Chapter Eleven

I actually come back to my desk after that doom-laden champers with Martin. I want to get started: brainstorming fresh ideas, requesting CVs from our HR lady, Googling ‘What happens when magazines get sold?’ – I close that depressing screen pretty quickly.

I’d almost forgotten it was baking class tonight when ‘Bread!’ flashes up in my calendar, so I dash to the Tube and twenty minutes later am almost at the college. I have my sleeves ready rolled, like an absolute nerd. If there is anything that can take some vicarious pummelling in the wake of work stress, it’s bread dough. In fact, the bread will be all the softer for my work angst. Also, I am secretly relishing the chance to tone my upper arms; since hitting thirty, bingo wings aren’t so much a joke as a Christmas Carol-style foreboding of the future. Just a light jiggle here, the echo of ripple there. Maybe a crusty loaf a week will be my saviour. I can have Madonna’s scary muscular arms but Delia’s cheery round arse.

As I uncross my eyes after that thought has left my mind, I pick up a voicemail on my iPhone. Lyds’s tinkly voice starts to play in my ear. Even in the darkening, windy October night, stood outside the college doors, her voice makes me think of warm, funny, friendly things.

‘Lady! Is tonight the class? I need more info, maybe a mobile pic, yeah? Thing is, I kind of have something bubbling under with the guy who does the jacket potatoes at the market, so taking stock right now. Someone said he’s been married, like, three times but that might be his dad who does the hog roast. Anyway, whatever you make, come round soon and I’ll eat it. Love you! Byeeee!’

And as soon as Lydia’s tinkly voice snaps off, there’s a trill to tell me that a new text has popped up too.

From: Hannah

Ellie, can’t make tonight, sorry. Just got back from a field trip and have two different vomits on me. No time to go home and change and I’m sure you don’t want a whiff of upchuck in your granary bap. Take notes for me. See you next week x

The warm, friendly buzz dampens a bit as I contemplate getting floury elbows on my lonesome. But a true baker must knead on regardless.

Just as I turn to push through the double doors, I get a faceful of soft denim.

‘Whoah, Nellie!’ Joe takes a deep step back and laughs.

I quickly rub my fringe out of my eyes and try to generally reassemble myself. ‘Ooof, sorry.’ My cheeks burn. ‘How are you, Joe?’ I decide to just style it out.

‘Better now I’ve had your face buried in my clothes.’ The friendly lilt of his voice somehow means this didn’t sound as creepy as it should do on paper. ‘But looking forward to some good, old-fashioned manly bread tonight. Got to balance things up after the girlier side of baking, you know?’

‘Mmm, yep. Right, mustn’t be late, off we go then.’ I don’t care that I sound like my aunt Helen, I just want to sweep the fact I smooched Joe’s shirt buttons under the carpet. I’d been in so deep for that split second that I still have the cinammony smell of his aftershave right up my left nostril.

‘No Hannah tonight?’ Joe asks as he ties his apron behind his back then rolls up the sleeves of his brushed light denim shirt. Lyds was going to die for those forearms.

‘No, she got vommed on.’ I pull the matching face.

Joe mirrors it. ‘God, she should get danger money for that job. Oh, here comes Mr Berry. No soggy bottoms, Ellie.’ He eyes me with mock-seriousness and I smile. As we strolled out of last week’s lesson, Hannah, Joe and I had discussed where our lecturer got his baking know-how from. We decided – in what Hannah gleefully decried as reverse sexism, ‘For once!’ – that he must be married to an excellent baking woman who’s taught him all she knows. Like Mary Berry. Or Mary, Queen of Scones, as I call her. And so now, our poor, earnest, humourless teacher will forever be Mr Berry.

‘Baps!’ he calls from the front of the room and I have to snigger into my clean tea towel.

Kneading is such a wonderful thing. Meditative, soothing, stimulating. Your hand is like a knuckly sea captain navigating the doughy ocean tides; rolling this way, flopping that, the gluten stretch of the waves snapping back in place and only ever going the way it wants to. This dough is a cruel mistress, I think to myself in a Cornish accent, and press down with my palms into the smooth wholemeal blob.

