Chapter 23
Rose
If I had a pound for every time I’ve heard someone say that they hate the smell of hospitals, I could probably buy myself a flight to Australia to visit my Uncle Simon. But you never hear that when you work in a bakery. Quite the opposite, in fact. There is something so heart-warming and life-affirming about the smell of freshly baked bread. I begin my days in the best possible mood.
Today, though, when I unlock the bakery door at seven a.m. using the spare key I had made, something is not quite right.
An indie rock song is blaring at high volume out of the bakery stereo, and when I open the door, Toby is sliding some rolls – he still can’t get used to calling them barms – off a large metal tray and onto a wire rack. He’s wearing a white T-shirt and has a white rag tied around his forehead, keeping his dark hair off his face. He looks a bit like he should be doing karate, not baking.
I go and turn the music down and he looks over at me.
‘Did your dad have to leave early again?’ I ask.
He gives me a dark look and then places his hands heavily on the worktop in front of him.
‘He’s at the hospital,’ he says. ‘Mum had a heart attack yesterday evening.’
‘Oh no,’ I hurry over to him, touching one hand to his flour-dusted forearm and the other to his back. His T-shirt is damp under my palm, a sign of how hot it is in here with all the ovens blaring.
‘They think she’ll recover. It was only minor. A warning sign,’ he says bitterly.
‘I’m so sorry. Are you okay?’
He straightens up, and our contact loosens. ‘Yeah, but I’m running behind.’
‘Have you been here on your own all night?’ I ask with alarm, looking at the dozens of loaves of bread cooling on the wire racks.
He nods.
‘You must be exhausted!’
No wonder he had his music on so loud. It’s probably been keeping him awake.
‘I’m fine,’ he says wearily. ‘This was the last batch.’
‘Tell me what I can do to help.’
‘Can you set up the shop? I could really use a cigarette break.’
‘Of course.’ I give him a sympathetic smile and go and get the cash register money from the safe. I’ve worked enough shifts now to know what to do to get started. The turnover from this place has been pretty incredible since its opening. Let’s hope it keeps up like this.
Later, after our regular customers have been and gone, Toby fires up the coffee machine. He looks shattered, his actions slow and sluggish.
‘Instead of drinking that, why don’t you head home to bed?’ I suggest in a no-nonsense tone. ‘I can manage here.’
He shakes his head. ‘I’d rather keep going.’
‘What if your dad can’t come in tonight?’ I say. ‘What then? You need to rest now, while you can.’
‘I don’t want to be at home.’ He looks suddenly anguished.
‘Hey,’ I say gently, going over to give him a hug.
‘I hate that place,’ he mutters, looping his arms around my waist and resting his chin on the top of my head. He sighs loudly.
‘Go for a lie down out the back, then,’ I suggest, pulling away slightly to look up at him.
‘Okay.’ We let each other go and I watch him push through the bakery door with a sinking heart. Poor guy. ‘Wake me up before the lunchtime rush,’ he calls over his shoulder.
But when I nip into the bakery just before midday, I find him out cold on the floor, his lean body curled around a sack of flour. I can’t bring myself to rouse him so I carry on alone.
It’s two o’clock before he emerges, and by then the shop has quietened down. I’ve been run off my feet.
‘Christ,’ he mutters, rubbing his eyes. ‘Why didn’t you wake me?’
‘You needed to rest more than I needed help,’ I reply.
‘Thanks.’ He smiles at me sleepily and then yawns. I notice he’s holding his mobile phone. ‘Dad called from the hospital. They’re keeping Mum in for a couple of days so he’s going to need me to bake again tonight. You were right.’
‘Toby, you have to go home,’ I insist. ‘Get some sleep in a proper bed.’
‘Yeah, I will, after this shift,’ he agrees.
‘It’s not going to be busy now,’ I say, checking the time. ‘I can manage. When do you need to come back?’
‘Ten o’clock.’
‘Bloody hell.’
‘Dad does it every day,’ he says with another yawn. ‘I’ll refresh the starter before I leave.’
The ‘starter’? But a customer comes in so I let Toby go back into the bakery without asking.
I’m so knackered that evening that I crash out at nine, but only a few short hours later, a bad dream stirs me from sleep. I lie there for a while, wide awake and unable to doze off, and soon my thoughts drift to Toby. I know what it’s like to lose a parent to a heart attack and no doubt he’s terrified that his mum won’t pull through. He has so much to deal with. Right now, he’s at work all on his own. I check the time on my alarm clock. It’s just after two o’clock in the morning. Am I really going to get back to sleep tonight? Or should I bite the bullet and go and help him?
