Chapter 3
The day ended on a high. Elena and her fat ankle had gone home and, starved of her partner in crime, Vicky was quiet and actually did some work. Everyone in the executive meeting was impressed by the new shaped mug and Marnie received three billion brownie points. And she noticed Justin smiling at her as she talked through the pricings and argued why they should adapt this shape and ditch the old one. He had a flirtatious sparkle in his eyes and her own eyes kept being drawn to his, as if they were twin sparkly light-seeking moths. Her feet almost hovered above the ground as she walked back to her car that day, but the closer she got to home, the more that buoyant, airy feeling began to subside. The weekend loomed drawn-out and depressing in front of her as it had done for too long now. Marnie hated Saturdays and Sundays, for however much she tried to tell herself that she was married to her work and didn’t need a man in her life, those two weekend days exposed that statement for the lie it was.
It was a particularly lonely phase as she was both boyfriendless and best-friend-less and it followed the worst Christmas she’d had for years. She’d intended to spend it sharing a house with her boyfriend of twelve months, Aaron. Her on-off-on-off boyfriend of twelve months that is, who had finally decided in August that she was the one he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. So, she’d sold her furniture and her flat only for Aaron to tell her, on the day of completion, that he’d made a mistake and was still in love with his ex.
Her best friend Caitlin wasn’t on hand to pick up the broken pieces as she was besotted by a high-flying city banker called Grigori and she spent all the time she could down in London with him. He was rich and handsome and successful and very posh and Caitlin had changed in the short time they’d been together. She’d become glossier and more groomed and – though Marnie hated to admit this – less fun, more staid and worst of all, distant. She’d denied having elocution lessons, though it was obvious from the slower, more measured way that Caitlin had started to talk and the strange shapes her mouth formed on certain words, that she had. And when Marnie rang her for a chat, Caitlin always seemed to be in the middle of something and said she’d call back. She didn’t always. This, the same Caitlin who had had a real go at Marnie for not giving her friendship time when Aaron arrived on the scene.
Caitlin had been single for over two years when she met Grig-ORRR-i, as she’d started to pronounce it. No wonder she’d sucked him up like a dehydrated woman falling face down in an oasis. Marnie couldn’t have been happier for her friend – then she’d met him, and she could have been very much happier for her because Grigori was a plank.
He might have been good-looking and clever and super-brainy and drive a Maserati but it was quite obvious that he didn’t like Marnie from the off, because the disapproval came off him in waves. She had first met him in person at the night do of an old school-friend’s wedding. Caitlin left Grigori and Marnie to ‘get acquainted’ whilst she nipped off to the loo. Marnie had opened conversation, but Grigori had turned away and wended his way out through the guests instead. Marnie was gobsmacked by his rudeness and she did wonder what Caitlin had told him to provoke that reaction. She had broached the subject once but Caitlin waved it away and said he’d been absolutely whacked with tiredness that night. Marnie hadn’t bought it and what she hadn’t told Caitlin was that later on, she’d encountered him on the stairs when he was arseholed and he’d been far more friendly. Feeling obliged to give him a second chance to make a first impression, she’d asked him if he was enjoying himself and he’d pulled her towards him and stuck his tongue down her throat before she pushed him firmly off. He’d fallen down two stairs and called her the c-word and though Marnie had tried to forget it and chalk it up to the drink, she never quite had. One thing was for sure – he had come between them and their once-strong vow that no man would ever do that was crushed to dust.
She’d got into the bad habit of drinking too much at weekends to numb that gnawing hunger within her for company, for affection. She recognised she was in trouble when she began to think that sleeping off a hangover was a better alternative than being conscious, and had tried to cut down over the last couple of weeks.
But on this particular Friday, maybe because she’d been so high earlier on from her successful mug presentation and a little male attention from the hottest property on the trading floor, her spirits nosedived and she felt extra sad and pathetic that night. So, unable to satisfy the cravings of her heart, her body tried to compensate by feeding her something else and put her hands in the way of a giant bag of sweet and salty popcorn and a bottle of Tesco’s finest Shiraz.
