A Little Love (3 page)

Pru smiled. She was used to this: each of his creations was always similarly lauded and the funny thing was, it was always entirely justified. ‘I can’t wait to see it. Any luck with the new trainee?’

‘Don’t. Even. Go. There!’ He held up a palm in front of her face. ‘Every single person they have sent has been completely useless. I have the same conversation with the agency after every sorry interview. I tell them repeatedly, I don’t need bakers! Bakers are ten a penny – no offence intended, Pru.’

‘None taken.’ She was a baker and proud.

‘But I don’t
need
a baker, I need an artiste! Someone who has the eye, the touch and the imagination, someone who can turn sugar paste into pure fantasy, someone who can make the dreams of others into reality! Is it too much to ask?’ For the second time in as many minutes he looked close to tears.

Pru stared at him in silence, fishing for a suitable response and wondering if this was the job description he had given the agency. Then she gave up and abandoned the topic altogether. ‘I’m nipping out this morning. Bobby has a dress fitting in Spitalfields, but Milly will be around if you need anything.’

‘Oh, a dress fitting? How exciting! I saw the lovely couple yesterday afternoon, strolling hand in hand like love’s young dream. Oh my goodness, so beautiful together! Can you imagine what
les enfants
will look like? They are a couple that heaven blessed for sure.’

‘I know, Bobby’s a lucky girl. She certainly doesn’t take after me; she takes after her mum, Astrid. She was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen.’

This wasn’t a topic Pru normally discussed. Astrid had disappeared to India when Bobby was three months old, leaving Alfie, her drug-addled boyfriend, to care for their daughter. She told Alfie she needed space and enlightenment; apparently it didn’t occur to her that what their little girl needed was a mummy who wasn’t over six thousand miles away. Ironically, the move probably saved Astrid’s life. She had been as fond of recreational drugs as Alfie, but she left before he progressed to heroin and the habit that would eventually kill him.

‘Oh, Pru, she most certainly does take after you. You are beautiful inside and out. I can see you now…’ Guy raised his hand as if shielding his eyes. ‘You could model for denture cream or stair lifts!’

Pru threw a napkin at him and turned on her heel, smiling as she did so.

It was two hours later that Pru found herself standing under the hot lights of the low-ceilinged basement room in Spitalfields. She found the pristine white walls and flooring quite dazzling and felt the beginnings of a headache stirring behind her eyes. Bella turned to her and grimaced: Bobby was not making her job any easier.

‘Bobby, you are not helping Bella by wriggling!’ Pru placed her hand against her forehead and un-gritted her teeth. ‘You need to stand still or you are going to end up with a pin in you,’ she barked at her niece, who twitched her arms and jiggled her legs as she squealed and chatted.

Pru ran her fingers through her hair and stretched out her right hand, glancing at the flawless solitaire diamond and its sister band that sat there rather loosely. She had bought the diamond herself: it was proof of her success and independence and a measure of her taste. It didn’t quite compensate for never having been given a ring by a man, but it certainly helped.

She flattened the front of her navy Chanel blazer, checked her buttons were neat in their holes and pulled at the sleeves until they rested just so above her silk cuffs. She might be well into her sixties, but she still had long legs, a slim physique and designer clothes to be proud of; reminding herself of this gave her a much needed jolt of confidence and happiness, every time.

‘Imightstickapininheranyway!’ Bella mumbled and winked.

‘Don’t you dare!’ Bobby shouted.

‘Keep still!’ Pru yelled. This whole exercise was altogether more stressful than any of them had bargained on.

She shrugged apologetically at Bella, the short, chubby seamstress who was toiling over the hem of the wedding dress. With a mouth full of bobble-headed tacks, a pincushion on the back of her wrist and a determined stare, Bella tucked, scrunched and pinned.

The bride-to-be stood on the small podium that raised her twelve inches in the air, her head only inches from the ceiling. ‘I can’t keep still, Aunty Pru, I’m too excited! I feel like the bride on top of one of your cakes, standing up here. I can’t believe it, in just under a year I shall be Mrs William Fellsley! Eleven months, and that will fly by.’

Eleven more months of this!
Pru took another deep breath.

‘I’ve been thinking about my bouquet,’ Bobby rattled on, ‘and I know exactly what I want. I can see it now: white lilies with ivy trailing through them. I want it to look like they’ve been grabbed from the wild and bunched together in a hurry. It will be haphazard but beautiful! Won’t it be wonderful?’ She did a little skip and clapped her hands again.

