Page 50 of A Winter Kiss on Rochester Mews
‘You’re being completely irrational. You took it to L’Institut and either it’s in your locker or maybe it fell out of your bag on the Métro.’
‘No,’ Mattie said firmly.
‘But are you sure? Like one hundred per cent sure? Because there was that time that you thought you’d lost your keys …’
‘Youlost your keys and took mine without telling me.’
‘I did tell you. Several times,’ Steven said and he clenched his jaw and pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘Can you tidy up in here? I can’t think in this mess. I do have finals coming up.’
‘Yes, I have finals coming up too and that’s why it’s absolutely vital that I find my recipe book!’ Mattie swiped her hand under the sofa again, but her fingers touched nothing but dust bunnies.
‘I don’t appreciate your tone,’ Steven said. ‘We’ve talked about you being shrill before. Nagging. Hysterical.’
Mattie winced in her prone position. Had she been shrill? Probably. Steven hated it when she became shrill. ‘I’m very sorry, Steven,’ she said contritely. ‘I didn’t realise that I was getting so high-pitched. I’m just panicking.’
Steven said nothing. Mattie sat up to see him standing there with his arms folded, the forbidding look on his face that always set her nerves on edge.
‘I’m very, very sorry,’ she said again, trying to make each word as sincere as she possibly could. There was a tiny space heater in the little flat that didn’t heat much of anything, so Mattie could see her breath curl in front of her face as she spoke. ‘I shouldn’t take my frustration out on you. Will you forgive me?’
Steven nodded curtly. ‘Apology accepted. And if you have lost your recipe book, it’s your own fault for being so careless, isn’t it?’
Mattie had a perfect memory of shutting her recipe book in the kitchen drawer the morning before, after copying out a recipe in progress for an almond and blackberry financier. It was a thick book with a faded hardboard cover and an ‘I heart Paris’ sticker on it. She’d put it in the drawer, patted it fondly as she always did and then closed the drawer.
She knew she had.
‘I said, it’s your own fault for being so careless, isn’t it?’ Steven repeated his question in a louder, colder voice.
Mattie flushed. ‘Yes, it’s my own fault,’ she parroted back. ‘I have no one to blame but myself.’
‘That’s better.’ Steven grinned. Mattie was so relieved that the grim set of his face had relaxed that she grinned back. ‘Were all the recipes you were working on for your finals in that book?’
It was no grinning matter but Mattie tried to be flippant about it, light-hearted, so that she didn’t become shrill again. ‘Yup! And the ingredients and the bake times were so precise that I’m not sure I can replicate them. Might have to start again from scratch.’
‘Sucks to be you!’ Steven drawled, flopping onto the sofa. ‘Going to make me dinner then? It’s the least you can do after putting me through this horrible scene.’
Mattie had agreed that it wasn’t nice for Steven to come home after a day at L’Institut to one of her scenes and even though she only had half an hour before her waitress shift started at the bistro fifteen minutes’ walk away, she leapt at the chance to make it up to him.
‘I didn’t mention the recipe book again after that,’ Mattie told Tom, who was listening intently to her sorry tale, his chin resting on his hand. ‘And I had to try and work up my finals recipes as best as I could remember them, but it had taken me months and the finals were only a week away. The Great Parisian Bake-Off, we called them.’
To graduate from L’Institut de Patisserie, all students had to individually make three different cakes in front of a panel of instructors: incorporating such techniques as meringue, ganache, piping and sugar work.
They didn’t have to be Christmas-themed, but Mattie was such a big fan of the most wonderful time of the year, that her three exam pieces had been given the full festive treatment, albeit in an exquisitely tasting, beautifully constructed, high-end way. Mattie had made an apricot and brandy cream millefeuille topped with miniscule marzipan fruits; a croquembouche, choux balls filled with a delicate chestnut puree and exquisitely decorated with spun-sugar Christmas decorations; and a humble cupcake. Except there was nothing humble about a cupcake, which featured the lightest Christmas-pudding flavoured sponge, frosted with sparkling champagne buttercream.
She’d spent over a year perfecting the three cakes and considering she’d lost all her detailed notes, she didn’t think she’d done too badly. But her instructors were stony-faced. Monsieur Brel wouldn’t even taste Mattie’s creations but gave an impassioned rant about her being ‘une petite voleuse’. A little thief.
It was all Mattie could do not to burst into tears, although when Madame La Directrice swept into the test kitchen, pointed her finger at Mattie and said, ‘Vous êtes malhonnête!’ it was also very hard not to pee her pants a little.
It turned out that another student had turned in three identical bakes of a far superior standard to Mattie’s. This student had spent months fine-tuning them, adjusting ingredients and writing up meticulous notes, whereas Mattie had just three scrappy pieces of A4 paper to prove the provenance of her patisserie.
‘But someone stole my recipe book!’ Mattie kept insisting, her face getting redder, her voice growing squeakier and squeakier and higher and higher, so that every dog in Paris must have been able to hear her.
It had been a long day. Mattie was told to cool her heels outside Madame La Directrice’s office while the other student was called in so they could get to the bottom of it.
Mattie sat on a hard-backed chair in the corridor for what felt like hours. News of the scandal had whipped round L’Institut like sprinkles on a cupcake and it seemed as if every student felt the need to detour past where she sat, with condemning stares. As if Mattie was already guilty. She wasn’t exactly popular, unlike Steven, who everyone adored and sympathised with because he had to put up with Mattie and, as he was constantly telling their classmates, ‘Mathilde is very difficult to love – but someone’s got to.’
Mattie tried to ignore the hostile faces and instead thought about what she’d say to the other student, who’d obviously stolen her recipe book. By the time she’d finished with them, they’d rue the day they were ever born. She’d demand that their locker was searched, that she’d be allowed to scrutinise their notes …
‘Mathilde!’ Her revenge fantasies were interrupted by Steven beetling down the corridor with Madame La Directrice.
