‘Meg, come and look at this!’
Tracing Sam’s voice to the kitchen, I found him hunched over his laptop at the breakfast bar, a half-empty breakfast smoothie at his elbow. It was putty-coloured, with lumps of banana where it hadn’t blended properly. More of a lumpy than a smoothie.
‘What is it?’ I said, though I’d guessed from his excited tone it must be cycling-related.
‘It’s the itinerary.’ The posh voice he put on clashed with his faint, milky moustache. ‘“Paris to Geneva,”’ he read out, his hazel eyes skimming the screen. ‘“Four days in the saddle, riding across stunning French countryside, through medieval towns, crossing through the famous vineyard regions of Burgundy and Champagne, culminating in the crossing of the beautiful Jura Mountains.”’
I suppressed a sigh as I crossed the black-and-white chequered tile floor to join him. I’d heard so much about his upcoming cycling challenge that I felt as though I ought to know the itinerary by osmosis, but there’d been some last-minute tweaks and it had only just gone online.
‘Sounds amazing,’ I said, because I didn’t begrudge him doing the challenge, it was just that training had taken up most of the year and nearly all his spare time, and I’d heard an awful lot about saddles, road surfaces, body-to-power ratios, lactate thresholds, and the benefits of windproof cycling jackets. ‘I wouldn’t mind going to Geneva.’
‘Hmmm,’ he said, still reading as I hoisted myself onto a shiny American-diner style stool at the breakfast bar, gripping the edge to stop myself slithering off. They were horribly impractical while wearing a silky robe. ‘I doubt I’ll see much of it.’
It wasn’t the right response, but I knew he was ‘in the zone’ and when Sam was ‘in the zone’ he found it hard to focus on anything else. Even me. I was sure he’d have noticed if I’d spoken in Italian, or shaved my hair off, but since I hadn’t changed much in the fifteen years since we’d met, there was no real need for him to drag his eyes from the screen.
‘I’ll print it out, so you’ve got a copy.’ He was radiating the sort of excitement normally associated with children on Christmas Eve, no doubt seeing himself sailing across the finish line, contorted over the frame of his bike in the aerodynamic position that played havoc with his back.
‘Let’s have a look,’ I said, leaning over, but a bolt of early sunshine had brightened the screen to a blank and I couldn’t see a thing. We were in the grip of an August hot spell and my robe was already starting to cling.
‘Just a few more days and we’ll be in Paris.’ By ‘we’ he meant his fellow cycling club members, who’d signed up for the challenge at the beginning of the year.
‘Yay,’ I said with a smile, wondering what I’d be doing while he was away, apart from worrying about whether I’d still be at the bakery when he came back.
‘I’m going to post our progress on the Pedal Pushers Facebook page every day, so you’ll be able to picture where we are.’
‘Lovely,’ I said. It might have been nice to be there in person, but the trip was members only, and I couldn’t have gone anyway with the bakery up for sale.
‘Oh, and Mum’s emailed another link to a company that does personalised wedding invitations.’ This time I was sure Sam was avoiding my gaze deliberately. Beverley’s email links were reaching crisis point as she attempted to organise every aspect of our wedding. She’d already persuaded Sam to book Studley Grange for the ceremony, and while I hadn’t argued because… well, Studley Grange was gorgeous, if insanely expensive, her suggestions were becoming ever more outrageous. I’d already declined some rhinestone studded invitations, as well as a scroll inside a bottle, complete with sand and shells as being too over the top, but Sam had clicked on the link and was saying, ‘At least these ones are reasonably priced.’ He picked up his glass and attempted to swirl the sludge inside around. ‘Three silver hearts underneath our names and the venue, and whoever gets an invite scratches them off to reveal the wedding date.’
I couldn’t stop a tiny groan escaping.
‘Yeah, I’m not keen on the gambling element,’ he admitted, to my relief. ‘What about a customised typography of our story?’
‘A what?’
‘How we met, that kind of thing.’ His eyes zoomed over the screen, and I appreciated that he was at least making an effort to think of something besides his cycling challenge. ‘Our first date, first kiss, things we love to do together.’ He knitted his sandy eyebrows. ‘Could be fun,’ he said doubtfully.
‘I’m not sure,’ I stalled. I had to be careful what I said, as Beverley was easily offended, and Sam preferred the path of least resistance when it came to his mother. ‘Most people already know we met at school, and that our first kiss was in your dad’s shed which smelt of petrol.’
‘Ah, you remember.’ He slapped a hand over his heart. ‘I still associate the smell of fuel with you.’
‘Idiot.’ I smiled, in spite of myself. ‘And I’m sure they won’t care that our first “date” was babysitting your little sister.’
