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But she did know who’d done it.
Her eyes wandered to the Bake Off questions.
How long has the applicant been baking?
That was easy. Sarah was already great by the time she moved into the old flat. It was her promise of home-made scones that won her Catherine’s vote when they first met.
Her mum had taught her to bake when she was little (the next question). Every year when she got tipsy on her birthday she told them how she’d baked her own Victoria sponge when she turned six. Every year they pretended this was new information.
Glancing again at the doorway, Rachel’s hand found a pen. It seemed to have a mind of its own.
I started baking my own cakes at six, she wrote.
Next question: What did she personally get from baking?
Sarah never really talked about it but it seemed to make her really happy. She usually sang when she baked, and filled the whole kitchen with a homeliness as she worked through her recipes. Rachel said as much on the form, but skipped the part about the singing in case that might be distracting on set.
Next were a load of questions about skills and knowledge. She had to guess at those. Sarah seemed to know how to bake everything, so Rachel just listed the main categories from one of her cookbooks as examples. The judges probably wanted a broad idea anyway.
When she got to the questions about hobbies and ambitions, it started sounding a lot like a dating profile. I like long chocolate eclairs on the beach, enjoying sunset cheesecakes, and I live life to the fullest-fat cream. The questions were handy though, given the conversation she’d have with Sarah when she got in. Two birds, one stone.
She let out a little yelp when the front door opened upstairs.
‘Anybody home yet?’ Sarah called from the living room.
She shoved the application back in the drawer. Somehow it seemed less sneaky to keep it there in relatively plain sight.
‘Been home long?’ Sarah said, throwing her bag on the table. ‘Whatcha doing?’
‘Just finishing my book. I got home a few minutes ago. Have you eaten?’
Sarah shook her head. ‘Let’s order from the Noodle Shop.’
She moved toward the tea drawer to get the noodle menu.
‘Let me do it!’ Rachel cried, launching herself at the drawer to shove the application beneath the menus. ‘You’ve just walked in the door. Go change into something more comfy. You want the Thai noodles, right?’
Sarah stared at her jeans and baggy dark blue fisherman’s jumper. ‘Catherine wants to get me out of my trackies and you want me in them. I wish you’d make up your minds,’ she called over her shoulder.
Rachel’s heart hammered. So much for feeling less sneaky. Still, Sarah would be grateful if she got the chance to have Paul Hollywood compliment her iced buns.
Twenty minutes later, Aziz was at their front door. His parents owned the Noodle Shop.
‘All right?’ he said, handing Rachel the steaming plastic bags.
‘Good, Aziz, thanks. You?’
Something about him looked different but Rachel couldn’t put her finger on it. Was it his hair? Yes, that was it. She could see his hair. ‘No helmet? Where’s your scooter?’
‘Got nicked yesterday,’ he mumbled, hunching further into his winter coat.
‘Oh no! Your parents aren’t making you deliver on foot?’
‘Nah, we’re not doing deliveries till we get the insurance money to replace it.’
‘Well thanks for making an exception for us.’
‘No problem, you’re our best customers. See you later.’
Poor Noodle Shop family, thought Rachel. As if the people in their neighbourhood didn’t have enough trouble making ends meet.
‘Aziz’s scooter got nicked,’ Rachel told Sarah as she unpacked their order.
‘That’s shite! It’s probably halfway to Africa by now.’
‘It didn’t run away, Sarah. It was stolen.’
‘I know. They’re selling them in Africa.’
‘Are you sure that’s not bicycles?’
‘Maybe.’ Sarah shifted her container of noodles aside to make room for her sketch pad. ‘What do you think of this? I’m pitching it at the ideas meeting tomorrow.’
Rachel pulled the pad closer.
She loved Sarah’s sketches. No wonder her cards were consistently bestsellers. Her company was very lucky to have her.
She’d done some preliminary colouring in on the pen-and-ink sketch. Two figures stood hand-in-hand beneath an arch of summer flowers.
‘What’s the theme?’ Rachel asked.
The man in the sketch was balding, with a big tummy beneath his suit.
‘It’s an Asian lady marrying an English man,’ she said, scooping up some noodles with her chopsticks.
The lithe young woman smiled adoringly at her paunchy groom.
‘Seriously?’
‘Harry’s always looking for ways to expand the wedding cards. I know everybody thinks she’s a mail-order bride but sometimes they must really be in love. Don’t they deserve a nice card too?’
Sarah was such a romantic at heart. Maybe it was the cause of her success as a wedding card designer. Or a consequence. Either way, it worked for her.
‘Well, good luck in the meeting,’ said Rachel through a mouthful of steaming noodles. ‘It is quite romantic. Speaking of which, I talked to James today. He’s joining RecycLove with me.’
Sarah peered at Rachel from beneath her blonde fringe. ‘Are you sure you’re going to be okay with James dating right under your nose?’
‘Womankind is welcome to him! We are absolutely just friends. So now you have to join with me,’ she continued. ‘And don’t say you’ll think about it. I know that means you won’t do it. We’ll do it together.’
Sarah sighed, closing her sketchbook. ‘Rachel, I don’t even know where to start with the profile.’
