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  A Little Love is dedicated to the woman who never taught me to bake, but did teach me to climb mountains and reach for the sky. She is the person I go to for everything from a cup of sugar to good advice. She has had my back since I took my first breath and my life without her would be no life at all. My mum, Anne, who I love with all my heart.

  Prologue

  As she paced the square room, her bare feet stuck to the wooden floorboards. The fire that burned in the grate seemed to heat the space directly in front of it, but little else. It was a tad too chilly in the room – at least, she thought it must be, as she was shaking. She wrapped her arms around her torso, but it made little difference.

  She was in a state somewhere between panic and hysteria, and when morning finally came, she would be exhausted from trying not to succumb to either. The morning. It felt very far away.

  The silky lotion she had rubbed into her legs made her skin shine where the lamplight touched it. It was a neat trick – one of many she had learned over the last couple of weeks, along with putting Vaseline on her eyelashes to make them seem thicker, and weaving a fat, loose plait to give her hair fabulous waves and make it look styled.

  Perching on the patchwork quilt, she felt the aged mattress sag beneath her. She sighed, fingering the lace front of her nightie, checking that each little pearlescent button sat snugly through its buttonhole, and patting the front flat. She wanted to look neat, nice. She then studied her fingernails, using the thumbnail of one hand to scoop behind the nails of the other.

  Dusk was falling and she was becoming increasingly agitated. Glancing at the clock on the bedside table, she wished she could turn back the hands to reclaim a couple of hours, give her longer to prepare. Not that more time would have made much difference; she would still reach this moment and feel exactly the same, with a churning sickness in the base of her stomach, the sound of her heartbeat loud in her ears and a layer of sweat on her palm that gathered like a little river in her lifeline. She licked it away, surprised that the salty residue wasn’t unpleasant on her tongue, then wiped the hand, slick with her spit, down her arm.

  She stretched out her fingers and studied the palm-wide crease more closely. It made her heart beat faster. Mrs Stanescu, who was married to the rag and bone man and wore a thick black scarf around her hair whatever the weather, had insisted on reading her palm. Lowering her bulk from her husband’s rickety cart one day, she had grabbed her by the wrist, smiling with her stubby, dark teeth revealed as she twisted and then slapped to make her fingers open. She had to concentrate on every vowel to understand the woman’s English with its heavy Romanian accent. Mrs Stanescu said she saw a long life, then pointed at the tiny triangles that sat on the crease, dotted almost uniformly along it.

  ‘These,’ she said as she jabbed at them with her long, dirty fingernail, ‘are very interesting. There are two sorts of island on a palm and they can mean times of deep sadness or times of great joy. They define a life.’

  She had looked up into the fixed eyes of Mrs Stanescu. Her lip trembled, pupils large. ‘Which sort are mine?’ she’d whispered, hardly able to listen to the answer.

  The woman’s stare hadn’t wavered. ‘Yours are not the joyous kind. They mean a life which will be bound by a chain that you will wear around your heart and a sadness that will sit behind your eyes, filling your mouth with sourness. It will taint all you do. You will die old and alone and you will know deep fear.’

  Crying, she had run to her mum, who petted her hair against her pinny and told her it was a load of old tosh and that she should take no notice of the loopy Mrs Stanescu, who probably said the same thing to everyone. It comforted her for a while, but still, most nights, in the seconds before she fell asleep, she would recall the old crone’s words. Her tongue would tingle with a bitter sensation and a wave of panic would wash over her as she wondered what it would feel like to live with a chain around her heart.

  She gasped and turned her head as the top stair creaked outside her bedroom door, drawing her into the present. Her heart leapt into her mouth. This was it.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  She didn’t know why these words left her mouth involuntarily or to whom they were addressed, but they were offered sincerely. Her palms ran with sweat once again and she thought of Mrs Stanescu. It might have been a load of tosh, but she knew the old hag had been right about one thing. Closing her eyes, she tried to smother the flames of deep fear that flickered inside her.