‘Oh, I don’t know, it was quite dramatic.’ He finally planted his gaze on mine, and I fleetingly wondered what he saw. The same as always, I supposed: shoulder-length wavy hair (champagne-blonde, according to Mum), pale-denim eyes (Mum again), generous curves, and probably a shiny face, thanks to the rising temperature. ‘Especially the bit where we lost her playing hide-and-seek, and ended up calling the police.’
I shuddered, recalling the episode as though it had happened yesterday. ‘I’m not sure your parents will want reminding,’ I said, remembering Neil and Beverley shooting home in a panic to find two squad cars outside their house, the inside swarming with officers, and a helicopter circling overhead. Luckily, the noise had woken three-year-old Sadie, who’d hidden under her duvet and fallen asleep. We hadn’t even thought to look in her bed. ‘And we don’t really do things together, apart from Sunday lunch with your family.’ It was true. Not in a bad way, we just had different interests. Sam’s were cycling and – less frequently these days – fishing, and I loved baking and… well, baking.
‘We go to the cinema sometimes’ – I couldn’t remember the last time – ‘and I’m home for dinner every evening, and we do a jigsaw together every Christmas.’ Sam had adopted a jokey manner, which meant he was ‘handling’ me. ‘That’s more than most couples manage.’
I supposed he was right. ‘Ah yes, the Christmas jigsaw.’ I tried to match his jolly tone. ‘But it’s not exactly white-water rafting, or… I don’t know, salsa dancing.’
‘You’d hate white-water rafting, you don’t even like getting your face wet in the shower, but we can take up salsa if you like.’ Getting off his stool, Sam began to strut up and down, popping his hips from side to side while holding an imaginary partner. I couldn’t help laughing. With his athletic frame – shown to advantage in tight-fitting cycling gear – he could easily pass for a dancer.
‘You’re right, we do plenty together. I just don’t think it needs putting on a wedding invitation.’
‘OK, I’ll let Mum know.’ Sam reached for his drink and I almost gagged, watching him drain the glass. I’d never liked bananas. ‘She thinks we need to get a wiggle on, that’s all, so that people can book accommodation.’
‘We’ve got ages yet.’ I slid off the stool and moved across to the kettle, keen to draw the conversation to a close.
‘January will come around quicker than you think.’ He rinsed his glass and placed it in the dishwasher. ‘She’s just trying to help, Meg.’ He swung round and, for a second, I thought he was about to comment on my apparent reluctance to let his mum get so involved, but instead, he said, ‘And you’re positive you don’t want an owl as a ring bearer?’
I gave him my toughest look. ‘Very positive.’
Beverley had come across a website a few months earlier called Flying the Knot, which had promised a beautiful ring-bearing barn owl to ‘elegantly and gracefully’ fly our wedding rings along the aisle. I’d almost wept with laughter – until I realised Sam was considering it. In truth, I’d still been reeling from the suddenness of his proposal. Although we’d been together for years, Sam had always been a bit vague on the subject of a wedding – even after Beverley reminded him that it had been my dream, at sixteen, for us to be married with a child on the way by the time I was thirty.
One minute we’d been chugging along as normal, me working in the bakery at Seashell Cove, Sam training hard for his cycling challenge, weddings apparently the last thing on his mind, and the next he’d booked a night at a spa hotel in Exmoor, and after a couples’ massage that he’d complained was too ‘light-fingered’ and a meal that took ages to arrive, he’d proposed in our four-poster-bedded room, and suggested we start trying for a baby that very night. Unfortunately, nothing had happened in that department over the next few months, despite tests showing there was no reason why, so we’d put starting a family firmly on ice until after we were married.
‘The owl was one of Mum’s sillier ideas,’ Sam acknowledged, startling me back to the moment. I was clutching a mug and staring blankly at the boiling kettle. ‘Especially as you don’t even like birds that much.’
‘Not close up.’ Grabbing a teabag with a pair of tiny silver tongs, I flashed him a smile. ‘I’d scream the place down if an owl went rogue and attacked everyone at the wedding, like the one we saw on the news.’
He smirked. ‘Do you remember when a pigeon landed on your head in Trafalgar Square, and you did a little wee?’
Of course I remember. It wasn’t long after you came back from Edinburgh, where you met someone else despite swearing you wouldn’t, and phoned to break up with me. I banished the thought, not sure why it had popped up when it was ancient history. Sam had been at university, and when his relationship with Andrea – an aspiring model – had ended a year or so later, he’d come back to me.
Actually, he’d returned to Devon because his dad was in hospital, which was where we’d bumped into each other again, and where he’d declared he still had feelings for me, and I’d been so happy that I hadn’t probed for details about his break-up. I didn’t want to know whether he’d said I love you to someone else.
‘Thanks for that reminder,’ I said, pouring boiling water into my mug. ‘It was only a tiny wee, but not my finest moment.’
