37.

Biddy turned up almost a full hour earlier than normal the following week. Her excitement had been mounting for days. She wanted to mix and stir. She wanted to watch the colours of all the different ingredients blend together in a magical muddle. She wanted to eat something exotic and mouth-watering that her very own hands had helped to create.

‘I’m truly excited about this one, Biddy,’ said Terri as she handed her an apron adorned with little pink roses. ‘It’s Nigella’s Boston Cream Pie.’ Biddy instinctively ran her tongue over her teeth. This sounded perfect.

‘I’ve been wanting to try it for ages; well, ever since my good friend Carla from London sent me her latest book as a belated Christmas present. How to be a Domestic Goddess,’ Terri chuckled holding up a shiny black hardback book with a photo of a single cup cake, dripping with white icing, on the cover. ‘Thing is, it seems a tad complicated,’ she winced. ‘Involves making a crème pâtissière. That’s the trouble with Nigella –’ she put the book on the table and pulled on her own brightly coloured apron, ‘– she may be a domestic goddess, but, sadly, simply owning the book doesn’t put the rest of us mere mortals on the same plane. Still, we’ll give it a bash, shall we? And by the end of the day perhaps you and I shall join the domestic goddess club,’ she winked. ‘But we’re going to use the age-old traditional method: our own hands!’ She held up her palms and waved them in front of Biddy, making her smile. ‘I know Nigella is into using a great big all-singing-all-dancing processor,’ Terri carried on, taking bowls out of cupboards and spoons out of drawers, placing them on the big wooden table, ‘but personally I can’t be doing with that. And she does say hands will do. So, hands it is. Okey dokey?’

A swell of apprehension tugged in Biddy’s chest. It was important that she impressed Terri today; that she showed her she was capable of doing simple, normal things. Capable, at least, of baking a cake. She had barely slept last night thinking about today, but for once it was excitement keeping her awake, and not anxiety. But now, with the reality of actually having to bake this complicated cake and make a cream-whatever-it-was from this striking-looking recipe book by someone as beautiful and sophisticated as Nigella Lawson (who she’d seen on This Morning just a few weeks ago) staring her in the face, she suddenly felt sick. She swallowed three times to push the acid back down her throat. Domestic Goddess? Her? What was Terri thinking?

But if Terri registered the panic, she completely ignored it, and gabbled on about Nigella and her friend Carla, who actually knew someone who’d been at one of Nigella’s dinner parties. So before she knew it, Biddy was creaming the butter and sugar, adding the eggs, measuring out flour and carefully adding it to the bowl; engrossed once again by Terri’s chatter, and absorbed by the recipe, which, despite Terri’s concerns, she found remarkably easy to follow. In fact, it didn’t seem complicated at all.

As her anxiety evaporated, she felt calmer and more invigorated since, well, probably since the last time she had painted. And that, she realised with a stab of irony, was actually the painting that had brought her here in the first place. She looked up at Terri and smiled.

‘Everything OK, Biddy?’ Terri smiled back. ‘Need any help?’

‘No, thank you.’ Biddy shook her head, still smiling. ‘I’m fine, thank you. I’m . . .’ she paused. ‘This is fun.’

‘Great. Terrific. Excellent!’ beamed Terri. ‘It is fun, isn’t it? We shall be the Domestic Goddesses of Ballybrock,’ she sang, and danced a little jig in the middle of the kitchen – which, for some reason, made Biddy think about the disco. Then calmly and methodically, she told Terri about the worst night of her life – and the only friend she had ever had. And she didn’t even cry. Not once. And through it all, they carried on baking: the cake mixture was put in the oven, the crème pâtissière was made and left to cool, the ingredients for the chocolate ganache icing were all laid out and ready to go. By the time she had finished the story, even the washing up was done.

‘Go and sit down, Biddy.’ Terri nodded towards the kitchen table, as she flung a dirty tea towel into the washing machine. ‘Rest your leg. You’ve been standing for ages and I bet you’re exhausted. The cakes will take another few minutes and then they’ll need to cool before we start the really fun bit – the icing!’ she winked. ‘In the meantime, I’ll make us a brew.’

Biddy did feel exhausted, but she also felt strangely relieved. Talking to Terri about all of these events from her past, things that still felt as though they had happened just yesterday, was making her feel different. Lighter, almost. It was as though she was shedding a load she no longer wanted to carry. But as Terri opened the oven door and the smell of the cake, her cake, wafted out, all thoughts of Miss Jordan and Alison Flemming and that awful night evaporated.

Terri placed the cakes onto a cooling rack on the worktop.

‘Look at the size of theses beauties,’ she gasped. ‘Biddy Weir, you’re a natural.’

Biddy beamed and clasped her hands in front of her. ‘I baked a cake,’ she laughed. ‘I baked a cake.’ Miss Jordan would be so proud of me, she thought.

 

On her way home that afternoon, a strange thing happened. As the bus headed into Ballybrock along the High Whinport Road, just by the shops at the entrance to Breen Housing Estate, Biddy saw a heavily pregnant woman with bleached blonde hair scraped back off her face, a cigarette in one hand, dragging a toddler behind her by the elbow with the other. She was yelling at it over her shoulder and the child, a little girl, who couldn’t have been more than three years old, was crying.

Biddy’s stomach lurched. She’d seen that child before. She knew who the mother was. In fact, she would see them often around this area on her way home from Terri’s. The toddler was usually crying, the mother was usually shouting, sometimes there would be another child or two in tow. And always Biddy would quickly look away for fear of being recognised. But at that precise moment the bus screeched on its brakes, the driver blasting his horn, at what Biddy couldn’t tell. But the sound was enough to make the woman look up and lock her dark, tired eyes with Biddy’s clear green ones. Biddy swallowed, her stomach somersaulted, she gripped the bottom of her seat. But she didn’t look away. This time, for the first time ever, Georgina Harte was the one to break eye contact with Biddy Weir.