  1

  Pru donned her dressing gown over her pyjamas, stretched thick socks over her feet and crept out of the flat door, closing it quietly so as not to disturb her cousin Milly, who was sleeping soundly in her bedroom further down the hall. She slipped down to the basement. This she did on occasion when the bakery was closed, usually in the dead of night when sleep proved elusive, and always with the snap of excitement at her heels as she did so, covertly.

  Her alarm would not pip-pip for another three hours, yet instead of resting her head on her plump feather pillow, here she was, wandering along corridors and punching alarm codes into locked doors, looking over her shoulder and tiptoeing like a thief.

  Using only minimal lighting, eschewing both the elaborate machinery around her and the complicated recipes that she and Milly had honed over the years, she did what she always did on these night-time jaunts. She set about running up a batch of fairy cakes with nothing but a wooden spoon and a ceramic bowl, just as she had been taught.

  Pru fastened the apron around her waist, then laid out her ingredients and tools in a row on the counter top. She got the familiar jolt of happiness, knowing she had everything she needed to execute her plan. It felt exactly the same now as it had all those years ago. She cast her eye over the white flour, the bowl of sugar and the greasy lump of margarine splayed on the saucer next to the shiny clean bowl, awaiting her attention.

  She hummed to herself as she tipped the margarine and sugar together and began creaming them into a thick paste. She savoured the gritty crunch on the back of the spoon as it smashed the crystals against the crackle-glazed side of the china bowl, pushing and churning until the mixture billowed with tiny bubbles of air and her fingers ached. Next came the spoonfuls of plain flour, a drop of essence, baking powder, the egg and gradually more flour. Pru couldn’t fully describe the lift to her spirits or the bounce to her step as she watched the dry ingredients transform themselves into a pale golden batter. There was no great science to knowing when the mixture was ready; instead she used the tried and tested dropping method, lifting the spoon and watching to see how the cake mix fell. Too quickly meant it was too thin, calling for more flour and more mixing. Whereas a blob that refused to shift from the back of the spoon required more liquid and a light mix. When the batter acquired the perfect consistency, it dropped into the bowl with jaw-clenching slowness.

  As the fairy cakes baked, the anticipation filled her stomach with butterflies. While they cooled, she made a strong cup of coffee to go with them. Then she decorated them, exactly as her nan had instructed: sparsely, sprinkling hundreds and thousands on to a tiny misshapen pond of white icing. Both of which had been a luxury in her nan’s house. Finally, she popped the soft, vanilla-scented sponges into her mouth, allowing the sugar to spread its warm, satisfying sweetness across her tongue and the icing to stick to the roof of her mouth. She gobbled them greedily and quickly, all of them.

  ‘I know you are shaking your head and tutting at me, but don’t judge me, Alfie! I could have far worse habits.’ This she uttered into the ether with her eyes rai
sed skywards and a smile about her mouth as she licked a stray blob of icing and a couple of sprinkles from her lip.

  As proprietor of the world-renowned Plum Patisserie, Pru had access to any number of delicate iced fancies and exquisite sugar-dusted morsels each and every day. Yet none of them gave her anything like the pleasure she got from eating a warm fairy cake made to her nan’s exacting recipe and wolfed down illicitly in the wee small hours. The parcels of moist cake not only made her mouth water, but if she closed her eyes, she was back in their grotty kitchen in Bow, a little girl again, working diligently at their wobbly enamel-topped table. Back to a time before she knew anything of the world beyond their front door, before drive and aspiration had yoked her to a winding uphill path. Her nan, standing at the shallow china sink dressed in a pink wrap-around overall that had worn thin at the seams; and her three brothers, with pinched cheeks and rings of grime against the backs of their necks, hovering around the large china mixing bowl, their dirty fingers scooping at the fine lines of cake mixture residue, which they deposited into their eager mouths. The smell of the fluffy little ingots baking would almost drive them to tears. Clustering around the stove, unusually silent, they waited.