‘Oh, and Mum’s been on again about you not wanting to take my surname.’
I tried to keep my voice light. ‘I always said that I’d never become Meg Ryan.’
‘She thinks most people won’t remember there’s an actress with that name.’
‘Is she kidding?’ On safer ground, I took the milk he was holding out and splashed some into my tea. ‘Everyone in the entire world remembers When Harry Met Sally.’
‘And you don’t want to be double-barrelled?’
‘Meg Larson-Ryan doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.’ I glanced at the hot-dog-shaped clock on the wall above our reconditioned 1950s stove. ‘I should get ready for work.’
He lifted his eyebrows. ‘It’s not really work though, is it?’
‘Oh, Sam, not this again.’
‘Just saying.’ He glanced at his watch, and I could tell he’d already moved on in his head, even as he was speaking. ‘You’re paid to work at the café, not to look after the bakery.’
I shot him a glance over my mug. ‘That’s where I bake my cakes, Sam, and I do get paid for those.’
‘Not very much,’ he said, with the faintly censorious tone that made me want to throw my teabag at him. ‘You need to find a full-time job.’
‘You know that I’m holding out for someone to buy the bakery and take me on.’
Sam was scooping things into his backpack now, not really focused. ‘Whoever buys it will probably turn the building into something else.’
You hope. For some reason, it niggled him that I was still holding out for a job there; that I’d suggested us putting in an offer, even though we could barely afford the wedding Sam had insisted on funding ourselves. That was on top of our mortgage and bills, and his cycling challenge, which had cost more than he’d bargained for.
I opened a Tupperware box and lifted out a slice of cherry and almond tart to have for breakfast. ‘We’ll see,’ I said mildly.
‘You could always ask for more hours at the café.’
I’d already told him there were no more available hours, but decided not to remind him as he came over and bent his head to mine. He was nearly a foot taller, and had nice lips – full and kissable – but a trace of banana on his breath made me turn my face, and his lips grazed my cheek.
Backing away, he grabbed his helmet and crammed it over his thick blond hair, and I saw him checking out his quads in the glass-fronted oven door. They were impressively honed, since he’d taken to cycling to his office in Kingsbridge every day as part of his training regime, and I supposed I couldn’t blame him if his eyes flicked down from time to time to admire his thighs and calves.
‘I’d better go,’ he said. ‘Negotiating world peace can’t wait any longer.’
I smiled at the little joke. Sam was a quantity surveyor, a job he’d got used to explaining as ‘costing the construction of buildings’ if anyone asked.
‘Be careful out there.’ He was one of those cyclists drivers tooted at, and I worried that one day he’d get run over.
‘You too,’ he said, looking vaguely appalled as I crammed a mouth-watering combination of buttery pastry and soft, almondy sponge into my mouth. ‘I’ll see you later.’
When he’d gone, I scooted across to the window, brushing crumbs from my cleavage, and as I watched him lovingly grip the handlebars and mount his bike, I wondered whether it was normal to feel slightly jealous. It was a long time since I’d been lovingly gripped and mounted.
My spirits drooped at the sight of the For Sale sign outside the Old Bakery; a daily reminder of how little control I had over its future. Like the butcher’s next door, it was a quaintly old-fashioned, two-storey building with a bow-fronted window and whitewashed exterior, and I simply couldn’t imagine the street without it.
I still missed the owner, Mr Moseley, and the way he’d say, ‘Here’s Meg, come to bake the world a better place,’ every time I walked in. He’d been at least seventy-five when I’d started work there six years ago, but he wouldn’t hear of retiring. The job had been his life, and his father’s before him, and nobody could imagine him sitting in his cluttered flat upstairs with his feet up, reading a newspaper all day. He’d come down every morning, until three months earlier, when I’d arrived to find his cleaner, Carol, weeping quietly in the kitchen, and a kind-faced paramedic had revealed that Mr Moseley had passed away peacefully in the night.
‘Looked just like he was sleeping,’ Carol had said, buttoning her coat with shaky fingers. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s left the bakery to you, Meg. He thought the world of you.’
I hadn’t been able to deny a swell of hope. Mr Moseley had taken a shine to me, and been like a grandfather in some ways. He’d tried to teach me how to make his signature loaves, despairing at my heavy handedness and lack of perseverance when I could bake cakes ‘like an angel’, but he’d trusted me with a set of keys, and hadn’t minded me coming over in the evenings sometimes to bake after everyone had gone home.
But it turned out Mr Moseley hadn’t even made a will, and his estranged brother, Lester, wasn’t interested in the bakery, opting instead to put the building on the market.
