Chapter 1
‘CHEESECAKE? CHEESE. CAKE?’
If the situation hadn’t been so dire, Marnie might have laughed at her mother coming across like an uppity Peter Kay.
‘Yes, Mum, cheesecake.’
‘You are not telling me that you’re leaving your job to . . .’ Judith Salt couldn’t finish off the sentence because the words were too ludicrous. Her mouth gave an involuntary spasm as if she had just bitten down on a pastry filled with battery acid.
Marnie might as well have said ‘I’m going to be a stripper’ or ‘I’m working in a brothel’ instead of ‘I’m making cheesecakes for a living’, though illicitly peddling sugar and fats was right up there with those sinful occupations, in the world according to Judith Salt.
Cheesecake was where it all started for Marnie really. Nearly twenty-two years ago, when she had first encountered the word.
Puddings and desserts were not allowed in Salty Towers, as Marnie came to think of both her childhood residences. At least not proper desserts: eclairs, cake with fudgy layers, a knickerbocker glory with a tower of whipped cream. Dessert was a banana, a baked apple, yogurt (low fat) and peaches that set her off gagging when her teeth made contact with their suede-like skins. Marnie’s diet at home was micro-managed and that included school packed lunches: no Penguins or Mr Kipling cakes for her in her Tupperware box. She wasn’t allowed to go to the birthday events of other children where there might be – drum roll – party food. If Marnie had been asked to give one word which summed up her childhood, she would have replied ‘hungry’. Hungry for food, hungry for attention, hungry for love.
Then, in the summer of 1994 old Mrs McMaid with the pronounced limp and the guttural Scottish accent moved in next door and Judith Salt thought it might be a nice gesture if ten-year-old Marnie offered to run errands for her in the six-week holidays. Her eight-year-old younger sister Gabrielle didn’t have the spare time, what with her singing, ballet, piano, flute, elocution and Spanish lessons. She had shown a natural propensity in all of these things, so Judith told anyone who cared to listen, therefore they were to be encouraged. Marnie had shown no such talents, which is why she escaped all the extra-curricular activities. She didn’t mind; she’d seen Gabrielle dance in a show and decided she had all the lightness of a Yorkshire pudding made with cement and was grounded for a week by her mother for tittering in the performance. And Sarah Brightman certainly had nothing to worry about. So Marnie was sent off to do her Christian duty and be of service to Mrs McMaid, with a firm dictate that she was not to be given any food whilst she was there as she was on a strict diet for health reasons.
It was torture for young Marnie because Mrs McMaid made jam, and lots of it. And she told Marnie how wonderful it tasted slathered on her fresh-from-the-oven white bread and warm scones, with curls of creamy butter that she kept in a big jug of iced water in her fridge. And she let Marnie whisk up bowls of cake mix, which smelled better than the baked end product, and line tins with circles of pastry for fruit tarts. Marnie’s stomach growled more that summer than it had in all her previous years put together.
‘Och, it’s a shame I canna give you any food, hen. What’s the matter wi’ you?’ Mrs McMaid asked her one day, absently handing her a jam spoon to lick before hurriedly snatching it back.
‘Nothing,’ replied Marnie with a sigh loaded with disappointment. ‘Mum just doesn’t want me to get any fatter.’
‘But you’re no’ fat,’ Mrs McMaid exclaimed, and her grey shaggy eyebrows creased in consternation. ‘In fact your mother and your sister could dae with fattening up a wee bit. It’s nae good fir you walking roon wi’ all your bones on show.’
And she passed the spoon back to Marnie whose hand almost shook with a seismic wave of joy as she reached out to take it and lift it to her lips. Her tongue snaked out in slow motion towards the sugary raspberry jam and when it made contact, her taste buds began to sing soprano. She closed her eyes and savoured the rush of sweetness and then she swallowed with a satisfying gulp.
Then the guilt washed over her like a tsunami.
Her mum would know. An all-seeing camera in the sky would report her sin back and she began to sob and Mrs McMaid enfolded her in a floral-scented cuddle and said over and over again, ‘It’s no’ right. It’s no’ right at all.’ Then she gave her another spoonful to help her feel better.
Contrary to her belief, her mother could not smell the licks of raspberry preserve on her and the relief that she was not indelibly permeated with it was palpable. That night she dreamt of swimming in a huge lake of jam, like an enormous ball pool filled with red berries instead of plastic spheres. She couldn’t wait to run around to Mrs McMaid’s the next morning in her cleaning clothes. She decided she was going to risk a mouthful of cake mix next.
But that day, instead of a sponge or scones or biscuits, she found that Mrs McMaid was making a cheesecake. The disappointment fell on Marnie like a hod full of bricks carried by a drunken builder.
‘Cheese cake?’ Marnie wrinkled up her nose. She envisaged a pile of melted smelly goo in the middle of a sponge and was a little bit sick in her mouth. ‘That sounds disgusting.’
‘Just you wait and see,’ laughed Mrs McMaid, unwrapping a packet of Digestives. She put them in a plastic bag and gave them to Marnie to crush carefully into crumbs with the rolling pin whilst she melted a block of butter in a pan. Then she combined both ingredients until the crumbs were all soaked, then she pressed them flat in the bottom of a round tin with her potato masher before putting it in the fridge.
