Wish Upon a Star (2 page)

He nodded, though he didn’t look as if he’d have placed any money on it.

But I clung to that idea, for of course the advances of modern medical science would ensure that my baby would make a full recovery and live a normal life. She’d be one of the lucky ones: my Stella, my little star.

Having been fathoms deep in a bottomless ocean of anaesthesia when Stella came into the world, I worried that I might find it difficult to bond with her. But the moment I set eyes on my baby I was consumed by a blinding flash of such instant besottedness that I could spend an hour or more just marvelling over the perfect convolutions of her tiny ears, or the minute crescents of her fingernails, like those fragile pale pink shells I used to pick up on Southport beach.

Celia, the friend who had so luckily been staying with me when I was rushed into hospital, was equally enthralled and enchanted, but Ma, who is not the type to dote on babies, only said the poor mite looked like a skinned rabbit. Then, this obviously having triggered a thought train in her head, she went out and bought Stella a white plush rabbit that was bigger than she was.

When we got the hospital chaplain to christen Stella, Ma suggested we have the rabbit as a godparent, after Celia, though I
think
she was joking … But there it was in the photographs, along with the special cake iced with the baby’s name that I’d sent Celia out to buy. If all had gone to plan, of course, I would have made it myself at a later date. For me, important occasions must always be accompanied by cake, since it earned me a living as a cookery writer, as well as being my comfort food of choice.

‘Go to Gilligan’s Celebration Cakes off Marylebone High,’ I told her. ‘If it has to be shop-bought, they’re the best and they’ll ice her name on it while you wait.’

‘Oh, yes, I remember you going there to research an article on traditional wedding cakes for
Good Housekeeping
and bringing me a chunk of fruitcake back,’ Celia agreed. ‘And you said one of the staff was dead sexy and looked just like Johnny Depp.’

‘Did I? Oh, yes, but Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow,’ I said, a sudden flash of recollection bringing up the undeniably attractive image of a thin, dark, mobile face with high cheekbones and a pair of strangely luminous light brown eyes meeting mine across a work table, while the heady scent of dried fruit and spices mingled with the sweet smell of sugar.

‘That seems like another life,’ I sighed. ‘It happened to a different person.’

During the long night watches after Stella’s first operation, as the lights flashed on the machinery and the hospital hummed faintly along to the tired buzzing in my head, there were way too many hours in which to think.

Her arrival had instantly turned my life upside down, so that everything I’d once thought important had run right to the bottom of my hourglass of priorities. My hard-fought-for career as a cookery writer, for instance, which paid the mortgage on the shoebox-sized basement flat within walking distance of Primrose Hill, where I lived with my little white dog, Toto.

Toto was a Battersea Dogs and Cats Home stray and looked like a cross between a whippet and a Skye terrier, if you can imagine that: all bristly white coat, with a terrier head but slender body and long legs. Ma and Celia were both staying on at my flat and looking after him, as well as taking it in turns to come into the hospital, though Ma spent most of her visits drawing a series of starfish-like little hands and winged creatures that appeared to be some kind of nun/angel/albatross hybrid. Her paintings are already very Chagall-with-knobs-on, so I could barely imagine the turn they would take when she got back home again.

Toto was an excellent judge of character and although he adored Celia and Ma, he’d never taken to my ex-fiancé, Adam, a tall and charismatic marine biologist who’d proposed to me after a whirlwind romance. In retrospect, I only wished I’d trusted my dog’s instincts more than my own.

Adam had swept me off my feet and we’d planned to get married in the lovely ancient church of All Angels in the village of Sticklepond, where Ma now lived … the minute he got back from the eighteen-month contract in Antarctica that he’d already signed up for, that was.

I’d suggested he cancel it, but he’d explained that he’d always dreamed of going there and needed to get it out of his system before he settled down.

‘It’ll be cutting it fine for starting a family by then, though,’ I’d said. ‘I don’t want to leave it too late, or it might not happen at all.’

‘Mmm,’ he’d agreed, with much less enthusiasm than he’d shown while talking about the Antarctic; but by then I’d discovered his acute phobia about hospitals and illness of any kind, and put it down as some general squeamishness to do with that.

