25

GRACE

On the third cooking lesson I arrived with a renewed sense of confidence for Jenny. She had perturbed me last time with the little one’s bruises. It did upset me to think of tiny helpless tots who were mistreated and the thought of that happening to little Mikee made me very sad indeed. I wondered if the kids were happy. What kind of life were they going to have? I wondered about Jenny and how she could carry on as though nothing was happening and, what kind of person that made her. But today I allowed those thoughts to subside and instead I let the mellow aura that seemed to ooze from Jenny so naturally lull me back to a state of admiration.

The babies still weren’t coming, so I satisfied my urge to create and nurture something through any form of cookery I could master. The day that Emily gave us a crash course on bread making was the day that I was saved. I was on the brink of crumbling. My husband was barely uttering any words to me and I had noticed that some of his larger possessions were gone. I knew it wouldn’t be long before he himself became as elusive as his stack of classic films and antique encyclopaedias.

The day I got my hands on that dough and began kneading and winding it into different shapes was a good day indeed. I was able to completely forget about the troubles back home. The feelings about my husband, slowly moving away from the home we had bought together and planned to raise a family in together, were pushed into the kneading of that bread; you could almost taste the betrayal in the finished loaf.

I liked the experience of proving the bread the most. Placing it somewhere warm and watching that little flat bit of dough treble in size, knowing that I had fed it and kept it warm enough to grow, was almost enough to replace the desperate maternal pangs for just a few hours at least.

The only thing that cast a shadow over the day was Jenny. She didn’t seem her usual sprightly self and as I tended to my bread dough like it was a small child, I could see Jenny fluttering about out of the corner of my eye. I was worried about her; she wasn’t concentrating and was clearly taken with some other pressing matter. Once my dough was safely in the oven and I had cleared my surface down, I wandered over to Jenny’s station. The woman had barely even reached the proving stage. Her stomach was slightly protruding out of her tight pinafore dress. Flour and dough were scattered everywhere and she had her handbag on the work surface, a clear health hazard, anything could have been clinging to the bottom of it and infecting her work area.

‘Are you okay Jenny?’ I asked.

‘Oh, Grace, no I’m afraid I’m not today. I’m a little out of sorts.’ Jenny continued to rifle through her handbag.