‘That’s the base. Now comes the topping,’ said Mrs McMaid, taking a tub out of the fridge. ‘This is crrream cheese. Mascarrrpone.’ It had a wonderful exotic name, especially with all those rich, rolling, Scottish ‘r’s, far nicer than Edam, thought young Marnie. She beat at the strange white stuff with her wooden spoon, then whipped up some double cream until it stood in soft peaks when the mixer blades were lifted out. She put them both in her blue and white stripey bowl, and added some unholy white sugar which she stored in a jar with odd dried-up bendy brown sticks.
‘That’s vanilla,’ said Mrs McMaid and held up the sugar jar for Marnie to sniff. The little girl felt her nasal receptors sigh with delight. ‘All the way frae Madagascarrr’. It sounded somewhere dangerous and dark where spice wars might occur.
‘And then there’s this,’ said the old lady, adding a pinch of something into the mix from an old square tin she brought down from her shelf. ‘Ma secret ingrrredient, passed doon frae ma motherrr ’n’ her motherrr’s motherrr,’ she added in a low voice full of drama. Then she whispered what that secret ingredient was and told Marnie never to tell anyone else. A mere nip of it would make her cheesecakes different to anyone else’s, promised Mrs McMaid.
Then, with her large spatula, Mrs McMaid plopped the creamy mix onto the cooled crumbs and put it into the fridge for an hour before removing it from the tin and pouring over the raspberries and strawberries and bilberries that she had softened in a pan with a large spoonful of the vanilla sugar. Marnie was mesmerised as she watched the shiny glaze walk across the top and drizzle down the sides onto the plate. Oh my, the cheesecake looked wonderful, the best of all the cakes they had made in the summer.
They cleared up the kitchen, did a bit of dusting and then Mrs McMaid said:
‘If you and I were to test oot the cheesecake, would you tell yer mammy?’
Marnie swore on the big bible that Mrs McMaid kept on her sideboard that she wouldn’t. So, they set up two deckchairs in the corner of the garden where the pale pink roses smelt of honey, then Mrs McMaid poured out two glasses of her homemade lemonade and passed Marnie a funny fork where the left outer prong was thicker than the others, and a whole equilateral triangle of the very berry cheesecake served up on one of Mrs McMaid’s lovely plates with bluebells painted on it.
Nothing could have tasted better. Nothing in the whole wide world was finer than Marnie’s first mouthful of that cheesecake. As they sat in the sun Mrs McMaid recounted all the flavours of them that she’d made in her time – and long before the fad came over from America, she said. Some with rum and raisins, others with chopped-up Mars bars in them, lemon and lime ones, salted toffee ones . . . And the bases – ginger nuts, crumbled coconut macaroons, minty chocolate biscuits . . . so many variations. Marnie wanted to make them all with Mrs McMaid. And the old lady laughed and said that they would – and more.
Mrs McMaid made cakes for fun and for profit. She made them to give to poor old souls who went to the same church as she did and needed a pick-me-up. And she made them for the woman from the big teashop in Ossett who pretended to her customers that she’d baked them herself.
‘But that’s lying and cheating,’ said Marnie, one day when the tea-shop woman with the fat legs and high heels had collected her load.
Mrs McMaid jiggled her old battered purse.
‘It is sort of, but I don’t mind,’ she replied. ‘I might as well sell a few because I could never eat all the cakes I love to make.’
‘I could,’ said Marnie and Mrs McMaid laughed and then asked what they should do that day. Marnie could choose. Anything she liked.
‘A rum and raisin cheesecake,’ said Marnie. It sounded naughty, illegal and exotic.
‘Rum and raisin it is,’ agreed Mrs McMaid, who produced from her pantry a jar of raisins which had been soaked in rum and were fat and sticky and smelt wickedly intoxicating.
That late August afternoon, they sat in the garden with a pitcher of Mrs McMaid’s blood-orangeade and a slice of rum and raisin cheesecake. It was Saturday and Marnie would be back on school on Monday.
‘But I can still come after tea and at weekends and half-term is only six weeks away,’ said Marnie, wishing she never had to go back to school again but could stay here with Mrs McMaid making cakes – even if they were for Mrs Fatty-legs.
‘Of course you can,’ said Mrs McMaid. ‘You’re always welcome in ma wee hoos.’ And Mrs McMaid suddenly put down her plate, lifted up Marnie’s face with her small, thin hand and smiled at her.
‘If I’d have hed a daughter, I’d’ve wanted her to be just like you, Miss Marnie.’
And Marnie didn’t say it aloud but she wished she had been her daughter and not Judith Salt’s. She knew then that she loved Mrs McMaid with her whole heart and knew that Mrs McMaid loved her back as much. Marnie felt as if the sun wasn’t only shining outside that day, but inside her too, as if she’d swallowed it.
The next afternoon, Marnie went around to Mrs McMaid’s with a cooked chicken leg that her mother had sent, and found the old lady at the bottom of the stairs, cold and lifeless with her body all twisted up. Marnie rang for the ambulance and waited with her old friend until it came and a minute before it pulled up outside, she took Mrs McMaid’s secret ingredient tin from the shelf and put it into her bag. It hadn’t felt wrong to do so then, and it never had since. Mrs McMaid would have wanted her to have it. She knew without any doubt she should be its rightful guardian now.
Marnie didn’t make any more cheesecakes for years. Not until she had grown up and bought her own house and someone at work asked if she’d donate a cake for a fundraising event. She made a raspberry cheesecake with a sprinkle of the secret ingredient and she remembered that wonderful summer and dear Mrs McMaid and her kindness. Marnie’s cheesecake went down a storm. No one had ever tasted anything like it. It had that indefinable . . . mmm, they said. And whatever it was, it was magic.