Gently melt the butter, sugar and golden syrup in a small saucepan …
That sounded simple enough. This was a children’s cookbook – a gift from her older sister Della, and intended as a joke. Roxanne was no cook. She couldn’t see the point of baking anything you could quite easily buy from a shop. However, if a seven-year-old could manage it then surely, at forty-seven years of age, Roxanne could follow a simple step-by-step recipe without setting her kitchen on fire. Couldn’t she?
Roxanne had chosen to make brandy snaps, her attention caught by the photograph in the book. As fashion director of YourStyle, she liked things to look pretty, and what could be more eye-pleasing than lace-textured biscuity curls? She opened her fridge, averting her gaze from the clear plastic sack of kale, which she had bought with the intention of throwing it into smoothies – to boost her energy and make her ‘glow from within’ – and which was now slowly decaying whilst awaiting a decision to be made regarding its destiny. Throw it away, like last time, and endure the wave of disquiet that was bound to follow? (‘I can’t even get it together to use up my kale!’) Or just leave it sitting there, quietly rotting? Deciding to pretend it wasn’t there, she grabbed the butter, checked the use-by date on the packet and shut the fridge door. It was still edible – just. As Roxanne lived alone, a single packet could last her for weeks.
Not being in possession of kitchen scales, Roxanne estimated quantities, all the while picturing Sean’s look of surprise and delight when he came over later and saw what she’d made for him. An edible love offering for his fiftieth birthday! How sweet was that? In the nine months they had been together, she had never made anything more complicated for him than toast, a coffee or a gin and tonic. ‘My undomesticated goddess,’ he called her, fondly, often teasing her about the kale supply: ‘Why not just stop buying the wretched stuff?’ Well, that would have been far too logical, and would have highlighted that she had given up on self-improvement. It would be like accepting she would never again fit into those size eight jeans stuffed in her bottom drawer and donating them to charity.
You kept them, just in case. Surely any woman understood that?
Anyway, never mind that right now. With all that syrup and fat, brandy snaps hardly counted as ‘clean food’, but on a positive note, an unusually delicious and heady aroma was filling her small, cramped kitchen.
While Roxanne might not exactly be glowing from within – a spate of late nights with Sean had dulled her light blue eyes and fair skin – she still experienced a flurry of anticipation for the evening ahead. Pushing back her long, honey-coloured hair, she smiled at the unlikeliness of the situation: Roxanne Cartwright, actually baking! She owned just one saucepan, one frying pan and a single wooden spoon with a crack in it. As children, her big sister Della had been the one to potter away contentedly with their mother in the kitchen; she now owned a quaint little shop back in their childhood Yorkshire village of Burley Bridge, which sold nothing but cookbooks. Initially stocked with their mother’s collection after she’d died, the shop was now thriving, a real hub of the close-knit community up there. Yet to Roxanne, that kitchen back in Rosemary Cottage had never felt welcoming. If she’d tried to help, she had botched things up and been snapped at by her mother: For God’s sake, Roxanne, how hard is it to chop a few onions? Oh, just give me that knife. Might as well do it myself! At the sound of a bicycle approaching along the gravelled path, Kitty’s expression would brighten. Ah, that sounds like Della. Thank goodness someone around here is capable of helping. Off you go, Roxanne. You’re just getting under my feet …
‘Getting under my feet.’ How those words had stung. I won’t, then, Roxanne had vowed. I’ll get well out of your way – as soon as I possibly can. She had dreamed of escape and adventure; of stepping onto a London-bound train and never looking back. Her mother smacking her bare arm with a fish slice – ‘Go on, scarper, can’t you see I’m busy?’ – had been the final straw.
Right here, in North London, was where Roxanne had landed at eighteen years old, having talked her way into the lowly position of fashion junior on a women’s magazine. From her Saturday job in the newsagent’s back home, she had saved up enough for an overnight coach fare to Victoria station and so was able to attend the interview without having to ask for money. Kitty had taken a dim view of the capital and all that she imagined went on there; ‘That London,’ was how she always referred to it. The intimidatingly chic magazine editor could hardly believe a fresh-faced teenager from a sleepy West Yorkshire village could be so keen to learn, so passionate about photography and fashion. She had gazed in wonder as this eager girl had spread all her sketches and scrapbooks over the desk. The fish slice incident had propelled Roxanne into action, and thankfully the editor offered her the job there and then. And here she still was, on a different magazine and fashion director now, with almost three decades of hard-earned experience to her name. Not that she was entertaining any fashion-related thoughts right now. She hadn’t even considered what to wear tonight for dinner with Sean. Right now, she was focusing hard on the job in hand:
Allow to cool slightly, then sieve in the ground ginger and flour. Stir in the lemon juice. Line a baking tray with a sheet of parchment and drop on teaspoons of mixture …
Parchment? What was this, Ancient Egyptian times? Of course, they probably meant greaseproof paper or something along those lines. She remembered that much from her mother’s kitchen. As she didn’t have such a thing – and Sean was due in less than an hour – she made do by liberally buttering her sole baking tray, then blobbed the mixture onto it and slid it into the oven. The used cooking utensils were dumped in the sink, and a tea towel draped over them for concealment purposes. That hadn’t been too difficult, she reflected with a smile. Really, it had just been a matter of mixing a few ingredients together. Why did people talk about baking as if it were some mysterious art?
In her windowless bathroom, with the fan whirring noisily, Roxanne pulled off the indigo shift dress with pretty crocheted Peter Pan collar which she had worn to work, followed by her plain black underwear. She stepped under her rather feeble shower, sluiced herself down, then wrapped herself in a scratchy towel before making her way to her bedroom, where she flipped through the rail in her enormous antique French wardrobe.