‘Yes, Bobby, wonderful. I could do with some sugar.’

‘I thought you said you’d given up sweets?’

‘I have, but there are certain days I wish I hadn’t.’ Pru didn’t confess to sneaking the odd packet or two of wine gums, when things got a bit much. This was fast turning into one of those days.

Roberta Plum placed her slender, manicured hands on her tiny waist, pulled her mouth into a sideways smirk and bit her cheek, an expression she employed when things weren’t going according to plan. ‘You look a bit fed up. I don’t feel like you are sharing my joy here, Aunty Pru.’

‘Oh I am sharing your joy, darling. It’s just that we’ve been sharing your joy for the last ten months and there’s only so many times I can hear about how wonderful Billy-boy is, what he said, where you went, what you wore, what he ate, where you are going on your honeymoon and how many kids you are planning on having, starting with a boy called Harry.’

‘Henry, not Harry! I knew you weren’t listening.’

Pru rubbed her temples and closed her eyes, pushing her thumbs into the sockets as if trying to relieve some unseen pressure. ‘I’m sorry, my love, you are right. Whenever you told me that, I can’t have been listening.’

As ever, she must have been running through the to-do list in her head while her niece was talking.
Check the sugar-paste order, get the repair bloke in for the other bread hook, run the invoice over to The Dorchester, send the sample colours to Lady Miriam so she can start thinking about the birthday cake, speak to the Condé Nast design team, chase the agency for the CVs, book a hair appointment with Cleo, order the paint for the front gallery window…
‘Tell me again, Bobby. I promise I’m listening now.’

Bobby visibly brightened and Pru felt the familiar swell of happiness at seeing her niece beam.

‘Well, after we are married, we are going to stay in the flat in Curzon Street, but that’s just until William gets promoted and gets his next posting, which we hope will be somewhere hot. I rather like the sound of Cyprus or Belize, but I am hoping for Cyprus because, as you know, I absolutely love halloumi and taramasalata, and I don’t know what they eat in Belize.’

It always made Pru smile, hearing Bobby speak with the enthusiasm of a child, taking pleasure from the little things. It was reassuring too to hear confirmation that her niece wouldn’t be going away any time soon. It was bad enough that she would be leaving at some point, but at least it wasn’t immediately. She and Milly would have time to adjust. Bobby would remain in the flat above theirs for some time yet, where they could keep an eye on her, as they had ever since she had come to live with her aunts above the bakery when she was eight years old.

‘I shall get pregnant literally just before we move and spend the whole nine months soaking up the sunshine while the Major does whatever majors do, and then I’ll come back to London to have the baby, a boy, who we shall name…?’

‘Henry!’ Pru came in on cue.

Bobby nodded, satisfied. ‘Yes, Henry! Well done, Aunty Pru. And on the day I have him, I want you to make me a basket full of those little white-chocolate muffins that I love, with pale blue ribbons streaming from the handle, and because I’ll still be a bit fat, I’ll be able to eat them and it won’t count!’

Pru searched in her navy satin clutch bag for a bar of Galaxy she had lurking there, for emergency use only. She held the shiny foil wrapper between her fingers.

‘Notinhere!’ Bella grunted through her pins and pointed at the foil-wrapped bar, understandably nervous about the combination of hand-beaded white duchess satin and sticky milk chocolate.

‘Of course not, Bella. I know! I’m not even going to eat it; it just makes me feel calmer to hold it, knowing I might eat it later, which I won’t, because I’ve given up sweets.’ She used the chocolate bar to point in the direction of her niece, who stood draped in her elegant gown. ‘I don’t know how she turned out like this, I really don’t.’ Bobby looked stunning. Her thick blonde hair hung like a wave over her left shoulder, her large eyes shone from above her sculpted cheekbones.

In truth, a lot of careful thought and loving attention had gone into making Bobby the effervescent young woman she now was. Alfie had struggled on for years after Astrid left, a single dad fighting his addiction and trying to care for his baby daughter. Finally, when he felt he was losing his battle against the toxic drugs that he craved, he had entrusted Bobby into the care of his elder sister: Pru, successful businesswoman, childless and wealthy. Some members of the family called him a heartless bastard – ‘How could a dad hand over his own daughter? What kind of man is that?’ They had tutted and sipped tea through lips stretched thin with disapproval. The same lips that had uttered a thousand reasons as to why they couldn’t offer him help when he needed it the most. But Pru and Milly had defended his action, standing defiantly with their chins up and shoulders back. They knew what kind of man he was. Alfie was a man who had performed the ultimate act of selflessness, handing over his precious, adored child into the arms of those who could do better than he, even though it hurt like hell.

