One Step Closer to You (6 page)

@GateauAuChocolat
Lunch today! Chorizo & cannellini bean soup along with our famous gateau au chocolat. What a feast!

I work in a café in Belsize Village called Gateau Au Chocolat. Belsize Village is a small enclave tucked away on the junction of Belsize Lane, a hidden part of London that thankfully few tourists have found. What I love about the village is that most of the shops and cafés are independent. There’s the local launderette, the family pet shop, the delicatessen selling a mouth-watering array of cheeses, salads and pâté. It’s off the beaten track, and I like being off the beaten track.

When I enter the café, I’m welcomed by the familiar smell of freshly made garlic and rosemary bread and winter soup cooking on the stove. I walk past the front table covered in hardback cookery books, delectable covers illustrating curries from India, homemade pasta and fish marinated in herbs from Italy, barbecued meat from Australia and pies with golden crust tops from the Brits.

On the shelves that line both sides of the shop are further cookbooks. One side is divided into sections, including vegetables, cheese, meat, baking, bread, coffee, parties, health, books for kids and spices and herbs. The opposite side is divided into countries.

Our test kitchen is at the end of the shop. It’s small with white tiles, a modern cooker and stove; copper pans hang from hooks, and we have an old-fashioned mixer and white porcelain cake stands, along with a blackboard where we write up the lunch menu for the day. There are five small tables that can seat two to three people, and then a larger communal table that can sit six, just in front of our mural-painted walls of lobsters, chilli, cans of soup and olive oil bottles. There’s a squishy sofa that customers enjoy with a cappuccino and a book. There are also shelves stacked with chef magazines and olive oils for sale, along with my boss’s red wine, produced in his own vineyard in France.

I share the kitchen with Mary-Jane. Mary-Jane is in her late fifties and has worked here ever since the café opened ten years ago. She comes from St Helena, a tiny tropical island in the South Atlantic Ocean, famous for being where Napoleon was exiled and died. She’s short and plump with a mop of thick dark hair and a determined stride. When I came in for my interview with Jean almost four years ago, she was standing at the sink in her marigolds, steely-faced and certainly not about to make me feel less nervous. ‘Mary-Jane is special,’ Jean assured me, giving her a wink that she
ignored, ‘but she’s not too good at …’ he clicked his fingers, ‘small talk.’ Mary-Jane shooed him away with her hand, as if he were an annoying fly, but I could see the affection between them.

She grunts when I say hello, before approaching me with the soupspoon. ‘Taste,’ she orders. I taste and give it the thumbs-up because, as usual, it tastes delicious.

Like me, Mary-Jane had had no professional experience before she began working here. Her passion for food came from her grandmother, who loved to bake. She was famous for her fruitcakes and coconut fingers – slabs of fresh sponge cut into slices and rolled in icing sugar and coconut. Granny lived with the family. Mary-Jane’s father was a farmer; he grew fruit and vegetables. When Mary-Jane talks about her childhood, it’s the one time that her eyes light up and she often giggles as if she were a young girl again. ‘Dad used to grow bananas, Polly. On a Saturday morning we’d help him pick them off the trees and bunch them together with string, and then we’d hang the bunches on the side of the donkeys’ saddles. We had beautiful donkeys, I can even remember their names.’ She smiled, as if she were standing by the banana tree that moment with them. ‘Prince, Violet and Ned. We had guava trees too: they grew wild and Granny used to make the best guava jelly. We’d eat it on toast after school.’

‘Find a boss who will make you a coffee every day,’ Jean says as I’m writing the menu on the blackboard. He’s standing by
the cappuccino machine, dressed in his blue apron. Jean is in his early fifties, tall and fit from swimming every day, with brown hair and probing eyes.

When he hands me a cup I can tell he’s in a good mood. Jean’s behaviour is as unpredictable as the weather. Often he loses his cool in the kitchen, spatulas and crockery flying across the kitchen. But today he blows Mary-Jane and me a kiss before disappearing upstairs to prepare his workshop on cooking with wild mushrooms.

