Issy.

‘I know,’ said Issy. ‘That’s where we met.’

Carole raised her eyebrows. ‘I thought he said you worked in a shop.’

‘I run my own business,’ said Issy. ‘I’m a baker. I make cakes and so on.’

‘I can’t eat cakes,’ said Carole. ‘They interfere with my digestion.’

Issy thought with some regret of the lighter-than-air sponge sitting in the kitchen. They’d already eaten the ham sandwiches – it had taken two minutes – and she now felt trapped and unsatisfied, still sitting at the table, waiting for the tea to cool.

‘So, er,’ said Issy, desperate to get this conversation on track. Graeme was whooping a goal; Issy didn’t have the faintest idea who was playing. But this was, potentially, her future mother-in-law sitting in front of her. Potentially, the grandmother … Issy stopped herself thinking along those lines. It was far too early, and far too precarious, to think along those lines. She decided to stick to the safest possible ground.

‘So, Graeme was totally the most popular at work. He’s doing brilliantly there, I think, still. You must be very proud.’

Carole almost softened for a second before remembering that this chubby, ageing harpy sitting in front of her had had the temerity to show up with a cake, implying that she, Carole, didn’t bake for her own son, and had swanned in here with her shoes on like she owned the place already.

‘Yes, well, he always did go for the best, my son,’ she said, larding the comment with as much double meaning as she could manage. Issy had been completely crestfallen.

There had been another long, uncomfortable silence, punctuated only by Graeme cheering or sighing along with his football team.

‘She hates me,’ Issy had pointed out mournfully in the car on the way home.

‘She doesn’t hate you,’ said Graeme, grumpy because his team had lost again. In fact, Carole had taken him into the kitchen to tell him in no uncertain terms that she wasn’t happy. Wasn’t Issy terribly old? And just a baker? Graeme, unused to his mother questioning his judgement on anything, had tuned out. He didn’t need Issy nipping his head about it too. Issy hadn’t deliberately tried to overhear the conversation in the kitchen, but figured the very fact that Carole had decided she and Graeme needed a private chat was probably all the information she needed. ‘She just thinks you’re a bit old.’

Graeme turned up Radio 5 Live. Issy stared out of the car window, into a rainstorm coming in from the east, over Canary Wharf. The raindrops came down thick and heavy, and started hitting the window.

‘That’s what she said?’ said Issy quietly.

‘Mm,’ said Graeme.

‘Do you think I’m a bit old?’

‘For what?’ said Graeme. He had the distinct sensation that this was a conversation he didn’t want to be in, but here he was stuck in a car with it, and no way out.

Issy closed her eyes tightly. So close, she thought. So close; she could just ask him now. Was this her happy-ever-after? Get it sewn up. Signed, sealed and delivered. But what if she did ask and the answer was ‘no’? And what if she did ask and the answer was ‘yes’?

If both the answers were going to make her unhappy, well, what did that mean? What did that make her? Suddenly she saw the years stretching ahead … Graeme, marching forward with his career, using her, maybe, as a sounding board if he needed to vent, but otherwise as a general slave … ignoring her to watch TV, the way he did his mother. An easy, non-demanding doormat.

Well, maybe she had been a bit like that – Helena, she was sure, would agree. But she had changed. The café had changed her. For the better. And this time it wouldn’t be shouting and histrionics, or an optional go-and-come-back whenever he wanted a hot meal. She would do it properly.

‘Graeme …’ she said, turning to him in the rain-flecked car.

‘What do you mean?’ Graeme had said. He’d been more upset than Issy had expected, but of course she didn’t know what this meant for him at work.

‘I don’t think … I don’t think this is going to work out, do you?’ said Issy, as calmly as she could, reflecting, as she did so, on the fine profile and tight jaw, as he cut up another car splashing out of a roundabout. After swearing repeatedly, he had shut up like a clam and refused to speak to her any more. As soon as was legally possible, he had simply stopped the car and dropped her by the side of the road. It felt oddly fitting somehow, thought Issy, watching the sports car zip away. Allow him his petty little victory; in fact, it wasn’t cold outside in the rain, she didn’t even mind too much; and when a cab cruised past, its yellow light shining like a friendly beacon, she hailed it to take her home.

Helena shrieked when she came in, and demanded all the details of her disastrous visit to Graeme’s mother.

‘It just became obvious,’ said Issy, ‘that, regardless of
what
is out there … well, it was doing me no good. Although,’ she said, with slightly wobbly bravado, ‘I would have liked to have a baby.’

‘You’ll have a baby,’ said Helena reassuringly. ‘Maybe freeze some eggs just in case.’

‘Thanks, Lena,’ said Issy, and her friend took her in her arms and gave her a long, reassuring hug.

Issy felt much better after a night’s sleep. After dispensing the goodies – which were met with considerably more enthusiasm than her Victoria sponge had been the day before – she flopped on to her grampa’s bed like she needed it more than he did.

