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11
June 2019
Lucy’s phone trills and she glances at it where it sits on the dining table in front of her. It’s not the estate agent and it’s not Henry. It’s a text from Stella’s school. Something to do with a cake sale. She ignores it. She can’t think about cake sales when her head is full of houses and Henry.
She picks up her empty plate and takes it to the dishwasher, making sure to stack it in size order with the ones already in there: biggest at the back to the smallest at the front. Sometimes, when she fails to do this, she can hear Henry rearranging them, once at three in the morning when he’d just got in from a night out. Then she remembers that Henry is probably halfway across the world and that she can stack the dishwasher however she chooses, so she takes the plate out and slots it at the front with the small plates.
Her phone trills again. It’s Stella’s school again. A PS to the previous text about cake sales.
Could all volunteers arrive through the back gates which will be opened for you at 3.20 p.m. Thank you!
Lucy is still baffled by English schools. In France the teachers want nothing to do with the parents; they’d rather children didn’t actuallyhaveany parents, she’d sometimes thought. Here the parents virtually live at the school: reading sessions in the classroom, special assemblies for parents to attend, cake sales every five minutes it sometimes seems.
It’s two o’clock. Lucy has nothing to do until she collects Stella but worry, so she pulls a recipe book down from Henry’s small collection on a small shelf in the kitchen and flicks through it for inspiration. The children of Havering Primary School, W1, she suspects, will not be interested in a lemon and pomegranate roulade, or a beetroot and cream cheese loaf cake, so she googles ‘fairy cakes’ on her phone, finds a recipe called ‘world’s easiest fairy cakes’ and starts to gather the ingredients together.
At ten past three she says goodbye to Fitz and carries a Tupperware box around the corner to the school. She smiles politely at some of the other mothers gathered by the back gate, all clutching shopping bags and their own Tupperware containers, as they wait for it to be opened. She has held back from getting to know the parents at Stella’s school; she doesn’t linger at the gates in the morning, or in the playground. There will be questions she doesn’t want to answer. And besides, her time in this area is almost coming to an end. But she knows how happy Stella will be when she leavesher classroom this afternoon and sees her mum with all the other mums behind the trestle tables.
The caretaker appears at the gate, and they file through into the school’s tiny, urban playground. A mother in a silk robe and head scarf smiles at her and says, ‘Which year is your child?’
Lucy has to stop and think, she’s so used to the French system. Then she says, ‘Year one.’
‘Yes. Me too. This is our table.’ They unload their cakes; the other mother has brought three trays of cupcakes from Tesco. As she unpeels the packages she says, slightly defensively, ‘We don’t have an oven in our room, just a microwave.’
Lucy nods. She wants to say, ‘Please don’t be apologetic, I once lived in a single room with my children, without an oven. I once lived on the street with my children.’ But that’s a conversation she doesn’t want to have. She looks down at the trainers Henry made her buy from Whistles and she thinks of the two million pounds sitting in her bank account and she feels a wave of horror and disgust at her own good fortune pass over her. She wants to give her money to this woman, so that her life can be changed and transformed. She wants to give her money to everyone who lives as she once lived.
She takes her cakes from their box and lays them out on a tray. Each one is iced either pink or blue, with a chocolate button on the top. She thinks of the mess she’s left in the kitchen, the sink piled with bowls and spatulas and baking trays. She thinks again of Henry, wherever Henry is, and feels a strange wave of discomfort pass across her consciousness. More mothers arrive and add their cakes to the display; they all chat to each other over Lucy’shead, then classes begin to spill out from the school building and Lucy scans the playground for the golden ringlets of her daughter. And there she is, her girl, her face lighting up at the sight of her mother. She runs from her friends, the Freyas, and to the front of the trestle table. ‘Did you make cakes?’ she asks breathlessly.
‘Yes,’ says Lucy. ‘These ones.’
Stella gasps slightly at the sight of the pinks and the blues. ‘Can I have one?’
‘Yes, but we have to pay for it.’
‘How much?’
Lucy turns to the woman in the headscarf. ‘How much do we charge?’ she asks.
‘For those?’ She gestures at Lucy’s cakes. ‘Fifty p?’
There are twelve cakes. That’s six pounds. She thinks about how far six pounds would go in a school like this where 90 per cent of the children are on a pupil premium and she unzips her wallet, pulls out a twenty-pound note and surreptitiously slides it into the money box before handing Stella a fairy cake.
The cake sale passes in a blur of outstretched fingers and sticky coins and suddenly there are no cakes left and it’s nearly 4 p.m. and the caretaker is helping to put away the trestle tables. Lucy holds open a black bin bag and Stella fills it with litter and used paper napkins. There is a sense of camaraderie as the mothers file from the playground and on to the pavement. Lucy finds herself chatting in French to a woman from the Ivory Coast about the maths homework that had been set the week before which appeared to have a number missing. She manages to sound as though she cares, but she really doesn’t.
The mothers disperse in four directions and Lucy takes Stella’shand and they are about to turn to head home when she feels her phone buzz in her handbag and a sixth sense makes her stop and pull it out.
And there it is, as she’d expected.
A message from Henry.
It’s a photo of him on an aeroplane clutching a small glass of champagne and the words:
Sayonara, little sister. I’m off to Phinland!!
Lucy feels a cold slick of dread pass through her. Henry’s tone is light-hearted, but his intent, she knows with a terrible certainty, may be anything but.