A moment later, I’m out of bed and throwing on the first thing I lay my hands on in my wardrobe – black jeans and a navy top. Then I bundle my hair up into a bun and go to the kitchen to write Angus a note, letting him know where I’ve gone.
There’s a chill in the air and the sky is sparkling with starlight beyond the orange street lamps as I get out of the car and walk along the pavement to Jennifer’s. Sale is deadly quiet. It’s Friday night, well, Saturday morning, but everyone is at home tucked up in bed. Everyone except us.
I recognise the song that’s playing when I enter the premises, but I’m so out of touch when it comes to cool music that I wouldn’t have a clue who it’s by.
I push open the bakery door and see Toby carrying a large, clear plastic container over to the wooden island unit.
‘Hey!’ I shout, knowing he’s going to be freaked out when he sees me. ‘Toby!’
But he’s still completely oblivious. He tips an enormous blob of dough out onto the work surface and begins to fold the dough edges up and over, from the outside in, turning it to face him each time. I’m fascinated as I watch, and a moment later he’s left with a smooth, round, elastic ball. He looks up and nearly jumps out of his skin.
‘Holy shit!’ he exclaims. ‘What are you doing here?’ He goes to turn the music down, but the loud chugging of machinery still fills the air.
‘I couldn’t sleep. Thought you might be able to use some help.’
‘I think I might love you.’ He exhales with relief as he strides around the worktop and engulfs me in a hug. My chest expands as I hug him back.
‘Tell me what to do,’ I prompt as he goes to check the contents of the Hobart – the large dough mixer standing on the floor.
‘Pass me the caraway seeds,’ he says, turning the machine off.
I do as he asks and he tips them into the dough, setting the machine going again.
‘Can you grab me the bannetons, too?’ He returns to the mound of dough waiting on the wooden countertop. ‘You can help me shape the sourdough.’
‘What are bannetons?’ I ask.
He gives me a look of disbelief.
The bannetons turn out to be proving baskets, and some of ours are oval-shaped and made out of wood pulp while others are constructed out of round cane baskets. Sourdough, apparently, is a wetter dough, so if it’s not contained in something, it will lose its shape and flop.
I flour the baskets while Toby uses a dough cutter to separate the dough into chunks, then I help him roll each one into shape and place them into the different-sized bannetons. He moves at a speed that makes my head spin, but I keep getting the dough stuck to my fingers.
‘Use flour to get it off, not water,’ he says, reading my mind as I glance at the sink. I dust my hands with flour and rub off the dough easily. ‘You have to work quickly or the dough will stick again,’ he warns.
He talks to me as he works, and I learn that being an artisan baker is all about the time it takes to do things. While working quickly at this stage is important, even more vital to the process is slowing things right down, because the longer something takes, the better it tastes.
Artisan bread is made using a combination of flour, water, salt, plus some kind of ‘leaven’ – the thing that makes the dough ferment and rise. French bread is made with fresh yeast, which comes in a packet like butter and smells pretty bad, but sourdough is naturally leavened using ‘starter’ or ‘mother’, as it’s also called.
Toby jokes that his dad’s ‘mother’ has been sitting in the fridge since time began, and every day it has to be fed with fresh flour and water to top it up. He tells me that some bakeries in France and Italy claim to have had their ‘mother’ on the go for centuries, being passed down generation to generation. It’s pretty grim when you think about it, but he reiterates to me that the longer something takes, the better it tastes.
‘You want to have a turn at baguettes?’ he asks with a smile.
‘Go on, then.’
‘No flour on the work surface, only on your hands,’ he directs me. ‘A floury surface makes shaping the baguettes impossible. As long as the worktop is clean, they won’t stick.’
I watch him do the first one, a blur of folding from the outside in, pointing the ends and rolling until the length is right. The whole thing takes him about ten seconds and then he’s laying it lengthwise on a flour-dusted cloth that has been folded into a series of pleats for the baguettes to lie between.
‘Chop chop,’ he prompts.
I shake my head. ‘I wouldn’t have a clue where to start. I’ll watch you do another one.’
At the end of the next ten seconds, I’m still none the wiser.
He smiles at my blank look and walks away from the counter, returning with a small piece of paper. ‘Watch where I fold it,’ he says.
He folds it from the outsides in. Then he folds it again. ‘Imagine an invisible line in the middle. You’re creating a spine,’ he says, and I’m reminded of making paper aeroplanes with my sisters and Dad. He folds in the end edges to create a rounded-off shape, then folds the lengthwise edges again, until he’s left with a long, thin piece of paper that looks a bit like a longboat. ‘Now you roll the dough out until it’s the right length. Okay?’
‘Okay.’ I nod and get to work, finding it easier to remember the folds when I think of it as a piece of paper. He still manages to make about ten baguettes in the time it takes for me to do one, and of course my hands are sticky with dough by the end of it.