‘Hello, Gramps.’

Her grandfather was wearing his little half-moon reading glasses. They were the same style he had worn when she was a child. She wondered if they were the same actual pair. He was from that generation – the type who didn’t change things just because they were tired of them, or they were outdated. You bought something, or married someone, and stuck with it.

‘I’m just writing a recipe to my granddaughter in London,’ he announced. ‘She needs to know this stuff.’

‘Great!’ said Issy. ‘Gramps, it’s me! I’m here! What is it?’

Joe blinked several times, then his vision cleared and he recognized her. ‘Issy,’ he said. ‘My girl,’ and she hugged him.

‘Don’t give me my letter,’ she said. ‘You’ve no idea how much it cheers me up to get them in the post. But I’ve changed my address again – I’ll give it to the nurse.’

But Joe insisted on taking it down; he pulled from his bedside cabinet an old battered leather address book that Issy remembered sitting next to their rotary-dial green telephone on the hall table for years and years. She watched as he turned the pages. Page after page was full of names, old addresses crossed out, over and over again; numbers starting short – Sheffield 4439; Lancaster 1133 – and becoming longer and more complicated. It was a melancholy document, and her grandfather started to mutter over it too.

‘He’s gone,’ he would say. ‘And them – the both of them. Died within a month of each other. I can’t even remember who this is.’

And he shook his wispy head.

‘Tell me,’ said Issy quickly to cheer him up, ‘tell me about my grandmother again.’

When she was little she had always loved to hear stories about her glamorous granny but it hurt her mother too much, so her grandfather had waited till it was just the two of them.

‘Well,’ started Joe, and his crumpled face relaxed slightly as he took on the familiar tale. ‘Well, I was working at the bakery, and she came in one day for a cream horn.’

He paused for appreciative laughter, which Issy duly supplied. One of the nurses, passing, popped her head in and stayed to listen.

‘And I knew her of course – you knew everyone then. She was the youngest daughter of the farrier, so quite posh, you know. Wouldn’t look at a simple flour boy like me.’

‘Mm.’

‘But I noticed that she’d started coming in quite a lot. Nearly every day in fact, even though people still had a woman then who would do that for you. And it got so that, well, I’d stick a little extra in her bag maybe. A little bit of jam tart that I happened to have spare, or some bath buns.

‘And I began to notice – oh, it was a lovely thing. I mean, in those days, the women were little things of course, not like those big carthorses who stomp up and down the halls all day and night now,’ he added fiercely, as Issy shushed him, and the nurse, who was generously proportioned, shook her head and laughed.

‘But she started to put a little flesh on – just a little bit, in all the right places, you know, up top, round the derrière. And I thought to meself, that’s my cakes that are doing it. She’s fattening herself up for me. And that’s how I knew that she was interested. If she were after some other fella, she’d have been watching her weight.’

He smiled contentedly.

‘So I says to her, “I’ve got my eye on you.” And she looked back, pert as you like, and said, “Well, that’s just as well, isn’t it?” and she sashayed out of that shop like Rita Hayworth. And so that’s when I knew. So when I saw her at the RAFA dance on the Saturday night, all dressed up, and me and my friends are hanging round for some of the latest shop girls, you know, but I saw her with all her smart friends, laughing and standing around with some posh boys, I said to my friends, I’m going to ask her anyway. Normally I would never see her at the dance halls we went to. Oh no. It was a stroke of luck that night. So I went up to her and she said—’

‘“I thought you had white hair”,’ chorused Issy, who had heard the story a hundred times.

‘Then she put out her hand and touched it. I reckon I knew about then.’

Issy had seen photos of her grandparents’ wedding day. He’d been a handsome man, tall, with a thick head of curly hair and a shy smile. Her grandmother was a knockout.

‘And I said, “What’s your name then?” although of course I knew perfectly well. And she said …’

‘Isabel,’ said Issy.

‘Isabel,’ said her grandfather.

Issy played with her skirt like a little girl.

‘But did you just know?’ she asked forcefully. ‘I mean, did you just know straight away? That you were going to fall in love and get married and have children and you were going to love her for ever and everything was going to be all right? Well, you know, until …’

‘We had twenty years together,’ said Joe, patting Issy’s hand. Issy had never known her namesake; she’d died when Issy’s mother was fifteen. ‘They were wonderful, happy years. A lot of people in here, they were married sixty years to someone they couldn’t abide. I know people in here who were relieved when their spouses died. Can you imagine?’

Issy didn’t say anything. She didn’t want to imagine.

‘She was a wonderful woman. She always was cheeky, you know. And confident, whereas I was a bit shy. Apart from that one night. I still don’t know how I found the courage to go up to her. And yes, I knew straight away.’

He chuckled at the memory. ‘Took a while to talk her old dad round though. Oh, he was a stickler. He perked up a bit when I opened the third shop, I remember that much.’