Page 22 of The Wedding Cake
She removed her apron, washed her hands, and stepped away from Ricky and Alejandro, whose amazing artistry she was overseeing as they decorated their first ruffled deckle-edged wedding cake together. It was such a fiddly task, but they’d nailed the brief admirably and she couldn’t wait to see the pastel pink masterpiece take pride of place at Saturday’s same-sex wedding at the bodega.
Hannah mooched along behind Freya to the small office, her eyes glued to her feet. Once they were inside with the door firmly closed, Freya motioned for Hannah to give her the paper, which she did with a visibly shaking hand.
Freya looked, looked again, and looked a third time. She closed her eyes and screwed up her face. She pinched herself hard on the arm in case she was having a literal nightmare, and then she gingerly opened her eyes to look yet again. She wanted to let out a blood-curdling scream. She was awake, but this could not be right. Merv had only been and double-booked the Goldsmith-Jackson and Moss-Nutkins wedding cakes for August the sixth!
The situation might have been salvageable were both couples opting for small and modest cakes, but no: Merv had basically promised the gargantuan eight-tier showstopper cake would appear attwo weddingsat completely different locations up and down the coaston the same day. There was no mistaking the hard facts swimming before Freya’s eyes, in Merv’s trademark spider-crawl handwriting on the stupid feint ruled page with the paperclip still attached to it; the paper clip that had presumably, at some undefinable point in time, come loose from the order book.
“B-but I don’t understand. Where did you find this?” Freya whispered, shock fizzing through her veins. She couldn’t even look at Hannah.
“Do you recall hearing the downstairs door slam earlier when that client didn’t shut it properly and the wind almost took it off its hinges?” Freya couldn’t answer and couldn’t see where this small talk was going. Hannah carried on. “A huge gust blew in, and that was when I saw a sheet of paper fly out from beneath the counter display unit. The one where we keep the book in its cubby hole. Well, of course it’s a large piece of furniture and regardless of who has been mopping the floors these past few months – you, me or the cleaner – the gap underneath the unit is miniscule. I picked the paper up, scanned it quickly, almost had a heart attack, and brought it straight to you. I’m guessing Merv didn’t attach the sheet of paper to the book properly and it fell, then somehow slid underneath the unit and remained there undetected.”
“Gawwwwwwd!”
Freya pelted downstairs to the shop floor, snatched up the dumb excuse for a professional order system and returned to the office breathless. Throwing the old green book with its cracked spine onto the table, she rifled through its pages to August as fast as her fingers would allow.
“I’ve been through these orders time and time again,” she said in a wobbly high-pitched voice. “Merv added the details of the Goldsmith-Jackson wedding in here himself. See: there they are! August the sixth. Finca Preciosa.” Freya gulped for air and wondered if she might start hyperventilating. “When he first started talking about the Moss-Nutkins wedding way back when, and I saw that he hadn’t added the details of that cake order to the book, I called him immediately. He made no mention at all of having previously recorded the order in writing, so he simply dictated the information ref Piper and Tim’s wedding cake over the phone. Date, August the thirteenth! In other words, an entire week away from Alice and River’s wedding.” Freya drilled the pencil down into the page until she made a hole. “One: when, in ten years of this business, have we ever tried to squeeze two of our biggest and most expensive cakes into one day? What was Merv thinking? And two, how come he didn’t flag this enormous date error up, when we went over every aspect of the Moss-Nutkins order on the phone? Surely he’d made a note of the wedding day being August the sixth at his end? This is an absolute disaster. We’ve had a few little calamities and mild panics over the years. That’s to be expected. But never anything like this!”
It was the last week of July. Every hour in the approaching weeks of the busiest season had already been accounted for, as had every ingredient and kitchen appliance. There was no chance of rearranging anything this close to both monumental orders.
Hannah began to hop about like a hen. “You can’t let him get away with this.”
“I know I can’t,” Freya snapped back at Hannah, feeling immediately guilty. “But call me a fool, I care about his feelings. He’s not getting any younger and I don’t want to lay into him and give him a coronary. This is half my responsibility in any case. I’ve been a doormat, making too many allowances for his archaic ways. I should’ve insisted long ago that we record the cake details properly on a computer system. Talk about screwing things up!”
“Point taken.But I’m not letting you take the blame, and I won’t stand back and listen to Mervyn slating you when he’s made such a whopping mistake. He’s the wedding planner, Freya. No matter how old he is.”
“We’re going to have to call the brides.” Freya panicked. “I can’t bear breaking the news to either of them. Alice, because she’s so sweet and deserves better and I loved her music when she was in Avalonia… and Piper because if that call on the yacht was anything to go by, she’s not going to take this lying down, and I dread to think of the way she could defame us on social media. We haven’t even got time to try to convince one couple to have the cake and the other to go for something a lot smaller. It’s August. We’re completely booked up!”