  Her nan would then turn the cakes out of the bun tin on to a wire rack on the sideboard. The scented steam that they gave off hypnotised them. And it would feel like an eternity before she would allow them to take one each. When they finally got one of those little cakes in their mitts, round-eyed and with a mouthful of sweet crumbs, it was a moment of bliss in an otherwise bliss-free life and it was wonderful. For Pru, nothing symbolised her success as much as her ability to eat a whole batch made in the kitchen of Plum Patisserie. She never told anyone about her trips down to the big kitchen; it was another little secret for her to keep.

  Pru laughed to herself as she perched on the edge of her bed a couple of hours later and applied the Crème de la Mer moisturiser to her face and throat. It was 6 a.m. but she had the alertness of someone who had been up for many hours. Fancy! She touched her fingers to her temples, where her once lustrous locks had now thinned. It was one of several habits she had acquired now that she was sixty-six, along with pushing up her eyebrows with her finger so that she could, for a second or two, re-create the wide eyes of her youth, before gravity had done its job and given them a hooded appearance.

  ‘I was lovely once, wasn’t I? Not that I really thought so at the time, despite what Trudy said. I never had her confidence – blimey, who did? She was something else, wasn’t she? So very long ago. I don’t know why I’m thinking about that, Alfie; our little flat in Kenway Road, my life in Earls Court. We had some fun: tough times, but happy times. A lifetime ago. You’re the only one I tell everything to, but I know you’re a secret-keeper, aren’t you, my love?’

  This she addressed to one of several silver-framed photographs on her bedside table. This particular snap was of a man astride a moped. He was looking over his shoulder, a roll-up hanging from his bottom lip. It was a black and white shot, and even though it had been taken decades later, it could have come straight out of the sixties. He had the air of James Dean about him, or maybe that was just how she preferred to think of him: an anti-hero rather than a hopeless, drug-addicted drop-out.

  He smiled back at her with eyes that crinkled into laughter, peeping from behind black-framed Ray-Bans that, with his head tilted towards the camera, had slipped down to the end of his nose. Pru loved this photo. There weren’t that many of her family – owning a camera had never been a priority – but his grin and the setting, on what looked like a bright, sunny day, meant that she knew he’d had this one good day. Or, more specifically, this one good moment on this one day. She hoped that when things had got bad for him, the memory of that moment might have sustained him. As usual, he didn’t reply.

  Pru padded around the flat in her soft grey jersey pyjamas and dressing gown, with a cup of hot black coffee balanced on her palm. She hummed as she walked from room to room, finding it calming to see that everything was just as she had left it the night before, harvesting reassurance from the order in which she lived and gaining confidence from knowing she was the owner of so many lovely things. The pictures were straight, cushions plumped and objets d’art positioned just so. Though she had to admit that, barring a messy burglary or natural disaster, the likelihood of this not being the case was extremely slim.

  She sat on the chair at the little walnut desk in the corner of her bedroom and let the bank statement flutter in her hand. She no longer paid heed to the black figures and their commas, lined up in neat rows; it was more of an inquisitive glance to see that payments had gone through and a reminder of where she was in the month. Gone were the days of shuffling balances and debts around to keep suppliers happy, juggling dates and orders to ensure there was enough money in the accounts to pay the wages. The business had reached the point a couple of decades ago where takings began to exceed expenditure and once the scales had tipped in their favour, they had never looked back. She unscrewed the lid of her Montblanc fountain pen and placed a tiny cross by the payment that was referenced CM; one thousand pounds had gone through on the fourteenth, just as it did every month and had done for the last ten years. If she did the maths, it caused a ball to knot in her stomach and a tide of panic to rise in her throat, so it was better that she didn’t. Pru folded the paper sheets and clipped them into the leather file that she stowed back in the drawer.