There was nothing on the TV but programmes about house renovations and dream sheds, a crap gameshow and the big film, which was about a man who couldn’t forget his first love – far too near the knuckle for her. At times, when she was plastered, she could see herself more clearly than ever and the revelations hurt and bewildered her. Through the clarity that alcohol supplied, she saw that she had been lonely for a long time, far longer than she’d wanted to admit to herself. Even when she’d been with Jez, Robert, Harry and Aaron she’d still been lonely. It took a particular skill to be lonely in a relationship, she had noted. Sometimes she had lain in bed next to a snoozing Aaron after sex and marvelled at how alone she felt. There had been only inches between their bodies but she had never felt as if she were truly part of a couple. Even when they’d been mid-bonk, there had been none of that ‘two become one’ or ‘bodies melting into each other’ bollocks. They’d been more like two hard pieces of wood bashing together than two balls of Play-Doh squashing into a single big ball of pliant softness.
None of the men she’d gone out with had made her feel secure, cherished, needed, not after the initial courtship period was over anyway and they had full access to the contents of her underwear. She often wondered if any man ever could. Maybe the men who still held doors open for you after you’d been together for over thirty years only existed in books – written by women fantasising about the same thing. Maybe that’s why Midnight Moon romance stories were so popular, because they contained the sort of mythical beings who rubbed your shoulders without thinking that it constituted foreplay, whipped you up a hot chocolate on cold winter nights, made you laugh till your cheeks hurt or set all your nerves jingling like the bells of St Clements simply by placing a hand on your waist.
In books men energised women; in her experience they sapped your energy to below zero level. Give or take the thump to the ego, it was almost a relief when the relationship limped across the finish line, but then she was left with just herself for company. During the week she could work late, plough everything she had into the job but nothing seemed to fill the chasm of emptiness that weekends brought – not even Candy Crush. She couldn’t continue as she was, she’d decided, and forced her brain to come up with a rescue plan, and so it did. For years, she’d toyed with the idea of writing a definitive cheesecake recipe book but had never got around to it. Maybe that was what she needed to get her teeth into and transform her weekends into a brighter brace of days.
So, with a notebook at her side, that night Marnie refilled her wine glass, switched on her laptop and typed ‘cheesecake’ into Google and before long she had been dragged into the deep quark web of baking. Within a few clicks, she’d happened upon an amazing American site which led her to the Sisters of Cheesecake club where fanatics all over the world sent in pictures of their mad creations and recipes or asked for advice. It was a defining moment when Marnie realised that it was nearly 2 a.m. on Saturday morning and she was more than half-pissed and involved in a three-way heated argument with a woman from Calgary and another from Memphis about the base to topping ratio. Sad didn’t even come into it. Weren’t women of Marnie’s age supposed to have wild dirty cybersex, not rows about baking?
The across-the-pond sisterhood were beating Marnie down, forcing her to accept that a thinner base was desirable. Then in stepped a fellow Brit, declaring that thick bases ruled, having Marnie’s back all the way. The brave British duo were declared losers of the lowest order but it didn’t matter because the connection they made with each other was a winner. And that is how the paths of Misses Lilian Dearman and Marnie Salt first crossed.
Normally Marnie didn’t engage with people she didn’t know personally on social media. She had no interest in learning about how some woman she didn’t know in South Shields had got on at Weightwatchers that week, or viewing some circulated footage of kittens or people’s dinners or sharing petitions and patronising inspirational messages. The internet was a nest of fraudulent vipers as far as she was concerned. If they weren’t fleeing from Nigeria and needed her bank details to deposit their millions, they were screwed up dickheads on internet dating sites waiting to pounce.
Wine, therefore, had been a strong contributing factor to how she ended up having an in-depth email conversation with someone purporting to be a sixty-six-year-old insomniac, who found the Sisters of Cheesecake site particularly well stocked with ‘sanctimonious know-it-all bastards’ with whom she enjoyed a good verbal battle. Her sleeps, Lilian Dearman said, though tardy in coming were superbly restful after giving those stuck-up frustrated old crows a pasting. Thin bases indeed.