As I stick my apron on and begin to assemble all the ingredients I need for my cakes and pavlova, I think about how working here was only meant to be a stopgap. It was something to do to help me through the early months after my break-up with Matt, and to earn some money, but more importantly to distract me from drinking. During the early days of rehab, I needed a sense of purpose until I felt ready to think about a new career or going back to teaching. In my early twenties, when friends, including Janey, were still at university I was lost as to what I wanted to do with my life. In the end, I enrolled on a one-year Montessori teacher-training course just off Oxford Street. It was hard work, practical and written exams at the end of the year, but I still managed to keep up my drinking and smoking habits full-time, rolling out of bed when my alarm clock shrilled at me, head pounding, only to be cured by another coffee and cigarette at breakfast. I passed my exams and found work, teaching children at
Barn Owls Nursery in Earls Court. I enjoyed playing games and singing alphabet songs with the children – it seems like another world now. I gave up work after giving birth to Louis, though always intended to return to teaching. After my break-up I couldn’t go back. It reminded me too much of my past. I needed something new.

During my unorthodox interview at the café I felt intimidated by Jean. He sat me down and began to describe how he had cooked all over the world. ‘America was like walking into my television set, Polly, it was as if I were on
Miami Vice
. Have you been there?’

I shook my head, staring at my CV placed in front of him that surely showed an underachiever. As to my travelling experiences, well, I’d been stoned in France and drunk in Thailand, so drunk that I’d had a blackout for three days, waking up to find an old Thai lady trying to force me to drink some awful herb tea. Jean went on to tell me that he’d left school when he was thirteen to make his own way in the world. ‘My father, he said I could leave school if I work, not sit around doing, what is it you say …’ He clicked his fingers until it came to him, ‘sweet Fanny Adams. All I wanted to do was be a chef. And you Polly, did you enjoy school?’ he asked, finally flicking through my CV, looking fairly uninterested.

‘I wasn’t an A-grade student,’ I confided, realising there was little point pretending, my nerves finally subsiding. ‘I wrote, “Happy Christmas” on my maths mock exam paper.
Got 3 per cent for that. Apparently that was for writing my name and the correct date.’

That was when Jean and I clicked. ‘You’re funny, Polly. You make even Mary-Jane laugh, no mean feat,’ he said, gesturing to her chuckling at the sink in her Marigolds, ‘but is your cooking as bad as your mathematics?’

I smiled at that, before shaking my head vigorously. ‘I can bake cakes, biscuits, pancakes, meringues, you name it, I can do it. I’ve loved cooking since I was a child, I’ve just never had this opportunity, so if you’ll let me …’

I watched as Jean scrunched my CV into a tiny ball and threw it over his shoulder. ‘I’ll give you a trial run. When can you start?’

*

Almost four years on and I’m still working here, partly because I love the job and partly because Jean allows me to be flexible, working my hours around Louis. My role is to bake the cakes (we have a selection of three, daily) and I serve the lunches and chat to the locals, all part of the job since it’s a goldfish bowl here; there are no doors to hide behind since it’s open-plan. I have to pinch myself, knowing I’m so lucky to be here, although I worked so hard in my one-month trial to prove to Jean I deserved a chance. I sweated at the oven and put so much passion into my food, telling myself I had to make this work. I’ll never forget when Jean tasted my chocolate chestnut torte and said, ‘Pure, undiluted chocolate heaven. Trial over, Polly.
The job is officially yours!’ I threw my arms around him and Mary-Jane clapped.

Being here has made me fall in love with baking all over again. When I’m rubbing butter into flour to make a breadcrumb mixture I find it therapeutic; it takes me back to my happy childhood memories, cooking mince pies with Mum or apple crumble with Hugo.

I take a file out from the shelf. The first cake is a chocolate layer cake with icing. As I sift the flour, soda and salt into a mixing bowl my mind wanders to Ben. Since I went to his flat two weeks ago we’ve met again, twice. Slowly I’m discovering more about his past. His stepfather runs a men’s fashion shop in central London. When I’d asked what he was like Ben said, ‘Well, at my mum’s funeral he called me a bastard, so that should give you an idea.’ Ben’s eyes didn’t give anything away. Perhaps it’s buried too deep, just like Emily’s grief. I discovered Grace had lived in Hampshire, in a village called Crawley. ‘I called her the village witch,’ Ben had said with a small smile when describing how she’d tried to cure his smoking habits with acupuncture. It was Grace who had urged him to seek help, get out of the City and stop drinking. ‘She was the only one brave enough to tell me that I was ruining my life.’ Ben told me that he’d stayed with her for almost six months after his stint in rehab and during that time he’d helped her to get going with her acupuncture business, managing her finances and accounts. At that time Grace was alone and pregnant, so in many
ways they both needed support. Ben certainly needed the distraction and Grace’s failed relationship – her boyfriend disappearing the moment she’d told him she was pregnant – had left her heartbroken. Yet she was determined to make a success of working from home, plus it would give her flexibility when her baby was born. ‘She encouraged me to think about managing other people’s finances professionally. After Emily was born I moved back to London and went on a three-year training course. I qualified as a chartered accountant. Not very rock ’n’ roll but to my surprise I enjoyed it.’