  After showering and blow-drying her auburn hair into its blunt bob, Pru sat down at her dressing table and applied the merest hint of taupe lip stain and a single wand-slick of mascara. She rubbed her fingers over her temples. She had never thought she would become this sort of older lady. In her youth she’d only ever imagined herself in her mid twenties, old enough to know best but still young enough to enjoy herself. Yet here she was, hardly recognising the face in the mirror. And it had happened in a heartbeat! She sighed and pulled her lower teeth over her top lip, making her neck and chin taut, the way they used to look. A liberal spritz of Chanel No. 5 and she was set for the day. She accessorised her navy trousers with a white silk blouse and two rows of pearls that hung in differing lengths against her small, high chest. She slipped her feet into navy penny loafers, her footwear of choice on days like this.

  Pru held her breath and tugged the blind. She watched a white transit van pull up on to the kerb with its hazard lights flashing, delivering to Guy all that they needed for a day of baking and trading. On the opposite side of the street, two young men in dinner jackets, with ties loose about their necks and a wobble to their saunter, walked arm in arm. No doubt homeward bound at this early hour. She smiled; there it was, Curzon Street, just as she had left it.

  She worried that one day she might pull the blind and see instead the traffic of Kenway Road, a few miles across town in Earls Court; as if she had dreamed her success, her home in Mayfair, her Italian marble flooring, espresso machine and walk-in closet and was still there, living that life. Back then, although her surroundings had been drab, she had been full of life: a young girl with a defiant stare and a gut full of determination.

  The day that she and Milly had arrived at the six-storey terrace on Kenway Road, they had thought they were invincible, immune to the regrets and recriminations that came with old age. It was the last in a long list of rentals that she and Milly had painstakingly ringed in the small ads, and from the moment they arrived they knew it was the place for them. A statuesque, elegant woman opened the door wearing a silk kimono and smoking a thin cigar in an ivory cigarette holder. She introduced herself as Trudy; she lived in a flat on the top floor. Pru walked to one of two deep-set sash windows on the landing and gazed at the most incredible view of the London skyline, all the way out to Fulham and beyond. She let her eyes skim the horizon and red-brick chimney pots. This would be the start of their journey, here among the west London rooftops, living with this assured, worldly woman. Pru followed Trudy down a narrow hallway, noting the way she swept along on her high heels
, which made her look refined and sophisticated, sexy. She was going to practise that walk and when she had enough money, buy herself a pair of high-heeled red patent leather shoes, just like Trudy’s.

  ‘Who’s David Parkes?’ Milly asked. She had stopped at a framed certificate that hung on the wall and pointed to it.

  ‘David was… err… my brother.’ Trudy arched a carefully plucked eyebrow. ‘He died a couple of years ago.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Pru offered. She rolled her eyes at Milly, who was always jumping in feet first.

  Pru and Milly told Trudy how they wanted to open their own bakery with a shop and a café, where they would make the most delicious cakes and bread that London had ever tasted.

  Trudy didn’t laugh or mock, as others had when they’d shared this. Instead, she nodded and blew large Os of cigar smoke. Then she pressed her full, carmine-painted lips together and said, ‘I think people without dreams are living only half a life and that’s a life I wouldn’t want to live.’

  Pru had been impressed, Trudy sounded like a poet.

  ‘But it’s no good dreaming unless you are prepared to work really hard. You have to dream it and set yourself a path to make it happen. A dream won’t put food on the table or money in your purse.’

  Pru had subconsciously patted the purse in her pocket, which contained their first week’s rent, bus fare and a lucky coin with a hole drilled through it. It was the sum total of their combined wealth. She nodded, wondering what they would need to do to clear their path – the one that led straight to the shiny glass window of Plum Patisserie.

  ‘What’s your dream then?’ Milly asked Trudy over Pru’s shoulder.

  Trudy gave the younger girl her full attention, and drew on her cigar. ‘To have a little love in my life,’ she said as she turned her back and walked forward. ‘I think that’s everyone’s dream, really.’