Rachel thought about the Bake Off application. ‘But I do. I’ll help you. It’s probably just some questions about your hobbies and stuff. Please say you will. All you have to do is ask Sebastian. If James said yes, then a horndog like Sebastian definitely will, just to get access to all the women. Please say you will. Please? What’s there to lose?’
Sarah ticked off on her fingers. ‘My dignity, my self-esteem, hours out of my life, just off the top of my head.’
‘At least try, Sarah. If you hate it you can always quit. Nothing ventured, nothing gained … Shall I text Catherine and tell her we’ll do it together?’
Rachel reached for her phone.
‘I’m texting. If you want me to stop, say so. No? Okay. Texting.’
Sarah squirmed, but didn’t move to stop her.
‘Texting. Texting. Sent. RecycLove, here we come.’
Chapter Six (#ulink_6df917c1-ab9a-5b27-a83f-b3cdd37233b4)
Sarah (#ulink_6df917c1-ab9a-5b27-a83f-b3cdd37233b4)
Everyone in the conference room stared between Sarah and her sketch pad.
Her boss was doing that thing with his throat when he got embarrassed.
As if he had anything to be embarrassed about. He wasn’t the one being gawped at like he’d drawn willies on the wall.
‘Help me see where you’re going with this, Sarah,’ he said.
But I’ve literally drawn you a picture, she wanted to shout. Why didn’t people ever seem to know what she was talking about?
Instead she said, ‘It’s simple. Lots of English men and Asian women get married. This card would be for them.’
‘You mean mail-order brides?’ Harry asked.
Someone sniggered. It was Maria-Therese. That woman spent more time in Harry’s back pocket than his own wallet did.
‘No, Harry, not mail-order brides! Don’t be insulting. It’s for Asian women and English men who are in love.’
‘I think that might be a little too niche for us, Sarah,’ he said.
This time she caught Maria-Therese roll her beady little eyes. She could never look at her colleague’s twitchy needle nose and pinched lips in her thin, washed-out face without thinking of bubonic-infected rodents.
‘But we’re supposed to be thinking of niche markets. Isn’t that what you keep telling us in these meetings?’
‘Not quite that niche,’ he said. ‘Who’s next?’
The problem with Harry was that he had no vision. They’d already covered all the usual ethnic combinations, plus gay marriage and their non-standard body type range (which was Sarah’s idea).
She didn’t mind illustrating traditional boy-meets-girl cards but they were getting killed by companies like MoonPig. At the rate they were going, she’d be sketching tourists for a fiver in Trafalgar Square by this time next year.
Harry’s meetings only took an hour but they always felt like they sucked about a week from Sarah’s soul. Despite all the evidence – the growth in online cards and all the high-street shops closing down – Harry refused to adapt. He’d only make little tweaks here and there to his family’s business. That was like reupholstering the seats on your horse-drawn cart when everyone else was working at Ford.
Sarah didn’t know which she hated more – getting bollocked for not bringing an idea to the meeting each week, or getting bollocked when she did.
She hurried toward the lifts, stuffing her sketch pads back into her bag. She didn’t have a desk there. None of them did. Harry called it ‘flexible working’, but he was just too skint to pay for office space. Working from home suited Sarah anyway, with Sissy to think about.
She was waiting as usual just outside the front door when Sarah got there, beneath the big sign that welcomed everyone to Whispering Sands. What a misnomer. Nobody whispered in the care home and the only sand within thirty miles was in the car park, left over from when they gritted it last winter.
‘You’re—’
‘I’m not late,’ Sarah said. ‘Are you ready to go?’
‘I was ready at two thirty,’ said Sissy, holding her wrist two inches from Sarah’s face.
‘Your watch is fast.’
‘No, you’re slow.’
‘Whatever. Let’s go. Button your coat.’ The November days were closing in. ‘We can pick up some flowers for Mum on the way.’
She was only in the next town but travelling back there always gave Sarah pangs, like that sinking-in-the-stomach feeling when you think about an ex that you really liked.
She pushed the feelings aside as they got to the florist near their mum’s.
‘Do you like any of these bouquets?’ she asked Sissy, who was sniffing the flowers in each of the two dozen buckets by the desk.
‘These smell nicest,’ she said, pointing to the long-stem red roses.
‘Yeah, well for three quid a stem, they should. What about one of these?’ She pointed to the £10 bunches.
Carefully, Sissy inspected each bouquet. It would take her a while to decide.
Sissy never let Sarah rush her. Her scrupulous attention to detail meant that even the most mundane task took her about a million years. Plus, she liked to touch everything she saw, which made clothes shopping with her an exercise in patience.
‘How’s everything going with your boyfriend?’ Sarah asked as Sissy sniffed a purple and yellow bouquet.
‘Good.’ Sniff.
‘Still holding hands?’
‘Sometimes.’ She glanced over. ‘And kissing.’
‘Oh, kissing? Is that nice?’
‘Yep.’ Sniff sniff. ‘This one smells nice.’
‘Anything besides kissing?’
She thought for a minute. ‘He gave me his jelly.’