A common assumption was that a woman in her position would live in a truly beautiful home, as photo-shoot-worthy as the models who trooped into her office on castings for shoots. Yet, perhaps because Roxanne lived and breathed her job, her domestic surroundings had always held little interest for her. Much of her furniture was, frankly, pretty scabby, having been hauled from flat to flat and more befitting her younger years as an impoverished fashion junior. In lieu of a proper bedside table, she still had a crate.
In fact, this wardrobe was the only item in her home which she truly cared about. With four doors and swathes of lavish carving, it was adorned with rococo swirls and carved angels picked out in gold. It was outrageous, really – an overblown folly crammed into the bijou top flat of a three-storey Victorian conversion in Islington. It was more befitting a French country home, somewhere with powder-blue shutters and gardens filled with lavender. It had been the flat’s previous owner’s, and once Roxanne had set eyes on it, she hadn’t been able to focus on anything else. How could she possibly formulate sensible questions about boilers and council tax banding when she had fallen headlong in love with a piece of furniture? ‘They did mention that they’re quite happy to sell it,’ explained the estate agent, catching Roxanne fondling it lovingly. ‘It was a nightmare to get in – had to be hoisted through the window by a crane, apparently. You’ll see a small chunk out of the left side. That’s where it smacked against the window frame.’ Poor injured thing; she couldn’t bear the thought of it being hoisted back out again, and possibly ending up being dumped. She had to have it.
With her wet hair bundled into a towel now, Roxanne pulled on her prettiest lingerie – scalloped indigo lace – followed by a simple bias-cut dress in charcoal linen. She blow-dried her hair upside down for maximum fullness, although, in reality, fullness was proving a little trickier to achieve than it used to. Where was all the volume going to? Perhaps it was time to consider subtle extensions? Her hairdresser, Rico, had already suggested she try some, in a way that had made it sound like a fun thing to do, rather than an emergency measure to compensate for middle-aged thinning. ‘No woman has the thickness of hair in her forties that she had in her twenties,’ he remarked cheerfully.
Now for make-up, with underplayed, natural eyes and strong red lips being her default look in a hurry. Forty-seven wasn’t that old, she reassured herself. It was just that the glossy world she inhabited revered youth and made her feel quite ancient sometimes; she suspected that in fashion years, she was something like 167. However, she still scrubbed up okay as long as the light was right, and the restaurant she had chosen was enhancingly dim. Just last week, she and Isabelle, her seventy-five-year-old neighbour from the ground-floor flat, had had lunch at the local Italian Roxanne had booked for tonight, and barely been able to read the menu – which was a good thing, she decided, even if they had had to ask the waitress to read out the tiny print.
As she blotted her lips on a tissue, the intercom buzzer sounded. Was that Sean already? Roxanne frowned and checked her phone. Time had run away with her; it was 8.26 p.m. and their table was booked for 8.30. She scampered through to her hallway to buzz him in. She had seen him two days ago but still, her spirits rose like champagne bubbles as she heard the front door close behind him two floors down. No one else had ever had that effect on her. All the terrible boyfriends, the compulsive liars, drunks and narcissists (impressively, some of Roxanne’s lovers had combined all three qualities): how joyful to be free of all that.
Once, her sister Della had joked that she had a talent for choosing men whose job titles required quotation marks: ‘DJ’, ‘record producer’, ‘design consultant’ – and, at one particularly unhappy point, ‘socialite’, which just meant he went out every night and could often be seen with cocaine-speckled nostrils, draped over models. Still, Roxanne had reassured herself: at least these men made life interesting – and what was so great about feeling safe and cared for and loved? Who really wanted a man who would cook for you and cuddle you when you were feeling down? Who’d show up when he’d promised to and didn’t sleep with anyone else? What was so great about that?
Roxanne’s own father, William, had plodded along, finally leaving her mother years after it had come to light that she’d had an affair with an artist from Mallorca. In fact, just a couple of years ago it had transpired that this artist, a man named Rafael, was Della’s real father. Although shocking, the revelation had explained the perpetual tensions between their mother and William at Rosemary Cottage when the three Cartwright children were young, and the simple fact that Della, with her dramatic dark colouring, looked strikingly different to the fair-skinned and blue-eyed Roxanne and their brother Jeff.
For Roxanne, the most baffling aspect had been the fact that William had known about Della’s parentage all along – and chosen to bury his head in the sand. Roxanne never wanted a man like that. She was attracted to fiery, irresponsible types; like Ned Tallow – a ‘party organiser’ – who had once ‘lost’ a ready meal in his oven, having flung it in with such force, it had tipped over and gummed itself to the back. She had always found it almost impossible to resist the charms of the glamorous, the unhinged and frequently out of it – men whom she had supposed epitomised thrilling London life, in contrast to the rather safe and reliable Yorkshire lads she had known back home in Burley Bridge.
However, with Sean she had finally discovered how wonderful it was to be with a properly grown-up man who thrilled her yet still cared. He was cool, sorted and hugely successful as a freelance fashion photographer (in other words, he had a proper profession that needed no quotation marks). Clever, funny and charming, he looked as good in bespoke suits as he did in old, faded jeans, and the only Coke he acquainted himself with came out of a red can.
Sean’s smiling, handsome face appeared as he hurried up the last flight of stairs towards her. It was his fiftieth birthday today, and Roxanne was determined it would be one he would never forget.