Meet Me at the Cupcake Café (9 page)

Bob from Marketing was roaring drunk by 7pm, so she propped him up on the corner of the banquette and let him go to sleep.

‘To Issy,’ said François when toasts were being raised. ‘And now that she is leaving us, let the only plus side be that we will all finally stop putting weight on.’

‘Hear, hear!’ shouted the others. Issy looked at them in consternation.

‘What do you mean?’

‘If your cakes weren’t so bloody delicious,’ said Karen, a heavy-set bookings clerk who rarely chatted to her, ‘I wouldn’t be so bloody fat. Oh, OK, I would, but I wouldn’t enjoy getting fat quite so much.’

‘Do you mean my silly cakes?’ said Issy. She’d had about four glasses of rosé and things were getting blurry round the edges.

‘They are not
silly cakes
,’ said François. ‘Never say that. They are as good as Hortense Beusy, the best patissière in Toulon.
C’est la vérité
,’ he said seriously. He’d had a lot of rosé too.

‘Oh, nonsense,’ said Issy, colouring. ‘You’re all just saying that because I bring in free cakes. They could taste like monkey poo and everyone would still scoff them because it’s better than working. At that … hellhole,’ she added daringly.

Everyone shook their heads.

‘It’s true,’ said Bob, temporarily lifting his head from the bar. ‘You’re much better at baking than you are at admin.’

There was some nodding round the bar.

‘You mean to say you were just tolerating me because of my delicious cakes?’ said Issy, stung.

‘No,’ said François. ‘Also because you were shagging the boss.’

Issy had sobered up quite quickly after that. One last look round, one last kiss for everyone, even the people she hadn’t really liked – she felt herself getting melancholy suddenly, as if Kalinga Deniki had been a family rather than a cut-throat bunch of property specialists out to make a fast buck. And for the Coins; it would be far too tragic to ever stop by there again, as if she was deliberately trying to run into all her old workmates. So with a slight croak to her voice she petted the old dog and scratched behind his ears, which he liked almost as much as salt and vinegar crisps, and bade farewell to the company.

‘Pop in and see us,’ said Karen.

‘With cakes!’ added somebody.

Issy promised faithfully that she would. She knew she wouldn’t; couldn’t. That chapter of her life was over. But what came next?

Chapter Four

Not Going to Work Nutella Cookies

225g self-raising flour

2 tsp baking powder

100g soft butter 100g white caster sugar

½ tsp bicarbonate of soda dissolved in hot water

2 tbsp warm golden syrup

6 tsp Nutella

1 gossip magazine

1 pair pyjamas

Preheat the oven to 200°C/gas mark 6.

Sift flour and baking powder in a bowl. Rub in butter, add sugar, bicarb, syrup and two tsp Nutella. Roll into walnut-sized balls and place on a greased baking tray, pressing down the centre of each ball with your thumb. Bake for about ten minutes.

While baking, eat four remaining tsp Nutella. Eat entire tray of cookies while reading gossip magazine and wearing pyjamas.

Optional garnish: tears.

Thank goodness Helena worked shifts, which meant she was often at home in the mornings. Issy wasn’t sure afterwards how she’d have coped if she’d had to face those first couple of weeks alone. To begin with, there was some sort of novelty value in not having to set an alarm, but it soon wore off and she would lie awake, fretting, into the night. Of course she could pay off some of her mortgage with the redundancy money, that would keep the wolves at bay for a while, but it didn’t solve the fundamental problem of what the hell she was going to do with her life now. And the Situations Vacant looked absolutely hopeless: full of fields she knew nothing about, or entry-level jobs that she was too old for and frankly wouldn’t keep her in Starbucks. Nobody in property seemed to be hiring, and Issy knew that when they did, they would have a huge pool of redundant specialists to choose from. Good people too.

Helena and Gramps were encouraging, telling her to keep her pecker up, that something would turn up, but it didn’t feel like that to Issy. She felt untethered, rootless; liable to spin off at any moment (not entirely helped by people saying things like ‘Why don’t you take a year off and travel the world?’ as if her presence was entirely unnecessary). It took her all day to get to the newsagent’s to buy a paper and some Smarties to make a Smartie cake. She found herself sculpting sad people out of icing; little sugar flowers with spots of rot appearing. It wasn’t good. She didn’t want to do anything: leave the house, play Scrabble with Gramps. And no Graeme of course. That stung too, horribly. Issy was realizing she had had more invested in this relationship than she’d ever let herself think.

