Page 4 of The Wedding Cake
“Simon Cowell has just requested a quote for a bespoke spin-off of our largest mega island to go in the middle of his new villa’s kitchen.”
Whoop-de-doo.
“I had breakfast this morning at the same café as George and Amal Clooney.”
And probably gave them indigestion.
“Next week I’m going to a Gala dinner hosted by Penelope Cruz.”
The poor woman doesn’t know what she’s let herself in for…
Freya had never been starstruck. Fame and fortune didn’t impress her. People were people, no matter where they came in the recognition stakes. She’d designed and baked wedding cakes for a handful of A listers – and a profusion of B and C listers – ironing out the finer details with them over the phone when they were too busy to call into the cakery to see her in person. Though she appreciated the custom, the celebrity game was meaningless and those who got off on name-dropping to the extent of the man sitting opposite her really needed to get a life.
Then came Lars’ most fabulous line to date, delivered just as the waiter lovingly placed the tray of assorted tapas before them.
“So, I was thinking… my kitchens and your cakes could make somebeauuuuutifulmusic, Freya.” Lars inserted a majorly cheesy wink into his pitch. “My stunning fjord- and forest-inspired kitchen table range would boost your profile enormously and elevate your finished products to the next level.”
Lars’ eyes bored into Freya’s skull while her stomach churned in protest.Hardly– the last time she checked, bridal couples tended to get marriedoutsideof the kitchen.
“I’ve been doing the maths: I like the HEA dream you’ve created for Marbella’s destination wedding venue clients.” Now his glance raked over her bust. “The toweringnakedlayer cake you made for last weekend’s wedding at the golf course sent shivers down my spine. Let’s get something in the diary for next week.”
Oh, if Ricky could be a fly on the wall right now. He was FOM’s sole naked layer cake decorator. Freya could already hear the puns of retaliation flying out of his mouth.
Without waiting for her say-so, her date pulled his smartphone out of the inside pocket of his jacket with one hand, wolfing down a particularly slimy disc of aubergine with the other. The idiot was something else. Freya had seen and heard quite enough of his targeted lingo and shameless snooping. How long had she been the jackass’s case study?
“Perdona,” she caught the attention of a passing waiter. “Una botella de Bollinger, por favor.”
The waiter nodded and sped to the bar.
“Awesome, babe. I knew you’d agree,” said Lars, assuming Freya had ordered a bottle of champagne to celebrate. “Now then.” He started tapping through the days of the week on his gadget with a stylus. “Monday and Tuesday I’m in hot demand but Wednesday evening suits me fine. The question is,” he paused to let the words linger on the air. “Your place or mine?”
Before Freya had the chance to reply, the waiter returned with an ice bucket and two glasses, his timing spot on for her to instruct him that only one glass was required, as she handed him a crisp fifty euro note. Lars’ pencil thin lips struggled to hold a smirk on the edge of combustion but Freya didn’t care. She took a sip of her Bolly, got her own more modest phone out, banged out a quick and belated ‘I’m here and all is well’ message to Hannah, held her glass aloft in a toast to thin air and then captured the image on her mobile’s camera for posterity.
“Cheers to me and cheers to never again agreeing to a date in a restaurant, café or bar…” What had she just said to her staff about the predictability of foodie fraternizing? “In other words,never againwill I fall for the empty promise of meeting a man in agoddamneateryor anywhere else of a stereotypical pick-up nature. Lars, you have an incredible talent for making a woman wake up and smell the coffee… and the –bleugh– pongy garlic-laden potatoes.”
Freya wrinkled her nose, ignoring the puzzled embarrassment on Lars’ face. Out of the corner of her eye she could see she’d amassed quite an audience, everybody else’s chatter having stopped to the extent you could hear a pin (or a grain of paella rice) drop. Next she positioned the bowls of tapas just so, as if she was directing a wedding cake photo shoot, hooking a squid ring over Lars’ ring finger on his left hand – later realising it should have been his right hand since he was Norwegian:minor detail– and making certain her gawking subject was the centrepiece for a second shot.
“Stay right where you are,babe,” she instructed him as she quickly set up the zoom lens on her phone’s camera. “I’ve got a bigger social media following than your bank balance and we’ll soon have this littlecatch of the dayadvertorial all over Marbs. The ladies will be queuing round the block now you’re offering your hand.” Freya snapped a perfectly gormless picture of Lars, and indulged in some speedy and expert hashtag priming, so that soon the desperate tableau was all over Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Her date, meanwhile, remained speechless. Smirk gone, mouth wide open. “I would leave you with the rest of this bottle.” Freya picked up the champagne and hugged it possessively to her chest, “But you deserve something as old as your chat-up lines, so you can keep the red.Adiosand definitely nothasta la vista!”
Freya walked out of the tapas bar, stunned at her own over the top performance. But something had to give and she was not prepared to take a moment more of the smart-arse’s bullshit. The champagne bottle she clutched tightly in her hand garnered her numerous looks of approval and disapproval as she paced through the streets, only stopping when she reached the wide boulevard flanking Marbella’s beach. It was virtually empty of tourists of course, this being low season. The mildness of the day was fast dissipating in hues of amber and plum as the clouds scudded across the sky. She stood at the wall, took a swig of her drink to buoy her up, looked out to the horizon, took a deep breath, and, for the first time in a decade, she gingerly – then more decidedly – tiptoed onto the sand, ecstatic with herself for overcoming such a large hurdle, and not just of the walking-away-from-the-wacky-wooing-game variety.