Luckily, I still had my keys, and access to the kitchen until the place was sold. Lester – who lived in Spain, and hadn’t even shown up to his brother’s funeral – had given his permission through the agent dealing with the sale, who’d pitched up at the bakery to look around, and found me up to my elbows in flour in the kitchen. ‘He’s agreed you can act as caretaker and keep an eye on the place,’ he’d said, and I’d got a bit teary with gratitude. I hadn’t told Sam I’d been using the money I earned at the café, and for making my cakes, to cover the cost of using the kitchen, and to pay for the delivery of fresh ingredients I ordered every week.
As I pulled the car round the back of the bakery and got out, Big Steve emerged from the butcher’s, a camera slung round his neck. When he wasn’t working at the bakery at Tesco’s in Newton Abbott, he liked to indulge his love of wildlife photography. ‘No interest yet?’ he called.
‘’Fraid not,’ I said, thinking, as I always did, how much like a typical baker he looked with his cuddly frame and plump smiley face, topped off with a shock of curly brown hair. He’d probably looked the same as a child, and wouldn’t change much as he aged, but I guessed he was in his late thirties. ‘Sure you won’t put in an offer?’
‘Wish I could, believe me.’ He pushed his curls off his forehead. ‘On my salary, I can’t even afford a place of my own to live.’ He jerked his eyes to the flat above the butcher’s, where he lived with his brothers. ‘Plus,’ he added, ‘it would probably finish off the old man.’
His dad had nearly disowned him already for not joining the family business, struggling with the fact that his youngest son was a vegetarian and loathed the sight of meat. Luckily, Steve’s brothers had taken the reins at the butcher’s shop when their father retired.
‘Ah well, happy baking,’ he said, moving with a light step towards the corner of the building. ‘Let me know if you’d like some loaves to pop in the window for show. I could make a few if you don’t mind me using the kitchen. The oven in my flat is a leetle bit temperamental.’
‘Will do,’ I said, smiling. If only Mr Moseley hadn’t been so territorial in his kitchen. Big Steve would have been a great asset, and things might not have gone downhill as Mr Moseley made fewer loaves, and his eyesight started to fail.
As I let myself in through the back door, goosebumps peppered my arms. I’d driven the ten-minute journey from Salcombe with the car windows down, glad of my sleeveless dress, but wished now that I’d thought to bring a cardigan.
In the past, Mr Moseley would have already been there for hours, proving the dough and baking the first batch of bread, ready for the early customers. The kitchen would have been warm and fuggy from the heat of the ovens, the door propped open in summer, and while I got busy serving, he’d start on another round, including his famous ‘doorstopper’ scones. Around nine o’clock, his long-time assistant, Martha, would arrive to take over serving so I could bake my repertoire of cakes, and mouth-watering aromas would drift from the building, drawing people like magic. Often, there’d be a queue outside, and Mr Moseley’s furrowed face would light up with satisfaction.
‘That’s what I’m talking about,’ he would say, before disappearing back into the steamy kitchen.
But that was before his eyesight deteriorated, and Martha retired to Scotland, and he started buying in part-baked bread to warm up in the ovens. Business had tailed off, despite the occasional request for a celebration cake, as regulars began buying their baked goods from the nearby supermarket.
Sighing, I pushed my hair inside one of the little white hairnets Mr Moseley had always insisted we wear, and pulled on my ‘Star Baker’ apron (Mum’s nod to my love of The Great British Bake Off), before switching on the ancient but efficient ovens.
Everything about the small kitchen was old-fashioned (or ‘vintage’ as my friend Tilly would call it), from the original red-brick walls, to the cream-and-terracotta tiled floor and frosted glass panes in the window, but Mr Moseley had been rigorous about cleanliness, and all the equipment worked.
After washing my hands and cleaning the surfaces, I lined up my ingredients on the wooden worktable. As well as making another cherry and almond tart, I wanted to try a chocolate and raspberry cream cake recipe I’d seen in a magazine, and adapt it by adding some lemon zest, and layering the top with toasted flakes of coconut.
Anticipation unfurled as I weighed out the flour to make the pastry for the tart. I didn’t take any chances when I was baking for the café, though I had a knack for guessing quantities correctly, like some people could play music by ear.
Mum said I took after my granny, who we’d lived with until I was seven, and my earliest memory was of cracking eggs into a ceramic bowl, her gentle hand guiding mine, while the scent of a baking cake still whizzed me back to Saturday mornings in her kitchen in Plymouth, cartoons blazing from the television in the living room.
‘Baking was her way of showing love,’ I’d heard Mum say to someone outside the church after Granny’s funeral – she’d collapsed on her way to buy eggs one winter’s morning and never came home. I hadn’t understood what Mum meant because Granny had shown love in all sorts of ways, which is why it had been so tough to accept she’d gone, and why Mum had sold the house (‘too many memories’) and taken us to Salcombe, where she’d holidayed once when her father was still alive.
But I’d grown to understand that when someone took their first bite of somethin. . .
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
