One
Not for the first time Cathy wished her mum had written this stuff down. Her gaze swept the worktop as she tied a band into her honey-blonde hair to get it out of the way. Whenever she did this there always seemed to be one stubborn, greying lock that wanted to escape, and it did so now, falling into her eyeline. She blew it out of the way, not bothering to try to tether it back with the rest of her waves – it would only come loose again anyway.
Flour, eggs, butter, baking powder… all the usual ingredients, but Cathy knew there was a secret ingredient – if she could just remember what it was. But the days of her mother writing it down were long gone, along with the days when Cathy could have watched more carefully and made notes. There were other recipes, of course – there were books and books, recipes all over the internet – but they wouldn’t be the same. They wouldn’t be her mother’s recipe.
With a heavy sigh she went over to the kitchen table and sat down. Her eyes were drawn to the window, where the November sun streamed in and lit the room with the sort of clean, fresh daylight that came only with the brightest and coldest of winter days. The tiny kitchen of her even tinier cottage was a little dated and in need of redecorating, but it was as welcoming as any, and right now it was warm and cosy, while outside a hard frost glinted on the ground.
The cottage stood on the outskirts of the northern town of Linnetford, a small path through a rose garden leading to its wisteria-garlanded front door, and had once been the dwelling of the tollkeeper in the days when travellers had to pay to use that stretch of road. The road that ran alongside was now covered in tarmac rather than cobbles, and it was far quieter these days as most people travelled through Linnetford and the surrounding Staffordshire countryside on the motorway or ring roads. In fact, it wasn’t often the road outside Tollkeep Cottage was troubled by much traffic at all, and it was certainly never troubled by the tailbacks that plagued the nearby A road.
Cathy had been for a brisk walk early that morning, soaking up the views, marvelling at how much prettier their grimy old canal path looked with an azure sky above it. And every so often she’d almost make some comment along those lines to her mum, but then she’d remember that her mum wasn’t there and the loneliness would threaten to overwhelm her again. But of course it was silly anyway because her mum’s wheelchair wouldn’t have made it along the towpath – they hadn’t been walking that way for years, not since her mum had been confined to that chair. Still, she would have liked it.
She turned back to the ingredients lined up on the worktop.
‘Nutmeg!’ she said with a sudden smile. ‘See, Mum, I worked it out after all.’
But then her smile turned into a vague frown. She was talking to her mum as if she was here again and that really had to stop. Spending her days talking to an empty house wasn’t good for her. She needed to get out, make new friends, find new things to do with her time now that her duties as a carer were over – but what? She’d spent so long caring for her mum she hardly remembered what sort of things she’d liked doing before.
There was cooking, of course. They’d both liked cooking. They especially liked baking and had often baked together, right from when Cathy had been a little girl barely old enough to reach the tabletop. She’d stood on a chair, tongue poking from the corner of her mouth as she mixed the batter, her mum hovering close, soft brown eyes the exact same shade as Cathy’s own watching every tiny wobble, ready to catch her if she fell. Cathy’s arms would ache and the batter would be lumpy but her mum would put it into the oven for her anyway and they’d eat the cake together and Cathy’s mum would pretend it was delicious. And then, one day, Cathy’s practice paid off and what she made started to become delicious for real.
She pushed herself up off the chair and returned to the worktop, reaching into a high cupboard to look for the nutmeg. ‘Come on, Cathy – snap out of this!’ she admonished herself. She knew her mum wouldn’t want her moping around forever.
And the truth was, Cathy was sick of moping, even though she didn’t know how to stop. It had been three months since her mother’s death but it had been no shock, and she’d had plenty of time to prepare herself. Even so, it had still caught her off-guard, still left her with a hole that she didn’t know how to fill. She’d got herself a little job now on the flower stall of a local market, but it was only for a few hours a week and it still left her alone a lot.
Relatives and acquaintances had all offered advice on how she could fill her time, ranging from joining a gym to putting herself on Tinder, but none of it had particularly appealed, and some of it had sounded downright horrifying. As for friends, she didn’t have many of those – tending to her mum’s every need hadn’t left a lot of time for socialising over the last few years. At thirty-eight she was almost beginning to feel too old to be starting again like this, rebuilding a social life and forging new friendships at a time when most women her age would have had all that firmly established. And as for hobbies, she wasn’t much good at anything really.
She weighed out the flour and tipped it into the same stoneware mixing bowl her mother had used for all the years Cathy had lived in that house with her. That mixing bowl was older than Cathy herself and she certainly had no idea where it had come from. Her mother had always said it made the best cakes and Cathy was inclined to agree. Then she measured out the baking powder and the butter and counted out the eggs before putting the oven on to heat.
That was when she heard the letterbox clatter the arrival of the post and went to look. She was still getting letters to do with her mother’s estate, not to mention various other official documents that she had to deal with, so she’d found it was better to go through the post as soon as it arrived in case she needed to make any lengthy phone calls before office hours were over for the day. She’d had to do all that alone too, and at times the sheer volume of official things she’d needed to sort had felt utterly overwhelming. She’d found she could cope slightly more easily if she didn’t let it build up.
Picking up the little bundle, she took it back to the kitchen and sat at the table for a moment while she opened everything. It was all fairly routine and boring – nothing to worry about today. But right at the bottom of the pile was a leaflet from a cancer charity advertising a coffee morning at St Cuthbert’s – the local church – and asking for attendees, as well as donations of cake and hot drinks.
St Cuthbert’s… it was funny. Cathy had fond, if rather vague, memories of that old church. She hadn’t been there for years, but before his death, her dad had been a regular. He’d even persuaded Cathy’s mum to go to the odd service too, which had been some feat because, as she’d got older, Cathy had come to realise that religion was one thing her mum was no great fan of. After the death of her father, neither Cathy nor her mum had ever set foot in there again, but Cathy still had those flashes of memory – of holding her dad’s hand as they filed in, the tuneless singing of hymns, the feeling of the smooth cold wood of the pews as they took their seats, and the smiles of old ladies after the service as they patted her on the head and told her dad what a pretty little thing she was.
Those memories gave her a melancholy smile now, as they always did, though she thought less and less of them the older she got. Nowadays, she wondered whether half of what she remembered was even true at all. She’d been five years old when he’d died and so five years old the last time she’d been to that church service, and memories that old couldn’t always be reliable.