Christmas at the Cupcake Café

She wondered what Austin thought about her job – he saw her at work, she supposed, making coffee and baking cakes and handling the customers, but she didn’t think he found it very impressive (she was quite wrong to think this; Austin thought what she did was amazing). Meanwhile, here he was, eating a very rare steak and explaining why the future of Europe was as luxury-goods merchants to roaring emerging economies, whilst everyone nodded sagely and listened to everything he said. Suddenly Issy wished Darny were there to wind Austin up and say something cheeky.

Cosy in the warm restaurant, drinking quite a lot of wine and eating her food without saying very much, Issy had felt herself start to slightly drift off when she heard her name.

‘It’s like Issy’s business model,’ Austin was saying. ‘High-end products, immaculately made and presented, not mass-market. That’s the future, because everywhere else we can’t compete.’

The table turned towards Issy, who felt very fuzzy in the head.

‘What?’ she said.

‘Is that true, Issybel?’ asked Merv. ‘Are you the future of commerce? When you’re awake?’

Everyone laughed as if he’d said something funny, and Issy blushed bright red and couldn’t think of a single word to say.

‘Well?’ said Merv.

‘Do you think your model is going to drive European-zone regeneration?’ snapped Vanya, as if they were in court or something.

‘Ha, well, hem,’ said Issy. She was bursting with embarrassment and bright red. Austin hadn’t told her this was a bloody job interview for her too. Even worse, because she hadn’t been following the conversation, she didn’t have a clue what to say. And even if she had, she didn’t know what the right answer was anyway.

‘Well, gee, it’s nice to have a hobby,’ said Vanya with a large fake smile, turning back to her salad and mineral water.

Austin took Issy’s hand under the table and gave it a sympathetic squeeze. This made things worse as far as Issy was concerned; she didn’t need his sympathy: she needed not to be put on the spot. The conversation moved on to real-estate prices, but Issy still sat there, burning up with crossness and feeling stupid and inferior.

Finally, when the pudding menu was coming round and Vanya and Candy were holding their hands up against it as if it were a list of poisons (which, Issy reflected, taking it, was probably exactly what they did think), Issy was ready. She launched in.

‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘if you make stuff that’s really good, people realise it’s a superior product. Well, most of the time. They still sell lots of squirty cream in cans. Anyway, that’s not important. The important thing is that even if people have less money, they’ll still buy themselves small lovely things as a treat. Sometimes even more because they’re staying in a lot, trying not to buy too much, so they’ll have a little reward …’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Vanya, sounding bored. ‘But what does that mean on a macroeconomic level to you?’

Issy spluttered. ‘It means … I’ll tell you what it means,’ she said, drunker than she’d realised, and suddenly sick of being patronised and talked down to and ignored and treated as the uninteresting dumpy girlfriend of the brilliant and fascinating man by these stupid, annoying glamorous Americans. ‘It means I wake up every day and I do a real thing. I get my hands dirty. I create something from scratch, with my bare hands, that I hope people will love, and they do, they really do; and I turn out something perfect and beautiful, that is meant to be enjoyed, and people realise that, and they do enjoy it and they pay me money for it and that is the best job in the bloody world and we should all be lucky enough to do something like that and that’s where we should be focusing our efforts. What did you create today, Vanya? Did anyone pick up one of your reports and smell it and give you a big smile and tell you it was absolutely bloody amazing?’

She paused to savour the open mouths round the table.

‘No, I didn’t think so.’

She turned to the waiter.

‘Does the gateau de fôret noire come with fresh cherries or marinated? Tell the chef fresh if he can, it’s far better; the acidity balances out the sweetness instead of making it cloying and overbearing. Of course, I’m sure he already knows that. On a macro level. So I’ll take it.’ And she shut the menu with a triumphant snap.

The party headed out rather mutedly, except for Merv, who had suddenly found Issy a bit of a one and asked her lots of cake-based questions and whether she could make a decent kugel, which actually she’d never heard of, then described his grandmother making it in their little Long Island kitchen and complaining that she couldn’t get kosher sugar and that the base wasn’t right, and Issy tried to talk him through it to see if she could figure it out.

No one else spoke to her at all; even Austin seemed stiff, and Issy, through her slightly drunken haze, started to worry that in fact rather than putting her point in a cool and measured way, she had perhaps shouted at everybody else at the table completely unnecessarily. Oh well. She couldn’t worry about that now.

As they got to the door, the beautiful waitress brought them their coats. Issy shrugged herself into Caroline’s now even tighter ridiculous white jacket. Candy stopped short. Then she leaned closer.

‘Oh. My. God,’ she said, the first direct thing she’d said to Issy all night. ‘Is that … is that the new Farim Maikal?’

Issy didn’t have the faintest clue who it was, but the name definitely rang a bell. And actually, now she thought about it, Caroline had gone on and on about the coat when it had arrived and been really smug about it and how she’d got one over on her friends and this would show them and all sorts of other stuff that Issy hadn’t really understood. But Farim she thought she remembered.

‘Hmm,’ she said non-committally.

‘It IS!’ breathed Candy. ‘Can I touch it?’ She held out her hand, reverently stroking the ridiculous white fur and collar studs. ‘Wow, the wait list at Barneys for this was like … wow.’

Even Vanya was looking at it with a touch of jealousy.

‘Shame they didn’t have your size,’ she said.

‘Oh man, that doesn’t matter, she looks amazing,’ said Candy. ‘Anybody would who got their hands on one. This is THE hot coat this winter.’