Helena felt bad too. Obviously she hated to see her friend sad – apart from anything else, it meant she didn’t have her best mate to go out and have a laugh with – but she was fundamentally a generous soul and understood Issy had to grieve for what she had lost. It was tough in the flat though; all through the miserable days of January and February, it was horrible coming home to a dark, unheated house, with Issy cloistered in her bedroom, refusing to change out of her pyjamas. The flat had always been such a haven, mostly because Issy made it so; made it comforting and warm and always with something to nibble or taste. After some harrowing days at work, all Helena wanted was to curl up on the sofa with a cup of tea and a slice of one of Issy’s experiments so they could have a good gossip. She missed it. So it was with selfish motives in mind too that she decided it couldn’t go on, and that Issy needed a stern dose of tough love.

Tough love she could do, thought Helena, dabbing on moisturizer one morning. Real love, that wasn’t exactly falling into her lap right now, but she didn’t, she told herself firmly, have time to worry about it. Dressed in a plum velvet top that made her look, she felt, pleasingly gothic, she marched into the sitting room. Issy was sitting in the gloomy light, eating dry Crunchy Nut Cornflakes out of a bowl in her pig pyjamas.

‘Darling. You have to get out of the flat.’

‘This is my flat though.’

‘I mean it. You have to do something, otherwise you’ll turn into one of those shut-ins that sit in their bedrooms in their pyjamas weeping and eating beef curry.’

Issy stuck out her bottom lip. ‘I don’t see why.’

‘Because you’ve put on two pounds in a week?’

‘Oh, thanks.’

‘I mean, why don’t you volunteer for a charity or something?’

Issy gave her a hard stare.

‘How is this meant to make me feel better exactly?’

‘It’s not about making you feel better. It’s about being a friend to you right now; the kind of friend you need.’

‘A nasty one.’

‘The best you’re going to get, I’m afraid.’

Helena glanced at the pink-striped see-through plastic bag beside Issy, filled with Smarties.

‘Have you been
out
? Did you go to the corner shop?’

Issy shrugged, embarrassed.

‘You went to the corner shop in your pyjamas?’

‘Hmm.’

‘But what if you’d bumped into John Cusack, hmm? What if John Cusack had been standing right there, thinking, I’m sick of all these Hollywood actresses, why can’t I find a real girl with real home values? Who can bake? Someone like her, only not wearing her pyjamas, because obviously that makes her a
crazy person
.’

Issy swallowed. Behave like you might meet John Cusack at any minute was a prevailing mantra of Helena’s and had been since 1986, which was why she never went out without her hair and make-up done absolutely perfectly, dressed in her best. Issy knew better than to dispute it.

Helena looked at her. ‘Graeme hasn’t called, I take it?’

Of course, they both knew he hadn’t. It wasn’t just about the job. But for Issy, it hurt so much to own up to the truth. That actually what she had thought was love and real and something special might just, when all was said and done … might just have been a stupid office romance after all. It was awful, unbearable to think about. She was getting no sleep, next to no sleep. How could she have been so stupid? All that time, when she thought she was so professional, coming into work every day in her little dresses and cardigans and smart shoes, thinking she was keeping her private life so separate, thinking she was being so clever. When in fact everyone was sniggering because she was shagging the boss – and worse, it obviously wasn’t even a serious relationship. That thought made her bite her own fist in anguish. And that nobody even thought she was any good at her job, she was just some cheery idiot who could make cakes. Oh God, that was almost worse. Or just as bad. It was all bad. It was awful. There didn’t seem to be the least point in getting out of her pyjamas. Everything was shit, and that was the end of it.

Helena reckoned there was patience, then there was submission.

‘Well, fuck ’im,’ she heard herself saying. ‘So what, your life is over now because your boss no longer requires personal services?’

‘It wasn’t like that,’ said Issy quietly. It hadn’t been, had it? She tried to think of some moments of tenderness; some sweetness or kindness he’d done for her. Some flowers maybe, or a trip away. Annoyingly, in eight months, all that came to mind was him telling her not to come over one night, he was tired from work, or getting her to help him file his management reports (she’d been so pleased, she recalled, to be able to take some of the strain off him; exactly, she thought, why she’d make him a perfect wife. Oh God, what an idiot).