‘You look like you’re in another world,’ says Joe, almost in a whisper. His small but even bread rolls are having their second prove under a damp tea towel and he’s leaning back against the counter, his arms folded. There is flour in the hair at his temples. I’m tempted to tell him that I know a few kitchen appliance companies that could give him lucrative work making Agas look sexual, but I have only met him three times. ‘Who are you thinking about?’

It’s not the right time to tell him about the knuckly captain either, so I say, ‘Oh, ha ha, no one. You all done?’

‘Yup, plumping up nicely before the oven. Mr Berry wants us to put them in at the same time so we get synchronised bakes.’

He subtly nods his head back and to his left., where I see the row of people behind me trying not to look as bored and pissed off with me as they must so agonisingly be. I have been playing bread pirates while they’ve been ready to go, no doubt with real journeys home to tackle, not imaginary ones where the mode of transport is a giant hand in a flour-and-water ocean.

I bite my bottom lip. ‘Okay-dokey. All done.’ I tear the dough into wildly random-sized bits and bang them on a tray. In any other situation I would fiddle about until they looked really equal, but this is no time to be a square. Or perfectly round, even. ‘I’ll be ready in ten,’ I mouth to Mr Berry, another of my huffy watchers. So nothing left to do but try and pull off nonchalance and copy Joe’s pose. My rolls puff up with all the confidence I seem to be leaking like a string bag full of custard. I start racking my brains for a topic to fill the silence that the kitchen timer is doing little to soften.

‘So, Joe, baked anything good for your sisters yet?’ In our first lesson Joe had quickly explained that his place on the course was a gift from his sisters – they were eight and nine years older than his twenty-six years and desperate to see him smarten up, get serious about things and make himself some proper food. He’d already done French Bistro Cooking and Introduction to Fish but, admitted sheepishly, he was still a friend to The Colonel at least one a week. But the courses were a good way to get his sisters off his back at least – not easy to do when he lived in the converted loft of one of their homes, in Balham.

‘They really liked the red velvet cupcakes I took home last week, so I did another batch of those. And Grace went nuts for them – that’s my niece, Grace. She’s five. I know I shouldn’t give her the sugary stuff, but I’m a sucker for a gappy smile.’ He wipes his hands on his apron and fishes a phone out of his back pocket, sliding his finger across the iPhone screen until he finds a beautiful sunny face with curly hair and a gap between her milk teeth so wide she could probably fit a Starburst into it.

‘She’s a cutie.’

‘Ah, see; I like you even more now. You have brilliant taste. Do you want kids one day?’

Oh, that lovely chestnut. Just what I need, today of all days. Martin’s gauntlet at my feet was making a nice pile of worries, alongside Mum’s Conversations and Pete’s thoughtful gift reminding me how behind I am in my life goals. Can’t there be one space in my life that doesn’t have baby footprints tracked through it? Maybe just this square of lino in this slightly shabby classroom? That would do.

It’s as if my hand decides to take the stress of this question all on its own and it sort of jerks out in a dismissive ‘How can I answer that?’ gesture and catches the metal bowl from the top of the weighing scales, which then takes a small bottle of milk down for good measure. As the milk sprints over the stone countertop like a dairy Jessica Ennis, I’m mopping up one end and Joe takes the other. Everyone else does a bad job of not staring.

‘Are you OK?’ he asks seriously, his thick black eyebrows scrunching in the middle.

‘Fine, fine, super fine,’ I squeak back, milk up my forearms and panic in my throat. I can’t even really begin to cover why I’ve turned into Mr Bloody Blobby right now. And besides, this class is my safe space: where jobs and husbands and families all come second to the right balance of raising agents and salt. When I can’t stand the heat of the real world, I come to this kitchen.

Sam looks politely away as Mr Berry clears his throat and announces, ‘Time to open those nice warm ovens, people. In the buns go.’

Speak for yourself.