I make a well in the centre of my bowl and add the sunflower oil, sugar, vanilla extract, eggs, yoghurt and cooled chocolate, inhaling the sweet smell. When Mary-Jane isn’t looking I dip my finger into the gooey mixture. ‘Saw that,’ she says.

While Ben and I were making pancakes with the children, laughing as Ben had tossed one into the air and onto the floor, he’d asked me how I came to work here, saying he must pop by sometime and sample one of my cakes.

I told him I’d found the job through my Aunt Vivienne, who goes out with my boss, Jean. ‘Nothing like a bit of nepotism.’

He detected there was more to this. I’m learning Ben is sharp and naturally curious. ‘And?’ he pressed.

‘You know I said our family was plagued by secrets?’ I inhaled deeply. ‘I didn’t get to know about my Aunt Vivienne until I was fourteen.’

‘How come?’

‘Long story.’

Ben had looked at Louis and Emily, now engrossed in eating their pancakes. He turned to me and shrugged. ‘We’ve got time.’

‘I feel ill, Mum,’ I say when she asks me why I’m not dressed for school.

‘What kind of ill?’ She stands at the bottom of the stairs, dressed in her navy jacket, matching skirt and heels, dark hair pinned back from her face.

‘Sick.’

Mum comes upstairs and touches my forehead. ‘Do you think you’re coming down with something?’

I nod.

She feels my glands before glancing at her watch. Normally Mum drives me to school and then goes to work. She is a part-time fundraiser for a charity for the blind and partially sighted in Norwich.

‘You don’t look great,’ she admits reluctantly. ‘I’ll call the office.’

‘No! I mean, no Mum, you go to work, I’ll be fine on my own.’

The thermometer reads normal. Mum leaves a plastic bowl and for a second I panic, thinking she might find the empty wine bottles under my bed. She says she’ll be home at lunchtime. She looks at me, almost with affection. ‘But promise to call if there’s any problem, darling,’ she says.

*

Later that morning, I’m enjoying a toasted cheese sandwich in front of
Friends
. I wonder if Janey made it to school? I’ll call her later. Last night we pretended to be upstairs doing our French homework, but instead we were smoking out of her bedroom window and drinking Baileys. I ran home giggling, my steps light, before I raced up to my bedroom, saying ‘Yes!’ when Dad called out, ‘Polly, is that you?’

The telephone rings from the kitchen. Bugger. That’ll be Mum again. I hear the answer machine beep but it’s a voice I don’t recognise.

When I enter the kitchen to make myself another sandwich I’m strangely drawn to the red light flashing on the answer machine. I press the button before opening the fridge.

‘Georgina, it’s me, Vivienne.’ No one calls mum Georgina. Yet her voice sounds familiar somehow.
Vivienne
. I shut the fridge, forgetting what I was looking for. ‘I’m back. Dad gave me your number. I hope we can meet. I know it’s been many years, but …’ She trails off. ‘How is Polly? I often think of you all,’ she continues. ‘You didn’t respond to my letters.
Oh listen to me, I promised I wouldn’t rant on the answer-machine, that I’d only say hello. Please call me.’

*

Mum arrives home at lunchtime, laden with shopping bags. She stands at the sitting room door, asks me how I am.

‘Someone called earlier.’ I follow her into the kitchen. ‘She left a message.’

‘Who was it? Did you get some sleep, darling?’ Mum begins to unpack the groceries, asking me to give her a hand.

‘Vivienne?’

She stops unpacking. Sits down.

‘Mum? Who is she?’

‘My sister,’ she replies in a small voice, staring ahead.

‘I didn’t know you had a sister?’

Silence.

‘Mum?’ I sit down next to her.