Pru would never forget the day Alfie knocked on the door of her swanky Mayfair address to deliver his little girl, who was clutching everything she owned inside a plastic carrier bag. He had looked to the left and right as if expecting to be castigated or turfed out of the postcode. His hair was dull from lack of shampoo, his skin grey and acned, and Pru noticed that he had lost more teeth, causing his mouth to pucker and making him look like the old man he would never become. The trainers on his feet had collapsed, gaping on either side to reveal his sockless, dirty instep. His tracksuit top, worn shiny on the arms, was smelly and stained.

Pru’s heart tore as he bent down, and kissed Bobby’s scalp goodbye.

‘You be a good gel, now, promise?’

Bobby had nodded and thrown her arms around his legs as she cried huge sobs that rattled her little chest and made her gulp for air. Her tears left pale white streaks down her sallow cheeks; she had the face of someone who had absorbed the stress and sadness of life with an addict, sentenced through association to a life of darkened rooms, squalor and a topsy-turvy routine.

Alfie peeled her arms from his legs before hugging his sister and kissing his daughter one final time. He sniffed, shoved his hands into the front pockets of his jeans and walked briskly out of their lives. He didn’t look back. Pru and Bobby watched until he rounded the corner and disappeared. The little girl howled and stamped her feet on the spot in frustration as her aunty placed her arm across her skinny shoulder.

‘It’ll all be all right, Bobby, you wait and see.’

‘I… I… want my dad! I want him to come back now! I want to go home and I don’t like you!’ she had stuttered through her sobs.

And now here she was, eleven years later, standing on the podium with a halo of light behind her head. ‘Look at her! She looks like Veronica Lake.’ Pru voiced her thoughts out loud.

‘Who’s Veronica Lake? She better not be anything like Ricki Lake!’ Bobby let her top lip curl upwards in disapproval.

Pru shook her head. ‘D’you hear that, Bella? All that money spent on her education. She has the voice and poise that make you think she was born with a silver spoon up her arse as well as in her gob and yet she doesn’t have the sense God gave her.’

‘Oh, well, that’s charming! It’s not my fault you sent me to those schools. You said it was so I wouldn’t sound like you and Milly, which I don’t, and now you laugh at me. I would have been happy going to the same school that you two went to. I wouldn’t have known any different.’ Bobby folded her arms across her chest in the way she had done ever since she was little, to show her vehement disapproval.

‘I’m teasing you, Bobby. You sound beautiful and you are beautiful. Besides, you wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in our old school, even if it hadn’t been knocked down to make way for the extension to the match factory. You couldn’t have lived in Mayfair and gone to a school like that without being robbed of your dinner money and your watch every day. And you never have to worry: you are worth every penny, my darling girl. I wanted you to be a lady and you are.’

‘Shebetternotstartgettinfat!’ Bella mumbled, nervous that there was nearly a whole year to go until the big day.

‘She won’t, Bella, don’t worry. She eats like a horse but doesn’t put on an ounce, it’s sickening.’

‘Ellokettle!’ Bella mumbled, nodding at Pru’s slender frame.

‘Do you think William will always love me?’ Bobby chewed her bottom lip and blinked hard, always one stomach flip away from the memory of her dad, the man who had loved her most in the whole wide world but had left her on a pavement and gone away for good without looking back. No matter the reason behind his actions, he had left her and that still hurt.

‘He’d be mad not to. And if he even thinks about doing anything that makes you unhappy, he’ll have me to deal with.’ Pru nodded, only half in jest.

She hadn’t shared her fears about William with Bobby. That he seemed a little aloof; not quite disinterested, but certainly not full of the enthusiasm that his wife-to-be displayed. Milly said she was being over-protective, reminded her that boys were different. She was probably right. But it was hard not to be over-protective. She had been chosen to look after Alfie’s precious girl and she couldn’t afford to get it wrong. His words would stay with her forever. As Bobby howled and stamped outside the front door, Alfie had looked at the sky and then the pavement, gently patting the top of his daughter’s head and her shoulders, unable to meet the eyes of his little girl, the one person in the world to whom he could not lie. He shook his head. ‘I’m not coming back, Bob. But you’ll be fine; Aunty Pru’s got you now.’