Caroline marched straight to the front of the queue. As she got closer, Pearl noticed she wasn’t her normal immaculate-looking self. Her blonde hair had greyish roots showing through. She wasn’t wearing make-up. And she had lost weight, taking her always very slender form into the realms of extreme thinness.
‘Can I speak to your boss please?’ she barked.
‘Hello, Caroline,’ said Pearl, trying to give this incredibly rude woman the benefit of the doubt in case she just hadn’t recognized her.
‘Yes, hello, em …’
‘Pearl.’
‘Pearl. Can I speak to your boss?’
Caroline glanced around the shop, wild-eyed. On the sofa were camped a group of young mothers cooing over each other’s babies while clearly preferring their own; two businessmen with laptops and papers spread everywhere were having a meeting near the big window; a young student reading an old grey Penguin Classic was having trouble concentrating on it and was instead eyeing up another student by the fireplace, who was scrawling notes on a pad while tossing her long lusciously curly hair over her shoulders, presumably on purpose.
‘Issy,’ bellowed Pearl down the stairwell, with such force it made Issy jump. She came up the stairs sucking her burnt finger. Caroline propped herself against the wall, tapping her foot anxiously.
She leaned in towards Pearl. ‘You know, my son is going to school in September. He’s got all these cast-off clothes I was just about to get rid of, but I wonder if your wee chap would like them? He’s about the right age, and it’s nice stuff – lots of White Company, Mini Boden, Petit Bateau.’
Pearl recoiled behind the counter.
‘No thank you,’ she said stiffly. ‘I think I can clothe him, thanks.’
‘Oh, OK,’ said the blonde, completely unperturbed. ‘Just thought I might save myself a trip to Oxfam! Not to worry.’
‘I don’t need any charity,’ said Pearl, but the woman had turned to see Issy coming up the stairs, and her hands erupted in a flurry of nerves.
‘Oh … oh, hello!’
Issy wiped her hands warily. Caroline and Kate hadn’t been back to the café since that first day; Issy had taken it rather personally. Still, local business was local business.
‘You know,’ said Caroline. ‘Uh, you know when I didn’t get the site?’
Pearl went back to serving the other customers.
‘Yes,’ said Issy. ‘Have you … did you find anywhere else?’
‘Um, well, obviously I weighed up lots of offers. It’s like totally an idea whose time has come …’ said Caroline, her voice trailing off.
‘Oh. Right.’ Issy wondered where this was leading. She needed to get back down to check on that ginger beer cupcake. ‘So, nice to see you again,’ she said. ‘Would you like a coffee?’
‘Actually.’ Caroline lowered her voice as if this was a terribly funny secret of some kind. ‘No. Er, OK. Well, here’s the thing. Ha, I know this will sound absolutely crazy and everything but …’ Suddenly, her haggard but still beautiful face seemed to crumple. ‘That bastard. My bastard husband has finally left me for that stupid bint in the press office – and he’s told me that I need to get a bastard job!’
‘No way,’ said Pearl afterwards. ‘No no no no no.’
Issy bit her lip. Of course it had been an unorthodox approach. But on the other hand, without a doubt Caroline was a smart cookie. She had a degree in marketing, and had worked for a prestigious market research outfit before giving it all up for the children, she’d sobbed bitterly, while her husband nobbed some twenty-something publicist. But once she’d stopped bawling, over about a pint of tea and some hazelnut tiffin, it transpired that she did in fact know loads of people in the area; she could turn the café into the place to get your baby-shower cakes, your birthday icing; she could work just the hours they were looking for, she lived round the corner …
‘But she’s horrible,’ Pearl pointed out. ‘That’s really important.’
‘She’s maybe just a bit wrapped up in herself right now,’ said soft-hearted Issy. ‘It’s awful when someone leaves you,’ her voice tailed off momentarily, ‘or things don’t work out.’
‘Yes, it makes you really rude and selfish,’ said Pearl. ‘She doesn’t even need the job. It should go to someone who needs it.’
‘She says she does need it,’ said Issy. ‘Apparently her husband told her if she wants to keep the house without a fight she needs to get off her arse and start working.’
‘So she wants to swan about here being snobby to people,’ said Pearl. ‘And she’ll want to introduce wholemeal flour and raisins and wheatgrass juice and talk about BMIs and yap on and on all day.’
Issy was torn. ‘I mean, it’s not like we’ve seen loads of wonderful candidates,’ she argued. ‘No one we’ve had in has been right at all. And she’d be covering a lot of your time off, it’s not like you’d have to see her that much.’
‘This is a very small retail space,’ Pearl said, darkly. And Issy sighed and put off making the decision for a while.
But things didn’t ease off – which was fantastic, but also brought its own problems. Now it was phones constantly ringing, and lists, and Issy falling asleep during dinner, and Helena being out all the time, and she hadn’t seen Janey since she’d had the baby, and Tom and Carla had moved into their new place in Whitstable and she hadn’t even made it to their housewarming, and God, when she had five minutes she was still missing Graeme, or even just missing someone, anyone, to hold her hand occasionally and tell her that everything was going to be all right, but she didn’t have time for that, didn’t have time for anything, and everything was just building up and up.
She pushed her feelings back down inside herself and worked even harder, but the day Linda pushed her way through the door, she was very close to her wits’ end.
It was a lovely Friday in late spring, and the warm air gave out the promise of a summery, light London weekend to come. People were thronging the streets looking cheerful, and they were doing a roaring trade in boxes of light lemon-scented cupcakes with a velvet icing and a little semicircle of crystallized fruit on the top; workers wanted to spread a little of the lovely day around their offices. Issy, though half bent over with exhaustion, was also taking huge pride in watching the enormous pile of cakes she’d started so early that morning – a mountain so big she couldn’t believe they would possibly all be sold by the end of the day – steadily diminish in sixes and dozens. And people were buying more cold drinks too, which took pressure off the coffee-making routine. Even though Issy could now make a flat white or a tall skinny latte with effortless grace and speed (the first nineteen times she’d usually spilled something), it was still more time-consuming than grabbing some elderflower juice from the fridge. (Issy had stuck to prettier drinks rather than fizzy ones. They fitted better, she felt, with the ethos of the shop. And also, Austin had pointed out, the profit margins were better.)