‘She …’ Mum presses her head into her hands. ‘She killed someone.’

‘What! Who?’

‘Stop! Polly, please, stop!’

I hand Mum a piece of kitchen roll. She blows her nose, wipes her tears.

‘Mum, I’m scared.’ I don’t like seeing her so upset. ‘Why didn’t you tell Hugo and me you have a sister? What happened?’

To my surprise Mum takes my hand firmly in hers.
‘She was drunk behind the wheel and killed her baby, my nephew,’ she says, as if it were only yesterday. I wait, sensing there is even more. ‘And she killed my brother, he was sitting in the front …
She
was the one that survived.’

*

It’s been ten days since Mum told me about her sister, and Vivienne is visiting us today. She’s coming for tea. It’s a Saturday and Hugo is back at home. Mum wanted us all to be together. ‘What do we call her?’ Hugo says to me quietly in the kitchen as he helps me lay the table for lunch. Dad is outside mowing the lawn. Mum is frantically tidying the house. All morning she’s been nagging us to tidy our bedrooms and put away our things.

‘It feels odd calling her Aunt Vivienne when we don’t know her,’ Hugo adds, placing a knife the wrong way round.

‘Don’t call her anything,’ I suggest. ‘Say hello, that’s all.’

‘Is she a bad person, Polly?’ he asks, as if she could be a murdering monster.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Why is she visiting us now?’

‘I don’t know, Hugo.’

‘I wonder what prison was like? Do you think she’ll talk about it? I still can’t believe Mum didn’t tell us.’

I nod. ‘Makes you wonder if she’s hiding any more secrets from us.’

Mum’s explanation for keeping Vivienne a secret was that Hugo and I were too young to understand the damage
she had caused to the family, and then the older we became the harder it was to stir up painful memories. ‘Sometimes it’s too painful to dredge up the past,’ Mum reasoned, Dad backing her up. ‘You need to let things be.’

Part of me wanted to argue and say that Hugo and I had at least deserved to know we had an aunt; the other part of me could see how much Vivienne’s forthcoming visit was upsetting Mum. I tried to imagine if someone had killed Hugo recklessly in a car crash, drunk behind the wheel. I wouldn’t be able to forgive them. But things are beginning to make sense now. Granddad Arthur at Christmas saying ‘She should be here.’ Mum not touching alcohol. ‘Gina, you’re not Vivienne,’ my father had said.

Dad has been able to explain a little more to Hugo and me about Vivienne. He told us that after she was released from prison she couldn’t settle in one place, she needed to leave the country and her memories behind. She fled to America.

‘How? Why?’ It all sounded so mysterious and tragic.

‘I’m not sure, Polly. Don’t ask too many questions,’ Dad had begged. ‘We just need the afternoon to go smoothly, no dramas.’

Over lunch Mum can’t eat. An hour before Vivienne arrives she’s twitching at the curtains. Dad tries to relax, says he’s going to watch the tennis on television. He enjoys Wimbledon. Hugo and I don’t know what to do; we kill time going for a walk by the lake. I smoke a couple of cigarettes.
Hugo asks if he can have a puff. He coughs and splutters. ‘It tastes like the kitchen bin, Polly!’

Five minutes before she is due to arrive, Hugo and I sit side by side on the sofa, now on our best behaviour. After my walk Mum made me take my jeans off and put a sundress on instead, ‘And please brush your hair, Polly,’ she’d ordered, before even snapping at Hugo to pull his trousers up.

Dad is helping Mum make the tea. I can hear cups and saucers being laid out on a tray, Mum determined to use the best china. What will Vivienne look like? What will we talk about? Will this visit upset Mum? I begin to chew my thumbnail, unsure I want to meet her now. Will I like her?
Should
I like her, after what she has done?

We hear a car approaching. I turn to look out of the window, see a taxi parking outside the front door. My heart is beating fast. Hugo grips my hand and I squeeze it back, glad we are in this together. We are a small family, only Auntie Lyn on our father’s side, whom we rarely see. We aren’t used to relations visiting, let alone an estranged aunt who killed Mum’s brother and her own son before being locked up behind bars.

*

Vivienne enters the room behind my mother, wearing a cream sundress and wide leather belt with gold clasps, showing off her slim waist. Hugo and I stand up as Mum introduces us.