Still, I’d been convinced he’d be bored out of his skull stuck in the Antarctic for eighteen months with a lot of other boffins, examining the local frozen seafood. But no, it turned out that there was a whole community there, with everyone from cooks to dentists laid on, which I supposed made sense when most of the year you couldn’t fly in or out.

They made their own entertainments too, and going by the pictures on Facebook of Adam messing about on Ski-Doos and in the snow with his new friends, he’d found a few ways to occupy his spare time.

Of course, we’d constantly emailed and chatted via Facebook, and sometimes he could call me, though not the other way round. But as time passed he seemed to become less and less interested in anything outside the base … I suppose that’s a bit like hospital, where your real world shrinks to your immediate surroundings and everything else seems remote and unimportant.

I expected that would change once he came home, even if I did feel nervous about our reunion. And there
was
a sticky moment at the airport, when he looked like an unshaven stranger as he came through into the arrivals hall. But when he spotted me and smiled there was that instant feeling of connection, just like the first time we’d met, and I ran straight into his arms. He’d kissed me, then said, looking genuinely startled, that he’d forgotten how pretty I was!

We went back to my flat and that evening everything was all right between us – in fact, it was more than all right. He
was
tired and abstracted, not helped by a call from a colleague, though what could be that urgent about Antarctic pond life I couldn’t imagine at the time. His end of the conversation was a bit terse.

I should have smelled a rat right then, because next morning it was like Jekyll and Hyde revisited: right after breakfast he suddenly announced he’d already signed up for another eighteen months in Antarctica
and,
moreover, he’d met someone else up there and she was going back in April, too.

Of course I was devastated and furious. I told him to get out of my flat and my life and he’d packed up his stuff and left within the hour, with my parting shot that I hoped they both fell down an Antarctic crevasse on their next tour of duty ringing in his ears.

Toto, gleefully grasping that the hated interloper was out of favour, managed to sink his teeth into Adam’s ankle at the last minute, which would give him something to remember us by till all the little puncture wounds healed up again.

It was only much later that I realised that Adam had left me a much longer-lasting and life-changing memento.

Once Stella was out of immediate danger, Celia needed to get back to her husband, four rescue greyhounds and six cats in Southport, who were all pining for her.

I would also pine for her, though she’d promised to return when Stella was finally allowed home.

Ma was staying on for a few more days, though I was sure she was dying to head straight back up north, too. In fact, I was surprised she’d stayed as long as she had.

When I was growing up in Hampstead I’d thought she’d seemed happy enough, though she was always fairly reclusive and preoccupied with her work, of course, but she sold up and moved back with alacrity to the Lancashire village where she was born after Dad died.

‘Ma’ is not some cute contraction of ‘Mum’, but a relic of her early attempts to get me to call her by her Christian name, Martha. She was never much like any of my school friends’ mothers, delegating most of her maternal responsibilities to a series of foreign au pairs, but I’d never doubted that in her way she loved me. And Anna, the final and most beloved of the au pairs, a tall, blonde, Swedish domestic goddess, had instilled my love of cooking and baking, so it worked out brilliantly for me.

I emailed Anna the news about Stella and received a warm, reassuring reply straight away: she’d always had the power to make me feel comforted, an effect that has also rubbed off onto the cakes she taught me to make.

I decided that for Stella’s first birthday I would make her a
prinsesstårta
, that most splendid of Swedish celebration cakes.

‘You
are
going to tell Adam about Stella at some point soon, aren’t you?’ Celia asked, just before she finally set off home.

‘No! Why should I, after he accused me of getting pregnant on purpose when I told him she was on the way and then suggested I get an abortion?’

‘I know he didn’t want the baby, but now she’s arrived he might feel differently,’ she suggested. Having an incredibly generous heart she was always looking for the best in everyone, even my absent ex-fiancé, Adam Scott – or ‘Scott of the Antarctic’, as Ma generally referred to him.

‘I don’t think so. Anyway, he’s changed his email address and I couldn’t phone him in Antarctica even if I wanted to, which I don’t.’

‘Facebook?’

‘I’ve blocked him.’