Freya wouldn’t even deliver a cake to a beach venue. The task was always passed to one of her colleagues, not that any of them seemed to twig that she had a phobia of the seaside. The very last time Freya had set foot on any stretch of coastline was the day of her own wedding. The day Sid had left her at the floral hoop altar.
Sid’s eyes had been the giveaway. It’s true, they are the windows to the soul. Freya’s father had walked her towards the stunning circle of pastel peach and blush pink flowers that she and Sid had chosen to symbolise their unbreakable unity, but instead of looking starry-eyed at his fast-approaching bride, Sid couldn’t meet Freya’s gaze at all. Even from afar Freya, who was long-sighted, could see that Sid was looking just above her forehead. As if that wasn’t unnerving enough, a nun had already crossed Freya’s path just as she’d stepped out of the golf buggy that had dropped her and her father off at the beach’s wooden boardwalk. Freya had immediately cursed herself for reading too much into old wives’ tales. But with every step she took in her crystal-embellished flip flops, the sudden terror of what was to come engulfed her. This was worse than walking the plank. The sea would swallow her mortification, submerging her from the pity of her family and friends, if only she could have traded places with a pirate right now. To add insult to injury, the next thing she knew, a teenage member of Sid’s side of the congregation had dropped their ring in the aisle. One of those gold-plated sovereign medallion rings that were the specialty of the high street. It wheeled along diagonally from Freya’s left side, coming to a brisk halt on a petal in front of her. She stepped over it, knowing she had now received her three omens that this wedding was doomed: nun, Sid’s shiftiness, ring drop. The minister could sense it too, his greeting dithery and wooden all at once. But it was Sid’s calm and softly-spoken words that were the most tragic:
“Freya, I’m sorry, sweetheart. I can’t be the man that you deserve. The thing is… I’m having a number of affairs. Three to be precise.” The minister swayed at this point, emitting a very definitemierdaunder his breath, and Freya feared he might pass out on her. Still, she hung on Sid’s words with misty eyes, as if he were saying his wedding vows. “I know this is lame and unbelievably weak. I know I should have come clean by now. You just got under my skin a little more than the rest. You’re such a wonderful person, such a strangely beautiful and intriguing woman. I guess I thought I could have my cake and eat it until marriage put an end to my wild ways. But, despite how amazing you look today…” Sid paused and let his eyes rove over her. Freya blinked rapidly as if that might wake her from the strange out of body experience. “And despite the fact I know you would be an incredible wife, the truth is that standing here on the day I should be committing to you, I can’t get Cecile, Ana or Simona out of my head.”
Freya watched on, dread plummeting from her stomach to her toes as her fiancé spun on his heel, then ran as fast as he could across the rippling sand, past their small collection of nearest and dearest.
Strangely beautiful?Was that even a compliment?
The modern day Freya would have thrown a bucket of sand in Sid’s face and put a spadeful of giant Spanish ants down his boxers. For starters. And how dare he bring her beloved cake into the mix? Merv might throw in his ‘ambushed by cake’ jokes in reference to one Boris Johnson and his unsavoury birthday party celebrations during lockdown in a pandemic, but Sid truly was using cake as his excuse: the very food that kept a roof over Freya and her employees’ heads. She’d never felt so insulted. In Freya’s world that made him just as immoral as the clown at Ten Downing Street. Thank God (not that Freya was sure God existed after that fateful day) none of the congregation overheard that bit – or any of Sid’s fucked-up spiel. No, all Freya and Sid’s friends and family got were the mumbles of an inept groom, the tears of a jilted bride, and an all-you-can-eat seafood buffet with sangria on tap. That was the real reason Freya hadn’t gone near a squid ring or a glass oftinto de verano, the local name for sangria, since her twenty-fifth summer on planet Earth. Oh, and consequently, that was the reason Freya had banned cake pop wedding cakes from her kitchen. She couldn’t bear to be within a thousand kilometres of the things.
She couldn’t have looked more stunning on that wedding day. Her unruly curls had been tamed and half tied back in dried flower hair combs, and her flawless, natural makeup had been applied by one of Marbella’s top artists. Admittedly, her casual white chiffon dress was understated to the max but it was also the epitome of less is more; everything Sid claimed to love about her. They were tying the knot on a laid-back beach, after all, not in some fancy colonial mansion or a luxury villa.
And what about those other women? Had they realised they were part of a harem?
Freya had pelted to the north of the beach seconds after Sid, her dad struggling along behind her with his arthritic hip, while the congregation froze in their seats. Which made it look as if she’d been desperately chasing after her ex-fiancé, but she could hardly sit it out on a deckchair and wait for a rescue ship, much less swim south to the haven of Morocco, even if the African coastline was just a few kilometres away. And Freya refused to veer east or west across the sand in her wedding dress to enliven the afternoons of July’s sun worshippers either. That was the hot lifeguard’s job.