Her arms are tanned and adorned with bracelets. Long
dark hair sweeps down her back. She is nothing like Mum, who keeps her hair short and practical. Tentatively Vivienne comes over to me first. No one says a word, until Mum finally mutters, ‘This is Polly.’

Vivienne runs a hand through her hair, her face free of make-up except for deep-red lipstick. I also notice she has two earrings in both ears. I feel paralysed. I just stand there, gazing at this beautiful gypsy-like woman. She clutches my hand and looks deep into my eyes. To my surprise she begins to cry and I don’t know where to look. ‘Silly me,’ she says, wiping away her tears. ‘Always been a soppy old cow.’ She laughs, her light-brown eyes still fixed on mine. ‘It’s just …’ She turns to Mum, ‘so lovely to be here.’ Mum nods curtly, as if this is a business meeting. They couldn’t be more different, but despite myself I find I am drawn to her warmth. She isn’t what I expected at all; she doesn’t seem like the terrible person Mum has talked about.

Vivienne moves on to Hugo. ‘I’ve heard so much about you,’ she says. ‘Your mother tells me you’re a fine skier.’

Hugo nods. ‘My school have chosen me to train for the Paralympics and the World Championships,’ he claims with pride. ‘I train at the dry ski slopes all the time.’

‘When I lived in Los Angeles, I used to take myself off skiing at Mount Baldy.’

Hugo giggles and Vivienne tells us she thinks the name is funny too.

Hugo points to a scar above his eyebrow. ‘I had stitches. I love going fast, too fast sometimes.’

I glance at Mum, so buttoned up. She can’t sit still, fidgeting like Hugo and me during a sermon at church. Dad pours the tea and tells Vivienne I made the coffee and walnut cake. ‘Do you like cooking, Polly?’ she asks.

I nod, vigorously. ‘She’s very good,’ Mum adds. It’s the first time my mother has complimented me and my head swims with pride.

‘Perhaps you’ll be a chef one day,’ Vivienne says, before telling me my cake tastes like heaven. ‘Maybe you’ll live in Paris and run a patisserie.’

*

Over tea Vivienne talks to Hugo and me, asking us questions about school and what we enjoy. I notice how graceful her hands are, placed gently around her teacup. She smiles and laughs generously, but there is also a sadness that haunts her face. Part of me wants to shout at Mum, tell her to make Vivienne feel more welcome, forgive her; but I have to keep on reminding myself why Mum is reserved. I answer questions politely. It is as if Vivienne has cast a spell on me to behave. Never before have I been so careful about my grammar. Mum keeps on hopping up and down, refilling mugs and cutting more cake, even though none of us are really all that hungry.

I am disappointed when Vivienne’s taxi arrives. She
says goodbye, hugging Hugo and me as if we are long-lost friends. Mum and Dad walk her to the car.

‘She was awesome,’ says Hugo with surprise. ‘I really liked her.’

‘Shush!’ I watch them from the window. It looks as if Vivienne is upset. Mum is shaking her head. Dad opens the passenger door, but Vivienne stays put. She is saying something to Mum. Oh I wish I could hear! I think they are arguing. Maybe Mum is saying she can’t visit us again. Vivienne glances towards the window, as if she senses I am watching. She waves goodbye. Tentatively I wave back.

When she’s gone I’m left confused. I feel sorry for Mum: her visit was clearly painful, but Vivienne also brought a ray of sunshine into the house, just as Granddad Arthur used to.

*

That night Hugo sits at the end of my bed. ‘What did she look like, Polly?’

I wish with all my heart I could wave a magic wand and let him see. I’d do anything for my brother, but I can’t help with this. ‘Oh Hugo, she had this amazing wild hair.’ I picture it; chocolate-brown, just like mine, tumbling down her back like a waterfall. ‘And brown eyes, like Mum’s. She wore these sparkly sandals and lovely jewellery.’

‘Do you think Mum will let us see her again?’

‘Hope so.’

‘Me too.’

When Hugo goes to bed, I shut my eyes. I see her tears, hear the warmth in her voice, taking such an interest in my life that I almost believed I could have an exciting future. A patisserie in Paris! Tired, I fall straight to sleep, only to stir when I hear footsteps across the landing. My bedroom door creaks open and I see the shadow of my mother standing at the end of my room, until quietly she slips away.