‘I still think he ought to know,’ she said stubbornly. ‘He has a responsibility to support you, too.’

‘I don’t want his support and I’m sure he still wouldn’t be interested – even less so in a baby with health problems, because he’s got that phobia about illness and hospitals, remember?’

‘Oh, yes, I’d forgotten about that. So perhaps you’re right, but if he hears about the baby from anyone, he may contact you when he comes back to the UK.’

‘I doubt it, and it wouldn’t be till October of next year, when Stella—’

I broke off, swallowing hard, and she said quickly, ‘Stella will be walking and saying her first words by then, you’ll see. The operation went well, didn’t it?’

‘Yes, but they made it plain they couldn’t fix everything in one go and would have to wait and see how her condition developed. She
seems
to be making progress.’

‘The body has great powers of self-healing,’ Celia said firmly.

I clung to that thought after she’d gone back to Southport: once I finally got her home, Stella and I would take the future one step at a time, savouring each moment like a special gift.

Long before Stella’s due date I’d stockpiled articles for my two regular publication slots: the ‘Tea & Cake’ page in
Sweet Home
magazine, which are quick, easy recipes, and my Sunday newspaper supplement one, ‘The Cake Diaries’, which have more complicated recipes along with some quirky background history, or stories about where I first came across a particular cake, thrown into the mix.

I usually work months in advance for magazines anyway, filing my Christmas articles in summer and my summer articles in winter, but this time I had almost a year’s worth in reserve. This foresight proved to be a very good idea, given the distractions and alarms of Stella’s first weeks, because the pieces all came out just as if nothing was going on in my life but baking and eating cakes.

Of course, I’d missed out on all the extra articles and assignments that would normally have come my way during this time, which usually put a bit of icing on the gingerbread of life. Once Stella was home, I knew I needed to get back into the groove as quickly as possible, even though this wasn’t going to be easy with a brain occupied entirely with worried thoughts wrapped in a thick fuzzy blanket of hope.

I hadn’t even lost any baby-weight, either – in fact, due to lack of activity and comfort eating, I’d put more on – so when I inadvertently caught sight of my stolid, stodgy pale nakedness in the bedroom mirror soon after Stella finally came home, I thought I looked just like a lardy cake.

Oh, lardy me!

I sat down on the bed and wept, and once I’d started I found I couldn’t stop for ages, which I expect was all the hormones still whizzing about in my system. But at least it was cathartic. It finally shook me out of the zombie trance and set me back onto the researching, experimental baking and writing track again, even if I did tend to shoehorn most of it into the times when Stella was asleep.

I’d kept on the expensive dog walker I’d had to hire for poor Toto while I was spending so much time at the hospital, and she took him out in the mornings. Eventually, when Stella was well enough, the three of us would head for Primrose Hill every afternoon for a bit of fresh air. (It’s as about as fresh at the top of the hill as you will find in London.) Toto, thank goodness, had taken to the baby immediately and didn’t seem in the least jealous, so slowly we all settled into the new regime.

And – waste not, want not – at least the lardy cake revelation inspired a new ‘Cake Diaries’ recipe.

Lardy Cake is a wonderfully stodgy, bready cake that originates from Wiltshire. It’s made with yeast and dried fruit – plus, of course, lots of lard, but I thought I would try to devise a slightly different version, replacing some of the lard with butter and adding a little spice …

Stella’s first three years were as up and down as a ride on the Big Dipper at Southport fun-fair, and while I struggled to persuade my changeling fairy child to eat and put on weight,
I
went from a curvy size twelve/fourteen to a Rubensesque sixteen/eighteen. This is what happens when your comfort food of choice is cake, and the nature of your work means the oven wafts the sweet smell of temptation at you every day.

The proof of the pudding was in the eating and I
was
that pudding.

I said so to Celia, who had come down to stay with me so she could do some early Christmas shopping, pop into the
Sweet Home
office (she did their ‘Crafty Celia Pull Out and Make’ section – if you could stick it, knit it, or stuff it, Celia was your woman) and, most crucially, support me through the next meeting with Stella’s hospital consultant, when he would outline her care plan for the next year.