Chapter 5
Chapter Five
VANESSA
Vanessa clenched her jaw. She knew she was talking too much. She was pretending to look at the recipe book, but in truth, she was berating herself for being so ‘extra’, as her older brother Carl often described her.
It was fine for him. He just tended to go with the flow, in his usual understated fashion, and somehow things just fell into place.
He and his girlfriend were thinking about buying a house together, something they could actually achieve thanks to their well-paid jobs in accountancy or something.
They had two cats, and people had started asking them whether he was going to propose.
Ugh, so dull.
But then, she wondered, would Carl have run away from a funeral to board a flight to Barcelona?
Nope. She grimaced, thinking of the text message he’d sent her when he realised she’d left their gran’s wake to go to Spain.
He had been singularly unimpressed. She might have replied saying she was equally unimpressed with his predictable life choices, but that would have been childish.
Vanessa tried to focus on the words on the pages before her.
She’d not had much time to look since she’d discovered the relic.
“I promise,” she’d said to her gran, speaking out loud even though Maria had long since stopped responding in her final days.
“I will stick at this idea. I won’t give up on the Spanish cafe. ”
After Maria died, Vanessa went to the care home where she’d lived.
She looked around the empty room in which her gran had spent her final years.
She volunteered to pack up the remains of Maria’s possessions, leaving the drawer her gran had mentioned until last. She knew it contained something special, but she also knew it was the last message from her gran, and she was in no hurry to bring that final moment any closer.
Somehow, once the room was packed up and she had collected the mysterious object, her gran really would be gone.
Once the business of folding cardigans, sorting through shoes and carefully wrapping family photos was complete, she looked to the drawer in the bedside unit.
She knelt before it and pulled. Inside was a jiffy bag containing something bulky.
It was slightly too big for the drawer, and she had to wrestle it carefully out.
Once she had, she took it and sat on the bed, which had already been stripped as if Maria had never been there.
Inside the jiffy bag she found an old, thick leather-bound book.
She couldn’t make out the wording on the front, but could tell from the wear on the cover that it had been well-used.
She opened it carefully, and inside, on the first page, saw a paragraph of handwriting in Spanish, followed by three names: Alma, Sophia, Maria.
Vanessa knew her great grandmother had been Sophia, so was Alma her great, great grandmother? She would have to check. It was, of course, the sort of thing that Carl would know.
Below the names was the title of the book.
While Vanessa’s Spanish wasn’t good, she recognised one word: Recetas.
It was a recipe book. A smile began to grow on her face.
She turned the page to see a contents page full of names of Spanish dishes, some she recognised, many unfamiliar to her.
This was the treasure her gran had left her, and it couldn’t be more perfect.
She closed the book again, and hugged it to her.
This was a sign, surely, that the bakery was a good idea and would succeed.
Here on the balcony, above the streets of Barcelona, the book felt like it came to life, and Vanessa began to look through the recipes.
She focused on desserts, cakes and sweet treats, and found that many of the pages were stained with butter and sugar: always a sign of a well-used recipe book.
There were no pictures, but here and there were line illustrations in among the dense text.
In addition there were handwritten notes, and amendments to recipes.
In one place someone had taken significant issue with the amount of butter prescribed – not enough – and had amended the recipe, finishing with an emphatic exclamation mark.
Beside the scribbled message was a greasy smudge through which the next page could be seen, no doubt courtesy of some of the lashings of butter the cook had used.
The words looked like they had been written with a fountain pen in a looping hand.
On the next page Vanessa saw more writing, this time in blue biro, which was probably more recent – perhaps the work of Maria herself.
It was more compact and neat, which suited her gran.
But thinking back through her childhood, Vanessa couldn’t recall her gran using the book.
She couldn’t recall her baking very much at all, in fact.
She heard Joey shift in her chair, clearly immersed in her own book.
She couldn’t help but admire the muscles in her neighbour’s bare arms. But then, Vanessa imagined she spent a lot of time kneading dough and carrying large bags of flour.
She shook her head slightly. She was at risk of becoming preoccupied with her grumpy fellow Brit, which Joey definitely didn’t deserve after her lack of friendliness.
She couldn’t deny there was something compelling about the capable woman, though.
Back to the recipe book. She turned the page, and found the recipe to ensaimadas.
She grinned. Yes, this was the delicious yet simple delicacy she’d eaten in Joey’s bakery.
The ingredients were basic – flour, water, eggs, mother dough (whatever that was) and ‘saim’.
She pulled out her phone and googled the word: Reduced pork lard.
‘Saim’ was a Catalan word, and gave the sweet treat its name. She looked at the Spanish instructions, knowing that she’d need a significant time with Google Translate to fully understand it.
Vanessa sighed and switched to Duolingo. There was no time like the present. Mindful of her grumpy neighbour, she put in her ear buds and began to listen to the basic Spanish words. If she was going to be taken seriously here, she’d have to work hard.