Meet Me at the Cupcake Café

‘Me too! Me too!’ yelled Seraphina.

‘Oh darlings … ’

Kate looked on the brink of giving up. ‘You don’t … you don’t have any little boxes of raisins, do you?’

‘Um,’ said Issy, ‘no.’

Kate sighed. ‘Well, that’s a shame. What do you think, Caroline?’

Caroline’s face didn’t move – her eyebrows were very pointy – but Issy still got the sense she was disappointed. She glanced at Hermia, who was gazing at her friends, one tear dripping slowly down her face. Achilles sorted it for her.

‘Mummy! Cake! Now! Mummy! Cake! Cake! Mummy!’ He went red-faced while wrestling with the buggy straps. ‘Now!’

‘Now darling,’ Caroline said, ‘you know we don’t really like cake.’

‘Cake! Cake!’

‘Oh dear,’ said Kate. ‘I’m not sure we’re going to be able to come in here again.’

‘Cake! Cake!’

‘They do say the sugar makes them hyperactive.’

Issy didn’t want to point out that everything in her shop was all-natural, and that they hadn’t even had any yet.

‘Fine,’ said Caroline, desperate to stop her son screaming. ‘Two cakes. I don’t care which ones. Hermia, little bites please. You don’t want to blow up like—’ Caroline immediately stopped.

‘Yes!’ shouted the twins by the counter.

‘I want pink! I want pink!’ they both yelled simultaneously, in voices so similar Issy wondered how you really did tell them apart.

‘You can’t both have pink,’ said Kate absent-mindedly, picking up the Mail. ‘Jane, you have the brown.’

Later, Caroline came over to chat.

‘This is actually quite quaint,’ she said. ‘You know, I love to bake too … obviously, much healthier than this, and mostly we eat raw of course, but I was like, now I must have a central island for my little messes … In fact, you know,’ she peered down the stairwell, ‘I think my oven is probably bigger than yours! My main oven of course, I have a steam oven and a convection oven too. But no microwave. Terrible things.’

Issy smiled politely. Pearl let out a snort.

‘I am dreadfully busy with everything now … I’ve taken on a lot of charity work, my husband’s in the City, you know … but maybe one day I could bring you one of my recipes! Yes, I create recipes … Well, it’s hard when you have a creative side, isn’t it? After children?’

She looked at Issy as she said this, and Issy tried to look polite to a customer, even an idiot, and even an idiot who was clearly implying that Issy looked old and dumpy enough to have loads of children. Caroline of course weighed about the same as a fourteen-year-old.

‘Well, I’m sure that would be fascinating,’ said Pearl, before Issy’s mouth drooped open any further. ‘Uh, Caroline, is that your son taking off his nappy and putting it in your Hermès bag?’

Caroline turned round with a squeal.

‘They’re all like that?’ asked Issy after they’d left, Achilles screaming, Hermia sobbing quietly, and the twins having perfectly cut their cakes into two halves, swapping them then squeezing them together again, so their cakes would be exactly the same, to Kate’s voluble disgust.

‘Oh no,’ said Pearl. ‘Lots are miles worse. One says she won’t potty-train till the child decides to do it himself.’

‘Well, that makes total sense,’ said Issy. ‘Keep them in nappies till eleven. Saves a lot of time. Does she let the child do the cooking too?’

‘Oh no, Orlando only eats raw vegetables and sprouting things,’ quoted Pearl. ‘Except when I caught him stealing Louis’s Mars bar.’

Issy raised her eyebrows but didn’t say anything. Neither had she asked about Pearl’s distracted demeanour all day. If Pearl wanted to tell her, she would.

By 4.30 that Friday, after their busiest week ever, they were utterly exhausted. Issy locked the door and turned the sign to Closed. Then they went downstairs to the cellar and Issy took from the catering fridge their now ritualistic end-of-the-week bottle of white wine. Saturday was a quiet day – although it too was picking up, especially around lunchtime – so they could indulge a little on a Friday without suffering too badly.

As had also become a habit (and would be severely frowned upon by health and safety, Issy knew, if they ever found out), after counting up the day’s takings they would slump down on the big flour sacks in the cellar, using them like gigantic bean bags.

Issy poured Pearl a large glass.

‘That,’ she said, ‘was our best week so far.’

Pearl wearily raised her glass. ‘I’ll say so.’

‘Compared, obviously, to not very much,’ said Issy. ‘But projection-wise …’

‘Oh,’ said Pearl, ‘I forgot to say. I ran into your fancy bloke at the bank.’ Pearl did the banking.

Issy’s interest was piqued. ‘Oh yes? Austin? Uh, I mean, really? Who?’

Pearl gave her a very Pearlish look. Issy sighed.

‘OK. How is he?’

‘Why are you asking?’ said Pearl.

Issy felt herself colour and buried her face in her glass. ‘Just politeness,’ she squeaked.

Pearl sniffed, and waited.

‘Well?’ said Issy after a minute.

‘Ha!’ said Pearl. ‘I knew it. If it really was politeness, you wouldn’t be that bothered.’

‘That is not true,’ said Issy. ‘It’s an entirely professional … relationship.’

‘So it’s a relationship?’ teased Pearl.

‘Pearl! What did he say? Did he ask about me?’

‘He was surrounded by about fifteen lingerie models and getting into a jacuzzi, so it was hard to say.’

Issy harrumphed until Pearl relented.

‘He was looking quite smart. He’d had a haircut.’

‘Oh, I liked his hair,’ said Issy.

‘I wonder who he got his hair cut for?’ mused Pearl. ‘Maybe it was you.’

Issy pretended not to be pleased with that remark, but men like Austin always had girlfriends. She was probably really pretty too, and really, really nice. That tended to be how it worked. She sighed. She just had to come to terms with it now; she was a career girl for the moment. She would worry about it later. Shame though. She found herself imagining, just for one second, gently stroking the back of his neck, where a wisp of hair had been left behind, and …