‘It takes practice,’ he says as I rub flour on my fingers.
‘You’re very good at it. Have you really been baking since you were eight?’
‘In the bakery, yeah, but I’ve been baking with Mum and Dad at home for as long as I can remember. Come on, we’ve got time to have a break while everything’s proving. You want a coffee?’ he asks.
‘Sure.’
We go out into the shop and he switches on the machine. It’s still dark outside, but dawn can’t be far away.
‘I think you enjoy baking more than you let on,’ I say.
‘It’s a bit of a rush,’ he confesses as he tips freshly ground coffee into the machine. ‘I like working fast and under pressure. And the finished product is pretty beautiful.’
‘Do you ever mess up?’
‘Christ, yeah, on many occasions. Lesson number one: don’t forget the salt. You need salt for flavour and it helps develop the gluten. Sometimes I’ll be mixing the dough for ages, wondering why the hell it isn’t doing what I want it to do. Dad will come in, pinch a piece of dough to taste it and tell me immediately where I’ve gone wrong. Lesson number two: don’t pop out for a fag and forget to turn the mixer off.’
‘What happens?’ I ask.
‘If you overwork the dough, the gluten bonds will overstretch and be ruined. You know when you came in and I was folding it over?’
I nod.
‘It looked smooth and elastic, right? Well, you can’t get it to look like that. If you overwork it, it’s wrecked. It has to go in the bin.’
‘Why don’t you use a timer?’
‘I probably should because I get a bit distracted, but Dad never does. He knows the process by heart.’
From the reverence in his voice, he has way more respect for his dad than he lets on.
‘Have you done many all-nighters with your dad?’ I ask as the coffee machine spits and gurgles out coffee into the waiting cups.
‘Not any more. We used to, back when Mum...’ His voice trails off.
‘When your mum what?’ I prompt.
‘When she was well, before she got so...’ He shrugs, his back to me.
‘Do you think this heart attack will spur her on to try to get better, maybe?’ I ask tentatively.
‘Who knows?’ He passes me a cup.
‘Thanks.’
He looks over at the cupcakes dwindling on the countertop. ‘We’re going to run out today.’
‘Who supplies them?’ I ask. I’ve wondered before.
‘Mum makes them,’ he says to my surprise. ‘This bakery was hers once. I mean, not this one, the first Jennifer’s in East London. It’s where she and Dad met.’
‘Did she bake?’
‘She did bake bread, but she was more into cakes and things.’ He blows on his drink. ‘She’s been baking from home for years, though.’
‘Does it still make her happy?’
‘I’d like to think so,’ he says, taking a sip of coffee. ‘I might get ahead with prep for Sunday night.’ Luckily the bakery is closed tomorrow, so no one has to work a night shift tonight, but it will be full steam again on Monday.
‘What do you want me to do?’ I ask, following him back into the bakery.
‘Roast garlic, caramelise red onions, soak raisins or toast some seeds and nuts – take your pick.’
The baguettes go into the oven last, because they take the least time to cool, but when they’re done, I stand for a moment and stare at the multitude of loaves cooling on the racks.
Bread has never looked so good. From fig and fennel and rye and caraway to garlic and rosemary and cumin and Gruyère, I feel like I could devour one of everything. Even the simple rustic white, or pain au levain as they call it in France, looks like a work of art.
I check the time on my watch. It’s almost seven o’clock.
‘Vanessa’s going to be late,’ he says with a raised eyebrow, reading a text on his phone. ‘She says she’ll be in at ten. You should go home and get some rest.’ He lifts up the hem of his T-shirt and mops the sweat from his brow. His chest is pretty ripped, I note with surprise. ‘I’ll open up.’
‘I can stay for a bit,’ I reply, giving myself a little shake. ‘I imagine we’ll both be working at half-speed today. Unless you want me to leave because I stink?’ He looks amused as I sniff my armpits. They’re alright, thankfully. At least I had a shower when I came home last night.
‘Thanks, Rose,’ he says suddenly, coming over to give me a hug. I hug him back, and then jump in surprise as his hand lands on my backside. He pats it once, firmly. ‘You’re a star.’
‘Thank you.’ I blush as I pull away. ‘It was a fun learning curve.’
‘I’ll get the float, you go and open up.’ He smirks as he turns away.
It’s only later, when a couple of our regular customers laugh as I’m getting their order that I realise what he’s done. I glance over my shoulder to see a white, floury handprint on my right bum cheek.
‘Toby!’ I yell at him as our customers continue to laugh. ‘You little git!’
He comes over and loops one arm around my neck, then whispers in my ear. ‘Lesson number three: never wear black in a bakery.’