“We’ll come up with a solution, boss. There’s always a way around these things,” Hannah insisted. “And hey, luckily, it’s a humdinger of a cake so neither wedding party will go hungry.”
“Oh, Hannah.” The lump in Freya’s throat turned to tears and she dived at the box of tissues on her desk, pulling half of them out and dabbing furiously at her face. “That’s a lovely sentiment but it’s a tad simplistic,” she sniffed. “Can you honestly see Piper Moss accepting half a wedding cake… and even then, which way would we cut it?”
“Well, four tiers each, obviously.” Freya couldn’t help but belly laugh. “You never know, this might set off a new trend,” said Hannah, deadly serious. “You could put it to madam that way. I’m more than happy to make the call for you if that helps. Looking at this logically with a bit of Yorkshire pragmatism, I really can’t see a problem. I know it’s not so great for us as a business, but each couple will save themselves a small fortune as we’ll have to refund them at least half of the cost – and that’s another reason you have to tell Merv about his mistake; Weddings in Paradise should take the financial hit. The other thing to remember is there’s no way either wedding party will get through all eight layers on the day. And, since the tiers are being repeated, so there are four sponges and fillings times two, by halving the cake, nobody will end up going without their favourite flavour.”
“Kind of,” Freya had to give Hannah an ounce of credit where it was due. “Slightly overlooking the fact that each repetition of tiers starts off with the scrumptious salted caramel layer, which does tend to be most people’s favourite… and totally overlooking the fact that the tiers get smaller as the cake gets taller. In other words, one couple would end up with a giant base tier of the most delicious flavour – as well as generous sized-tiers of the others – and the other couple would get a significantly smaller version of everything.”
“Then there’s only one thing for it: the cake will have to be split equally down the middle – from top to bottom – and the iced waterfall of roses will have the same treatment too.”
“How can we possibly do that? It’ll look hideous.”
“It’ll look avant-garde. How else do some of these weird and wonderful wedding cake trends come to be? Ricky will rise to the challenge and the rest of us will rally around to help him. Piper might not warm to the idea at first but once she’s turned it over in her head and thought about how leading edge she’ll come across to all her influencer mates, I’m telling you, she’ll be converted.”
“I admire your confidence. I can’t see the wood for the trees, or the dowling rods for the tiers, right now. It’s enough to reduce me to this kind of tears all over again.” Freya pointed at her panda eyes.
“One step at a time, love.” Hannah was perfect. A modern-day walking and talking agony aunt. “How about I take care of breaking the news to Mervyn? Diplomatically, of course, and just as the first point of contact. You can follow up later. Meanwhile, you deal with the brides.”
“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: you’re my rock, Hannah Barlow. I honestly don’t know what I would do without you,” Freya cried. “If it hadn’t been for your eagle eyes, we wouldn’t even know there was a problem. Can you imagine how much more of a fiasco this would be on the wedding day?”
ALICE
The sun rose on a brand-new day in Salamanca. Drawn by its rich Celtic history and fabulous architecture, River and Alice had made a beeline for the stunning northern Spanish city as soon as they’d driven off the ferry in a super shiny and polished Twinkle. Today was their third night at the Airbnb located off the central square, and River had driven to the out of town hypermarket to buy yet more delicious Mediterranean provisions, insisting that Alice soak up the early morning rays in a café on the Plaza Mayor before they got too intense andsiestatime called. Could there exist a better man in this world?
She’d taken a bit of a risk keeping her financial skeleton in the closet for so many months, but she still didn’t regret delaying before telling River about the stables benefactor. To throw another cliche into the works, once that horse had bolted, things would have quickly led to a flurry of arguments at a time when there was already plenty of stress over the amount of work to be done. Hopefully, now there would be no more little secrets between bride and groom to be. They had a solid and trusting relationship and loved one another to bits, but their respective upbringings could not have been more different. Occasionally that made it hard for one side of the couple to relate to the other.
River had taken the news of Alice’s dad’s secret cash injection into the transformation of his late aunt’s former caravan park about as well as she thought he would… hence her resorting to alcohol before breaking the news.
“I wish you’d told me before,” River had said, when Alice blurted everything out after that delicious Coco Loco. “There’s no way I’d have let your dad play knight in shining armour. Only a couple of years ago he strung you along so badly, leading you to believe he’d invest in your dream Cornish stables, then pulling out at the last minute so you had to rent that shabby, rundown place on the edge of a tumbledown farm instead. He can’t just flit in and out of your life on a whim. It’s so shitty of him.”
“I know and I’m sorry I didn’t bring up his contribution to the renovations before. But if I’d told you at the start of the project, you’d have said a flat out no,” Alice had explained.