Marnie opened up another bottle of wine as they messaged back and forth. Somehow the conversation segued from recipes for cheesecakes to recipes of disaster – i.e. Marnie’s life. Lubricated by fermented grapes, a dam burst inside her and out it all poured in a torrent. Everything. Starting with Aaron and then reaching back in time to things she hadn’t even told Caitlin. And Marnie went past caring if the person she was typing to was a genuine elderly lady, a Daily Mail reporter or a serial killer called Darren.
Despite her intentions to clean up her act, Marnie awoke very late on Saturday afternoon with a major hangover, egg on her face and no recollection of getting to bed at all. The last thing she remembered was telling Lilian about reading Wuthering Heights at school and having a crush on her English teacher, Mr Trent. Dangerous territory. What a bloody idiot. How could she have blurted out so many secrets to a stranger? Stuff she had locked away in boxes in her head and yet their locks had sprung at the merest tickle and the contents had come spewing out perfectly preserved in brain-aspic.
Marnie was a panicking mess; what else she had said that she couldn’t remember?
She switched on her laptop, after taking two ibuprofen and a Red Bull and tried to log on to the Sisters of Cheesecake site but found that, despite being hammered, she’d obviously had the foresight to delete her account before going to sleep, probably to stop herself reading what she’d written to this ‘Lilian Dearman’ in the private message box. How could she be so thick and rational at the same time? Whilst she was in cringe mode, she also checked that she hadn’t sent an embarrassing email to Aaron but no – there was nothing recent in her sent box to her overwhelming relief. What was there in her inbox, though, was an invitation from Miss Dearman to have afternoon tea with her at a mutually convenient time in the near future. She’d suggested the Tea Lady tearoom in Skipperstone, a market town near to the village of Wychwell where she lived. So, Marnie had given Miss Dearman her email address then. And probably her mobile number, house address, bank details, national insurance number, all her PIN codes and passwords as well.
Marnie had a shower and an omelette and, when revived, looked up Wychwell on the internet, because she’d never heard of it and it was probably no wonder as it seemed to be in the middle of a big forest somewhere in the Yorkshire Dales. Photographs of it on ‘images’ were more complimentary: twee little cottages standing around a village green, an ancient stone church with a crooked spire and a beautiful manor house on a low hill. There were no pictures of Lilian Dearman, though there were plenty of other Dearmans: Montague Dearman, Ebenezer Dearman, Erasmus Dearman, and more. All with very highfalutin names, stiff poses and handlebar moustaches.
And as Marnie had bugger-all entries in her diary and she was inexplicably intrigued now, she emailed back that she would like to meet up. At least that way, they could both see that the other wasn’t a serial killer called Darren or a tabloid journo.
Marnie slobbed around in her dressing gown for the rest of the day feeling weak and wobbly. She had planned to go out and buy her sister a birthday card but ordered one from the internet to be sent directly to her instead. They didn’t do presents. They never had. Only at Christmas, which was an ordeal in itself because Gabrielle was allergic to soaps, perfumes, wool and animals, didn’t eat chocolates, didn’t drink, only read certain literary novels, didn’t want anyone else to buy her clothes and flowers set her hay fever off. Marnie spent from August onwards trying to source something that showed she’d put a bit of effort in, whereas Gabrielle bought her an M&S talcum and hand cream gift set in a meh flower fragrance every year. Gabrielle was brazen about her lack of effort in present-choosing.
Marnie looked again at her diary and found she had filled in some entries, in a looping drunken scrawl, when she’d been off her face. Amongst others she had blocked in a four-hour lunch on Wednesday with Hugh Jackman and a trip to Lanzarote with Justin Fox on Thursday. Saddest of all, she had booked the following Saturday and Sunday for a catch-up, spa and shopping with Caitlin. She was pathetic with a capital ‘P’ and she’d ruined her diary with the stupid inclusions. She ordered a new one from Amazon and then took out the recycling, noting that she’d put away two full bottles of wine. Usually after two glasses she was comatose. No wonder she’d told a perfect stranger her entire life story and filled her diary with pitiful gobbledygook. Regrettably, she had more chance of having lunch with Hugh Jackman than she did of a whole weekend catch-up with Caitlin or that holiday in Lanzarote with Justin Fox.